Read Everything Must Go by Jenny Fran Davis (2) Page 2 Online novels for free

Elijah’s uniform:

• Cuffed, slim-fitting jeans

• Dusty brown Blundstones

• White T-shirt paired with open flannel jacket

• Tiny round glasses

• Briefcase

• Camera on strap on shoulder

Elijah on his favorite album, Sean Kingston’s 2007 Sean Kingston: “It’s so fucking chill.”

I’m such a confused and sweaty mess right now. Mum and Daddy have been screaming at each other all night about money—it all started when Mum bought those almonds with turbinado sugar, which Daddy deemed to be an extravagance, to which she replied, “WHY DO I WORK SO HARD, ARNOLD, IF I CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS?” and then they started this awful argument about why his dental practice is thriving while her obstetrics one is floundering, and now Lael and I are holed up in my room, eating red grapes. Lael is seething. She just put in earplugs to finish her early action application to Harvard. I can’t focus on pre-calc right now, so I’m journaling instead.

When I told Elijah on Thursday that Mum and Daddy have been having awful fights, he just listened for a long time, silently. Then he rose from his seat wordlessly, but with the most delicious little smirk, and bought me a single pink macaron at the counter with a crumpled dollar from his leather wallet. He set the plate down in front of me.

“For the girl who has everything,” he said. His smirk reached a breaking point, and his face erupted in a smile.

I wanted to DIE. But also live, you know?

Oh my God. I just got home from an Elijah meeting, and I am FREAKING out.

Let me start from the beginning.

After we’d settled at a table, he thumped a packet of readings on the table but rested his big hand on it, keeping me from reaching for it.

“Have you ever been photographed?” he asked.

“I mean, yeah,” I said. “Hasn’t everyone?”

He just shook his head. He wasn’t smiling this time, and I shifted around in my seat.

God, he’s so intense. I would do anything for him.

“I mean by a professional,” he said. “In an artistic way.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You’d know if you had.”

“I haven’t.”

“Can I shoot you?”

His eye contact was sending electric signals to my chest, making my heart beat funny. I had to look away, so I did, down at my calf-length light denim skirt.

“What did you have in mind?” I asked when I’d gathered the strength to look up at him again.

I was flirting with danger at this point, and I knew it. I was nervous, but I was also wearing a vintage Prada blouse (for which I’d paid twenty-eight dollars at a consignment shop, naturally), so I felt a bit unstoppable.

“I’m asking if I can take a series of photographs of you in various outfits for a project I’m doing,” he said.

I paused. The moment stretched out before us like a strand of a spiderweb.

“Yes,” I said. And then: “Why?”

He laughed. “You have such a look about you,” he said. “The clothes themselves, but also the way you wear them. You’re, like, reclaiming them somehow. I think it’ll translate well on film.”

My neck burned. Is there anything quite as delicious as a physical compliment? I don’t think there is, and definitely nothing better from Elijah.

“I still haven’t seen any of your work,” I said.

He rummaged in his back pocket for his phone and extracted it, tapping with concentration. Finally he held it out for me. I stared at the screen. A pale girl with long, shining white hair floated on her back, arms akimbo, in a high-waisted white bikini. White-blond hair glimmered on her legs, under her arms, at the edges of the crotch of her bikini bottoms. Two mossy, dirt-speckled lily pads floated beside her. There was something hauntingly beautiful about the photo. My chest tightened.

“Who is she?” I asked.

“She’s a photographer, “I shot her first,” he said. “This was last year. Before she got into taking her own photos.”

I looked into the girl’s big green eyes, which pooled with tears. The name came to me at once.

“I totally know who she is,” I said. “She’s Ursula Abbot, right?”

Ursula Abbot was one of my favorite feminist Instagram artists. She basically argued, with beautiful shots of her looking sad in mirrors, in hospital beds (Urusla had a life-threatening illness and documented her doctors’ visits), and in Victorian backyards, that being visibly sad—emotional, moody, diseased, upset—was political and liberating in a world that shames girls for their sorrows about sexism and sickness, about the demands society places on women. That being an unhappy girl could reshape the very idea of sickness itself, exposing it as a capitalist project and crafting it into a weapon against the patriarchy.

After agreeing to meet Elijah at the entrance to Central Park, I ran home, a scream scratching at my throat, and took another bath to hold my body. In the bath I prayed, “Dear Jesus, please, please, make him fall in love with me.”

After drying off, I pulled out my laptop and typed “Elijah Huck” into Google. And Elijah Huck, it turned out, was kind of a Big Fucking Deal. I mean, he was hardly a national celebrity, or whatever, but he’d made headlines in the independent online magazine from Oyster (“Elijah Huck Documents Upper-Class Underworld”), the teen feminist magazine Nymphette (“Urban Hipst-onary: A Conversation with Up-and-Coming Photographer Elijah Huck”), and even a New York Times live piece called “Too Cool for Instagram (But on It Anyway).”

Nymphette, by the way, will become much more important later on in the story.

I didn’t tell my friends. They would have called him a creep or something (but he wasn’t that much older than we were! Only nineteen to our sixteen! And his age was part of what made him so attractive). Like one of my idols, Clueless’s Cher Horowitz, I’d made it my policy not to date high-school boys. (Not that I really even knew any high-school boys, on account of going to Bowen, but that was beside the point.)

He told me to wear whatever I wanted to the shoot, so the night before, I tried on every item of clothing in my closet for Lael, my sister, who sat on my bed, eating chocolate soy milk ice cream from the carton. She wasn’t impressed—by Elijah or by my outfits.

“So he’s into your clothes,” she said. “Is he gay?”

I shook my head. He’d mentioned a high-school girlfriend, a Polish immigrant named Ivana who’d been a math whiz and, as it had turned out later, a lesbian, a fact he’d shared while trying to illustrate a point about the Wars of the Roses.

“Not gay,” I said. “And besides, it wouldn’t matter. I’m not interested in him romantically. Also, way to dabble in tropes, Lael.”

Lael just laughed.

I finally settled on a short apricot shift dress and a matching coat (both made in 1958; I’d bought the set on Etsy from an old woman in Idaho) that didn’t make Lael want to gouge her eyes out with her ice cream spoon, which she’d almost done earlier when I put on a busy green Marimekko dress. (About that number, she’d declared, “Pregnant art teacher.”)

In hindsight, the coat was a little bit too heavy for the weather. I arrived at the entrance to the Park ten minutes late (my 1950s guidebook called “So You Want Him to Pin You”—not that I wanted Elijah to pin me yet, of course—cautioned against punctuality, and though as a proud feminist I obviously read it ironically, it wasn’t like I was about to read good advice and ignore it), sweating more than I cared for him to see.

I saw him before he saw me. He was adjusting the lens of his camera, squinting in the sun a little bit and pursing his lips. I took a deep, shaky breath. I waited until he saw me and waved me over, slowly nodding approval at my outfit.

He photographed me on the street first. It was more awkward than I’d expected to be photographed: I felt like I had to hold my breath the whole time, and I had to make sure none of my limbs were at funny angles. Besides, it was a weekend morning, and the streets were flooded with tourists. People around us stared. A few tourists photo-bombed us, especially as we headed toward Fifth Avenue, as though we were a famous art monster couple or something.

The shoot lasted for a few hours, into the early afternoon, and it seemed natural to get lunch in a Le Pain Quotidien that had just opened on Fifty-Ninth Street.

It was there, over a vegan fall tart that we shared, that he told me his idea: instead of taking an entire series of photos and uploading them to the portfolio on his website, he’d create a blog in order to share the images every week. The goal was to drum up a robust fan following on social media, a career move his mentor had been urging him to make. I agreed, with two caveats: one, that he couldn’t tell anybody that the photos were of me (he agreed to always cover my face somehow, with a big hat or my hair or a sign of some sort), and two, that he had to expand on the Pennsylvania Dutch thing, which I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about ever since he’d told me.

“You really want to know?” he asked, setting his fork down on his plate.

I nodded.

“Remember when I told you about the Quare Academy?”

I nodded again.

“That’s where I went for my last two years of high school.”

“Is it in Amish Country, or something?”

He laughed. “No, no,” he said. “It’s in upstate New York. In the Hudson Valley. It’s an alternative farm school where you learn peace studies and global issues and environmentalism instead of normal English and history and science.”

“So how did you know the phrase?”

“Quare offered an elective in Pennsylvania Dutch. Accompanied by a narrative history seminar, part of which took place in Amish Country.”

I swallowed a laugh. “That’s the long story you couldn’t get into before?”

He nodded, crossing his arms. “Are you going to back out of the blog now that you’re not satisfied with my answer to your question?”

I pretended to think about it.

It took us a few tries, and a few soy lattes, but we finally settled on the concept. He laughed as he typed out the first post, hyperbolic and wry. Of course he wasn’t taking this seriously. He was too cool for that in his flannel and cuffed jeans. He pressed publish. We each took a bite of éclair.

misstulipblog.com

Photos c/o Elijah Huck

Click to navigate through photo album

Meet Miss Tulip, a teenager who has made it her mission to dress every day like it’s 1958. Before you roll your eyes and shake your fist at the whims of this generation, or worry about troubling nostalgia for pre-Civil-Rights-Era America, hear—or, more accurately, watch— her out. You might just be surprised.

I met up with Miss Tulip at the entrance to Central Park on West Fifty-Ninth Street. She showed up in this matching apricot dress and coat from the waning days of the Eisenhower administration, as well as a pillbox hat that she’d informed me had been dyed to match by her tailor on Third Avenue.

The thing about Miss T is that at first glance, she could be the type to reinforce a classic femininity that conjures baking casseroles and darning socks. She’s got an in with every vintage retailer in New York. She has an honorary PhD in accessorizing. But don’t be fooled by her demure exterior: Miss Tulip is a rebel. Recontextualizing outfits from an era plagued by even more bigotry than our own throws the gazer into a new incarnation of the constructed feminine, one informed by, yet working to liberate itself from, its past.

But the clothes are only half of it. After the shoot, we discussed intersectional feminism and modern-day settler colonialism over coffee, two keen interests of Miss T’s: at the surface, she’s pure 1958, but inside beats the heart of a Jezebel editor.

Daily Elijah interactions:

8 a.m.: The Spence Room, at breakfast, eating half a bagel and sipping coffee.

My heart starts to hammer, and I make a point to pass the table he’s at—with a few other teachers, usually, but sometimes alone, sometimes writing in a little notebook—and if he doesn’t look up and smile at me the first time, I walk by again and again until he does. If he beckons me over to the table he’s at, I make a point to gesture at myself, all fake-surprised, like, Me??? and he laughs and I walk toward him. On the walk, I can’t feel the ground under my feet, probably because my toes have gone numb.

1:30 p.m.: Dr. Levin’s class, which he sometimes leads.

I literally can’t sit still when he comes to observe in Dr. Levin’s class. I’m so aware of everything. I’ve never felt so alive. But it’s the kind of alive where I feel like I’m about to die—that’s how alive I feel. I can’t sleep. My heart is beating too fast. Everyone’s voice sounds tinny, like when music plays on a computer.

3 p.m.: Dismissal, when I stroll past Dr. Levin’s room to watch Elijah collecting his stuff and preparing to leave.

Which isn’t really even that creepy, if you think about it. I mean, I could be a Peeping Tom, or something.

4:30 p.m.: every Thursday: our meeting on the Upper West Side.

On Thursday, at our meeting, he told me about this super-emotionally damaging relationship he was in during high school (post-Ivana) after I gave him a Mum-and-Daddy update, and we just sat smiling at each other behind our lattes despite the pain that we’d just shared. He’s just so in touch with his emotions and gets so sad despite the cool front he puts up!!! I have it SO BAD.

He’s taking a year off from Columbia next year to teach an elective on the history of violence at Quare, the peace-environmentalism-and-arts boarding school he graduated from. So that means he won’t be around next year. The thought of not seeing him at least twice a week makes me want to die. I hope by that time I’ll have convinced him not to leave, but that’s kind of creepy, so I’ll keep that to myself for now.

I want him every hour of the day.

God, if anyone found this journal, I would absolutely DIE. Is there anything more humiliating than being in love?

TO A T(W)EE:

NEW ARTIST AND MUSE TAKE CENTER STAGE

There’s a new sheriff in town, and her name is Miss Tulip. She’s taken off like wildfire, especially with the teen set—specifically, with teens who’ve eschewed Forever 21 in exchange for thrift stores. Elijah Huck, who’s made a name for himself in indie photography, receives over one hundred emails per day about the series, most of them gushing with praise and thanks for giving them a fashion resource they can relate to.

In the past few weeks, the Miss Tulip blog has spurred dozens of copycats, including Hex in the City (a Wiccan teen, Lula Mikelson, wanders New York in vintage gothic attire performing rituals), PEARLS (four young women clad only in pearls pose with Park Avenue doormen from Seventeenth Street to the Bronx), and The Wizard of Bras (a young designer of feminist lingerie dresses statues of men in all five boroughs in her custom bras and underwear).

Huck’s posts, which regularly attract thousands of visitors, are unique in their ability to evoke both modernity and antiquity, as well as provide a tentative explanation—a subtle one— about why today’s young people look to the past for answers about their identities and their futures.

I haven’t even told India and Cora about him, because they’d definitely tell me to snap out of it. Every time something gets written up about Elijah and Miss Tulip, I feel such a sense of pride, but it’s PRIVATE pride—like an intimate thing between Elijah and me.

Elijah fantasies:

• We’re in the Met. He pulls me off to the side, into some deserted corner, and starts kissing me.

• I’m standing in front of an ornate bookcase, studying it, hand on my chin. He comes up from behind and drapes himself over me. I spin around; we kiss.

• We’re on the subway. He reaches for my hand; I let him hold it. I look down at my lap and smile. There is electricity at the line where our legs touch.

Let me pause here and say that I know this seems like the most trivial, most bourgeoisie shit ever. I mean, a hipster fashion blog in which I dress in clothes from 1958? Please don’t lose heart, readers. This was my old life, remember. It’s as painful for me to relive this time as it is for you to hear about it, if not more so.

Anyway, I was his muse, but he wasn’t in love with me. Or was he? Therein lay the problem. He wanted to follow me around the city, photographing me in vintage clothes. He called me interesting. He listened to my problems and opened up about his. He told me that I could really rock a Jackie Kennedy head scarf and that I knew a thing or two about tastefully pairing prints. AND YET. He didn’t invite me over to his 107th Street apartment to kiss me. He didn’t even touch me, not even once to adjust me during a photo shoot. We took the subway together on weekends from Brooklyn to Manhattan to Queens, even rode the Staten Island Ferry together, but he didn’t so much as put his arm around me. There was always a thin barrier between us, which I chalked up to his position of power. And although sometimes this barrier was made of metal, sometimes it was made of a gauze that seemed thin enough to tear.

Let me pause again for one more minute. At age sixteen, just as now, I was a fucking woman. It wasn’t that I needed his approval to exist. Even in this time of frissons and jittery stomachs, I knew my power without Elijah. I didn’t need him to kiss me. I just really wanted him to, and that wild desire made my body feel like it was on fire. I was in love, and it was the kind of love that made me forget myself.

So he didn’t kiss me, but he talked to me. He told me countless hilarious stories about Quare, academically rigorous and socially conscious, and encouraged me to apply, albeit in a buoyant, slightly jocular way. Until eleventh grade, he’d attended Westwood, Bowen’s prestigious brother school. (Quare was for students in the eleventh and twelfth grades only.) He’d grown frustrated, just as I was growing frustrated, with the stuffy, pretentious private school scene. (Even though I would never say that out loud.)

And as I’d mentioned in my journal, he’d be taking the following year off from Columbia to teach photography at Quare. We’d be interesting together. Cue fantasy of us picnicking and reading subversive literature in a field. Cue fantasy of Elijah realizing how adventurous I was, professing his love, and kissing me, preferably in a canoe, on a pond at sunset.

One thing happened after another, and before I knew it, I was asking for recommendations and writing my application essay for Quare about the need to make adoption more accessible to same-sex couples.

The Quare Academy

Flora Goldwasser

470 West 79th Street, Apt. 5A

New York, NY 10024

April 10

Flora,

On behalf of the Quare admissions committee and faculty, I’m thrilled to offer you a spot in the class of 20—. Quare received a record number of close to 250 applications for just 16 spots, and it’s a testament to your ambition, creativity, and curiosity that you’ve been selected.

Please sign and return the enclosed document, along with a preliminary deposit, by May 10 if you wish to attend Quare next year. Please also feel free to call our office should you have any questions at all; I or another member of our team would be delighted to speak with you.

Infinite blessings,

Miriam Row, Headmistress

As soon as I got the letter, I knew that I would go.

Elijah would be going to Chicago to spend the summer as he always did, studying under his photography mentor, the famous Michael Rosenberg, at Chicago Arts, and I’d be interning at Sotheby’s.

I hardly heard from him all summer; he was busy in Chicago. So I did my Sotheby’s internship, ate my last Maison Kayser macarons with Cora and India—who still couldn’t wrap their heads around why I was doing this; I told them I was bored at Bowen and needed an adventure, which I could tell they didn’t quite buy, but what could they say?—and packed my nicest dresses, skirts, and shoes—along with my portable mint-green Underwood Olivetti typewriter to compose letters on the go—into two huge steamer trunks.

What follows are the letters, journal entries, and other sundry items from my first year at Quare Academy, where I had gone to follow my One True Love (or for the adventure, depending on who was asking).

misstulipblog.com

Photos c/o Elijah Huck

Click to navigate through photo album

Morning, cool cats. Miss Tulip woke up feeling a little bit glum, but after stepping into this plaid skirt suit (courtesy of the year 1958), her day got brighter. A whole lot brighter. It’s not that she’s materialistic, or anything, but she knows the power of a smartly cut suit.

And why today to bust out such a number? The three-quarter sleeves are just right for spring, and the fabric is swingy and breezy. But good luck getting your hands on one: the make is Mode O’Day, and Miss T has one of the very last ones ever manufactured. As usual, she knew a guy. What can we say? Not all of us can be so lucky or so fabulous.

Miss Tulip will be on hiatus indefinitely due to her various other social, academic, and political engagements. From both of us, subject and her documentarian, thank you for being such a rapt and reverent audience for these past months. Miss Tulip might be going away for the moment, but keep your eyes open as you wander the streets of Manhattan. You just might find her.

74 THOUGHTS ON “BREAKING PLAID: RED, WHITE, AND TULIP”

PastelsnPrints MAY 30 7:57 A.M.

WHAT THE FUCK WHY IS MISS TULIP NO MOREEEEE :((((((

Rebel MAY 30 8:46 A.M.

I’M OBSESSED WITH MISS TULIP UGH WHY HAVE YOU NOT POSTED SINCE APRIL

VivianXoXo MAY 30 8:51 A.M.

I think I’m sadder about Miss Tulip’s disappearance than I was about my own grandmother’s death.

SexyGayKitty MAY 30 11:59 A.M.

Yesssssss Miss T at it again. Looking DAMN good too.

Load 70 more

The Bowen School for Girls

A note from the headmistress

Flora Goldwasser

470 West 79th Street, Apt. 5A

New York, NY 10024

June 8

Dear Flora,

It has been my distinct pleasure to serve as your headmistress for the past eleven years. I’m writing to express my regret that you’re leaving us at the end of this school year, and also to wish you the best of luck in the future.

Bowen is accustomed to sending girls to institutions such as the Phillips Andover Academy and the Groton School when they choose to depart for boarding school, so I was surprised to learn of your choice. I am not familiar with Quare (though our college guidance team assures me that its college entrance rate is nothing short of spectacular!). I wonder if Bowen, too, might benefit from including Peace Studies and World Issues in its curriculum—you’ll have to let us know how it goes.

Perhaps the most bittersweet part of my job is saying farewell to girls I’ve come to know over the years, especially when those girls are, like you, among our brightest stars, but I am confident that you will find a home at Quare. We hope you keep in touch!

Fondly,

Lorelei Winkle, Headmistress

The Bowen School for Girls

Final Upper School Report for Flora Goldwasser, Class 10

Precalculus	A	History	A
Orchestra	A	History Tutorial	A
Chemistry	A	French	A
English	A	Drama	A
Physical Education	A	Community Engagement	A

To: Lael Goldwasser <[email protected]>

From: Flora Goldwasser <[email protected]>

Subject: Ugh

June 12, 8:17 a.m.

Lael,

I can’t believe this is the last email either of us will send or receive with our Bowen email addresses. And I really can’t believe you’re already in England. Summer hasn’t even begun yet.

I’m getting the weirdest vibes from Elijah. After your graduation, he bolted without saying good-bye. I mean, I’ll probably see him around over the summer, and if not, then once we get to Quare in the fall, but still. He is just SUCH a baby bird (like, a hot and confident one), and it scares me how v. v. into it I am. I can’t even blame him for acting weird, you know? He’s a brilliant artist. He can’t exactly be expected to be tethered in any meaningful way to this world, or any petty romances it might contain.

By the way, your graduation was beautiful, your dress was beautiful, and I’m so proud of you. I can’t believe you refused to come out to Les Deux with me and India and Cora—we celebrated YOUR graduation without YOU, because you needed to sleep before your flight. You are such an old woman sometimes.

Keep me posted about how it’s going at Oxford! I’ll be here relaxing as Mum and Daddy throw vases at each other.

Xoxo

Flora

To: Flora Goldwasser <[email protected]>

From: Lael Goldwasser <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: Ugh

June 13, 5:19 p.m.

Flora,

I didn’t say anything before, because I was a little bit preoccupied with graduating and also didn’t want you to strangle me, but I’m having worse and worse doubts about this whole Quare thing the more you talk about it. So I waited until I got to Oxford to say this.

Don’t go to Quare.

You always get these romantic notions in your head about things, and usually, it’s charming. But this—following some wimp to this hippie school to make him love you—might take the cake. And his limpid good-bye at graduation doesn’t bode well for the future. Abandon it while you still can. Talk to Lorelei Winkle; she’ll take you back in a flash. Daddy will be so happy, and Mum will be miserable, which is pretty much worth it in itself. Let Elijah go to Quare alone. It’s his home, not yours, and I have a strong feeling that you’ll regret this.

I know you’re not going to listen to me, but this is my official advice. I’m printing this email now, in fact, so I can tell you the exact day and time that I (quite rightly) warned you about this foolhardy thing you’re about to do.

Your adoring sister,

Lael

To: Lael Goldwasser <[email protected]>

From: Flora Goldwasser <[email protected]>

Subject: Ugh

June 13, 9:30 p.m.

Lael! He is not a wimp. I really wish you would stop saying that. Do all men have to be muscle-bound blocks of emotionless concrete? He’s SENSITIVE, for God’s sake. Stop acting like this is some sort of crime. And read something by Judith Butler about gender, while you’re at it. (Gender Trouble is my summer reading for Quare, and to be fair, I’ve only read the back cover, but STILL. Get with the program.)

And please, would you calm the hell down about Quare? It will be an adventure, if nothing else. It’s not like I’m doing it SOLELY to be with Elijah, or anything. Jesus Christ.

hey flora, just a heads-up, i decided to stay at columbia this yr & won’t be coming to quare after all. but i’m planning to come visit in dec. let’s do one last miss t shoot!

The Quare Academy

Flora Goldwasser

470 West 79th Street, Apt. 5A

New York, NY 10024

August 24

Flora,

As the broccoli and cabbage appear aboveground, the eggplant bursts onto the landscape purple and ripe, and the mint springs up in succulent pockets, we prepare ourselves to welcome the sixty-second class of Quare students. You are a member of one of our most vibrant classes yet: sixteen dreamers, poets, dancers, environmentalists, knitters, milkers, and activists selected from twelve states and two countries among hundreds of applicants.

Yesterday, our child, Basilia, mewed at the first sliver of tooth poking through her gums, and we laughed that the first of the visitors had already arrived. We were reminded that with every change comes the possibility for strife, and we invite you to embrace whatever insecurity you might be feeling in the days leading up to your arrival on campus.

I am delighted to inform you that you will be living with Juna Díaz, who hails from Santa Fe, New Mexico. I advise you not to pack more than a couple of bags’ worth of belongings: the “love shacks,” as we call our cabins, are rather cozy.

We very much look forward to meeting you and celebrating your story.

Infinite blessings,

Miriam

quare.edu/about/index.html

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

What is Quare?

The Quare Academy is a two-year residential, college preparatory boarding school for students in eleventh and twelfth grades focused on environmentalism, the arts, peace studies, and global issues. Quare occupies 420 acres in the Hudson Valley region of upstate New York.

What are the classes like?

The Quare Academy assigns work at the college level. Five academically rigorous, seminar-style courses yield credit in English, government and economics, math, science, and language, through a combination of research and hands-on experience. In addition, each student earns elective credits that include feminist forms, ethics and the environment, permaculture seminar, and art activism. Students may also choose to take one independent study course during each semester.

What qualities do you look for in prospective students?

High school students entering their eleventh- or twelfth-grade years are admitted based on their academic records, service work, recommendations, and extracurricular activities as they demonstrate motivation, aptitude, and achievement. Specifically, Quare seeks students who feel called to come here—called to challenge themselves, called to engage with the world’s ills, and called to join a radically inclusive community of dreamers and thinkers. Admissions cap at twenty students.

Where will I live?

Students live in two-person A-frame cabins circling Quare Pond. The cabins contain a small sofa, a wood-burning stove, shelves for books, and desk space, as well as a drying rack.

Where is Quare located?

Quare is located roughly twenty miles from Woodstock, New York. The town of Main Stream, which is home to just over one thousand residents, is rich in history and culture; many artists, peacemakers, and farmers reside here. Just a five-minute drive, or a twenty-minute hike, to the Hudson River, Quare is fortunate to call such a scenic pocket of New York home.

Where do graduates go to college?

In the past five years, Quare graduates have matriculated Bard College, Brown University, Columbia University, Grinnell College, Harvard University, Macalester College, Northwestern University, Oberlin College, Pitzer College, Pomona College, Reed College, Smith College, Stanford University, Swarthmore College, the University of California at Berkeley and Los Angeles, the University of Chicago, Vassar College, Wesleyan University, Williams College, and Yale University.

How can I communicate with my friends and family?

Because of our limited bandwidth, Quare students in their first year can email anyone with a Quare email address using our internal server; however, to communicate with friends and family off campus, we encourage these students to call or write letters. Second-years can send and receive email both internally and externally.

The Quare Academy | 2 Quare Road, Main Stream, NY 12497 | 846-552-1304

I feel like I’m on a trolley speeding down a hill. And for once I don’t even feel like I’m being dramatic in that comparison. I’m going to QUARE in a few days, and it’s entirely too late to back out. I’m really GOING, and he’s not going to be there after all.

Holy FUCKING shit. I can’t back out. I can’t. My stuff is packed. The papers are signed. I have a roommate and everything, according to a letter from the headmistress.

And now that I think about it, there was that weird look Elijah gave me in the early days after my acceptance—a look that at the time I interpreted as adoration, but which now seems a little bit off, somewhere between a gas pain and a “this is awkward.”

I’m trying so hard to remain calm. I have three candles burning, and my blinds are closed so I can’t see my creepy across-the-street neighbor Mr. Cheney. But there’s this awful weight in my stomach that even the lemon-lime seltzer I picked up on the way home isn’t helping. I don’t know what to do other than curl up in a ball and cry. I feel so stupid and pitiful.

To: Flora Goldwasser <[email protected]>

From: Emma Engelbrecht Goldwasser <[email protected]>

Subject: onward!

August 26, 7:18 a.m.

Darling,

I’m ever so sorry that I won’t be able to come with Daddy to drop you off at Quare. I know you understand, but I hope you aren’t too sad about it. It was absolutely crucial that I spend this week in West Virginia. The people I’ve met here in the more depressed bits of Appalachia are nothing short of heroes: in the face of mountaintop removal, chronic asthma, and rampant Oxycontin addiction, they nonetheless find the will and the grace to go on.

And so will you. The future is bright, darling. I am thrilled that you agree Quare is a much more suitable environment than Bowen, and I commend you for taking my complaints about Dr. Winkle all these years to heart—really, her unrelenting focus on Advanced Placement classes and etiquette seminars denies you the most important part of yourself: your individuality. I’m so proud of you for finding this place, and I know that it will soon feel like home.

Love always,

Mum

Lael Goldwasser

Harvard College

2609 Harvard Yard Mail Center

Cambridge, MA 02138

August 29

Lael,

I didn’t back out. Even after getting that text from him. I think I was in a state of shock, and besides, my trunks were packed.

So I’m here. At Quare. It’s actually happening.

I was one of the first ones here, of course, at least as far as I could tell, because Daddy forced us to leave the city at about five forty-five in the morning, even though I told him about a hundred times that it’s only a two-hour drive. So we got here at the crack of dawn, just in time to hear a rooster howling. I’m kidding, but just barely. As we neared Quare, I hardly opened my eyes, not only because I was so tired, but also because I didn’t really want to see it—something about seeing it would make it real, I guess.

It isn’t that I wish it weren’t real, per se. But I’ve been a bundle of anxiety for weeks, and I simply couldn’t deal with the sight of a dirt road at seven in the morning.

And Daddy was so quiet on the drive up here. I mean, it’s not that he’s usually such a great conversationalist, but he didn’t even offer the obvious statement-nod combinations he usually does (“Red house. Blue sky”). I had no idea what to say to him, either, because we hadn’t exactly been chatting it up all summer.

Thanks, by the way, for leaving me to deal with Mum and Daddy while you did whatever you do with test tubes at Oxford.

I feel like Daddy’s depressed; the divorce funk is only going to get worse now that we’re both at school. It wasn’t lost on me that he’s driving directly to his new house in Rye on his way back from dropping me here. I don’t even want to know what the house looks like—I can only assume it has gray walls and a solitary toothbrush (and single tongue brush and single floss container and single tub of mouthwash, of course) in the medicine cabinet. Oh, and maybe a single bottle of Prozac, assuming that he goes to see Dr. Modarressi like I urged him to.

Wow, that image got really harrowing, really fast.

Anyway, I should probably finish—or start—unpacking. Daddy didn’t really stick around after helping me get all my stuff into the cabin. We hugged a little, he told me he loved me, and then he was just . . . gone. I felt superlight and had no idea where to put myself, so I sat down and wrote to you.

Can you tell me about Harvard, please? I’m dying to know whether your roommate is really as mousy (in a good way!!) as she seemed online.

XOXO,

Flora

India Katz-Rosen

1025 Fifth Avenue, Apt. 9C

New York, NY 10028

August 30

Dear India,

Do you remember those macarons we used to get from the Seventy-fourth Street Maison Kayser?

Well, I’ve been having dreams about them.

They fall somewhere between Casablanca and that old French movie that Madame Leflore had to turn off because of all the boobs.

I’d definitely rather make out with a macaron than with that old French guy with the weird mole on his face.

You might be wondering why I’m fantasizing about macarons. I can answer that in one word: quinoa. Want another? Kale.

It’s not that I have anything against quinoa. Or kale, for that matter. You know that I enjoyed a spring quinoa salad in the Bowen cafeteria as much as any other girl. And I can’t even count the number of times I’ve opted to add kale into a smoothie at Juice Gen. But it’s gotten to the point—and I know it’s only been two days, and I should be grateful that we have food to eat, blah, blah, blah—that if I am forced to eat either of these things one more time, I might just lose it, and we both know that my losing it is not something anybody wants to see.

I’ll stop talking about food now so you don’t put this letter down and watch a video tutorial on doing milkmaid braids, or something, as I know you are wont to do when you’re bored.

(I promise I won’t tell anyone if you get a prescription for some Adderall. You can reach Dr. Modarressi at 212.547.8923. He got Cora a Xanax prescription when that thing with her dad happened—has that blown over yet, by the way?—and he’s superconfidential. Call him, India.)

Oh my God. I just remembered those thin little pizzas we used to get at Sal’s on Friday afternoons. Please tell our cute Italian waiter that I miss him. Maybe make it sound like I had some sort of romantic mental breakdown, à la Natalie Wood as Wilma Dean Loomis in Splendor in the Grass, instead of the truth, which is decidedly less glamorous.

So anyway, after Daddy dropped me off at Quare like a sack of moldy carrots and then drove off into the sunrise, I was left with two choices: to meet my new classmates or to unpack my stuff.

Obviously, I chose the latter—not because I didn’t want to meet new people (okay, if I’m being perfectly honest, I didn’t really want to meet new people), but because I had to do SOMETHING to make the crapshack I’m living in more palatable.

Honestly, Inds, you wouldn’t believe what it looks like in here. You would be back in your mom’s car the minute you peeked your little blond head inside. When I tell you it’s rustic, I mean it’s rustic—but not in the posh, house-in-the-mountains-of-Colorado way. It’s rustic in the shack-in-godforsaken-upstate-New-York-hippie-school kind of way. Not cute.

My pile of bags alone took up most of the floor space. I felt a bit sheepish about having brought so much stuff. It took me and Daddy about twelve trips to retrieve all the little odds and ends I brought. But seriously, like I was going to leave my collection of scents at home? I know it weighs about three hundred pounds, but I swore on the day that we left New York that I would not let myself go, and I stand by that promise. There was this one small suitcase lying on the other bed—my roommate’s, I assumed— but there was no further trace of her.

By the way, I’ve decided to refer to the cabins exclusively as “hovels” from now on. Technically they’re “love shacks,” for the purpose of “community building” and “honest and judgment-free expression,” but really they’re hovels. We’re talking creaky wooden floors, cobwebby corners, and mildewed mattresses. I opened all the windows to get a cross breeze going, but somehow that just made it worse, maybe because I’m downwind from the communal bathrooms.

But I mobilized quickly. A lone tapestry, probably left by some druggy kid in the seventies, hung from the ceiling when I got there, but I quickly took it down and repurposed it as a dust rag. (And thank God, because otherwise I would have had to untie my silk head scarf—and use that instead.)

Oh, and there was also a squashed beanbag chair, which I imagined reeked of urine—I held my nose as I tossed it unceremoniously out the door, so I didn’t actually smell it— perched in the corner like a socially awkward party guest. I cleaned my entire living space with the cleaning supplies I’d brought from home before unpacking a single T-shirt. I replaced my head scarf with a Rosie the Riveter–style bandanna to get down to the (very complicated, as you know) business of unpacking. But I got it done, and now—

Merde. The dinner bell just rang. I’ll write soon!

Love forever,

Flora

Hello. You’ve reached Flora Goldwasser. I regret that I’m not able to take your call right now, but if you leave a message at the tone, I’d be happy to get back to you as soon as I can.

Flora, what the fuck? I just got your letter about Elijah not coming to Quare. Way to not tell me about that until you’re at that godforsaken place. Why are you letting him get away with this? He completely bailed, and you’re, like, immune to any criticism of him. I guess I just don’t get it. Fuck. I have to go to a first-year meeting. God damn it. Call me back.

I haven’t even been able to write about my first day because I’ve been so overloaded with orientation activities. I still can’t believe Elijah isn’t here. I feel like I’m living in an alternate reality, and it’s all I can do to get up every morning (okay, two mornings so far) and put a small smile on my face.

The first person I met here on my first day was Dean, my mentor, who’s a second-year. We drove right up to the office, a little gray house, and she was inside, waiting for me with her arms crossed against her chest.

Dean’s look is slightly mesmerizing, and as soon as I saw her, I swallowed hard, because she’s clearly cool, which I have to say really threw me off. Her hair is straight and black and frames her face perfectly, and her solid line of bangs has zero splits or uneven pieces. And she’s got these thick black glasses that are way too big for her face, but they make her look awesome, just like Jenna Lyons. She wore high-waisted jean shorts, a stained white T-shirt, and blocky tennis shoes that made her look like a camp counselor from the early 1990s.

Dean barked out to Daddy that she’d point us in the direction of the first-year cabins and then meet us there. We got back in the car, and she jogged along behind us. When we pulled up to the hovel, she was panting slightly.

It was still around the same time I used to get on the subway to go to Bowen in the morning. I hadn’t eaten breakfast before leaving because I was too nervous, so finally, perched on the edge of the mildewed mattress that would become my bed after Daddy drove off, I dug around for a Luna bar in my backpack. Dean stood there watching me, clearly judging my (environmentally friendly!) cleaning supplies; she had refused my insistences that I was fine by myself. I offered her a chunk of the Luna bar, but she just shook her head. Her hair didn’t move one inch.

“I’m off sugar,” she said.

Dean somewhat grimly offered to stick around and help me unpack, but I politely declined, because a) I needed to be alone to absorb the fact that Daddy had really left me here to die, and b) I didn’t particularly want her riffling through my clothes. (I’m such a bitch, I know, but my clothes are the only things I have from my old life. They will not be corrupted by the Quares.)

I felt deflated, but quickly got to work. I was suddenly determined to make this work, if only aesthetically.

A few minutes after Dean left, I was hanging all my dresses on the (tiny, tiny, tiny) hanging bar that I handily installed by dismantling my bamboo lamp and positioning the reed between the two beds (they couldn’t have actually expected me to FOLD my dresses, could they?). I looked out the window to make sure my new roommate wasn’t coming up the path. She wasn’t, thankfully.

Instead I could just make out in the distance someone in another cabin walking out onto her porch: a girl with a mane of coarse yellow hair. That hovel’s exterior was strewn with all the trappings of whom I took to be its freakish owner: assorted miniature flags dotting the surrounding lawn, Mason jars of coffee on the ledge of the porch, and broken wind chimes littering the molding steps.

I got this impulse to grab those vintage binoculars I got in SoHo (the really nice ones with the faux leather strap) and watch her, this new person.

And here’s what happened—I’m almost too grossed out to write this: the girl suddenly scampered down the porch steps, pulled down her cords and granny panties, squatted in the grass, and released a waterfall of neon-yellow urine onto the grass. In plain sight! In the light of day! The communal, gender-neutral bathroom was forty paces away!

But when I quickly diverted my binoculars’ gaze out of sheer disgust, I saw something even more horrifying. Right above where she squatted was a clothesline with about four white cloths dangling from it, each held up by two clothespins. I squinted harder, and I could make out red and brown splotches staining the cloths.

She’d hung up what I can only assume are the cloth-diaper version of maxi pads on a clothesline outside her cabin.

I didn’t blink for about forty minutes after that. After I had recovered from the incident—which took a quick listen to the meditation app on my iPhone and copious lavender spray—I went back to unpacking. I was quite proud of myself, actually: once I had hung up some old movie posters, put my sheets and comforter on the bed, and lined up all my shoes by the doorway, it didn’t look half bad. Still a hovel, of course, but MY hovel.

Ugh, it’s time for a campfire. We have to tell our life stories and roast bananas or something. I feel like I’m radiating with loneliness, sometimes, as though people can feel it coming off me like invisible microwaves.

I can’t believe I’ll have to wait until December (if Elijah even comes then) to see him. I can’t do this I can’t do this I can do this I can do this.

Two · lips

Fashion show & exhibit by six up-and-coming New York designers September 1, 8–10 p.m.

ABOUT THE COLLECTION

The styles in today’s show are in homage to Miss Tulip, the star of the award-winning blog that rocked the alternative fashion world. Our six young designers hail from all five boroughs of New York City and took inspiration from various blog posts over the course of the past year.

ABOUT THE DESIGNERS

Keisha Miller, an alumna of Brooklyn Heights’s Parker School, was born and raised in Canarsie, Brooklyn, and began studying drama at Yale University in the fall.

Lanier Haim hails from Forest Hills, Queens, where she’s a senior at Forest Hills High School. She’s been taking weekend classes at Parsons since sixth grade.

Joshua Lu, a native of Staten Island, is entering his second year at Williams College. In addition to designing, he enjoys playing water polo.

Frank LeFront emigrated from Haiti to the north Bronx when he was six. All of the fabrics in his collection, Spring into, are from his last trip to Port-au-Prince. LeFront attends Columbia University.

Bea Martinez grew up on the Upper West Side and attended the Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School. She entered Vassar College this fall.

Margot Wade-Horowitz is a downtown girl through and through: in addition to growing up in the East Village, she now attends NYU, where she’s a sophomore.

ABOUT THE LOOKS

Some enchanted evening: Looks that will keep shining even after the clock strikes midnight.

Jog your memory: Miss Tulip gets her workout on.

Blue: A little winter never hurt anyone’s style.

Spring into: Florals, naturally. “Florals? For spring? Groundbreaking.”

Out to lunch: Lunching with friends and looking good.

Old school: It’s no secret that school comes first for Miss Tulip. Watch her rock ten looks, from fifties-inspired pantsuits to plaid skirts.

All proceeds go to the Ali Forney Center, dedicated to helping LGBT homeless youth.

Lael Goldwasser

Harvard College

2609 Harvard Yard Mail Center

Cambridge, MA 02138

September 1

Lael,

I need to tell you more about arrival day! I was putting the finishing touches on the walls (a bulletin board, a simple vision board, and my entire 1940s movie poster collection—I hoped my roommate didn’t have any grand plans for the space, because I was definitely monopolizing it at this point) when the door burst open. I froze with my thumbtacks in my hand as though I were in the middle of committing a misdemeanor.

It was Dean, my mentor, unsmiling as ever.

“YOU’VE BEEN SUMMONED, FLORA GOLDWASSER!” she boomed after stepping inside my newly cleaned hovel. Her announcement was so loud that I jumped about four feet in the air.

Okay, so you know me. I can’t say no to people, especially not to people I’ve just met, so I followed her out of my cabin. She walked so fast that I was practically jogging to keep up with her. I followed her across a short footbridge stretching over a babbling brook lined with tall grass, and across the enormous soccer field (more of a huge lawn with two soccer goals). The blue-green mountains spread out in the vast beyond almost made me gasp, but it might have just been that I was out of breath trying to keep up with Dean.

The dining hall is huge and oddly shaped, with weird parts jutting out of it where it’s clearly been expanded as the years have gone on. Dean pushed me directly inside the kitchen part of the dining hall, a conspicuous side entrance, before I could examine anything more thoroughly. There she introduced me to a woman named Pearl, who was peeling a mountain of potatoes at a wooden table, letting the skins fall to the floor. I still didn’t know what I had been “summoned” for, but I didn’t mind Pearl, because her face reminded me of a homesteader or a pioneer— one of those plain potato faces you can just see in the 1860s. It helped that her hair was in two long straw-colored braids, I suppose. Anyway, Pearl said that she teaches women’s literature this semester and that she’s my academic adviser.

Yes, I have both a mentor and an adviser. I meet with each of them every other week.

It soon became clear that I had been summoned to help Pearl peel the potatoes. So I did, with as much grace as I could muster, given the circumstances. You’d be proud of me: I donned one of the hideous purple aprons and pretended to be excited to meet my fellow students. I even said, and I quote, “Quare seems like a really nurturing place!”

We were peeling potatoes and making small talk, and Dean was banging around on the stove, making what she described as “the tangiest, most mouth-tastic miso soup in human history” when a commotion erupted from the pantry in the back of the kitchen. It sounded like two rain sticks coming down together. Pearl got this worried look on her face and rushed into the pantry, and when she came back out, she was carrying a four- or five-year-old girl with long blond braids just like Pearl’s, and only a diaper on. I was the only one who was shocked by the just-diaper situation— the girl was at least four, Lael; everyone else’s primary concern was the girl’s shattered psyche.

“It’s just some spilled rice,” Pearl was cooing, swinging the girl by her armpits. “Shhh, shhh, shhh, just some spilled rice.”

I mean, Jesus, you’d think she was comforting a girl who had just accidentally stabbed her dog with a steak knife.

Pearl shot me a look that was hard to read. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to join in on the comforting or what, so I just stood there, frozen, the peeler in my hand.

“Flora, would you mind taking her to the garden?” Pearl asked, swinging the child over in my direction. “Cass, go on with Flora. Show her all the cukes that are growing in your garden.”

Now, we both know my feelings about children (except for those exceptionally cute, phenomenally well-behaved Lower School girls). Cass, from the looks of it, was not one of those, but I didn’t have a choice but to take her hand and let her lead me (humiliatingly enough, I had no idea where we were going) to the garden.

I’ll admit that it’s a nice garden. There are rows and rows of vegetables, some neat-looking rusty trellises, and a few awesome vintage wheelbarrows with plants just exploding out of them. The soil is all plush looking, and it’s oddly peaceful to gaze out at the mountains in the distance. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized how QUIET it is here. It’s downright scary.

Cass had her own little plot next to the playground—which is more like a wooden set of monkey bars and a few swings—and she told me all about her cucumbers. I stopped listening pretty much immediately, but I was impressed by how she knew every detail about how to grow things, and I’ll admit that she turned out to be pretty cute. She’s got huge brown eyes and red cheeks, just like Pearl’s. Cass wanted to go on the rickety little swing, so I started to push her, getting fancy with the underdogs (you remember how much I love my underdogs).

“Is that Cass all the way up in the sky?”

I spun around to see a slender young woman with a cute bob and a big white quilt in her arms. She smiled a little bit, nodding at me.

“This is Basilia.” The girl tipped the swaddled baby so I could see her squashed face. “Miriam’s child.”

Miriam, as I might have told you before coming here, is the head of school. And yes, she named her daughter—sorry, her child; they’re raising this child without gender—Basilia.

Juna and I began to chat. She seemed halfway normal, remarking on the layout of the garden and telling me some of the things she knew about permaculture.

“Why are you taking care of Basilia?” I asked.

“I’m just helping Miriam out,” Juna said. “She’s got a really bad cold and didn’t want Basilia to catch it, and the nanny is training to be a doula this weekend.”

I wondered what Miriam’s advertisement for a nanny had read. Probably something like this:

Middle-aged Quaker seeks caring, compassionate caretaker.

No gendered pronouns. Must be familiar with the body-contact method and be comfortable with harvesting raw goat milk, which we feed our child for its immunity benefits.

“That’s cool,” I said, because I wasn’t sure what else to say. I had a sudden pang of homesickness, thinking about how little Juna and I had to say to each other.

“Is your dress vintage?” I asked her, trying to make conversation. The dress was bright yellow, tied at the shoulders.

She gave me a slightly pitying smile, and suddenly I felt very, very nervous.

“You obviously didn’t know this before now,” she said, “but you’re actually not supposed to give physical compliments here. . . . You know, ‘no shell speak’?”

She reminded me of an ice-cream scooper trying to sound nonconfrontational and buddy-buddy with her coworkers who were swiping gummy bears from the toppings bar. The fondness I’d initially felt toward her dissolved as quickly as it had come.

“I think it’s a great rule,” she said quickly, as though she were afraid that the swing set was bugged. “It totally takes the emphasis off what people look like and lets conversations go way deeper.”

Lael, I could barely stifle an eye roll!

“Why is it called ‘shell speak’?” I asked.

“Miriam and the rest of the administration think of the body, physical features, and clothing and accessories, as a shell. It’s just protecting and covering up what’s inside. So by not commenting on other people’s shells, we’ll all get to know each other deeply and soulfully.”

A small surge of vomit rose in my throat, but I swallowed it back down quickly.

“I wonder what they’re doing over there,” she said when I abstained from commenting on “no shell speak,” pointing in the distance to where a few disembodied straw hats were bobbing up and down among the rows and rows of vegetables, presumably harvesting something. My stomach lurched at the sight of new people; I remembered all the people whom I would have to meet later—and the fact that one whom I had already met I presumed would be none too pleased to see that I’d gone ahead and decorated our whole “love shack” with my own . . . shell.

If India and Cora were here with me right now, we would be making fun of “no shell speak” immediately, but here I can’t even bring myself to laugh about it. Juna was clearly very committed to the idea, judging by what she’d just said to me. I made a quick vow to myself that even though I couldn’t talk about clothes, I would still never relax my own personal standards of presentation.

“Maybe it’s for dinner tonight,” I suggested, focusing on the harvesters to curb the nausea. “That’s actually what I’m supposed to be doing now. Helping Pearl with dinner. It’s funny, because it’s only, like noon.”

“Is it noon?” Juna’s face creased.

“A little after,” I said.

“Oh,” she said. “I have to return Basilia now. Want to come with me and then head back to the cabin? I haven’t unpacked at all.”

I agreed, and we dropped Cass off at the dining hall on our way to Miriam’s house, which was one of the houses at the edge of campus. There are a handful of faculty houses, and Miriam’s is nestled among them. All of the houses are on a dirt road that eventually leads out of campus. Juna let me hold Basilia for a minute as we walked, and it was so cute the way she looked up at me with her little face scrunched up.

Juna rapped on Miriam’s door a few times before she answered. Miriam’s forty-ish, with short salt-and-pepper hair. She wore a grey tunic and grey linen pants and was barefoot. Her toes were very pale and hunched-looking. I could tell that that she had a cold by how red her nose looked and how watery her eyes were, but when she saw us her face broke out in a huge smile.

“I’m Miriam,” she said to me, pulling me into an embrace. “It’s so lovely to meet you.”

I introduced myself, and her face lit up.

“Roommates!” she said. “I’m so glad you’ve encountered each other. Already I’m particularly excited about this match.”

Juna and I looked at each other nervously.

Once the door shut, Juna and I set off down the dirt road. We didn’t talk much until we reached our hovel, at which point Juna swung the door open and gasped.

We stood on the step and looked at the fruits of my hard work: the posters, the perfume collection, the sunglass shelf, the pastel carpet.

“You did a lot to the place,” Juna gasped.

“Sorry if I went overboard,” I said, rushing to move my typewriter off Juna’s dresser.

Juna kept assuring me that it was fine, but I can’t shake the sense that she’s miffed by the way she looks around occasionally and shakes her head slowly before going back to her reading, which is some obscure book of poetry.

I’d better go, because this letter is ridiculously long and I’m getting the sense that Juna is annoyed by all the clacking. When she first saw my typewriter, she gushed all over the place about how cool it is, but now I think all the noise is driving her crazy— from the looks she keeps shooting me.

Please write me back. You are the only thing keeping me sane.

Wait—before I sign off—a note on Elijah: I know you’re worried about me, but I’m fine, really. He’s an artist. He’s got opportunities in the city he can’t say no to.

Love from the farm,

Flora

India Katz-Rosen

1025 Fifth Avenue, Apt. 9C

New York, NY 10028

September 1

India!

I’m writing to you from my new home at Quare. So far, these are a few things that have gone down:

• I brushed encrusted shit off a pig’s back at the farm orientation with a wire brush and then dry-heaved for twenty minutes.

• My peace studies teacher, Allison, who’s eight months pregnant and has a mop of curly orange hair, workshopped birthing positions and cathartic noises on the big field in the middle of campus (see attached map).

• One pair of shoes (my suede Carel flats with little apples on them) and one dress (the green gingham one with the white collar) have been stained, nearly irreparably, but that is TBD after the baking soda soak I have going on my desk chair.

That’s all for now—I should probably get back to sterilizing this place so I don’t mess up my cleaning schedule (twice a day, including the stuff that belongs to my roommate, Juna, which usually makes her glare at me). I’ll write you every day. I swear to God, you and Lael are better than diaries any day of the week. Oh, and here’s a map I drew so you could picture everything.

Love from the farm,

Flora

To: Cora Shimizu-Stein <[email protected]>

From: India Katz-Rosen <[email protected]>

Subject: Flora!!!

September 4, 12:13 p.m.

Oh my God. I only have a few minutes because Dr. Nadler is breathing down my back, but Blanca just texted me that I got a letter from Flora and that it seems things are NOT going well. (I told her to open anything from Flora IMMEDIATELY and text me the update.) Blanca said something about there being a urine-soaked beanbag chair?? Anyway, she’s headed to Maison Kayser to put together a care package ASAP.

I’m honestly worried about Flora. Why did she decide to do this, again??

To: Faculty, staff, and students <[email protected]>

From: Miriam Row <[email protected]>

Subject: Welcome back!

September 4, 4:45 p.m.

Dear community,

It’s my pleasure to let you know that the gang’s all here! The sixteen first-years, of course, arrived a few days ago, but I’m delighted to say that all eighteen second-years are now all accounted for on campus.

I wish everyone the best of luck with classes tomorrow, and I invite you once again to reach out to me (my office hours this week are posted on my door) if you have any questions or concerns—or if you’d just like to chat.

Infinite blessings,

Miriam

Lael Goldwasser

Harvard College

2609 Harvard Yard Mail Center

Cambridge, MA 02138

September 6

Lael,

I realized that I’ve told you about only two people, and that just won’t do, so here goes.

As other first-years began to arrive at the beginning of orientation, I watched them settle into their own hovels from my tiny little porch, disguised by a huge sun hat and sunglasses.

MARIGOLD CHEN (my neighbor):

Hometown: San Francisco, CA

Physical description (shell speak be damned):

Tall, wiry, conventionally beautiful

Attire: Crown of daisies in her hair, which miraculously seemed to be unaffected by the humidity that’s making me frizzy (to add insult to injury). Other than the flower crown, Marigold’s not really a hippie, and her clothes and bags are actually cute—lots of Free People and Element, and well cared for, none of this tattered tunic trend that has taken off with everybody else.

I thought maybe we’d be friends, or at least friendly, but when she came to my hovel to say hello to Juna (who’s way more popular than I am, by the way), I lowered my sunglasses to smile and wave at her, but she just stalked right by me. From my perch outside I could hear her hyena-laughing about some quip of Juna’s.

BECCA CONCH-GOULD, Marigold’s roommate: Hometown: New York, NY

Physical description: Cropped blond hair and a receding chin— meek as anything, just this whispery voice in a fringy top Attire: The aforementioned fringy top, accompanied by loose-fitting cotton pants with a low crotch. She’s also been spotted in quite a few tattered linen tunics with swirling floral patterns. Ooh, they should all start a band called the Tattered Tunics. Isn’t that a great name?

But I digress.

LUCY AND BENNA WILLIAMS (neighbors on other side): Hometown: Amherst, MA. Lucy and Benna have been homeschooled their whole lives on a farm in the Berkshires. Quare is their first brush with formal education. I asked them a million questions in spite of myself, and though Lucy answered them happily, Benna rolled her eyes, as though I were exploiting them or something.

Physical description: Fraternal twins. Lucy is tall and thin with a puff of drooping curls, and Benna is shorter and stouter with longer ringlets.

Attire: For Lucy, unflattering flared jeans and a white tank top.

For Benna, a wrinkled rusty-orange T-shirt dress.

When Lucy saw me sitting on the porch, she asked if she could come in and see my hovel. I acquiesced, a bit nervous, and followed her inside, because I didn’t know what else to do. But she thought the old movie posters were cool.

“That’s awesome,” she said, pointing to It’s a Wonderful Life and simultaneously shirking her pants. I tried not to stare. Lucy has been experimenting with nudism, she explained to me; all I can say is that I’m glad her underwear stayed on. (For now, at least.)

Benna stared at my The Scarlet Letter poster for a long time, saying nothing. “That’s cute,” she finally mumbled.

For the first few days, Juna and I, and our neighbors Marigold and Becca, moved as a clump. We went to dinner together (Kale. Quinoa. Potatoes. Repeat.). We went to the garden tour together. We went to Meeting for Worship together (thirty minutes of silence. Inner truths.). When classes started today (I’ll tell you about them in another letter), we headed to those together too. But for the past few days, they’ve been enveloped in their various cliques, leaving me to fend for myself. Benna has been taken up by the activists; Marigold has been adopted by the artists; Becca has been swooped up by the environmentalists; Juna has become one of the intellectuals. Allow me to explain.

The Quares: A Field Guide

GENUS HIPPIE: tattered tunics, bare feet, untamed body hair (we’re talking pits and legs), showers few and far between, usually seen toting musical instruments such as guitars, fiddles, and saxophones

ACTIVIST SPECIES: unequivocal outrage at social injustice, propensity for protests and in-depth discussions about cycles of violence

ENVIRONMENTALIST SPECIES: Mason jars instead of water bottles (nobody uses plastic, but the most popular bottles are canteens), dirt caked under fingernails, sunburns

GENUS HIPSTER: cuffed jeans, flannel, tiny round glasses, groomed facial hair, vintage clothes (not cute like mine, though; more like tablecloths from the 1950s worn as skirts), usually seen with musical instruments such as ukuleles, banjos, and harmonicas

ARTIST SPECIES: “creative” clothes, “interesting” makeup, “experimental” haircuts

INTELLECTUAL SPECIES: dark-framed glasses, pen-stained fingers, furrowed brows, functional clothing, strong necks with muscles strengthened from all the impassioned nodding about Proust

I haven’t exactly been chatting it up with my peers. That may come as a shock to you, my being the social butterfly that I am, but I don’t want to get too attached.

And it doesn’t help my social stock that I’ve been dressing to the nines every day. Maybe it’s a reaction against all the tattered tunics, but my appearance has become my raison d’être. I wake up early for the sole purpose of putting together my outfit du jour. I dress even nicer than I did in the city. Every day is 1962 for me, and my Grace Kelly dresses are certainly getting quite the workout.

Maybe my Bowen shoe rebellion was a sign of things to come: my goal is to make it as hard as possible for the Quares to follow “no shell speak” with me, but they haven’t indulged me yet. I get a lot of weird stares, and I can tell that the tattered tunics want nothing to do with me by the way they cluster closer together when I walk into a room. When Juna invites her friends from other cabins over to our hovel, they try not to stare at all the stuff. My twelve pairs of shoes. My collection of white gloves, which as you know keep my hands smooth and ladylike. My vintage parasol. I don’t want to be paranoid, but something tells me they talk about me behind my back.

I know what you’re screaming at this letter right now: “LEAVE.” Right? Part of me wants to do just that. It’s not like Elijah is returning my phone calls. Well, the most obvious obstacle is logistical—more specifically, the surrounding woods. I know that Woodstock is half an hour away, but . . . which way? My engraved explorer compass might be gorgeous, but I don’t exactly know how to use it.

It’s just hard. Write me.

Peace,

Flora

To: Grace Wang <[email protected]>

From: Wink DelDuca <[email protected]>

Subject: Fashion show

September 6, 5:22 p.m.

Grace,

I just wanted to check in to make sure you got a writer to cover the Miss Tulip fashion show a few days ago. This is the type of article that will take the features section to the next level!

Besides, it’s important that we keep reminding our readers that even though Miss Tulip may have gone on hiatus, she’s still (hopefully) alive and kicking. As always, keep forwarding me tips from readers, even if they ARE woefully uninformed, as you receive them.

;)

Wink

Editor in Chief, Nymphette magazine

Nymphette is an online feminist arts & culture magazine for teenagers. Each month, we choose a theme, and then you send us your writing, photography, and artwork.

To: Wink DelDuca <[email protected]>

From: Grace Wang <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: Fashion show

September 6, 6:17 p.m.

God, yes. Did I not tell you? I sent Chester, and he said it went great—got lots of interviews with the designers, audience members, etc. He did say that it had slight funeral vibes, though, like it was a final good-bye to Miss Tulip (please lord, let that not be the case, obviously). I wish I could have been in New York for the event!

And yes, I’ll keep forwarding you tips, even if most of them are improbable subway sightings. Sigh. Someone needs to explain to these girls that not every young woman in a pillbox hat is Miss Tulip, especially on the train to Williamsburg!

Grace

Features Editor, Nymphette magazine

Nymphette is an online feminist arts & culture magazine for teenagers. Each month, we choose a theme, and then you send us your writing, photography, and artwork.

Lael Goldwasser

Harvard College

2609 Harvard Yard Mail Center

Cambridge, MA 02138

September 6—night

Dearest Lael,

I have to tell you something. I’ve been trying to ignore this sinking feeling I have.

Things are not going so well for me.

I wanted to write this in the smallest handwriting I could, because I’m not exactly proud of my decision to come here. I’m not even writing on my typewriter, I’m so ashamed to say it. But you’re my sister. If I can’t admit that I think I made the wrong choice in coming here to you, then I can’t tell anybody.

You know why I’m here. But I’m getting confused by everything now, and maybe that’s because it’s the middle of the night and I can’t sleep, but I want to lay it all out.

What I told India and Cora was that I’d been feeling more and more last year as though I’d outgrown Bowen. Not outgrown the two of them, of course, but the school itself. Nothing interesting happens there, ever—unless you count the odd cheating scandal or that time the editors of the Bulletin broke the “news” that Miss Bowen was a lesbian.

It wasn’t even a total lie. The more I thought about coming to Quare, at least in the abstract, the more it appealed to me. Lounging in the grass, reading Naomi Klein’s No Logo or Patrick Reinsborough’s Decolonizing the Revolutionary Imagination. Setting tomatoes in a straw basket with a plaid cloth and picnicking on a mountain with my banjo-playing friends. Weaving together prayer flags and knitting afghans. Wearing my cat-eye sunglasses and silk head scarf, striding confidently on a clear trail with the wind at my back, environmental sampling kit in hand, like a regular Rachel Carson.

Needless to say, Quare hasn’t exactly been a picnic, and I haven’t heard from Elijah. This is all to say that I think I’ve made a huge, terrible, massive mistake. I mean, I’m assuming he’s still coming in December, like he said in his text, to take one last Miss Tulip photo, but even that doesn’t exactly help, as it’s still the beginning of September. Please write back and tell me I’m being ridiculous.

Love,

Flora

Flora Goldwasser

Pigeonhole 44

The Quare Academy

2 Quare Road

Main Stream, NY 12497

September 8

Flora,

Okay, Miss Mopey. Last time I checked, nobody was holding a gun to your head, forcing you to go to Quare, so if you’re so unhappy, why don’t you just pack up and come home? (And don’t give me that bullshit about finding your way through the woods with your ineffectual compass, either.)

You and I both know the reason: Elijah. I didn’t trust him last year, and I sure as hell don’t trust him now. I know this sounds harsh, but I’m worried about you—I have been for a while, actually, but to be honest I never thought you’d actually go through with it (Quare, I mean).

Face it, Flora. You wanted this to be some grand romantic gesture, and now you’re upset that there are bugs and sticks and armpit hair (which, by the way, you really shouldn’t shame if you truly call yourself a feminist).

Sorry for the tough love, but I’ve had about as much as I can take of the whining. You chose this. Make the most of it or get the fuck out.

From,

Lael

PS. Harvard is fine. There are some real dweebs, but overall a bunch of cool people. My mouth hurts from smiling so hard. It’s exhausting to be friendly.

India Katz-Rosen

1025 Fifth Avenue, Apt. 9C

New York, NY 10028

September 8

Dear India,

I itch. All over. And I’m going to start bitching about the itching.

I’m pretty sure it’s not poison ivy, because there’s no rash or anything. But every inch of my skin itches like hell. I changed my sheets (because I know I’ve been shedding dead skin cells in this weather), but to no avail. I changed my moisturizing regimen to three times a day instead of twice—nada. I even started wearing tights and long sleeves, although it’s still warm out, because I figured maybe there were tiny invisible bugs in the atmosphere that I wasn’t seeing (it’s far-fetched, I know, but believe me, if you were in my place, you would try anything too).

I finally got up the nerve to ask the Oracle of Quare, who doubles as the official spiritual guide of Quare and the maintenance guy (everyone says he and Miriam are hooking up, which, ew, would be superweird because he’s in his twenties and she’s at least forty—an age difference, of course, that society accepts in heterosexual couples when the man is older but shames when the woman is older), to come and check out our hovel to see if it was infested with bedbugs or termites or some other godawful thing like that. He tore apart my whole bed (and seriously damaged my mattress pad situation) looking, and destroyed Juna’s bed too, but he came back outside a few minutes later and said he hadn’t found anything, “nothing but a serious case of bad vibes.” I guess I was lucky, because in New York a guy would have charged a hundred dollars for that, but the Oracle just hugged me (he smelled terrible, by the way) and danced away into the sunset, ropy arms akimbo.

So I’m left with no explanation—besides my case of bad vibes, of course—as to why I’m so itchy.

This is all to say, please excuse this letter.

The second-years (the ones who aren’t peer mentors like Dean, that is) have descended upon us. They all know each other, of course, so across the dirt road—where their hovels are—came their unbridled shouts of glee and booming laughter.

Also, news flash: Dean is cool. Like, really cool. I’m not even offended anymore that she’s about as interested in me as she is in a random twig on the ground.

The night they arrived was Quare Share, which is part of the orientation activities they do at the beginning of every year. It’s held in the Art Barn, which is very cool: it’s all glass, so when you’re on the outside, you can see everything that’s happening inside, and vice versa. There are huge solar panels on the roof that make it look like something from a science-fiction movie. It’s like a spaceship that randomly landed behind the dining hall.

For Quare Share they moved everything outside, so it was just this massive open space, a glass barn with a wooden floor. I was so itchy that I had so sit with my back against the wall, subtly rubbing it up and down to get the places I couldn’t reach. I’ve turned into a bear, apparently.

Then Dean, who is not only my mentor but also the master player of Guild, Quare’s student-run theater troupe, went onto the “stage,” a slightly raised platform at the front of the room, and everyone went insane. You know those upperclassmen girls at Bowen who were just effortlessly COOL? Well, Dean is one of those, but to the extreme. She’s definitely a hipster, but she’s an intellectual-artistic crossover. It suddenly made sense why I’m scared shitless of her: I’ve always been terrified of people who inspire awe in others.

When Dean assumed the stage, the crowd went wild.

“WELCOME TO QUARE SHARE!” she shouted. She was a rock star, and I stopped itching to watch her perform. She was absolutely hypnotic.

Dean grabbed the microphone and pressed it to her lips. “Now, as many of you know, Quare Share is the first time in the year that the entire campus comes together in the name of performance art. So let’s give it up for one another!”

Again, cheering.

“We’ve got some outstanding acts for you tonight, including some—let’s hear it for them—FIRST-YEARS!” Dean shouted.

When the hoots and hollers died down, Dean explained the rules. There were no drugs or alcohol permitted, obviously, and no acts that glorified violence, but everything else was fair game. We could propose marriage. We could have sex onstage. We could come out of the closet (as though there was anybody still IN the closet). As long as we kept it to two minutes, we could do anything.

Then the performances started. There was no set list, as far as I could tell. People just rose, one after another, and assumed the stage. Dean would sort of mediate between two pieces with a remark that made everyone laugh: a joke about how because she’s a lesbian, she’s friends with all her exes, or about how her Samoan mother had said X, Y, or Z to her over summer break.

I have to admit, I was surprised at how . . . well, TALENTED, people are here. I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise—Quare is superselective—but some of the performances were scarily good. I was rather fond of the slam poetry, actually. It always starts with some big shocking statement, like, “I was twelve when I discovered I could masturbate with my mom’s construction hammer,” and then the poet proceeds to describe all this hurt and shame with all this flowery language and these motifs that you have to carefully follow. I’ll admit that I got chills once or twice. You know how I appreciate wordplay.

There were some singing performances, too, and a couple of really cool magic tricks. And then there’s the unofficial Quare chant when someone does something unexpected (like when Althea delivered a lecture on invasive species, the topic of the elective she’d be teaching that semester, for her act):

“KEEP QUARE QUIRKY! KEEP QUARE QUIRKY! KEEP QUARE QUIRKY!”

Now that I think about it, maybe the fact that we’re in the sticks is the reason I haven’t gotten any of your letters yet. I’m writing my address one more time here, just on the off chance that you misplaced it (or maybe Blanca threw it out accidentally while cleaning your room?). It’s such a pain that there’s no cell service out here and that we’re not supposed to overload the fragile Internet connection with streaming (good-bye, Skype) or social networking sites (good-bye, Instagram) or even OFF-CAMPUS EMAIL, at least until next year.

I’d better sign off now and tend to these itches. But please, WRITE ME BACK! I’m dying to hear from you.

Love forever,

Flora

By now you’re probably wondering, just like Lael did, why I didn’t just leave. I still am not totally sure why I didn’t call Daddy to come take me home. The only way I can make sense of it, if only a glimmer, is that at Quare, in those early days, I felt Elijah everywhere.

It wasn’t something I could explain, or even something I told Lael, but something about Quare felt infiltrated by him. Even among the annoying hipsters (if Elijah was, in fact, a hipster, he certainly wasn’t annoying, and besides, he was my hipster), I saw him in the dining hall, smiling widely, serving himself sautéed kale sprinkled with sesame seeds, leaning back in his chair during peace studies, pulling absentmindedly on a rake during shared work. I didn’t leave, because I was hanging on to the dogged hope that even though he had yet to show his face, he was here somewhere, just around the corner or behind a bale of hay.

For the Love of Singing!

[To be chanted slowly, in unison]

Simple is what I want to be

To know I’m enough, and enough is me

Others say I should want money, pow’r, and control

But I ought not be fancy; I just ought to be whole

Amsterdam Dental Group

1243 Amsterdam Avenue

New York, NY 10027

Flora Goldwasser

Pigeonhole 44

The Quare Academy

2 Quare Road

Main Stream, NY 12497

September 8

Dear Flora,

I’ve been trying to reach you on your cell phone, but Lael reminded me that service is somewhat lacking up there.

Mum and I are both stable. She is very much enjoying her apartment in the Flatiron and I am quite happy in Rye. The suburbs suit me, I think. From the bedroom window, I can see the Long Island Sound at the tip of the property.

I know this has all been hard on you, and I want to thank you for your resilience. You’re really a great kid. (Between you and me, I’d have preferred you stayed at Bowen, but I knew arguing against your mother would not have been such a good idea.)

I’m sorry if you felt that you had to run away from home. Is that what going to Quare was about? I know things haven’t been so pleasant for us as a family recently, but now that Mum and I are both settled in our respective places, we’d love to have you home. Rye is just a forty-minute train ride from Grand Central, and obviously Mum’s apartment is just a quick hop on the subway from Bowen and your friends uptown.

If you decide to stay, please let me know if you need anything sent to you on campus, and I will arrange for someone to send it.

Love,

Daddy

Lael Goldwasser

Harvard College

2609 Harvard Yard Mail Center

Cambridge, MA 02138

September 10

Dear Lael,

Just got a letter from Daddy. He thinks I’m here because I wanted to “run away from home,” as though there’s even a home to run away FROM. And he even had the GALL to act like it’s some secret that he disapproves of Quare (because, God forbid, I go to Oberlin or something and not Harvard like him and Mum and you).

I’m lashing out, I know. And I really am trying to be less mopey, like you said. I have no one to blame but myself for my current pickle, especially since, at the rate things are going, Elijah will forget that I ever existed by Thanksgiving.

Besides, how can I be even remotely chipper when we’re going to Mum’s stupid apartment for Thanksgiving? I want to go to New Jersey, like we always do, but just as usual, Mum and Daddy have been completely selfish.

I wonder why they got married in the first place: it’s hard to think of a couple more different from (erratic, spontaneous) Mum and (staid, mild-mannered) Daddy. They’re both doctors and everything, but still—even then, all they share is a fondness for orifices.

I’m really trying to be happy about being here. And fine, maybe you’re right about (((Elijah))) and the whole grandiosity thing. I’m actually starting to wonder if I made him up, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Another part of me wonders if this is what I get for trying to realize my hetero-romantic fantasy at a school called QUARE. But something in me is like, “Stick it out, Flora.” Just to prove to myself that I can do it, or something.

And okay, yeah, maybe I’m holding out for Elijah to come to his senses. I’m just so sure it’ll happen, that’s the thing—I’m positive he’ll show up here at some point and realize that I was perfect for him all along.

But taken all together, these present circumstances have turned me into quite the unhappy camper. My mantra these days is “I would prefer not to.” (Remember when you were reading Bartleby in your junior year, and I read it too?)

I would prefer not to join my entire class of sixteen on an impromptu wilderness hike. I would prefer not to swim in the nasty lake, even though it’s sweltering (the reason being that I would prefer not to ingest an amoeba). I would prefer not to strengthen my connections with students by engaging in circles of nonviolent communication practice.

There was one activity last week during the host of get-to-know-you seminars and icebreaking exercises that I wasn’t given the chance to prefer not to do. Very little at Quare is required, but this certainly was.

Allison Longfield, the Peace on Earth teacher, is friends with the Woodstock-based poet Ellis Sugarman (you probably haven’t heard of him). He’s got all these tufts of bright orange hair exploding from his scalp and a long, scraggly red beard.

Anyway, Ellis coached us through a variety of different exercises to get us to acknowledge our privilege—racial, class, gender, religious, etc.—and process them creatively. First he made us stand in a horizontal line on the soccer field, facing the net or whatever it’s called. He—wearing a tattered piece of fabric and those tan pants with the crotch that sags to the ankles—shouted a bunch of statements, and if they applied to us, we were supposed to take a huge step forward.

“I CAN WALK AROUND MY NEIGHBORHOOD AT NIGHT WITHOUT WORRYING ABOUT BEING HARASSED,” he shouted, and a bunch of kids, mostly the boys, stepped forward, toward the soccer net. “I CAN GO INTO ANY BUILDING AND GET AROUND REGARDLESS OF WHETHER OR NOT THERE’S AN ELEVATOR OR A RAMP.” Almost everyone stepped forward. “I AM NEVER ASKED TO SPEAK ON BEHALF OF ALL PEOPLE OF MY RACIAL GROUP.” The white kids, about half of us, stepped forward.

I stepped forward for most of the statements, actually, and at the end, when he shouted, “NOW, EVERYBODY, RUN TO THE NET!” I was one of the first to touch it, even though I was wearing my oxfords with the slight heel, which are notoriously difficult to run in.

But I’m far from the only one here with copious privilege. There are some really rich people here. Even though they wear shirts with holes in them and haven’t had a professional haircut in years, you can kind of just tell by the way they talk about their families that they’re uncomfortable with how much money they come from. We’re an economically diverse group, though, thanks to the fact that Quare’s rich alumni pledge to pay the full tuition of any student whose family can’t afford to send them here.

Afterward, at Allison’s—the peace studies teacher—house, we had to write poems about the experience. Juna, my roommate, was all, “I am a stranger, I come / from a strange place / from bone, born of the sea,” and got lots of snaps. Ellis’s beady little black eyes almost popped out of his misshapen head, he was so excited. I wrote something about the idea of ownership (I’m too embarrassed to say more, unfortunately), and pretty much only Ellis was into it—and it was kind of his JOB to be into everything we wrote.

The only poem he wasn’t really into, actually, was by this guy Sam, who’s different in a strange way. He’s really popular, and makes everyone laugh about all the disparaging stuff he says about Quare and Canada, where he’s from, but I can sense that he feels a little bit like an outcast too. His poem was totally off topic in the most hilarious way—it was about being trapped in a shower with a huge spider. Now that I think about it, it was probably a metaphor, but I’m not exactly sure for what.

When the workshop was over—and I’d LIKED the workshop; the privilege stuff was superimportant—Ellis bolted out the door kind of spazzed out in a fit of love. He started twirling and laughing maniacally on the patch of grass outside of Allison’s house. We all watched him from her porch. A laugh bubbled up in my throat—it was just like an SNL skit, Lael—but I swallowed it down once I saw that everyone else was humming and swaying. (Except Sam, whose eye I caught—he started to laugh but looked away.) Ellis zoomed back inside Allison’s house and emerged with a pair of scissors seconds later.

“I WANT YOU ALL TO TAKE THIS BEARD,” he said, handing the scissors to Juna, “TO REMEMBER ME BY. TO REMEMBER THIS SPECTACULAR DAY.”

When Juna hesitated, he guided her hand toward his face. She gingerly snipped off a little piece of beard and held it between two fingers. He closed her fist around it and pressed it to her chest. She looked like she’d swallowed a cucumber.

“Save it forever,” he said. “Promise?”

She nodded.

The scissors made their way around. Agnes—he’s a guy, despite the name, a black guy with dreads, and I don’t know why his parents named him that—cut a huge, ambitious chunk that made Ellis look like someone had taken a bite out of his face. After that, people really got into it. Sam took an even bigger piece and solemnly promised to plant it sacredly in the ground. I kept escaping from the lineup and slithering farther down, avoiding my turn until absolutely everyone else had gone. Ellis’s face was a lot barer now, revealing a receding chin.

“DO IT,” he instructed.

“I’m okay,” I said lightly, not wanting to offend him.

He orchestrated the group in a chant.

“DO IT! DO IT! DO IT!” everyone shouted at me.

I reached out to touch his face. His beard was crunchy and wiry. My stomach leapt. His black eyes gleamed into my soul, and his little red mouth, now surrounded by awkward strands of red hair, twisted up eagerly at me. I opened the scissors and then pressed down hard. The chunk of beard was between my fingers. Everyone cheered.

I have few acquaintances. It’s not that I hate everyone, or anything—I just feel like a turtle whose head is stuck in its shell. I feel, frankly, dull and quiet and uninteresting. I wouldn’t mind being friends with my teachers, though. The only thing I WOULD prefer to do is the reading from my classes. I’m such a nerd, I know, but when Juna is out doing whatever it is she does with Marigold, no-chin Becca, and the twins, I’m so happy lying on my bed with a stack of books. Old habits die hard, I suppose.

It’s also really woodsy here. I just ordered a mosquito net from Amazon (bad me, using the Internet for nonscholarly purposes and cluttering the bandwidth, but it was an emergency), and the second it comes in the mail, I’m hanging it above my bed. I think our hovel is infested with bugs, and the thought of little creatures climbing into my mouth at night makes me want to fall on a sword.

Tell me all about school! I want to hear about your friends, your professors, your activities . . . everything! Anything to distract me from here.

Oh, and when you’re home on fall break, could you search through the boxes in my room at Mum’s for a few things? My wardrobe is crying out for variety.

• Yellow-and-white-striped mini-dress—mod style one with slightly torn hem

• Light pink wool dress with cord around waist

• Faux-suede wrap skirt

Lots of love,

Flora

Flora Goldwasser

Women’s Literature

Short response: Jane Eyre

September 10

When Jane leaves Lowood School for her position as a governess at Thornfield, she marks the change by presenting a new scene and addressing the reader directly. She narrates:

A new scene in a novel is something like a new scene in a play; and when I draw up the curtain this time, reader, you must fancy you see a room in the George Inn at Millcote, with such large-figured papering on the walls as inn rooms have; such a carpet, such furniture, such ornaments on the mantelpiece, such prints. . . . Reader, though I look comfortably accommodated, I am not very tranquil in my mind. (111)

Rather than merely addressing her reader—establishing solidarity but preserving distance—Jane begins to do the analytical work that we readers are accustomed to doing. Hovering above the page, addressing form and distancing herself from plot, narrator Jane’s voice becomes larger than the novel itself, and she moves toward her reader while protagonist Jane remains opaque on the page. Her dissociation— becoming both character and narrator—is deliberate and measured. Jane amplifies her narrative voice by achieving duality, a superhuman feat, and she obscures the distance between us and her by creating one transparent version of herself to come stand beside the reader: Jane is behind the “curtain,” but she is also on our side of it. We watch the unfolding scene together.

COMMENTS:

Very interesting observations, Flora. You seem to be suggesting that Jane’s ability to separate herself as narrator from herself as character is where she derives strength: what, then, does this suggest about the role of any woman writer in straddling the line between acting and narrating—between acting as protagonists and authors of our own lives? What changes in ourselves when we write our own stories? And what happens to the stories we tell about ourselves as we live? —Pearl

Flora Goldwasser

Pigeonhole 44

The Quare Academy

2 Quare Road

Main Stream, NY 12497

September 12

Dear Flora,

I can’t believe Daddy said that he and Mum are “stable.” That’s fucking hilarious.

Quare sounds just like I thought it would. It’s still so funny to me that you’re at a place where the focus is on stripping away the frills of life and getting at the depths of the soul. (No offense, but you’re, like, the definition of frill.) Elijah really must have done a number on you. God, you’ve always loved the ones who look meek and mild, haven’t you? (I’m thinking of your thing for Michael Cera last year, obviously.)

Oh, and I was really moved (read: in tears of laughter) by your description of the conclusion of the orientation exercise. I worry, however, that saving the beard clipping is unsanitary (you didn’t indicate what you did with it). I hope you discarded yours and washed your hands thoroughly.

The food here is outstanding. I’ll tell you more about my friends soon, but I have to run to a meeting with my TF, the scintillating Susan.

I found those dresses you asked for. Expect your package in about two weeks. Anything else you want delivered? I’m charging it to Mum’s card, so the heftier the better.

From,

Lael

To: All-staff <[email protected]>

From: Wink DelDuca <[email protected]>

Subject: Miss Tulip

September 12, 1:12 p.m.

Salutations,

Wink here. Forgive me if this letter sounds delusional. I’ve just given a whole lot of blood at the Red Cross and I’m seeing stars, but nothing short of hospitalization could keep me from providing you with information about Miss Tulip.

As we all know (only too well), Miss Tulip dropped off the face of the earth on April 30 of this past year—the last day the site was updated. She lives on in our memories, eternally clad in a stunning red-and-white plaid skirt suit. My myriad emails to the domain holder have bounced back. My daily jogs in Riverside Park, where she was last photographed, have been fruitless (well, unless you count my ass, which now won’t quit).

I don’t really have much more info than that, but I do want you to know that we’re working hard to track her down. I have a hard time believing that Elijah Huck decided to stop the blog just like that (it was a shoo-in for a bunch of other awards, after all), but he’s notoriously difficult to get in touch with.

But we’re not giving up yet, comrades. Miss T means too much to all of us for that. You never see her head, sure, but she really gets under your skin. Besides, how are we supposed to know how to dress without her stalwart example??

(Just kidding. I know we Nymphette editors all have our own beautiful and unique senses of style. But Miss Tulip really was—is? I’m not quite ready to start speaking about her in past tense— iconic.)

;)

Wink

Editor in Chief, Nymphette magazine

Nymphette is an online feminist arts & culture magazine for teenagers. Each month, we choose a theme, and then you send us your writing, photography, and artwork.

India Katz-Rosen

1025 Fifth Avenue, Apt. 9C

New York, NY 10028

September 12

India dearest,

We don’t get grades here—just written evaluations for each class at the middle and at the end of each semester. I think the first round of comments is coming up soon. I’m not worried. All my teachers love me. (I know I can tell you this without sounding like a braggart.) It’s the students I’m not so sure about. It’s not that they hate me, exactly, so much as they keep their distance from me, like I’ll infect them with my materialism or something.

By the way, I didn’t tell you what happened to the student lounge. It used to be in the basement of the dining hall, but one night a little while ago all the seniors took the furniture and created an outside lounge. It’s funny, because they took the door off its hinge too and propped it up in the grass, though of course it’s entirely useless.

The outside lounge is where the club fair was held this morning. The second-years were all standing next to booths for the clubs they run, chatting with the people milling around and deciding which clubs to join. You’ll find included in this letter a pamphlet embellished with my annotations.

I lingered at the Guild table. It was the most impressive table, wooden and heavy and round with a curvy pattern carved around the edges. A gold lamp, not connected to any source of power (its cord just lay in the grass like a dead snake), rested on the table. Dean was the only one present. She sat in a stiff-backed nineteenth-century wooden chair that looked out of place, to say the least, wedged into the damp grass. Dean Elliot, she of Quare Share lore (and my mentor! Though sometimes I doubt she remembers my name), was totally motionless and expressionless, hands crossed over her chest, not exactly moodily but with serious (and seriously enviable) ’tude.

I stood watching her, wondering if the dead expression in her eyes meant that she was a) made of wax, b) unspeakably bored, or c) daydreaming. But finally she caught my eye and wordlessly she beckoned me to approach. She did this without moving her face one bit, but somehow I just KNEW that she wanted me to come over. I did so.

“This is Guild,” said Dean, gesturing to a small placard on the table. Guild, the placard spelled matter-of-factly in flowery script. “We’re Quare’s oldest and only theater troupe. It’s a society of sorts. I’m master player this year, so it’s my responsibility to recruit new members. We have an elaborate . . . process, I guess, of selecting people and then having them move up the ladder. If you’re interested, our first meeting is this afternoon. Woolman Theater. The back half of the meetinghouse. During lunch. It’s millet mountains today, but don’t worry. It’ll be worth it.”

I debated for a moment. Not about the missed millet mountains (they’re mounds of millet stuck together with egg substitute and spices and then baked, and they’re alarmingly tasty), but about joining a CLUB.

You’ll remember that I was a bit of a Joiner at Bowen. French Club, Movie Appreciation Society, Sewing Club, Bowen Urban Gardening (BUG), Bowen Feminists for Girl Power!, the Bulletin, and yes, the Dramatic Club.

But at Quare, I lie low. I don’t speak unless spoken to. I don’t volunteer details. I don’t join in unless it’s absolutely mandatory.

I’ll admit that I’m un peu fatiguée of keeping my eyes down and my mouth closed. Not because I want to BELONG here, God forbid, but because I miss social interaction. But taking the first step—signing my name on the Guild interest list—gave me pause. Once my name was on that list, there was no backing out. I was on the grid. At Quare, I’m like a cat. I need to know I’ll be able to escape whenever I need to. Signing my name would mean giving up that security.

But I did it. I signed the sheet.

So I’m writing to you from Woolman Theater, which is indeed at the back half of the meetinghouse (more on that later), waiting for the Guild meeting to start and using this activity—letter-writing—to avoid talking to people. It’s a nice spot, with a great big stage and a long velvet curtain. They even have a fairly sophisticated light system. It’s not as high-tech as the Bowen theaters, of course, but then again, Quare likes to kick it old-school. Also, there’s only so much that the solar panels can do, I guess.

Meeting’s starting. I’ll keep you posted (literally).

Love from the farm,

Flora

P.S. I’m attaching my annotations on the club fair pamphlet.

• THE EARTH SOCIETY: How can we give back to—rather than take from—the earth?

(Table featured a plate of quinoa-and-chocolate-cranberry cookies. Run by a gangly environmental hippie and a few barefooted cronies)

• LANGUEDOC: A group to appreciate the contributions of French artists, particularly the hippies living in the conservative south of France.

(Run by hipsters, both intellectual and artistic. (You might be thinking that this is my type of club, right? I thought that too, until I noticed the emphasis on painting with menstrual blood. I’m a Francophile, of course, but not that much of a Francophile—I’ll take the pastries and the shoes and leave the “period pieces,” thank you very much)

• MAIN STREAM POTLUCK: An organization that cooks potlucks for Main Stream residents and Quares to mingle, because we believe that breaking bread together is the answer for mutual healing.

(Run by activists. Gave out millet mountains to everyone who came by)

• MAKE LOVE NOT BOMBS: A club that discusses the ways in which safe sex and masturbation can curb cyclical violence.

(Run by intellectuals with a good bit of activist participation. Filled wheelbarrow with condoms, vibrators, and spermicidal jelly)

• THE MUSES: A society for budding musicians of all stripes to come together and practice their craft.

(My neighbor Marigold hung around their table, probably because its leader is a cute harmonica-blowing hipster and not because she’s semi-skilled on the banjo)

• RUN CLUB: The closest thing Quare has to a sports team, Run Club meets up weekly to jog the seven miles around the perimeter of campus.

(Led by a reedy second-year and some environmentalists, all of whom wear those five-toe shoes that are, like, the dorkiest things ever—and wouldn’t they give you a serious toe wedgie?)

• GUILD: Quare’s oldest and only theater troupe.

(Run by Dean Elliot, she of the perfect hair and awesome glasses. Featuring, inexplicably enough, intellectuals, artists, activists, environmentalists, and everyone in between)

To: Wink DelDuca <[email protected]>

From: Theodora Sweet <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: Miss Tulip

September 12, 9:49 p.m.

Wink,

Thanks for the update. I’m obviously just as upset as you are at Miss Tulip’s disappearance. As much as I hate chalking up my decision to study photography at Stanford (undeclared as of now, but I’ll keep you posted) to a white man’s gaze of a female subject, it really was Elijah, and the entire blog, that made taking photos seem like something I’d want to spend the rest of my life doing.

I mean, I get that Miss T kind of has a cult following—not to say that we haven’t spoken to people in, like, mainstream Kansas and Utah who also read it religiously—but like you said, she touched us Nymphettes especially deep. And it’s not even just the vintage clothes! I wear the first thing my hands touch in the morning, as you can probably tell. It’s the whole thing. You just don’t see things that are so goddamn tender anymore.

She was an empowered muse, that’s for damn sure. God, I need to stop before I get too emotional in my ecology lecture.

Anyway, just writing to say thanks for persevering, and let me know what—if anything—you find.

Deuces,

Thee

Cora Shimizu-Stein

95 Wall Street, Apt. 33A

New York, NY 10005

September 12

Dear Cora,

Remember me?

Can you check with India to make sure she’s getting my letters? I know we agreed that she would keep everyone else in the loop re: Quare, but something tells me she’s shirking her duties. (Could Jasper, that idiot from Dalton, be to blame?)

Anyway, I thought I’d write to you. I miss you, and something exciting has happened. I’m imagining you reading this while on the elliptical at the gym in your apartment’s basement. Or maybe you’re in the steam room? (You’re honestly the only person in the world who’d read a letter in the steam room—and that’s exactly why I miss you so much.)

Yesterday morning I did something impulsive. I went to the farm to milk cows with Lucy (one of my neighbors) and Fern (another first-year).

The farm is actually quite nice. It’s up past the orchard, and all the trees are full of fruit. You pick it off, just like that, and because they don’t use pesticides, you can bite into an apple after just rubbing it a little bit. I felt a little bit awkward with Fern and Lucy, because they’re both so gentle and well-meaning. Fern is dewy and soft-spoken with a long blond braid that she circles twice around her head and dots with daisies, and Lucy is a nudist who’s nuts about animals. I mean, I’m a vegan 90 percent of the time (you know how I feel about my pastries, obviously), but I feel like I appreciate animals more in the abstract—I believe of course, that killing them for meat is murder, but that I don’t necessarily have to roll around in mud with pigs. I feel big around both of them; maybe that’s it. Not so much physically, but like I take up too much room or have too many things.

Once you get to the actual farm, there are some pastures with cows. Have you ever seen a cow in person before? Stupid question—of course you haven’t. They’re huge and very nuzzly, with pink nostrils covered in stubbly hair. I didn’t want to stop petting them. And there are goats, too. They’re much smaller, with wiry hair and little horns, and they bit our hands through their fences. Not hard, really, and it wasn’t entirely unpleasant.

It was my first time at the farm, if you must know. When the rest of the class went up for a tour, I complained of cramps. But I wasn’t even lying! Much.

When we were done milking the cows—I wasn’t crazy about the idea of getting my hands dirty, so I just watched—Lucy, Fern, and I took off down the orchard, breaking into a run toward the bottom of the hill, because simply walking down it is nearly physically impossible. The sun was up, there was a nice breeze, and things suddenly didn’t seem quite so bad.

The two of them ran directly into the two showers, so I had to wait on the small step in front of the communal bathroom. From my perch I watched the lights go on in people’s cabins, one by one. Before long, Althea, my across-the-street neighbor, emerged from her cabin up the hill and took her morning piss on the grass, smiling up at the rising sun. (I’m sure India’s told you about the peeing outside thing. At this point, it doesn’t even faze me.)

I must have dozed off for a few seconds, because suddenly a pair of bright white sneakers was directly in front of me. I looked up to find Sam, a fellow first-year, with his puffy hair eclipsing the sun. He has a nose with a really high bridge—a Roman nose, if you will. He’s Canadian, the only international student this year.

“Hi,” he said. “Are you waiting for the shower?”

“Yeah.”

He looked around like he was making sure nobody was watching. He whistled a few notes absentmindedly and then sat down beside me. I don’t think I had ever talked to him before that morning (we make eye contact sometimes), but suddenly here he was: Popular Canadian Sam, just chomping at the bit to converse with me. It was eerie.

“I just had breakfast at Miriam’s house,” he said quietly, as though he were confiding in me.

“Why?” I asked.

“No real reason.” He shrugged and stuck his feet out in front of him, luxuriating on the slab of concrete. I couldn’t look away from his bright white sneakers. “She’s inviting every first-year to breakfast in the next few weeks. I don’t know why I got the first spot. Maybe Miriam just has a thing for Canadians.”

I forced a laugh.

“I guess Canada really has embraced the Quare ethos,” I said.

“Nah,” Sam said. “It’s the other way around. Quare copied us. That’s why I’m right at home here.”

I studied him. The thing about Sam is that he’s NOT right at home here. He hates gardening because he doesn’t like to get his hands dirty (and mumbles under his breath the whole time about the bacteria in the soil), didn’t learn how to chop wood because he said he’s too uncoordinated and he didn’t want there to be a bloodbath, and almost gagged when he tried the lentil loaf for the first time. The other thing about him, though, is that unlike me, he’s so goddamn CHEERFUL about not fitting into Quare, so everybody loves him for it. And the final thing about Sam is that he dresses like he’s in his eighties: square glasses, slacks (sometimes plaid, sometimes brown or gray), and cardigans in somber patterns. And of course the blindingly white and vaguely orthopedic sneakers.

“Anyway, Miriam’s house is amazing,” he said. “It’s got a pink refrigerator from the 1950s, and all the beds are gold. I think you’d like it.”

“Gold?” I asked.

“The covers. And the headboards. It’s like she’s preparing for a visit from Louis the Fourteenth.”

I laughed again. Look at me, being all sociable!

He pulled a book out of his satchel. “Have you been keeping up with Jane Eyre?” he asked. We’re reading that for women’s literature, and Pearl, our teacher, forces us to speak in British accents in class for authenticity. It used to be horribly embarrassing, but I’ve become used to it, mostly because I try not to speak in class at all (writing fifteen-page essays is more my jam).

I admitted that I was, in fact, keeping up with Jane Eyre. I didn’t tell him that I’d read it before, though.

“I’m drowning,” Sam said. “And Pearl knows it. I’m surprised I haven’t been sent a gentle email yet. I mean, I’m not saying I DESERVE to be very kindly asked if I’m having emotional issues that are preventing me from doing my work, but if that’s what has to happen, then I’ll suck it up and take it.”

“At least your British accent is good,” I said. “When I try one, I sound like the biggest idiot—and my mum grew up in South Africa.”

Cora, I swear, it just slipped right out. I’d sworn not to tell anybody any details about my life, and up till then I’d been perfect. I immediately stopped talking.

“South Africa?” Sam looked amazed, like that was the most exciting thing he’d ever heard. “I didn’t know that.”

Why would he have known that?

“Just until she was fourteen,” I said. “After her dad died, her mom decided to start over again in the US. But the accent stayed.”

I didn’t for the life of me know why I was giving him so much information. Something about him hypnotized me—the square glasses, the white sneakers, the way he rubbed the bridge of his nose while he spoke.

“Sorry about your grandpa,” he said. It was a Canadian “sore-y” that I nobly resisted imitating. “But I mean, that’s pretty cool. We’re Quebecois on my dad’s side, and whenever I speak French, every actual French person judges me so hard, because Canadian French sounds like you’re quacking.”

At that moment, Lucy came out of the shower in a tattered white towel. I half-expected Lucy to drop the towel right then and there, which is what she does in her room next door (I’m used to her naked body now, but for the first few weeks catching a glimpse of her through the window was taxing), but she just smiled slightly and strutted off toward our cabin, her towel just grazing the bottom of her derrière. I waited until Fern, in a light blue bathrobe, followed her before I stood and gestured to Sam that it was my turn to use the shower. Sam quickly excused himself and disappeared into the other side of the bathroom.

But enough of all that. I want to hear about you! How is Bowen? And have you been to see your dad? I know Dr. Modarressi warned you that it might be triggering for you, given what happened last time you visited, but maybe you could call your dad? And this time make sure none of his financial convict buddies are listening in and leering at your Prada miniskirt. I think you’ll be able to have a much more honest conversation that way.

You should totally get some pastries and take them with you if you ever go see him. You’ll be a hit with all the inmates (even more so than when you wore your miniskirt, I mean). The number of that place on Seventy-fourth Street is 212.744.3100.

Some things you never forget.

Love from the farm,

Flora

I felt a little better today. Having Sam helps. He’s someone to walk to class with and sit with at dinner, and he has a cool style.

Sam outfits:

• Oversized square glasses

• Suspenders (sometimes)

• Woolly cardigans (but he only ever wears them to breakfast and at night, because it’s still pretty hot during the day)

• White grandpa shorts from the seventies

• Huge sneakers that squeak when he walks

Flora Goldwasser

Pigeonhole 44

The Quare Academy

2 Quare Road

Main Stream, NY 12497

September 13

Flora!!!!!

You need to come home THIS INSTANT. If the terrible cell service and menstrual cloth girl weren’t enough to merit your leaving, then SCABIES certainly is!!!! Do you want my mom to call a cab? We’ll pay! I know you’re too interesting for Bowen, or whatever the reason was that you left us for that shithole, but it has to be better than living in a HOVEL!

The only thing is that you might want to wait until next semester to come home, when that bitch Ms. Lancaster goes on maternity leave. The hormones must be impairing her brain function or something, because she’s been failing people left and right. She gave me a B+!!!! I’m including my essay for proof that I’m not CRAZY. If you could send it back when you’re done reading, that would be super.

Anyway, I have to go. My parents are fighting about my chances at Penn again, and I have to separate them before they murder each other.

Love forever,

India

India Katz-Rosen

1025 Fifth Avenue, Apt. 9C

New York, NY 10028

September 15

My dear India,

Okay, first of all, thank you SO much for writing me back and proving that you’re alive. Lancaster isn’t so bad, and a B+ isn’t the end of the world, but I’ll read your essay and tell you what I think. Second of all, I didn’t realize how weird and (strangely) cool Guild would be.

The first shocking thing: Althea, the one I saw peeing by her cabin the first day, is the apprentice of Guild this semester. The apprentice is the master player’s right-hand woman, and it means she’ll be assistant-directing the show that Dean (aka Jenna Lyons aka my mentor) will write, direct, and produce this spring.

Althea was sitting with Luella, a second-year with long, straight blond hair. She looks at you when she speaks and she’s always smiling, even when nothing is particularly happy. You know that I usually abhor senseless jolliness, but in Luella’s case, it works, somehow.

I chatted a little bit with Agnes, a fellow first-year. He’s from Georgia. He has two moms—one of them is Tedra Louis (you know, the famous gender theorist who coined the term “gender warfare”?). So I guess it’s no wonder he ended up at Quare. Agnes speaks all slow and Southern, and he never actually talks about his famous mom—even though everyone else does.

Dean mounted the stage suddenly. I didn’t even see her come in, but she was suddenly up there, alone, ready to command the space.

“Is everybody here?” She looked around expectantly, black hair moving in one cohesive unit, and when nobody answered, she began. “I suppose having this meeting on millet mountain day wasn’t the wisest choice, but eh. I guess it’ll separate the wheat from the chaff, if you will.”

I let out an appreciative chuckle for the wordplay, but nobody else made a sound.

(I’ve decided that Dean is my lighthouse: sophisticated, fashionable, and COOL. She’s even scaring me less in our mentor/mentee meetings, during which I used to clam up, but lately I’ve been getting pretty confessional. I even told her about Mum and Daddy’s separation.)

“This is Guild, everyone,” said Dean. “I’m thrilled you made it. Especially delighted to see some new faces in the audience. First-years, where you at?”

I held up a hand, feeling like the geek of the world, but what else could I have done? Juna, Agnes, and this first-year girl Becca were also in the audience, and they raised their hands too, all a bit meekly.

“Wonderful. So. A quick rundown of what this is, how this works, et cetera. Guild is Quare’s oldest and only theater troupe. We put on one or two shows per semester. Written, acted, directed, costumed, and lit by students. This is the real deal, kiddies. Parts were chosen last week for this semester’s first show, written by our very own Michael Lansbury, and the next show will be done by yours truly.

“First-years, as tempting as acting sounds, it’s important to remember that for your first semester, you won’t act. Guild is not about acting. It’s about producing theater. So what do first-years do, you might ask? You guys review. We believe here in Guild that good acting starts with good OBSERVING, and good observing is required for good WRITING. So once you’ve reviewed a show, you’re golden. You’re free to audition for plays. And only after that can you apply to write your own play. You can direct it, or you can ask for help. We’re big on that here.

“There’s no real hierarchy, but in the past all writer-directors have been second-years. It just takes that much time to cultivate the necessary experience. So I know that was a lot of information, but I think you’ll realize that things in Guild work fairly smoothly. There’s a lot of support. You’ll sleep in each other’s beds during tech week and pin each other’s costumes two seconds before the show when you realize you gained three pounds from nervous pre-show eating. Okay, so this speech is getting pretty long, so I think I’ll stop talking now. Does anybody have questions?”

Some people asked banal questions, I was too busy staring at Dean to pay attention.

Then Dean asked for two volunteers to review the first fall play, called Pork Chop, which goes on right around Halloween. She said she’ll pick the better review—that’s what she called it, the better one; I was shocked, because this was Quare, after all—and get it published in the Quare Times, the collaborative news co-op. I raised my hand, along with that girl Becca. Ugh.

Becca is the only other first-year from the City, and—as anti-Quare as I sound saying this—she’s the actual worst. Well, maybe that’s an exaggeration. There’s just something about her that gets under my skin. Her parents live in Greenwich Village. She thinks that this somehow makes her special. She has enormous, unblinking blue eyes and wears feather earrings. Her chin recedes into her neck as she makes pretentious comments in class. This is major shell speak, I know, but what can I say?

In class, Becca gushes over how much she loved the article that was assigned the previous night, or how excited she is for the next elder circle (Miriam believes in intergenerational healing to combat our youth- and beauty-obsessed culture, which has replaced traditions that value wisdom and age). I spend too much time growing silently furious at Becca and her gushing. It’s becoming unhealthy, how much I hate this girl. My teeth are grinding even as I write this. She is my sworn enemy, India. Worse than Priscilla Gubermeyer back at Bowen.

I’ll stop bitching now. And I’ll focus on the positive: Guild is cool. It’s not like the other clubs at Quare. It seems edgy, fast-paced, even competitive.

It seems—dare I say it?—exciting.

Bisoux,

Flora

misstulipblog.com

Photos c/o Elijah Huck

Click to navigate through photo album

Miss Tulip isn’t exactly the exercising type—she’s too busy with her various social engagements, political protests, and academic pursuits to frequent the gym—but when this 1940s gym uniform came along, she felt called to go for a little jog in the park. Not Central Park, of course, which is always flooded with tourists, but Carl Schurz, a little gem on the Upper East Side. Miss Tulip jogged along the reservoir for about thirty minutes. Of course, she had to stop every few minutes to catch up with acquaintances, and by the end, had collected a whole flock of fellow joggers, all flipping off catcallers and chatting about the oppressive male gaze.

When Miss T wears this playsuit, she feels like an adolescent in 1944 who collects aluminum for the war and gets fresh with boys in the backseats of red cars. And if that weren’t enough to put a spring in her step, the soft cotton—and the beautiful burgundy—alone would do it. Who needs Lululemon when you’ve got vintage?

nymphettemag.com

NYMPHETTE MAGAZINE

Ask an Older Dude: Elijah Huck

Okay, so he’s not THAT much older— nineteen—but Elijah Huck has already captured the minds, and, more so, the hearts of all of us here at Nymphette. Feminist? Naturally. Artist? Of course—have you seen his award-winning photo series, “Miss Tulip”? Wearing cuffed jeans, a bomber jacket, and his signature round glasses, Huck sat down with Nymphette’s features editor, Grace Wang, to talk about his hair-care regimen, Miss Tulip, and muses.

Nymphette: What’s up?

Elijah Huck: Not all that much, actually. I just finished a huge term paper, so I washed my hair for the first time in about two weeks. So there’s that.

N: That’s exciting. How often do you usually wash it?

EH: Well, it depends. Usually just a couple times a week. I’m not saying that’s how often I should wash it, but that’s pretty much what happens.

Hello! October’s theme is LUST.

For whom does your heart beat, Nymphettes? Let’s see what you’ve got! Send your work to [email protected]

ABOUT NYMPHETTE Nymphette is an online feminist arts & culture magazine for teenagers. Each month, we choose a theme, and then you send us your writing, photography, and artwork.

N: Let’s talk about “Miss Tulip.” Readers want to know: What happened?

EH: That’s so nice that you’re a fan. Honestly, we—Miss Tulip and I— just got too busy to keep up with the blog this year.

N: There’s no chance you’ll tell us who Miss Tulip is, right? How about a hint?

EH: I wish I could say, but I can’t. All you’ll be able to know about her is what you can see from the neck down. Miss Tulip isn’t supposed to exist in this world, or feel rooted to it in the form of just one person. But at the same time, she isn’t lofty or merely an ideal, and I can confirm that she’s just as real, and just as delightful, as she seems in the photos. Her privacy is her choice, and it’s something we all have to respect.

N: I don’t think anyone will be satisfied with that answer, but I can tell you’re uncomfortable, so we can move on.

EH: Not uncomfortable! But yeah, not giving anything away.

N: Can you at least say if she’s ever coming back?

EH: I will say that there’s a possibility, but it’s a small one. That’s the thing about muses—you never know when they’ll return.

N: It’s clear when you look at all the pictures of Miss Tulip that you have a particular relationship to your subject. The gaze is adoring, like the way someone looks at his lover. Are you in love with Miss Tulip?

EH: Wow! That’s quite a question. Let’s just say Miss Tulip and I were—are—close friends.

N: I won’t keep prying, but I don’t believe you, and neither will our readers.

EH [laughing]: That’s fine with me.

N: How’d you get into photography?

EH: That’s a tough question. I guess I’ve always loved taking pictures, but I didn’t really understand how it could be an art in itself—like, I’d take pictures to remember stuff that was beautiful and unusual. Now I find myself gravitating toward things that are interesting: sometimes ugly, sometimes deformed, but I’ll like the lines they make.

N: Are you professionally trained?

EH: Sort of? I went to this supersmall alternative boarding school in upstate New York, and all these artists who live in the area come through to teach classes—artists in residence, they’re called. When I was a first-year—sorry, a junior—we had this super-rad dude come teach us how to take pictures. He had this thing where before we could even touch the camera, we had to learn how to see. The class was actually called “Ways of Seeing.” A lot of staring at walls and trees and trying to read texture.

And then over the summer I started doing Chicago Arts, which is this program for teenagers into visual and performing arts, and I met a bunch of friends there who just wanted to talk about, like, making art all day. It’s an amazing opportunity that they afford to young artists, and I learned a lot from them—and some of us ended up going to that same little boarding school upstate.

N: Do you want to be a photographer when you grow up?

EH: I thought this was “Ask an Older Dude”! Am I not supposed to be a grown-up already?

N: Do you feel like a grown-up?

EH: On some days. I recently went back home to Queens—I go to Columbia, so it’s kind of a commute—to spend a few weeks with my mom, just because we’re really close and I missed her. So I’ve been living in my childhood home, right next door to my childhood best friend, but still feeling kind of mature, I guess.

Well, there you have it, Nymphettes. Smart, stylish, AND caring. Please try to restrain yourselves in the comments section.

And there, snaking just between the lines, was everything I needed to hold on to the hope that he was coming for me after all.

After everyone went to sleep last night, I snuck into the library and Googled Elijah, just for old times’ sake. I haven’t done it since being at Quare, and as soon as I saw the interview, I was immediately flooded with warmth. My thoughts:

• See! He DOES care for me.

• Why hasn’t he written me yet? Or confirmed his December visit?

• I’mhismuseI’mhismuseI’mhismuse

• He’s off being an artist. Of course he hasn’t been in touch.

I read the line about not being meant to be rooted to this world maybe fifty times, and then I turned off the computer and hyperventilated for a while. The library was completely dark and silent, and the computer I’d been using was warm.

To: All-staff <[email protected]>

From: Wink DelDuca <[email protected]>

Subject: Miss Tulip

September 24, 9:54 p.m.

Salutations,

Wink here with the weekly digest.

After we published Grace’s piece yesterday, the comment section blew up, just as expected. I’ve been hearing from many of you editors, too, and it seems that everybody’s on the same page: we want Miss Tulip back, and we want her back now. As you’ve read, Elijah seems pretty set on staying tight-lipped, but a girl can have hope, can’t she?

As usual, we’ll be meeting on Wednesday evening. Those of you who are local will be at the diner, and we’ll Skype the rest of you in. We can drown our feelings in burgers and milkshakes and do some serious scheming. It’s Rhonda’s turn to buy.

;)

Wink

Editor in Chief, Nymphette magazine

Nymphette is an online feminist arts & culture magazine for teenagers. Each month, we choose a theme, and then you send us your writing, photography, and artwork.

Elijah Huck

245 West 107th Street

New York, NY 10025

September 24

Dear Elijah,

I’m here at Quare.

It’s just as bizarre as you made it out to be. And it’s strange to think that I’ve only been here for less than a month. I’m already forgetting how to shop online.

Why did you decide not to come to Quare this year? Did it have anything to do with me?

Funny story! One of my neighbors, Marigold, was sitting next to me in the computer lab in the library and pulled up the latest issue of Nymphette, which as you know features an interview with you.

“Can you believe he went here?” she kept asking. “I’m such a huge Miss Tulip fan.”

I tried to play it cool, and be all blasé but I was having difficulty swallowing.

Elijah Huck

245 West 107th Street

New York, NY 10025

September 24

Dear Elijah,

Everyone here nods and says, “This Friend speaks my mind” when they agree with someone.

My roommate is Juna. She’s okay, but very serious and I think she hates me. There’s an awful wood nymph girl named Becca who thinks the proportions of sex are akin to an orange trying to fit into a straw.

It’s awful and I hate it. Can you come get me?

Elijah Huck

245 West 107th Street

New York, NY 10025

September 24

Dear Elijah,

You would be so proud of how I’m adapting to Quare. I love how kooky and bizarre everyone is! I’m even embracing “no shell speak,” though you teased me endlessly about not being able to do it when you told me about the rule last year.

That said, I haven’t become ugly or unstylish. I’m maintaining relationships with my favorite Etsy merchants, who continue to update me immediately when they get something in that they know I’ll like. I trust you won’t tell anyone that I’ve been using the Internet like this when you come in December.

Elijah Huck

245 West 107th Street

New York, NY 10025

September 24

Dear Elijah,

I want to bury my head in your neck and smell your flannel and wear your tiny round glasses but as a joke and everyone in Maison Kayser will look over and be like, Oh, those two again, they’re so in love

Everything Must Go by Jenny Fran Davis (2)

The Quare Academy

The Bowen School for Girls

The Bowen School for Girls

The Quare Academy

Two · lips

Amsterdam Dental Group

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