What We Hide (17 page)

That’s the story. Please write me when you’re ready to find it in your heart to be happy for us
.

Your true friend, even though it may not feel like it right now
,
O

Sarah
,

I don’t really think all the name-calling was necessary. You left months ago! So it’s not exactly a “heinous betrayal,” is it? You claim you wouldn’t care except that I lied to you, but aren’t you actually lying to yourself? Nico says you were never really as close as you pretended to me, that he liked you, so he wasn’t faking or anything, but it was a much bigger deal for you. So don’t go around calling me a bitch when your idea of the relationship was just a tad inflated
.

I know you’re hurting, but don’t take it out on me
.

Your friend, Oona

DURING BIO

Dear (I really mean it) Sarah
,

Haven’t heard from you, so I’m wondering …?

I knew you’d be upset, but I couldn’t call myself a friend if I didn’t tell you the truth about what is happening
.

Though I honestly expected you to be slightly more rational about it
.

I’m in love with someone and so are you, but I’m here and you’re not, so what did you suppose was going to happen?

Hurting you was the last thing we wanted, and believe me, Nico feels the guilt. He has been quite withdrawn lately
.

Oona

BRONTË DORM, MIDNIGHT

Sarah
,

A word of advice. Not wise to ring Nico yesterday on his birthday “for old times’ sake.” He’s a little bruised by this whole transition, and it would be appreciated if you would avoid writing or trying to ring him again. I assure you that he is doing the right thing, but has no intention of grinding your face in it. So leave him alone, for your own mental health
.

O
.

FORGIVE ME PLEASE FORGIVE ME PLEASE

FORGIVE ME PLEASE FORGIVE

Dear Sarah
,

I would be surprised if you’ve even opened the envelope after the contents of the last one
.

I kneel before you in abject misery, begging your forgiveness. Hurting and betraying you is the worst thing I’ve ever done and I see that even more clearly now that I’ve been hurt and betrayed myself
.

Nico has revealed his true colours and they are ugly indeed. Even when he was with me, it turns out that I was not the only object of his attentions. He was also flirting and testing his charms with several others, beginning with Jenny-the-American-tart-with-a-boyfriend-at-war and moving on from there. Naturally, my meager appeal cannot compete with the apparent willingness of the entire female race
.

I realize now he was only using me. He claims he never meant to get off with me and that I was just a little too available! As if he wasn’t having a fondle-fest whenever he could!

Every minute that I see him panting after some slag is a minute of scalding pain for me. As much as you suffered when I betrayed you, at least you didn’t have to
watch.

Please please pleeeeeeeease consider my supplication for renewed friendship
.

Yours forevermore
,
Oona

nico

The news whisked through school on Monday morning that Jasper, the English master, had broken an ankle over the weekend, hiking in the Cotswolds. A nasty break that needed surgery, a metal pin, an extended stay in hospital. A supply teacher had been hired, her first assignment. She would begin today, taking over lessons on the regular schedule. Had anyone seen her? She’d gone into Richard’s office before breakfast and had not yet emerged. Wasn’t it awful about poor Jasper?

Nico and the other fifth-form boys were all faintly relieved about Jasper, none of them having finished the reading for the Monday quiz. By Wednesday, fifth-form opinion was mixed on the topic of Amy Storm, but no one gave poor Jasper another thought.

The girls said:
Too young to take seriously. Too bloody perky. Pretentious vocabulary. Trying to be everybody’s best mate. Snooty voice. Tits as round as bleeding grapefruits. Do you think she has a boyfriend?

The boys said:
Hot
.

Nico did not like being one of a crowd, but he had to admit, Amy was hot. Extra hot today due to a dove-grey cashmere sweater snugly enhancing her young and perky body at the front of the chilly effing classroom in the bleakest corner of Yorkshire, where Nico could not believe that winter was only just beginning. Did he imagine that Amy seemed to smile in his direction more than anywhere else in the room? He tried to calculate; if she had gone to uni straight from school, with no work abroad or other do-gooder nonsense, she could be as young as twenty-three or twenty-four. Not
so
much older.

“I’m going to veer a little from what Jasper was planning.” Amy tipped her head backward and shook out her long hair. Nico, watching closely, could almost feel the breeze on his own neck. “He wanted to focus for a few days on the important concept of
point of view
, and we’ll do that. But I’m super excited to use a different text as the groundwork for our study. We’re going to begin with a close look at the short story entitled ‘Lady’s Fancy.’ ”

Oh no. Anything but that
.

“I’m sure you all know that this a
-may
-zing story was written by one of your very own Illington alumni”—her eyes sparkled at Nico—“under the pen name Miss Althea Neverly. And aren’t we so lucky to have Miss Neverly’s son right here in the room!”

Nico tipped his chair back very slowly. As if Nico being born five years after the story had been written had anything to do with anything.
As if the story was even worth discussing
, his mother would holler.

“Here we have a classic example of shifting points of view,” said Amy. “Neatly layered in a masterful narrative that calls out for close analytical reading. You’re in for a treat, my friends, if you are experiencing this story for the first time.”

Nico rocked ever so slightly, willing his classmates to speak up.

“Excuse me, Amy?”

Thank you, Esther. Always willing to be the supreme nerd
.

“Esther?”

“I don’t know if you’ve run this past the headmaster? I mean, the story is in our anthology … and most of us have read it … but the school … well, it’s not meant to be on the curriculum … you know, out of sensitivity to Nico.”

Amy’s glossy lips pouted like those of a birthday girl with a broken balloon.
Aw, diddums
, thought Nico.
Party over
.

“Not that it’s not good,” Esther hurried to add, with a quick look at Nico. He bestowed upon her his sexiest smile of gratitude, which caused an instant flush up her freckled neck. “But it’s rather … out of bounds for discussion.”

His mother had written the stupid story as a lark one weekend, with three university roommates each writing one too. They’d sent them all off to an American magazine
with pseudonyms invented while under the influence of gin-and-lemonade cocktails. Thea’s story had been accepted, the others had not. Thea Nevos had invented her nom de plume, Miss Althea Neverly, thinking it sounded gothic and hilarious and not Greek. Her friends were not surprised that her submission was chosen, but they were a bit miffed. More than miffed when her one silly story launched a career of deconstructing male assumption and mythology about writing by women, eventually making Thea Nevos an outspoken and foulmouthed celebrity on behalf of the new women’s liberation movement.

“Janice never really got over it,” Nico’s mother said. “That’s why she screwed your father a week after you were born. Hardly the behaviour of a woman defining sisterhood.” She shrugged. “Of course back
then
, in the fifties? There was no such thing. It was up to us to define it. Possibly she was doing
exactly
what a
liberated
woman does.”

Nico hated when she talked to him like that. He hated when she acted as if he were an adult, a peer, a pal, a woman, instead of a kid.
A boy kid, Mother, in case you hadn’t noticed. And I’d rather not hear about your menstrual blood on radio programs either
.

Amy recovered quickly. “Come on, fifth formers. To revisit a classic is often to discover a new work! Each phase of our own maturity is marked by the ability to reinterpret what we have considered familiar, to adjust our point of view, to encounter …
revelation
.” She slid her bum up onto the desk and crossed her legs, making Nico wonder what
happened underneath the skirt. That would be a revelation worth looking into.

“Point of view from here a nice one,” Adrian whispered, pissing Nico off that he’d been thinking the same thing.

But Amy was still chattering.

“I’m sure Nico is mature enough to handle a bit of literary appreciation! Since we’re all
experts
on the Neverly tale, I want you to consider the character of Lady Rosalyn. Is she an archetypal victim? Or is she possibly what is now being referred to as a feminist icon? Does everyone know that word,
feminist
?” Amy’s method of teaching clearly relied on a deep bucket of pseudopsychological insights. And now she was going to apply this phoney crap to Thea Nevos?

Nico imagined bashing a dent in his own forehead using the edge of the desk as an implement. He pictured his mother slowly raising her fingers in a cursing V at the shiny-faced Amy, her head giving its customary shake of disdain.

“Ah!” Amy clasped her hands together in front of her chest, making everything jiggle for a moment, distracting Nico just as he intended to interrupt the lecture.

“An enlightened source!” said Amy. “Nico?”

Young Thea did not waste time after the tiny flurry over her short story (told in the alternating voices of Lady Rosalyn and her child maidservant, Melly). She had quickly rewritten her thesis—“Reinterpreting the Gothic Novel”—as fiction, from the point of view of a vengeful female ghost. She was offered book deals from several different publishing houses and accepted two of them. Carefully balancing
her academic intentions with a deft talent for ghostly murder mysteries, Thea wrote four more books in five years. She was suddenly a social darling, photographed at parties and climbing out of limousines.

Until the next phase of her notoriety: the out-of-wedlock conception of her son. (“
Wed
lock?” said Nico’s mother.
“Doesn’t the word just
scream
of something to be avoided?”
) She referred to the father of her baby only as M, but did not flinch from recording the size of his penis or his love of maple syrup as a sex accessory. Thea Nevos was despised by anyone who didn’t idolize her. The next book, promoted as strictly nonfiction, recorded her youth and the early years of motherhood, and quickly became a bestselling and irreverent “bible” for young parents.

“I can’t listen to this,” said Nico. He might as well go all the way. Ticket out of class, right? “You’re spouting rubbish. She didn’t know she was writing this destined-to-be-a-curriculum-hit type of story.” That was his mother’s phrase.
Curriculum-hit
, she’d sneer.
Big literary aspiration. The story is derivative, unmitigated crap
. “She whipped it off as a dare. For a magazine contest.”

“I know that’s the myth,” said Amy. “But even if it’s true, she came up with a super story! It has all the elements of an old ghost tale, with a ‘new woman’ agenda enmeshed in the echoes of a gothic literary tradition, challenging our preconceptions about—”

“She just needed the cash.” Nico could hear his mother’s irritated amusement.
I just needed the cash. I had my eye on a Volkswagen Beetle
.

The other kids laughed. He tipped his chair farther back, balancing.

Amy sighed. “You’re not giving the author enough credit here, Nico. Is it too difficult for you to have an objective dialogue about what is possibly household scripture?”

Nico’s chair legs hit the floor with a
thunk
.

“You’re being intentionally rebarbative,” said Amy. “I’m certain that your classmates take your mother’s story more seriously than you do.”

“Really?” Nico shrugged. “They look pretty bored to me.”

Amy’s cheeks were as pink as a girl’s who has just been kissed. “You may go.”

He nearly went. He’d purposely pissed her off so he could leave. But, “We just did this,” he said. “With Jasper. The unreliable narrator.”

“These narrators are
not
unreliable,” insisted Amy. “That’s what makes your mother’s work so fascinating! She explores the same incidents through such different eyes. A woman chafing against the bonds of convention, and a girl in servitude who remains spiritually free, not yet trapped by expectations. Both perspectives are valid and reliable. They serve to enhance our—”

“In your version,” he said. “From your
point of view
, ‘Lady’s Fancy’ is some libber masterpiece. According to my mother, it is shite juvenilia. And I’m like, who cares? So whose point of view wins? What’s the real story?” Would Amy take on the battle of a curse word spoken in class? Hands waved in the air, and she ignored the
shite
.