Page 85 of The Academy
Zip Zap alert:Finally, an answer to the question everyone has been asking all year. How does Davi Banerjee eat so much and stay so thin? She sticks her finger down her throat.
Saturday morning, Charley holds her breath as she opens the Zip Zap alert. East seems pretty confident he’s immune to Zip Zap, but Charley thinks his attitude is naïve. Zip Zap doesn’t care who he is. Nobody at Tiffin is off-limits.
Charley reads the post and—although she considers herself above dramatic gestures—screams into her hands. She races down the hallway; it’s so early, nobody else is awake. She taps lightly on Davi’s door before easing it open.
Davi is sitting on her bed in her pale pink Roller Rabbit pajama set, which reveals just how thin she’s gotten. Charley has noticed that lately, in the bathroom, Davi always wears her bathrobe.
She’s bent in half, staring at her phone.
“Davi,” Charley whispers. “Oh my god.”
Davi raises her face; her eyes look like obsidian marbles. “Get out.”
“What?” Charley says. “Davi, it wasn’t me. I didn’t say a word to anyone, I swear.”
“Get the fuck out,” Davi says. “Nobodyknewexcept you. You threatened me! Maybe you thought I didn’t take you seriously but I came home and emailed Dr. Pringle…”
“Maybe Dr. Pringle told someone,” Charley says.
“Dr. Pringle didn’t tell anyone,” Davi says. “Have you never heard of HIPAA?”
“It wasn’t me,” Charley says. “I swear on my life.”
“You told East.”
“I didn’t!”
“You’re the only person who knows,” Davi says. “Or you were, until now.” Her eyes fill with tears. “It’s a private issue and now all of Tiffin is going to be gossiping about it, pretending topityme but deep down, thinking I’m pathetic.”
Charley can’t deny this is probably true. Maybe the girls on the floor weren’t asleep; maybe they were just afraid to come out of their rooms.
“I care about you too much to have betrayed your confidence like this,” Charley says. “We’re friends, Davi.”
“We were friends,” Davi says. “But you can go back to your plants and your books. I’m done.”
“I can’t believe you think this was me,” Charley says. But, looking at it objectively, who else could it be? The timing is so incriminating. Charley cringes as she replays her words:I’ll tell the whole school.“I’m not Zip Zap and I don’t know who is. It’s like Big Brother is out there, watching us. They probably read your email to Dr. Pringle.”
“Charley,” Davi says, and her voice sounds sort of normal, which gives Charley hope. “Would you please get the fuck out?”
That night, it’s Charley who sends the green arrow to East. She’s been holed up in her room most of the day; the one time she ventured to the bathroom, she bumped into Tilly Benbow, who wrinkled her nose and said, “You’re disgusting.”
Charley, who has always found Tilly irrelevant and vacuous, was surprised at how much those words hurt. “It wasn’t me, Tilly,” she said, but Tilly sniffed and stormed out.
The first-floor girls’ take on that morning’s Zip Zap is that Davi deserves to deal with her eating disorder discreetly and Charley made it public in the most grotesque way. She won’t be able to dissuade them from this position, at least not until the person behind Zip Zap is outed.
Charley is friendless now, just as she was for most of the first semester—but it’s worse now that Charley knows what having a friend feels like.
She hears the girls leave for the auditorium. Everyone is being extra solicitous of Davi, who, apparently, will be sitting with Olivia H-T’s super-hot cousin at the second night ofMean Girls. Good for her,Charley thinks. As soon as everyone has left the dorm, Charley pulls a red Sharpie from her desk drawer and marches down to Miss Bergeron’s room. Miss Bergeron repapered her door at the start of the new term and it’s still mostly blank; writing down quotes has lost its novelty.
Charley picks a spot at eye level and writes:“I think most of humankind would agree, the hard part of high school is the people.”—Demon Copperhead,Barbara Kingsolver
By the time she gets back to her room, East has liked her text. Charley exhales and heads downstairs.
She planned on using their time as a distraction—going down to the tunnel is like leaving Tiffin altogether—but as soon as Charley walks into the bomb shelter and sees East hand-sanding the pieces of door trim, she bursts into tears.
“Oh, Charles,” he says, opening his arms. “Come here.”
He runs his hands up and down her back and breathes into her hair. She bawls in a way she hasn’t since her father died, and this thought alone makes the tears subside. What does any of this matter, compared to losing her father? It’s a tiny blip. Davi is upset, she’s going through something hard, and now the whole school knows it. Of course she’s angry, of course she’s blaming Charley.
