The Little Woods

THE LAST TIME I SAW
my sister we played hide-and-seek. My dad was still alive then too, and heart attacks were something that happened to other people. My mom wasn’t drinking back then. Or maybe she was. It’s hard to know when you’re a kid.

We were supposed to be playing in the yard, but I knew Clare had gone inside. From my perch up in the oak tree, I saw her slide open the back door and sneak through. My dad was trying to find us, and I didn’t want to be the only one playing inbounds, so I climbed down, darted across the yard, and crept in after her. I found her in the den, her pink Keds poking out from under the heavy curtains. I thought I might hide with her; we usually did that, but for some reason, that day it wasn’t allowed. Sensing me, she pulled back the thick fabric, and meeting my eyes, she shook her head. Not today. Today I
would have to find my own hiding place. She held a finger up to her pencil-thin lips, and then, closing her eyes, she drew the curtain, disappearing behind it.

It was ten years old, that memory of my sister, and the last one I had, though I knew there must be others somewhere. I must have stood behind the car waving as she and my dad drove off for California. I must have helped her pack. I must have at least hugged her goodbye and inhaled the scent of her for the last time—strawberry ChapStick mixed with soap. But I don’t have those memories. I don’t know where I put them.

That summer my dad had a conference to go to in Sacramento, and Clare had a camp friend nearby. The mother of this camp friend was a teacher at a boarding school called St. Bede’s Academy, and my dad thought it would be great for the girls to have the run of the place while it was empty.
How liberating
, he’d said. He was always going on about how kids these days were too constrained, too protected, unable to roam wild and free like he’d done when he was a boy.

Whether Clare enjoyed the freedom was something we’d never know. On the third night of her visit, she and her friend vanished from their beds. Their bodies were never found.

My aunt Kim, my cousin Danny, and I were sitting at their kitchen table when I told them I’d been accepted at St. Bede’s Academy. Kim looked up from her pile of bills and stared at me like I was an alien species. Danny continued munching his Cocoa Puffs.

“Tell me you’re joking,” Kim said, but she knew I wasn’t.
Mom had recently broken a six-month sober stint, and her appearances at home were becoming increasingly sporadic. Soon she would take off again, and I didn’t plan on waiting around for her.

“You can’t change schools in the middle of the year like that.”

“Yes I can. I’ve already been accepted. Kim, it’s a top school, and they’re giving me a full ride,” I said. “Because of Clare.”

My aunt winced.

“
That
school?” Danny stopped munching and froze. “You want to go there?”

“It’ll get me into a good college. Besides, I don’t want to be home anymore.”

“Cally,” Kim said before taking a drag off her cigarette. “You can always stay with us. You don’t want to go to that place. Danny, tell her she’s being crazy.”

Danny’s eyes met mine. My cousin was a big guy—close to three hundred pounds—with eyes like mud. He was also my best friend. “You sure about this?” was all he said.

“I’m sure,” I said, though I wasn’t. How could I be?

Danny nodded and gently placed a hand on his mom’s arm. “Cally knows what she’s doing. She goes there, she could probably get into Stanford or something. Let her go if she wants.”

Kim winced again and stubbed out her cigarette.

It wasn’t that I needed permission—Mom had already signed everything that needed to be signed—but Danny and Kim were important to me. Maybe I wanted their approval. Maybe I wanted them to stop me.

But no one did stop me, and a month later, I took a plane
down to California and a bus up into the Sierras. It was a gorgeous campus with rolling green lawns surrounded by a dense, rich forest of poplars and pines. The buildings looked like miniature castles, and for the first time, I felt incredibly fortunate to be given this chance. Maybe St. Bede’s didn’t have to be just my escape. Maybe it could be something more. Maybe it could be my opportunity.

I was met by Mrs. Harrison, the headmaster’s wife, a sweet redhead with bouncing curls. She called me sugar and looped her arm through mine. When I’d spoken to Dr. Harrison on the phone, I’d told him I didn’t want the other students to know about Clare. I didn’t want to be that weird girl with the dead sister. I’d been her enough already. I wanted to be someone new. Dr. Harrison had seemed relieved—what headmaster wanted something like that dredged up after ten years?—but immediately upon meeting me, he offered his condolences and told me his office was always open. Then he handed me my orientation packet and pointed me toward my dorm.

My dormitory was called McKinley, and I was lingering in its dimly lit foyer, searching through my packet for my room assignment, when someone stepped into the hallway.

“Um, hello?” she said, her voice scratchily feminine as she held a hand up to her eyes as if it would allow her to see me better. “I was just about to turn on the lights.”

“Hi,” I said into the darkness. “I’m Cally Wood. I’m new.”

She stood for a moment, small and wispy, and I remember now that I thought she must be a student, and a younger one at that. But then she switched on the light and I saw that her
face had the sharp demarcations around the cheek and jaw of a woman in her early twenties.

“Welcome,” she said, holding out her hand, but something in her eyes told me that I was not, in fact, welcome, that there was something she was doing in her apartment that she wanted to keep on doing, and that she didn’t want to have to deal with me. “I’m Ms. Harlow. I’m your dorm head.”

“Hi,” I said, shaking her hand.

“Well, let me show you around,” she sighed, and brushed her waist-length honeyed curls over her shoulder, only to have them fall forward again.

I followed her through the dorm as she pointed out the showers, the laundry, the common room. She moved languidly, one of those people with a deep inner stillness that always scared the shit out of me. She wore ratty sweatpants with a red
Harvard
curving around her left quadriceps and a white T-shirt that was so old it looked silky and chic. I could see her lavender bra through it, though I kept trying not to. At last we reached my room.

“Four-oh-six,” she said, shrugging. “Why it’s called four-oh-six when there’s only one floor is beyond me.”

“Oh,” I said, attempting to laugh out of politeness, but only half committing, so it sounded weird and vaguely rude. She squinted at me like I’d just stuck to the bottom of her shoe and now she’d need to decide how best to scrape me off.

“Your roommate’s name is Helen Slater,” she said, opening the door. “But she won’t be back from winter break until tomorrow morning, so you’ve got the place to yourself tonight.”

I said thanks and smiled at her, and she smiled back, but not really, and that was that. I closed the door behind me and leaned against it.

The room was cozy, with warm hazy-yellow walls, two wooden sleigh beds with matching desks, and a sliding glass door that looked out onto an upward-sloping, intensely green lawn. I felt like a gnome hiding in an underground bunker.

My roommate’s side was subdued but lived-in. A navy-blue flannel comforter smoothed neatly on the bed. An Egon Schiele print. A few music posters: Leonard Cohen, Bauhaus, Billie Holiday. A smattering of interesting books showing a clear preference for French existentialism. There was a framed photograph of a remarkably pretty little girl wearing makeup and a beauty pageant sash. I hoped this person was not my roommate. She wore a tiara. The girl with the navy comforter and the Bauhaus and the Sartre probably didn’t wear tiaras or frame pictures of herself. Or maybe she did. I would find out soon enough.

I stepped into the closet and poked my head inside. The cedar planks were lined with what looked like decades of ballpoint graffiti. It was too dark to make out much more than
Ashley Sodor is a Tit Queen!
but that was enough. I unpacked, stuffing T-shirts into drawers, haphazardly draping things in the closet, pretending not to notice when items slipped off hangers and puddled on the floor. I tossed my paperbacks onto the shelves above my desk and threw shampoo and soap into a bathroom basket, which I placed near the door. When I’d finished, I sat on my bed and wondered what I was supposed to do. How did a boarding school girl act? What was going to
occupy all the time I would have spent doing slightly illegal and potentially dangerous things with Danny?

I was hungry as hell, so I headed for the dining hall—a crosshatched L at the far end of campus, according to my map. The walk was eerily quiet. Just the odd pair of girls wandering back from dinner arm in arm, intent on not seeing me.