8
I liked my teachers at Littlefield. Although they dressed more formally than the teachers in my previous school, the men here wearing ties and jackets and the women wearing dresses with hems at least at midcalf, I felt a more relaxed atmosphere in their classrooms. There was definitely a different energy throughout the school. Everyone moved more slowly, and teachers especially spoke more softly.
In my public-school classes, imposing discipline always seemed to be the first order of business and a continual issue. Many of my teachers, male and female alike, often lost their tempers. They held themselves like people who anticipated unpleasantness, shoulders braced, eyes full of suspicion. Sometimes you felt you could cut the air because it was thick with tension. For some of my public-school teachers, there were classes that ruined their entire teaching day and students they’d like to put in front of a firing squad. However, if they let down their guard, those who were more interested in disrupting our classes pounced.
Cutups were sent to the dean. Students were frequently suspended. Smoking in the bathrooms was a constant problem, as was graffiti. We knew that teachers were often judged, especially the new ones, on how well they kept order in their classes and how often they had to give up and send someone to the dean. They were aware of it, too, and tolerated a great deal more than they should, which in the end hurt how well we learned. There were so many interruptions.
Here at Littlefield, the teachers had a great weapon: the cost. If you were misbehaving repeatedly or did something that required the dean to be involved, you risked all the money your parents paid to have you attend, and even for well-to-do people, that was a significant loss, not to mention the embarrassment.
I learned quickly that it was true: Mrs. Mitchell was the Iron Lady when it came to discipline. If someone was speaking too loudly in the halls or even jokingly punched or pushed another student and she witnessed it, she sent laser arrows from her eyes, and the student cutting up instantly turned into Little Lord Fauntleroy, the Harry Potter of his time, perfectly mannered, polite, and considerate. It was like slowing down when you saw a traffic cop with a radar gun ahead of you.
She didn’t have a radar gun, but she had a way of looking so intently at us as she passed by or stood in an office doorway, watching us move from class to class, that most of us had to look away or down, soften our voices, or hold our breath. My fears were different, of course. I worried that she realized something more significant than what had brought the other students here had brought me to Littlefield, and I feared that one of these days, she would call me into her office to cross-examine me. I doubted I could lie to her.
Nevertheless, as the first week of school at Littlefield drew to an end, I did feel more self-confident. At breakfasts, lunches, and dinners with my classmates, I listened more than I spoke, but when I did speak, I talked about my school and social life before my abduction, answering the usual questions about friends and parties. Did we drink anything, take anything? How late could we stay out? Did I have parties at my house? How wild did our parties get?
I didn’t want to appear too goody-goody, but I didn’t want to make everything seem all right, either. I tried to sound just naive about it. Some were disappointed. They were like prisoners on an island who had hoped to hear raucous tales from the ones who had just arrived.
A number of times, I almost gave away that I was an identical twin, but I was able to rescue the references by assigning them to this mythical best friend. I made it seem like she and I were inseparable. I called her Audrina and fabricated her history, family, and personality, weaving in details from novels I had read.
Marcy asked the most questions about her, pressuring me for a detailed description, coming right out and asking if I thought she was prettier than I was. I simply put together some features from three or four girls and created an imaginary friend who was attractive by anyone’s standards. Marcy pushed on, wanting to know how long we’d been friends. What did we have in common? Did we share clothes and things? Was she jealous of me, especially over a boy?
If anything, I thought Marcy was the jealous one, jealous of my admiration for this mythical best friend. I realized early on that despite her outgoing personality, Marcy had really never had a close friend. I sensed she was hoping I might be her first. I wasn’t averse to it. For too long, Haylee had to be my best friend, and I had to be hers. The prospect of growing close to someone without Haylee looking over my shoulder and in some way interfering was exciting to me.
But Marcy’s questions made me feel like I was writing a teenage soap opera, and finally, one day at lunch after she asked me whether I knew if Audrina was a virgin, I spun on her and said, “Please, no more questions about her, Marcy. I’ve left that world. This is my world now. I don’t even email or Instagram anyone back home. To be honest, they were all mad at me for agreeing to attend a private school.”
She both liked and didn’t like my answer, but she stopped asking questions about the mythical Audrina. She did, however, want to know if any of the boys I liked or the ones who liked me felt I had become a snob or something when they learned I was going to leave and attend an expensive private school.
“That happened to me,” she said quickly, to be sure I would answer.
“I wasn’t really involved with any boy closely enough to care,” I told her. That was the truth.
Of course, what she suggested had been of some concern when my father and Dr. Sacks proposed that I attend a private school. I did have friends whom I admittedly pushed away in the period immediately after my rescue. I regretted losing them and imagined that their way of writing me off forever now was to think of me just the way Marcy was claiming her friends thought of her. We thought we were too good for them. The difference, I hoped, was that the ones who were sensitive and intelligent would realize how difficult it would have been for me simply to rejoin them.
Was it naive of me to expect that after a while, none of that would matter, that I would start a new life here and forget the horror I had endured? Can you really tuck away the painful memories in your life or bury them under new and better ones? How damaged was I? When, I wondered, would someone here look at me and realize it? I hadn’t met that many of my classmates yet, but every time I got to speak to someone new, I held my breath, anticipating her or him to pause and ask, What really made you want to come here? What happened to you, Kaylee Blossom Fitzgerald? Something did, so stop pretending otherwise.
Claudia had yet to ask such a question, but sometimes I caught her looking at me with more curiosity, and I thought she was on the verge of doing so. Haylee used to tell anyone who criticized her for something she had done that, “It takes one to know one.” There was some truth in that. Someone who was deeply emotionally wounded should recognize someone else who was, I thought, and that was why I feared Claudia would eventually get the truth from me.
Claudia tagged along reluctantly when we went to the dining hall, but I wouldn’t let her drift into solitude, where she would surely only feel sorry for herself and thus make things gloomier for me. I always kept a place for her at our table in the dining hall and included her in any conversations. By driving her darkness back, I hoped I would be driving away my own.
I wasn’t starting to like her so much as I was finding it easier to tolerate her, thanks a great deal to Marcy, who would swipe away Claudia’s dour expression with a quip about Mrs. Rosewell or her own roommate, who she claimed was obsessive-compulsive, insisting that toothpaste tubes be squeezed from the bottom up.
“I do that, too,” Claudia claimed, after which Marcy went into a dramatic faint, slapping her hand over her forehead, falling onto my bed, and claiming she was overwhelmed by efficient, organized people.
“You don’t know what this means to confront another organized person. If this keeps up, I’ll have to reform, get good grades, and behave myself. I’ll choke on compliments!”
Claudia actually laughed. She can be rescued, I thought. I still wondered if I could, but she certainly did have good qualities. She wasn’t one to raise her hand in class to answer questions, but when she was called on, she always had the answer the teacher was looking to get. As she had predicted, she started off well in math, getting a hundred on our first quiz and A-pluses on her homework. Thanks to her, I did just as well. She had no problem tutoring me and certainly showed more patience than I would have tutoring someone.
Maybe I’d learned more about psychology than I thought, but gradually, whenever Marcy wasn’t hovering over us, I began to get more and more out of Claudia concerning her home life and her self-image. She was less reluctant to talk when I did what my therapists did and acted almost disinterested, clearing away any sense of pursuit or pressure. If she offered something, some detail, I made reference to someone I knew who had a similar experience, so I could say, “I know what you mean, Claudia.” As a result of all this, she grew more comfortable with me, more comfortable, I thought, than she had been with any previous roommates.
Although I didn’t think she would like it, I began to feel sorry for her. I had trouble believing and accepting the idea that a parent could dislike his or her own child, but the more she told me about her relationship with her parents, especially her mother, the more I accepted that it was possible and the sorrier I began to feel for her. My father was right. I was becoming a little more than an amateur therapist. You suffer a wound and watch how the doctor treats it, and nine times out of ten, when something similar happens to someone else, you can help.
I understood her bitterness when she told me how her mother, almost from the days of Claudia’s infancy, never wanted to go shopping with her for clothes, shoes, or practically anything for her. She gave that assignment to their housekeeper and nanny, Beneatha Patterson, an African American woman, whom Claudia admitted she liked more than her own mother. Claudia never had the mother-daughter talks Haylee and I had with our mother, and she certainly spoke little with her about sex and relationships. I gathered that the icing on the cake for Claudia was when her mother decided she didn’t need Beneatha to serve as nanny to her new daughter, Jillian. Now she would willingly and lovingly take on those motherly responsibilities.
I could easily understand why that was so painful for Claudia. After all, this was the exact opposite of how Mother had treated Haylee and me. There was never to be an iota of favoritism in our house, nothing to ever stimulate jealousy or sibling rivalry. Mother would practically lunge at my father to claw him if he complimented only Haylee or me for some reason, no matter how simple. Listening to Claudia describe her home life, I began to wonder if Mother was all that terrible after all. She had become something of an expert in parenting. She just went a little overboard. Well, maybe she went a lot overboard.
My father was the first to bail out, of course. The divorce still came as a shock to both Haylee and me when it happened, but Mother didn’t seem as disturbed by it, as we had anticipated she would be. Now all of it, all the responsibility for us, had fallen squarely on him.
My father called me twice the first week. The first time was to be sure I was comfortable and happy. The second time was to talk about Haylee.
“I thought you should know what’s happening, Kaylee. If you don’t want to know, just tell me, but I wasn’t going to shut you out of it all without your telling me to do so.”
When I realized why he was calling, I left my room and went outside for privacy. When we were nearby, Mother used to warn her friends who were talking about other women that “little pitchers have big ears.” People, especially girls in Cook Hall, snooped on one another.
Claudia, like everyone else at Littlefield right now, believed I was an only child. Probably, if I was going to trust anyone with the truth, Claudia would be the best one. The girls who spoke to her did so solely because she was part of Marcy’s and my group from Cook Hall. She didn’t actively pursue any friendships other than what she had with us. Except for Marcy, who did it because she thought it pleased me, no one asked her personal questions. I did tell myself that if I needed to confide in anyone here, Claudia would be the one, because whatever I told her would never find its way from her lips. It would almost be like talking to myself. Right now, I saw no urgent need to do it.
“What’s happening with her, Daddy? I do want to know.”
“Dr. Alexander called me yesterday. Haylee’s catatonia was still severe, so they wanted to begin electric shock treatments.”
“Electric shock?”
“Yes.”
“Did they do it?”
“They did it just an hour ago, Kaylee.”
Despite the cruel thing Haylee had done to me and all the deceit that followed, I couldn’t erase the years we had spent together being more like conjoined twins than merely identical. For most of our lives, whenever one of us suffered pain or an illness, the other did, too, if not actually, then virtually. Of course, it was mostly psychological, but that didn’t make it less painful for one of us than the other. Mother taught us early on that when one of us caught a cold, the other would for sure, and that always seemed to happen. She even began giving medicine to both of us, even if the other showed no symptoms yet. When we were little and one of us cut herself on something, Mother would cut the other in the same place—a finger, a hand, a leg, whatever. We were taught that each of us must always feel what the other felt. We must think of ourselves as halves of the same person.
There was some reality to it. Neither of us could be allergic to something without the other also being allergic. We suffered cavities in the same teeth, which absolutely shocked the dentist. If one of us developed a cough, Mother gave the other the same cough medicine, and soon after, we were both coughing. Maybe we began to cough out of sympathy or simply because we wanted to please Mother, but whatever the reason, we did it. It happened.
Standing there in the late-afternoon twilight, miles and miles from Haylee, practically in another world, I could still empathize with her. I even grimaced with pain as I did more than simply imagine the electricity passing through my brain; I felt it. My jaw stiffened. My whole body hardened with expectation. I felt myself tremble.
“Kaylee?” my father asked when I was silent for too long.
“What happened?” I asked after regaining my breath.
“It worked,” he said. “She’s much better.”
“So you visited her?”
“Yes. I had to, both for her sake and your mother’s.”
“Yours, too, Daddy. She’s still your daughter.”
“Right. I saw her, but I didn’t speak to her. Anyway, I wanted you to know so you wouldn’t blame yourself for any of this. Don’t tell me you didn’t, Kaylee,” he added quickly. “You wanted to punish her, get even somehow, and you believe you did.”
“Yes,” I confessed. We had discussed it, but now, with Haylee getting this painful treatment, I felt more guilt than pleasure. It was still true and maybe always would be. Everything I did to her, I did to myself, and vice versa, whether she wanted to admit it or not.
“Anyway, it’s over,” my father said. “Her therapy has begun again. Dr. Alexander and I decided I would visit her next week. I’ll call you after I do.”
“Okay.”
“You can’t let this interfere with your good progress, Kaylee. You’re going to have a better life now, and that’s that,” he said firmly. “What’s happening to Haylee she brought on herself.”
“All right, Daddy.”
“Are you making new friends?”
“Yes, and I like my teachers and the classes.”
“Good. Your mother finally asked me about you.”
“Did she? I did call to speak with her, but Mrs. Granford said she was sleeping, and she never called me back.”
“Yes, well, I told her about Haylee, and I think it’s all finally sinking in. In fact, she seems a lot better, too. Mrs. Granford said she is doing a lot more for herself. Maybe she’ll call you soon. Things could get back to being . . . normal, whatever that means for your mother.”
“Oh, I want that to happen, Daddy.”
“It will, I’m sure. You enjoy yourself, understand? Dana and I are talking about driving over one weekend to take you to lunch, okay?”
“Yes, I’d like that.”
“Okay, sweetheart. Have a good night.”
“I will. Thank you, Daddy.”
I stood there in the growing darkness for a while, thinking, remembering. You can be angry, you can hate, but you can’t stop recalling better times. On nights like this, when Haylee and I were alone and Mother and my father were downstairs watching television or out to dinner during those happier years that my father vaguely referred to as “normal,” the two of us would cuddle, either in her bed or mine, and talk about dreams and wishes. Back then, we wanted to please each other. Love wasn’t only natural; it was the glue that held us together and made us special. We enjoyed being special then. We pranced about in our new shoes and dresses, knowing we were the center of attention, two sisters who mirrored each other so perfectly that we brought amazement to faces that hadn’t been excited by much in their lives for years. Smiles and laughter rained down on us. We were Mother’s perfect little girls. Surely only good things would come our way.
When we were little, we wanted so much to be older. Why was I thinking more often and more fondly now about my little-girl days, longing for them? In so many ways, I wished I was a little girl again. Other girls my age would surely think I was crazy, especially now, when you could do so much more on your own—drive, stay out later, and generally be responsible for yourself. Yes, I wanted to go back in time.
And yet, deep in my heart, I knew Haylee and I could never be those perfect twins again, certainly not the way Mother had envisioned us. Now it was difficult even to think of us as merely sisters.
“You didn’t come out to smoke, did you?” I heard.
At first, I didn’t see him standing there in the shadows, but he stepped out, and I recognized Troy Matzner. He was in a dark green pullover sweater and jeans tonight.
“What are you doing hovering in the shadows here?” I demanded. I felt spied upon.
“Not hovering in the shadows. I’m just taking a walk,” he said, coming closer and into more of the light spilling from the building and the outside fixtures. “I wasn’t hanging in the shadows listening to your conversation,” he added without smiling. “If that’s what you’re afraid of.”
“I’m not afraid of it.”
“Old boyfriend left back home?” he asked, nodding at the smartphone in my hand.
“My father, if you must know.”
He nodded and looked away, his arms folded. “You enjoying it here?” he asked, without turning back to me.
“So far,” I said. “How long have you been here?”
“Three years.”
I knew he was a senior. I didn’t cross-examine the other girls to find out about him or ask Marcy anymore, but whenever anyone made a reference to him, my ears perked up . . . whether I wanted them to or not.
“So if you’re not spying, what are you doing at Cook Hall?”
He turned back to me. “I’m getting some fresh air,” he responded sharply. “Actually,” he added, softening his tone, “I’m taking a much-needed break from my inane roommate.”
“Inane?”
“I’d say he’s about ten years behind on his emotional development. If I hear one more fart joke, I’ll be on trial for murder,” he said. I noticed that when he spoke firmly, he began looking at me but almost immediately looked to the side or down to finish.
Now that he was more in the light and closer to me than he had been, I could appreciate how handsome he was. His dark brown hair was layered softly with strands just over his forehead. It looked like it had been styled by someone who worked in Hollywood, sculpted and trimmed and yet very natural-looking. When I had glimpses of him passing in the hallways, I thought his eyes were unique, but now that I could see them clearly and closely, that impression was verified. They were hazel with a slight tint of green, perhaps brought out more by the lighting. He had full, sensuous lips and prominent high cheekbones complementing his male-model perfect nose. His good looks and the way he held his firm shoulders back, the way he held his head and just slightly tucked in the right side of his mouth, did give him an aristocratic arrogance that I was confident turned off most of the boys here and intimidated most of the girls.
“I did hear that you’ve had a new roommate every year and one year had none for most of the time.”
“Maybe I snore.”
“Somehow I doubt that was it,” I said.
He turned, and I thought he was just going to walk away, deciding he had given me enough of his royal time or something, but then he turned back.
“So were you complaining to your father? Is that why you came out to have the conversation? You were afraid someone might report you to the Iron Lady? She has her little informers, ass kissers, you know.”
“No,” I snapped back because of how condescending he sounded. “I’m not afraid of that. But now that you’ve brought it up, why do you continue attending school here if you’re so unhappy?”
Instead of saying something nasty and walking away, he smiled. “Who says going somewhere else would make me happier? I just have one more year, half a year, actually. I’ll grit my teeth and bear it.”
We heard some girls laughing as they came up a sidewalk in our direction. I felt myself calm down.
“Do you take a walk every night?” I asked.
“Just about.” He paused, like someone deciding if I was worth another few minutes. “So really, what’s your impression of the place? You haven’t been here a week, but it doesn’t take long to decide.”
“It’s fine. I like my classes and teachers, and the place is beautiful. Maybe my bar for satisfaction is lower than yours,” I added.
He didn’t laugh, but he widened his smile and looked away. “Where are you from?” he asked, again not turning back.
“Ridgeway. And you?”
“Carbondale,” he said, “but I consider myself an exchange student.”
“What? How are you an exchange student if you’re from Carbondale, Pennsylvania?”
“I speak another language,” he said, turning back to me.
“What other language?”
“English,” he said.
“Very funny.”
“Is it?” There was that pause again. He looked like he was fighting with himself to continue talking to me, like he would just walk away. “What brought you here? Why didn’t you begin your high school education here?” he asked, like a lawyer in a courtroom surprising a witness.
Of course, the question sounded alarm bells, but I also thought he wouldn’t have asked it if he wasn’t interested in me. Could flattery overpower caution?
“I had to finish my needlework project in arts and crafts before I could leave my previous school,” I said.
He stared, first in disbelief, and then a real look of appreciation washed it away. “Do you always finish what you begin?”
“Of course, don’t you?”
“Can’t wait to see it, then,” he said.
“I don’t show it to just anybody. You have to earn the right.”
“And just how do I go about doing that?”
“Figure it out,” I said. “I’ll give you the rest of the year. Got to get back to my homework and tease the Iron Lady’s little spies. Enjoy the rest of your walk.”
I didn’t look back. Haylee used to be firm about that whenever we dated or flirted with a boy. “When you walk away, you don’t look back. If you look back, you commit and give them an advantage. Never show how interested you are, Kaylee,” she’d instructed.
I paused now, thinking about that, and then I shook my head and continued walking.
No matter what, as crazy as it seemed to me and probably would seem to anyone who knew about us, I was still relying on Haylee’s advice.