Issue 4, October 2009
{
}+previous next story+ Caitlin Delohery
So, you've done it again. The entire St. Mary the Virgin of Roses lacrosse team walked in on you scoring in the showers with Sister Chris, the phys ed teacher, and now your parents have shipped you out to yet another all-girls' establishment. (When will they learn?). Straightways Academy is the last stop before the nunnery. It's a converted army barracks hidden up in the Catskills and the code of conduct matches nicely with the harsh, ugly architecture. You arrive and meet the headmistress, Mrs. Alan J. Whiteburger. You examine her as she prunes your worldly possessions of anything seedy. She's an abominable snowman of a woman, with gray skin, thumbs like snowplows and the gait of a polar bear with a displaced hip. You cannot see her face, even when you are looking at it under the one bare florescent bulb that hangs like an udder from the ceiling of her sparse office. Her face is like the side of a mountain right before an avalanche – painfully white and ready to rage.
She demands you remove your leather-studded belt because it is not "ladylike." You hesitate, staring into her puny snail eyes but foresee more important battles ahead. You remove your belt, and with a rebellious little snap, drop it on her steel desk. She curls her uncooked bratwurst of a lip at you and, for no reason at all, confiscates your harmonica. She even takes the pocket watch with the motorcycle etched on the inside that Sister Chris gave you to remember her by. In the end, you are left only with clothes.
Her voice is surprising – thin and quiet, like the noise a sled dog makes when he’s tired of pulling his master along. “You are in the Ann Coulter Bunkhouse. Rooming with . . .” she checks her clipboard and the tentacles of her eyes wiggle with delight, “ . . . of course. Jackie, Lydia and my Lavender. They’ll make sure you properly learn the Straightways ropes.”
Your load much lighter now, you set off for your bunk. In between the Palin House of Manners and the Laura Bush Sciences Shack, you spot the Coulter Bunkhouse – a tiny wooden log cabin with tiny green shuttered windows. It looks so much like it’s made out of Lincoln Logs that for a second you feel like you might be grasshopper-sized. You want to hop away, but nervously, you knock.
The girl who opens the door is either struggling with a horrific tapeworm or she has been reading too much Cosmo. She’s parasite thin. All her clothes are pinned or cinched or in some other way complicatedly rigged to her twiggy frame. Her matte eyes – gray and dim – remind you of scuffed up snow globes. Anything could be going on back there – maybe a family skating cheerfully over a tin foil pond to the tune of "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" or just a single member of the cast of Cats, petrified in a jazzy pose as glitter pours down menacingly around him. Shaking her limp head as though waking up from the 30-second nap she took when she opened the door, she pushes her meager bottom lip out, suggesting a pout. “Oh. I thought you’d be the mail. I’m waiting for a letter from Bruce.”
The Boss? you think. “No, I’m—”
“I know, the new girl, Bitch.”
“Excuse me?”
“Bitch! Your name is Bitch, right?”
“Uh, Butch. Name’s Butch.”
“Oh. I’m Lydia." She draws out the last syllable tremendously, like she's announcing herself as a contestant in a beauty pageant. "That’s Jackie.” She pushes the door open a bit more to reveal a girl with a long dark braid down her back, lying on the floor, meticulously filling in a gigantic paint-by-number picture of a horse’s face. She does not look up. “You can sleep on top of Lavender,” Lydia points to the bare mattress of the upper bunk. “The rule is you can only use the phone before 9 am and after 11 pm, in case Bruce calls. Got it?”
“Who is Bruce?”
“My boyfriend, duh. He's in college.” She sits down at her vanity and makes a sad face at the mirror. Then she makes an angry face. Then she does "aloof and anemic," which you take to be her face at rest. So ends your guided tour of the bunkhouse.
In your first weeks at Straightways, your roommates provide no consolation. You still haven’t laid eyes on the mysterious Lavender. And, as you suspected by examining Jackie’s quadrant of the room, which looks like a cross between a stable and an equestrian museum, Jackie is one of those horse girls. This girl doesn’t just ride horses or talk about horses or clandestinely brush the tiny polyester manes of her tiny horse dolls. Jackie is one of those horse girls on horse steroids. She has a long, long face with a long, long nose, a Julia Roberts kind of supermouth and a diamond birthmark right in the middle of her forehead. When you enter the room, she looks up, briefly, with a galloping kind of hope in her eyes before she immediately returns to her horsing around, disappointed. You imagine that she checks just to make sure you are not a pony.
Everyday it is the same. You wake up to Jackie whinnying in her sleep and Lydia dream-mumbling about the dangers of baked goods. You put on your silly uniform quietly (you don't like having your knees showing underneath that plaid. It makes you feel like a bagpipe player. You despise the bagpipes). You have to wake long before your roommates because you have been sentenced to Etiquette Boot Camp, taught by Mrs. Alan J. Whiteburger herself. (To her face, no one ever calls her anything else; no one knows her first name and no one has ever met her husband). There are three other students unfortunate enough to join you in your sunrise braincleanse, and though you are not allowed to speak to them, they bring you a tiny bit of comfort: Mo, a smart little muffin, with a smart little faux hawk to match her wits; Cole, her blonde bossom buddy, whose disapproval of the class emanates from her in silent, articulate waves; and Cheryl, who, you hear Lydia telling Bruce, soon ends up running away with the lunch lady to a ladies-only commune in rural Vermont a few weeks into your unhappy tenure. For most of the class period, you are forced to imbibe massive amounts of pop culture brain candy from the 1950’s and 60’s. Sometimes you have to practice flirting with posters of teen idol boys that are hung up from the ceiling like those cardboard cutouts cops use for shooting practice. Sometimes Whiteburger makes you do common tasks so she can watch and screech at you like a hungry vulture: Turn your wrist like this, she barks, hold your fork like this! It’s excruciating to watch that matted beast hold a teacup with her ice pick of a pinky sticking out to the side.
Sometimes you see Mo and Cole looking at each other wickedly across a lacy tablecloth. Seeing how much more than friends than are makes you ache for Sr. Chris. You don’t think you’re going to make it. Your roommates are the doldrums and Whiteburger keeps her slimy eyes on you like you are Sappho risen from the dead, ready to burn all Straightways’ training bras and seduce all its young girls. She keeps you busy folding doilies after class or forcing extra knitting projects on you on the weekends. Not that you have the will to do anything fun, anyway. Without a lady by your side you are like Superman sucking on Kryptonite.
You come home one Sunday after planting begonias in Whiteburger’s personal garden to find a strange girl reading on the bottom bunk. She doesn’t acknowledge you at first, she’s so absorbed in her book, so you have a moment to examine her. The first thing you notice is not her brunette bob or the fashionable red glasses perched on her pert little nose or the small scar on the back of her left hand or her adorable ankles – though you do soon notice all of this, and more – but first you notice that this girl seems to have her own internal light source. She is as bright as all the candles in the candle box at St. Mary's. She’s like an indie rockstar and a librarian and a cat, all at once. What is this heartbreaker, this newness, what is this vision reading? You turn your head sideways to decipher The Well of Loneliness on the spine of her book, when you notice that she’s looking at you.
“Hi,” you bleat, your head still sideways.
“You must be Butch. Whiteburger can’t stop talking about what a handful you are. I think she has a crush on you.”
You’re speechless. You cannot speak. Sexy girl made a joke. Sexy girl made a gay joke. Your head is still sideways.
“I’m Lavender,” she continues, smiling like she knows everything about you, from what your first word was to how long it takes you to fall asleep at night.
You right your head. “I know,” you say, not exactly friendly. You can’t make your words work. It is always much easier with straight girls and nuns.
“So. . . how do you like Straightways?” Her eyes wander over your short hair and then down to the beauty mark on your neck. This girl doesn’t miss anything.
“Great, it’s wonderful,” you say, not thinking.
She blinks.
You take a deep breath. “Actually, I hate everything about it. I hate the food, the rice cakes, the plain yogurt, the new lunch lady who always suggests you eat the Jello – I hate Jello! I hate the classes, I would rather have beetles inserted into my skull than spend another minute in Etiquette and we only read male authors in English – this is an all-girls school! And they don't even offer writing! Or math! Math, for crying out loud! Not that I am craving math, but I would like to have the option, is what I'm saying.” You're getting worked up. “I hate my roommates – not you, yet, I don't know you – but Lydia's really boring, cliché anorexia is so after-school-special…” Lavender laughs! “…and Jackie's pony obsession just makes me really sad. And most of all, I hate Whiteburger! And how she makes me feel like a mutant! And every single night I dream of running away to some place green, where I can run around and get dirty and have a nice girl by my side.” You take a breath. You feel like you've slain a demon. You just look and look and look into Lavender's face.
“I can't tell you how nice it is to hear someone say all that.” Her eyes do this kind of fireworks thing, but it's more like the reflection of fireworks in a river. “I know how you feel . . . I've been here since I was in the second grade.”
You just let out a low, long sympathetic whistle.
She blushes and then sits up straighter in her bunk. “Have you read this?” she asks, pointing to the book. You shake your head. “You shouldn't. It’s really fucking depressing.” She throws it aside.
There is what feels like a very long silence. The silence rolls out between you. It is a red carpet to her bed. You are an Oscar winner. You are a lottery winner, too. You manage to navigate the long, long distance between where she sits, her long legs folded next to her, neatly, and where you stand, all a-tremble. Somehow, you are kissing her. You are kissing her and she smells like grass and cedar chips, she smells like a brand new playground, she smells like swinging. Somehow, you are kissing and you don't stop, ever, you don't stop for whole lifetimes...
You don't stop until you notice that Lydia and Whiteburger are both screaming in the middle of the bunkhouse.
“Ewww! Mrs. Alan J. Whiteburger, make them stop!” Lydia is pinching her wrists and rocking back and forth slightly on her heels.
Whiteburger manages to get both of her albino gorilla arms around you and tosses you like she's a contestant in the Scottish Highlands Games and you are a burlap sack of straw. You thump to the floor, causing an avalanche of horse figurines to fall on and around you. You watch, helplessly, as Whiteburger slaps Lavender across the face. You feel the sting of it on your cheek. Then a big bronze stallion comes down on you hard and everything is dark.
When you come to, you are still on the floor. Your head feels like you’ve been trampled by a real horse. You hear a little sniffle somewhere near you. “She broke Marcy!” Jackie wails when she notices you are conscious, holding out pieces of what used to be a porcelain carousel statuette.
“Where's Lavender?”
“That monster's euthanized poor Lavender like On the City, the glorious chestnut colt who broke his femur trying to escape from Belmont Park.”
“Jackie, please use people words.”
“Whiteburger expelled her. She’s locked her up in her office until she can get a hold of her aunt. Lavender despises her aunt as much as Secretariat hated glue factories.”
“Why did she let me just stay here?”
“You're not expelled. She wants to keep you around. You see, Butch, Lavender is Whiteburger's personal secretary. Sadly, she's the closest thing she has to a daughter. To anyone, really, that she loves. So, soon, she will banish Lavender, because Lavender hurt her. But, you, you she will spend the next four years breaking like a wild mare.”
You are shocked that Jackie is capable of such insight. You are more shocked, though, at your horrible fate.
What do you do?
- Summon an army of famous lesbians to hold off Whiteburger as you and Lavender make your escape.
- Attempt to use the Wiccan spell Lavender has been perfecting to erase Whiteburger’s memory and remain at the school as though nothing happened.
- Conform to her wishes, lose your love, and be Whiteburger’s whipping girl for the next four years.
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