Estelle Marcus, the girl they were looking at when they spoke, had a silver dot in her left nostril. She hadn’t had it when I had seen her earlier in the dorm hallway.
“It’s not a fad for me,” she shot back indignantly. “I wear it when I want to wear it and because I want to wear it. The emphasis,” she added, imitating Haden’s quotation marks in the air, “is on ‘when I want.’?”
“Don’t you have to wear that all the time or the hole will close up?” I asked her. Mother wouldn’t permit Haylee or me even to have pierced ears. There would be no deliberate changes in our bodies for fear that one would not be exactly like the other.
“I wear it enough to prevent that,” Estelle snapped back. She took a second look at me to see if I was favoring the argument the boys were making.
“If she wore it to class, Mrs. Mitchell would have her expelled,” Terri said. She almost added, And rightly so. The words were spelled out in her disapproving look.
I thought that was that, but then Claudia suddenly blurted, “You wouldn’t be at the last school I was at.”
Everyone turned to her. She looked shocked at herself that she had spoken, as shocked as I was, especially because she sounded like she was in defense of piercing, but then she added, “However, they needed the money, so you could practically get away with murder there.”
“What school was that?” Estelle quickly asked, sounding like she would transfer in the morning.
“Saddle Brook,” Claudia said. “A girl was gang-raped the year I attended, but the school managed to keep it out of the newspapers.”
No one spoke.
“She was my roommate,” Claudia continued.
Marcy and I looked at each other, surprised at how talkative Claudia suddenly was, and how revealing.
“Really?” Luke asked. “How horrible for you, but, of course, more for her.”
Everyone looked at Claudia as if she had just missed being gang-raped herself.
“She’s in a nuthouse right now,” Claudia said. “Catatonic.”
“Catatonic?” I asked, too quickly perhaps. “I mean, I think I know what that is.”
“It’s like a coma with your eyes open,” Claudia said. “Most of the girls there seemed catatonic to me,” she added without the slightest hint of humor.
A heavy silence followed. In moments, Claudia had wiped away all smiles and excitement. The potential dangers and horrors of the world that hovered just outside the boundaries of our special, privileged, private world flashed behind everyone’s eyes. The lesson was clear to me. If you brought sadness and horror in, you were as marked by it as Cain was marked with sin. It was a clear “blame the messenger” message. No one here, I vowed to myself, would learn what I had endured.
“Let’s eat before I lose my appetite,” Marcy suddenly declared, practically leaping to her feet.
Terri and I, with Claudia following slowly, rose and went to the food line. Marcy glanced back at Claudia and widened her eyes at me.
“I feel sorry for you if you get to tell each other bedtime stories when the lights are out,” she whispered. “She’s like a female Norman Bates from Psycho. You could ask Mrs. Rosewell to arrange a room change.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Just shout if it ever gets too much. I’ll bring the depression extinguisher,” she said, then moved quickly to deliberately bump against the boy ahead of us.
He turned with annoyance until he saw who it was and then smiled. “A bit clumsy?”
&n
bsp; “Only around you,” she told him. “You have that effect on jeunes femmes.”
He widened his smile and looked at the three of us. “New victims?”
“Freshly served,” she said, and introduced us to Rob Brian, a senior with curly dark brown hair and an impish smile. He seemed a perfect match for her. He introduced us to Ben Kaplan, a boy about Claudia’s height with a similarly lean build, a face peppered with orange freckles, and short apricot-colored hair.
“Welcome, girls,” Rob said. “Be skeptical of everything Marcy tells you about us.”
“Kaylee doesn’t need to be warned. She can handle herself. She was prom queen at her last school and is a brilliant student with a four-point-oh. I plan on stealing all her homework,” she declared, “and raising my grade average enough to get my father to buy me a car.”