Private (Private 1)

about keeping this little affair hush-hush?

“Good,” Kiran said. “Now go.”

No time for questions I’d never have the courage to ask anyway.

FORCE FED

I turned and got out of there as fast as I could.

For a while, I had no contact with the Billings Girls, aside from practices with Noelle, at which she mostly ignored my existence. By the third week of school, I was starting to feel hopeless, wondering what I had done wrong. Had Kiran told them to shun me in order to keep me away from them, thereby lessening the chances that I

would reveal what I knew? Every time I saw her I wanted to talk to her, to reassure her that I would keep my mouth shut. But every time I saw her, she was with Noelle or Taylor or Ariana and there was no way I could approach them.

Approaching them without an invitation was out of the question.

Meanwhile, it seemed as if the Billings Girls were everywhere.

During morning services one particularly hot day, Dean Marcus

announced that a very special guest and alumnus of Easton had

come to make an announcement, then introduced Lance Hallgren,

Oscar-winning superstar and champion, for no apparent reason

that I had ever been able to discern, of the U.S. space program.

Everyone applauded and murmured as Lance stood before the

84

K A T E B R I A N

P R I V A T E

85

podium, all big teeth and slick hair, and told us that he was not the Easton newspaper— The Chronicle—with an accompanying story only star there that day. That he had graced us with his presence proudly noting that it had been accepted to be published in The New only to present a National Academic Award for Excellence in

Yorker, which received thousands of submissions from poets of all Scientific Research by a high school student to Taylor Bell. He ages and stages of accomplishment. Then the ballot came out for brought her up to the front of the chapel to thunderous applause, that year’s senior class superlatives, and Noelle’s name was all over then handed over a plaque and a check for $5,000. The award also it. She was nominated for everything from Most Beautiful to Most came with an all-expenses-paid trip to Washington, where Taylor Likely to Succeed to Class Couple to Best Sense of Humor.

would present her research during a banquet at the Smithsonian

That I had yet to see evidence of.

Institution, where she would sit at Lance Hallgren’s table.

I glanced over at the Billings table as Diana, Constance, and I The biggest academic award I had ever won got me a stiff blue

emerged from the lunch line on a rainy Tuesday afternoon. Without ribbon and a $25 gift certificate to Outback Steakhouse.

the sun streaming through the skylight, the cafeteria seemed dim That same day, Kiran received a bouquet of two dozen white lilies and dank. But s

till, the Billings girls were the brightest spot in the right in the middle of lunch hour. She passed the card around, so I room.

assumed they weren’t from her secret Dreck boy, who sat a few tables

“Have you picked an artist for your art history project yet?”