Page 23 of The Academy
“What are you doing down here?” Rhode says.
“Oh…” Simone says. She turns around, thinking she’ll have to throw East under the bus to save herself. She has no choice. But East has vanished. The tunnel behind her is so impenetrably dark that Simone wonders if East was ever there or if what happened was some trick of her imagination. She takes a breath. What, if anything, did Rhode see?
“I noticed the door to the basement was propped open,” she says. “So I came down here looking for Charley, but she’s not here. We should go.” She scoots past Rhode and heads for the stairs. “She’s probably back in her room by now, and if she’s not, we’ll tell Audre.” Simone hopes Rhode follows her instead of venturing any deeper into the tunnel. “Come on,” she prompts.
Rhode stares past her into the darkness. Does he see something?
“Rhode?” Simone says.
Reluctantly, he turns to follow her.
Every once in a while, Simone thinks, the universe does you a solid.
When Simone checks Charley’s room—Rhode stays out front, there are no men allowed in Classic South after eight p.m.—she finds Charley sitting on her bed, reading. She’s undone her braids, and her hair runs in wavy kinks down her back. She’s wearing a long white cotton nightgown with rickrack on the chest. The other girls in the dorm sleep in Roller Rabbit pajama sets. If Charley’s daytime attire is from another decade, her nightgown is from another century.
“Where have youbeen?” Simone says. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”It’s official,Simone thinks. She sounds like someone’s—everyone’s—mother.
Charley regards Simone with frosty eyes. “I walked over to the Paddock for coffee, but it was closed.”
“You walked there in your nightgown?” Simone says.
“Obviously not.” Her voice is filled with savage disinterest. Or maybe it’s pity. Simone realizes then why Charley Hicks causes her so much anxiety. She exposes Simone’s impostor syndrome. Simone isn’t a good teacher, she’s not qualified in the subject matter, she isn’t mature enough to stand up to the students, and, as the past fifteen minutes have just proven, she has grave moral failings as well. She let Andrew Eastmankissher! The bald fact of this is newly appalling now that she’s upstairs in the warm, well-lit dorm that houses the girls she’s supposed to be in charge of. There’s no way Charley could know what happened in the tunnel, but she’s eyeballing Simone’s party dress (Simone bought it on sale at Forever 21 for a McGill fraternity formal a few years earlier) as though she would expect that behavior and worse. Charley blinks. “I came home and changed. Did I break any rules?”
Simone tries to calculate the timing. If Charley left just before Simone arrived, walked to the Paddock, and walked back, she and Simone might have missed each other. Then when Charley would have returned, Simone would have been wandering the bowels of the building and kissing a student.
Did I break any rules?
Simone swallows. “No,” she says. “I’m just glad you’re safe.”
Charley returns to her book without a word.
Before Simone closes the door, she says, “Did you write that quote on my door? In red?”
Charley doesn’t look up. “What do you think?”
Simone thinks she should leave before she says or does anything else she regrets.
“Good night,” she says.
8. Tiffin Talks: Day in the Life
After First Dance, we settle into a routine, which coincides with the shift from summer to fall. The days are still warm (hot as hell if you’re on the football field wearing full pads), but we grab a hoodie when we’re going to the Teddy or the Sink after dinner, and Davi Banerjee posts a thousand pictures of what she calls Tiffin’s “foliage porn”: the leaves of the shade maples turning colors. Our teachers finally figure out which Madison and Olivia is which, and the puny third-formers learn the shortcut from the Paddock to the art studio,where they’re all required to take Visual Foundations (and they start calling it “Viszh Found” like the rest of us).
Our days at Tiffin start with breakfast, which is mandatory for third- and fourth-formers. Fifth- and sixth-formers will often roll through the Paddock for the bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches that Chef Haz sets out. Sometimes one of us will stop to talk to Chef—he can often be found just outside the back door, smoking. Davi keeps begging Chef to appear in a TikTok—she features his food all the time—and although he has resisted so far, she thinks she’s wearing him down. He finally asks if there’s “any money” in being a TikTok phenom, and while the answer is yes for Davi, she has to be noncommittal with Chef. When she tells him he’d probably receive some new cookware or a case of organic peanut butter, his interest seems to fade.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays we attend Chapel, where the dress code is coat and tie or dress or skirt. Every Tuesday during Chapel we’re “treated” to a senior speech. Each sixth-former is required to present a talk centered on a meaningful experience, ideally one that’s led to a philosophical insight or personal growth. Favorite topics are dead grandparents, grandparents with Alzheimer’s, or lessons learned at boarding school.
However, the week after First Dance, Annabelle Tuckerman captures our undivided attention with her senior speech, entitled “Three Brushes with Death.” Number one is Annabelle’s revelation that her mother, upon discovering that she was pregnant with Annabelle, was determined to get an abortion. She was on the partner track at a big New York law firm. “Because the world is a patriarchy,” Annabelle explains, “a pregnancy would have derailed her career.” We tense up: Has anyone uttered the word “abortion” in Chapel before?Also,we think,what kind of mother tells her child that she was nearly terminated in utero?
Number two: When Annabelle was eight years old, a tumor thesize of a grapefruit was removed from her abdominal cavity. Although the tumor was benign, we agree this counts as something life-threatening.
Number three: This past summer, while on Martha’s Vineyard, Annabelle was the victim of a hit-and-run accident. She was biking home at midnight from her job as a food runner at the Red Cat when a car swerved onto the bike path and hit her, leaving her unconscious. When Annabelle came to, she didn’t know where she was or what had happened, but she had road rash across her thigh and her bike frame was mangled. It was only later, once she limped home, that she recovered the memory of being hit by a car.
“Other than surface wounds and the temporary amnesia,” Annabelle says, “I was fine.” She wipes imaginary sweat from her forehead in a “Phew!” gesture. “I’ve been wondering what the universe is trying to tell me, and I’ve decided it’s this: I’m built to survive whatever comes my way. It’s also taught me to practice gratitude for each day I’m given. I’m lucky to be here. Thank you.”
We erupt in thunderous applause while Annabelle’s friends rush to give her a hug. Her bestie, Ravenna Rapsicoli, says, “Why didn’t you tell me what happened on the Vineyard?” The answer is that Annabelle Tuckerman wanted to save the story for this very moment. She recognized senior speech gold when she saw it.
The only person who remains nonplussed by Annabelle’s speech is Head Prefect Lisa Kim. She’s scheduled to speak next Tuesday, and she’d been planning on talking about her dead grandfather. She wishes she could come up with something more dramatic, but Lisa’s life has been blessed, and quite boring.
