Page 18 of The Academy
Just as Rhode asked, “So what’s your deal? Are you seeing anyone? Or were you, before you got here?”—which was a thinly veiled way of asking if she was available—Audre Robinson interrupted, and Simone was so relieved she could have kissed her.
The next time Simone is alone with Rhode, she needs to be clear that she’s interested in friendship only.
The quickest way back to Classic South is across the Pasture, but Simone is wearing her stupid heels, which will sink into the grass. When she gets back to the dorm, she’ll change into sneakers (all the girls were wearing sneakers with their dresses, even Davi Banerjee). Simone clips along the road, taking a moment to appreciate the beauty of the Tiffin campus: the classic brick architecture (Georgian, she’s learned), the Pasture enclosed by white horse fencing, the athletic fields to her left. Simone can just make out the ghostly arms of the football goalposts in the moonlight. The bells of the chapel ring the half hour—it must be nine thirty—and the only other sound is the faint thump of bass coming from the Teddy. Tiffin exists in a bubble; it feels removed, sealed off from the rest of the world. Do traffic, pollution, poverty, pestilence, or the Olive Gardeneven exist? You would never know it from where Simone is standing. She is oh-so-fortunate to be here. She might be out of her depth, but she’s always been a strong swimmer.
She rolls her eyes at herself.
In Classic South, most of the room lights are off—the girls are good about not wasting resources—with the exception of Simone’s own room (Simone’s embarrassed that she forgot to turn off her light) and one dimly lit room at the end of the hall. That would be Charley, in 111. Simone heads to her own room first in the interest of changing her shoes. Also, she needs to think about what to say.
Immediately, she notices something different about her door. There’s a new quote written in red Sharpie northwest of the doorknob.“It’s better to be yourself and have no friends than to be like your friends and have no self.”The quote is unattributed; lots of the quotes on the door are; the girls find them on the internet and snatch them up like impulse buys at Target. Fine. There isn’t a doubt who added this quote, especially since tonight everyone is at the dance but Charley.
Simone considers the quote as she pries off her heels—ahhhhhh—and slips into her Vejas. The girls love that Simone wears Vejas just like they do, though in light of Charley’s quote, does she feel the pinch of conformity? Is it cool that Simone wears the same brand of sneakers that all the kids do, or is it pathetic? And why, exactly, is she checking on Charley? If Charley Hicks is happier lying in bed reading, isn’t it her prerogative to do so uninterrupted? Must she be made to feel like a pariah? Audre Robinson is, no doubt, hypersensitive to the school’s outliers after what happened the year before, but Charley doesn’t seem sad, depressed, or even lonely.Au contraire,she’s a strong, independent thinker.
Simone is tempted to return to the dance without laying eyes on Charley, but Audre will ask Simone for a report, and what’s Simone going to do—lie? She heads down the hall, intentionally squeakingthe soles of her sneakers against the linoleum so Charley will hear her coming. She pauses before Charley’s door, sets an ear against it, hears nothing. There’s a strip of dim light at the bottom. Charley is reading, or maybe she’s fallen asleep. Simone pauses. What if she wakes Charley up?
But she has no choice, she’s under direct orders from the Head. She knocks.
There’s no response. Sleeping, then. Simone tiptoes away, imagining herself sayingCharley was asleepand the expression of relief on Audre’s face. Simone can’t fathom what it was like to have opened that very door and found a student dead. Simone stops in her tracks and heads back to Charley’s room. She knocks on the door a little louder.
“Charley?” she says. “Charley, it’s Miss Bergeron.”
There’s no response. Simone puts her hand on the knob. This feels like an egregious invasion of privacy, though after just a week and a half of school, Simone has learned dorm culture: Girls walk in and out of one another’s rooms all the time, sometimes with a cursory knock, but sometimes they just barge in like they’re all siblings.
The doors in the dorm don’t lock, so the knob turns easily. Simone knows that on the day she killed herself, Cinnamon Peters wedged the door shut with her desk chair. She didn’t want to be saved.
“Charley?” Simone says again. “Charley, I’m coming in.”
Still no answer. Simone eases open the door, pokes her head inside. The light is coming from a tiny reading lamp that Charley has suction-cupped to the wall above her bed. There’s a nice seagrass rug, a framed poster of Virginia Woolf, an entire corner filled with plants. Charley has turned her milk crates into bookshelves that are stacked floor to ceiling.
The bed is neatly made with a patchwork quilt and two pillows incrisp white cases. There’s a navy fleece throw blanket smoothed across the bottom of the bed; Simone sees it’s embroidered with an ALE… then she figures out it’s a Yale blanket. A copy ofThe Talented Mr. Ripleyis open face down on the quilt, and… there’s a yellow-and-pink neon tube dress crumpled on the floor.
Simone enters the room. “Charley?”
The desk chair is empty, Charley’s laptop—closed—lies next to her math textbook.
Simone hurries down the hall to the bathroom, but the lights are out. She turns them on and searches the showers first, then pushes in the door of each of the toilet stalls. “Charley?” Her voice is shaking. “Charley?”
Where is she?
The common space is dark and deserted, so Simone proceeds down the hall, opening the doors to all the other rooms, but not one of them is occupied.
“Charley!” Simone is shouting now, thinking,Is this what it feels like to be a parent?If so, how awful. Simone won’t be able to get a clear breath until she finds the child.
Simone charges up to the second floor. It’s a sixth-form floor this year, many of them doubles. Fourth- and fifth-form students have singles because the workload is so intense; by sixth-form, the heavy lifting is mostly over and the girls feel nostalgic. Their boarding school days are coming to an end. What did Honey Vandermeid tell Simone?They would all sleep in the common room together if I let them.
The second-floor bathroom is rumored to have the best water pressure in the building; maybe Charley took this opportunity to check it out. But the second-floor bathroom is dark as well.
Simone goes back down to the first floor and checks Charley’s room again. What is the room trying to tell her? It looks as thoughCharley stepped out for a moment. Was she hungry? Like the rest of the kids, Charley has a mini fridge as well as hanging baskets of various snacks. Charley’s tastes run toward Cool Ranch Doritos, Takis, birthday-cake-flavored Oreos. Perfectly disgusting and normal.
Simone wants to cry. Where did Charley go? Was she abducted? Maybe Tiffin isn’t the protective bubble Simone thinks it is. If everyone else was at the dance, what would stop a serial killer from creeping onto campus and preying on a vulnerable girl left alone in the dorm?
But there’s no sign of a struggle in Charley’s room. Simone is being absurd. Maybe Charley actually went to the dance; maybe she cut across the Pasture and Simone missed her. Simone calls Rhode. When he picks up, she hears “Afraid to Feel.”
“Simone?” Rhode says. “Everything okay?”
“Of course,” Simone says. She doesn’t want to sound any alarms just yet. “I’m just confirming that Charley Hicks ended up coming to the dance. She’s there, right?”
“No,” Rhode says, and Simone’s hopes shatter.Fuck,she thinks.Fuck!“Why, is she not in her room?”
