Page 77 of The Academy
Charley smirks, and Simone wants to slap her. How dare she make light of keeping a bottle of whatever this is in her fridge after what happened to Cinnamon Peters in this very room?
“What is it?” Simone demands. She hears whispers coming from the hallway; the girls are watching all this unfold like it’s tonight’s movie.
“Plant food,” Charley says.
Simone deflates. Plant food—for the parlor palm, the fiddlehead fern, and all the other greenery that, for the first semester anyway, counted as Charley’s only friends.
Simone replaces the plant food and slams the fridge door closed. She ransacks Charley’s dresser drawers. There is vodka here somewhere, she knows it. She tears through the closet, rummaging in the duffels on the floor. She hears Olivia P. in the hall say, “Buh-bye, Miss Clavel; hello, Dolores Umbridge.” In Charley’s mirror, Simone sees the other girls huddled around Charley, watching as Simone rifles through Charley’s boat shoes and L.L.Bean moccasins.
The Dolores Umbridge crack stings, but Simone will not be deterred. She abandons the closet and targets Charley’s desk. She pulls open the top desk drawer and… stops short.
She pulls out a shiny metal tape measure, just like the one East had down in the tunnel.
Slowly, she holds it out to Charley. “What is this?”
Charley blinks. “A tape measure.”
“Where did you get it?”
“I brought it from home.”
A lie,Simone thinks.She got it from East.Simone is convinced it’s the same one East used to measure the distance between her shoulders.
“What are you doing with it?”
Charley points to the wall next to her bed. “I hung up a poster I got for Christmas. I wanted to make sure it was centered.”
Simone follows Charley’s finger. Next to Charley’s poster of Virginia Woolf is a new poster of the Brontë sisters—Charlotte, Emily, and Anne—which is annoyingly on-brand. Simone recalls hearing that Charley was named after Charlotte and Emily Brontë.
Simone squints. “Did you usetacks?”
“Putty,” Charley says. “As specified inThe Bridle.The kind that won’t stain the paint.”
Simone huffs, then resumes checking the desk drawers—extra notebooks, printer cartridges. She inspects Charley’s hanging baskets, peers under the bed. Where is the vodka?
“Fine,” she says, standing up. The girls in the doorway disperse. She’s given them plenty of time to dispose of any contraband in their own rooms—but she doesn’t care what anyone else is hiding.
Out in the hall, Madison J. touches Simone’s arm. “Miss Bergeron?” she whispers. “Are you okay?”
Zip Zap alert:Turns out, Miss Bergeron wasn’t always such a sterling role model. She lost her floor fellow position in her final semester of college and was disciplined by the university.
Early on Sunday morning, Simone is awakened by her phone ringing. She can’t lift her head off the pillow and her mouth is chalky.
After the room check, Charley decided to go to the movies afterall; the other girls treated Charley gingerly, as though she’d been the victim of some gross abuse. Olivia H-T said she felt a migraine coming on, which was just the excuse Simone needed to hang back as well, and in the darkness of her room, she drank the new bottle of wine that she’d stashed in her Hunter boots.
It was shameful, but at least she’d resisted the temptation to text East.
She grapples for the phone. It’s Rhode.
Ugh,she thinks.At eight o’clock on a Sunday morning?
“You’ve been Zip Zapped,” he says.
Cordelia Spooner has made a resolution: She will fix things between herself and Honey.
She invites Honey over to her cottage for Sunday supper.I’m making my pimento cheese dip and the ham and poppy seed sliders you like. We can watch the Wild Card games in front of the fire.
Honey says:Sounds heavenly. I’ll be over at five. Go Bills!followed by blue and red hearts.
