What We Hide (13 page)

I got to the bottom of my trunk in my mission to make snipped art pieces of every single garment (except the underwear). I’d have to borrow clothes for Parent Visiting Day, when Mom and Dad were flying over just for the long weekend. I took my nail scissors to the Swamp one evening to cut Kirsten’s orange hair. It had grown out so that the dark stripe at the roots made her look like a tiger. Her natural color was a coffee-no-milk brown, and we made her hair really spiky.

Nico taught me that the trick to breakfast was to make bacon sandwiches. Recipe: spread margarine over a piece
of dry toast and fold around a clump of really greasy stuck-together bacon. School version of piggy in a blanket. Yum.

I could see time passing by watching Percy’s notebook, which he had with him morning till night. The pages he’d written on were tatty and rippled with words, the untouched ones smooth and blank, waiting for his next inspiration. Sometimes he’d snicker and start scribbling in the middle of a conversation, dreadlocks trembling while he wrote. The other girls said Percy had a crush on me, but he was never shy or annoying, so who knows?

“He’s your type,” Penelope said. “As in, dark. Right?”

Ill Hall Lesson #29: don’t rise to Penelope’s bait.

“It makes me sick how the boys treat him,” Kirsten said. “Luke told me Adrian soaked Percy’s towel the other night, so he got out of the shower and had to freeze.”

Percy never complained. He just sat there cackling and writing stuff down.

“What the hell?” Penelope would say. “Am I in your film?”

“What do you think?”

“Well, am I?”

“Do you want to be?”

“What’s it about?”

“What do you think it’s about?” He answered her every question with a question; it drove Penelope
mad
.

“What’s it about?” I asked him.

“It’s more than one little film,” he said. “I’m creating an oeuvre. The Boarding School Chronicles.”

We woke up one Friday to a whole lot of banging outside.
Kirsten sat straight up with a shout and we piled onto her bed to stare out the window. The Brontë girls crowded in to join us for the best view. The field of the farm next door was full of trucks and men.

“The Autumn Fair!” Everyone seemed thrilled to bits. It would be ready to open by evening and would stay all weekend. Even the teachers loved the Autumn Fair. Even
Richard
agreed that in the tradition of the great English novelist Thomas Hardy, such celebrations were a worthy rustic entertainment.

“Not sure why he’s such a fan,” said Kirsten. “The country fair in
The Mayor of Casterbridge
is where the bloke sells his wife and baby to a sailor, effectively ruining everyone’s lives. I suppose Richard has faith that none of his students will sink so low.”

“None of us are married,” said Esther, in a typical moment of clarity.

“Right.”

“Do you think he’ll cancel Saturday lessons?” asked Oona. “He did that one time.”

“You’ve conveniently forgotten why they were reinstated,” said Kirsten. “The boys that year went to the cider booth at half past nine on Saturday morning and were completely sozzled by noon.”

“In the meantime,” came Hairy Mary’s voice from the doorway, “
this
morning’s lessons will proceed as scheduled. The bell for breakfast will ring in two minutes and I see altogether too many undergarments in the Jane Austen dormitory.”

“What power does an unreliable narrator have upon a story?” asked Jasper. He jingled the change in his pockets and looked around the classroom. “Hmmm?”

His trademark
Hmmm?
was deeply irritating.

Fifth-form comments on Jasper:

Hmmm’s like a deranged wasp
.

Trousers like a butler
.

Ear bristles like a privet hedge
.

Goatee like a girl’s pubes
.

“How does the reader absorb what he is being told, before and then
after
he recognizes a narrator as being untrustworthy?”

Zero response in the fifth form. Nico was tipping his chair, rocking on the back two legs.

“Excuse me, Jasper?”

“Ah! Esther!”

“There’s something I don’t understand.”

Esther was so dependably dorky that everyone kind of loved her. She could distract a teacher for an entire lesson, following some teeny-weeny point down a bumpy, shadowy path.

“Hmmm?”

“Well, it seems to me that each of us just sees the world, you know, the way we see it. Since we’re each living our own story. So wouldn’t that mean that—”

“Yes!” Nico landed his chair legs with a thud. “Sorry to interrupt, Esther, but—”

Esther’s face was now the color of Plum Loco lip gloss. Getting attention from Nico might be enough to cause a seizure.

“I think about this all the time,” said Nico. “Like, for instance, who is telling
this
story?”

“Which story?” Jasper seemed a bit bemused.

“
This
one!” said Nico. “The story of the English lesson on Friday morning in a shabby ex-stable that hasn’t had the windows washed in a hundred years. We have”—he looked around—“sixteen stories in here, right? And all of them are true, right? According to the”—he twitched his fingers to show that he was quoting—“
narrators
. But all of them are unreliable, if you’re one of the other fifteen people. So how can it be some literary genre, the unreliable narrator? There isn’t anything else.”

“That’s heavy, man,” said Adrian.

“I agree with Nico,” I said. My turn to get the sunshine of that amazing smile. “
But
 … isn’t there a difference between someone telling a story from his—or her—point of view, and … and …” Suddenly I didn’t want to finish the sentence.

“And purposely lying?” said Penelope.

“
Misdirection
is perhaps a more suitable term,” said Jasper. “In the literary sense. And that brings us back, thank you, to the unreliable narrator.”

By the end of the day the mood in the dormitories was practically giddy. The Autumn Fair was only a carousel, a miniature Ferris wheel, and a few tacky games booths, but you’d think we were off to Las Vegas. Richard made
us wait until after tea and then he laid out the rules. There would be no drinking of alcoholic beverages, including hard cider. There would be no disrespectful language or behavior toward the townspeople. There was a curfew of nine o’clock for first through third forms, and ten o’clock for the rest of us. “ ‘Go then merrily!’ ” he said, quoting some antique poet.

“Luke’s found a townie.” Kirsten pointed to where her brother was chatting with a boy from the village. “How do people just start nattering to strangers? I can never do that.”

“Watch and learn.” Penelope flexed her muscles, as if she were going to demonstrate tree-cutting techniques. “Hey, Alec!” she called.

“That doesn’t count,” said Kirsten. “You already know that grimy lot.”

I recognized Alec from my first day at Ill Hall. He’d been one of Penelope’s boys in the chip shop. His head was still shaved, and when he grinned at Penelope we could see a new tattoo over his eyebrow, like a worm crawling across his face.

“Hallo, Pen,” he said. I had the idea that maybe he couldn’t pronounce her whole name. Two other boys were with him, neither of them with more hair than fuzz on a peach. It made them look like aliens, especially since the boys at school all had long hair. Wild hippie hair like Luke’s, or soft brown waves like Nico’s, falling across the eyes. These boys were weirdly clean. A bit scary. They all had tight pants, tidy sweaters, and boots with thick dangerous soles. One wore suspenders.

“I’m going to borrow a quid from my brother.” Kirsten gave a quick wave, leaving me there with Penelope’s conquests.

“This is Jenny,” said Penelope. “She’s from America.”

“I hate Americans,” said one of Alec’s friends.

“America hates you,” said Penelope. “So everybody’s happy.”

Lucky for us he thought that was funny, since he looked the type to chew his way through a car fender.

“I’m not really from America,” I said. “I was born in Madagascar. That’s an island off the coast of Africa. Lots of monkeys. My parents are monkey smugglers.”

“What the hell?” said Alec.

“We only live in America for cover,” I said. “The zoos over there are big clients. Sometimes they’ll pay, like, half a million dollars for a rare monkey.”

“A pregnant monkey,” said Penelope. “Isn’t that what you told me, Jenny?”

“Well, yeah,” I said. “That’s like getting two monkeys for the price of one. So the cost goes up.”

“So you’re rich,” said the boy with navy-blue suspenders.

“I hate rich people,” said the other one.

“And rich people hate you,” said Penelope. “In America, everyone is rich.”

“How the hell do you know?” said Alec.

“From when I was there last year,” she said. “Right, Jenny?”

“Uh-huh.”

“We went to this amazing ice cream parlor,” said Penelope.
“Where the film stars go. I brought home sundae cups as a souvenir.”

“I remember,” I said. “The night we met Robert Redford, who played the Sundance Kid.”

“You’re bonkers,” said Alec.

A crowd of boys from school showed up, so we peeled away. Adrian, Henry, Nico, and some fourth-formers. Enough to surround us while our straight faces slipped into massive laughter.

We tried the tossing games, losing fistfuls of shillings. We ate sugar buns that looked better than they tasted. And then somehow it was Nico and me, the next two in line for the Ferris wheel, which was so small it had only six swinging chairs, each fitting two people. Probably made of tin. I asked myself afterward, did he plan to be next to me like that? Or was it spur of the moment? One certain thing is that Nico smelled delicious, like walking into your grammy’s kitchen when she’s baking spice cake.

He nudged me, sending vibes of
Hello there, it’s you and me, kid!
the way big brothers do in movies, with a wide-open smile that makes you think you’re the favorite. My own big brother was a little more jaded. The old carny guy held open the carriage door and Nico slid in after me, already fussing about the seat belt. As if a seat belt would do anything if the entire ride tipped over. Cool as anything, he draped his arm across the back of the seat so I could feel it there, warm and chummy
—Here we are, about to have fun!

Our chair rocked forward, rolling the next one into
place beside the loading platform. Brenda and her townie boyfriend climbed in. I wanted to twist around to see who else was there, but then Nico might have taken his arm away. And I liked it where it was.

Finally the music started, crackling up from a speaker next to the operator, and the wheel creaked into motion. Nico tipped his chin toward the view of Illington Hall at twilight. “Picture postcard, eh?”

“They should take a photo from up here for their next brochure,” I said. “And update the clothing list while they’re at it.”

His fingers ruffled the fringe at the neck of my sweater, making it feel as if a cat’s whiskers were tickling my cheek. “I wondered why you wear these weirdo togs,” he said. I was kind of queasy from being so close to Nico, and being up in the air right over the stench of burning gasoline from the Ferris wheel engine. And then he kissed me.

Right at the top of the wheel, in front of everyone in Yorkshire. A real kiss.

For a second I was just … gobsmacked, as they say in England. His lips were, oh, warm … His hand was cupping my face and even though the rest of me was thinking,
Yikes!
my lips were kissing him back and then his tongue was there at the same second that I heard hooting and clapping. I pulled away, with shivers creeping up my spine.

“Hey,” said Nico. “Where you going? You’ve got a great mouth.”

He leaned in again, but I said, “Wait, stop.” No one had ever said that about my mouth before. No one this good-looking
had ever been near me before. But our carriage was at the bottom of the cycle and we were practically face to face with Adrian and Henry. They were doing a slow clap, chanting, “Go, go, Nic-O
h
! Go, go, Nic-O
h
!”

I felt like a total dupe. I’d let him … Part of some dare or showing off, and I’d fallen,
plunk
, into the trap.

“You … you … sod!” I thunked him in the chest with my fist. Mostly it was so embarrassing because we’d been
really
kissing!

“Aw, come on, Jenny.” He scooped his hand under my hair, cradling my neck with gentle fingers. “You can’t blame me for them being idiots! Be fair!”

The ride slowed, thankfully us being the first ones off. The boys on the ground made sweeping bows as if welcoming a grand lady from a gilded coach. I would have stomped off in a mighty fit, but my path was blocked by Penelope.

“The worst thing,” I told Percy and Kirsten later, “was trying to get away from the stupid boys and having Penelope smirk like I’d set out to make it happen.”

“She’s just jealous,” said Kirsten. “Nico ignores her.”

“Well, I wish he’d ignored me.” I was lying.