The KE continued her interrogation.
“So you can smoke but you can’t watch telly?”
“No. Yes,” I said, suspicious now. This was the first proper conversation I’d ever had with a King Edmund, other than the insults they spat at us from the far side of the school wall. Why, I wondered, was a KE so interested in our rules? What did she want?
“And no, like, computers or Game Boys or Sega or anything?” she kept on.
“No.”
“That’s retarded.” The KE stared at what was left of her fag.
I shrugged.
This lack of modern technology at St. John’s was another immovable fact of being Divine. In one classroom there was a row of ancient word processors where we learnt to type, deemed an essential skill for young ladies, yet we handwrote all our essays with fountain pens. We had restricted access to the single coin-fed phone installed in a booth in the middle of a corridor outside our rec room, the least private of all places. Outside of a few short hours in the evenings it was padlocked, to ensure that we didn’t fritter our days speaking to boys. There were no mobile phones at all, though we briefly carried black pagers, which we clipped to our tweed skirts like emergency room physicians, until Fat Fran realized what they were and put a stop to it. We had no access to chatrooms. Facebook didn’t exist, no likes or dislikes, no Google, Wiki, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, or Gmail. Total radio silence. Television was permitted at weekends in strictly policed portions, Miss Graves tugging the plugs from the walls as the allotted time expired, often midprogram, swinging the cables in her hand like a baton. The kind of programs we were permitted to watch were infantile, mindless drivel—Blossom, Jerry Springer, Gladiators, Ricki Lake.
“So, you’re basically in prison,” the KE mused.
She took one last drag on the cigarette then scratched it against the fence to put it out, tossed the butt into the can by my feet. It made a hiss as it hit damp tin.
“Actually”—she changed her mind—“my cousin Steve, he’s banged up, and he has a telly in his cell.”
I didn’t believe her. I dabbed my sleeve on my sweaty top lip when she wasn’t looking.
“What for?”
“To watch Corrie,” she said, and fluttered her eyelids at her joke, which she thought was hysterical. Her eyelashes were as pale as her hair, almost invisible, which made her eyes seem watery and borderless.
“I meant, what’s he in prison for?”
“This and that.”
“Fine. Whatever,” I said, trying to act as if I didn’t care, though I’d never met anyone before with a relative in jail.
“You lot probably eat better food, though,” she pondered.
I raised an eyebrow. Divines survived on fruit shoelaces, squeezable cheese, instant noodles, and other kinds of high-salt, high-sugar, tuck locker trash. It was amazing we had the bone density to walk. The exception was my dorm mate that term, Gerry Lake, who, due to the demands of a rigorous training schedule, ate like a pig, refectory food and all. Three times a week a beige Ford Escort made a brief stop in the Circle so that Gerry could jump into the rear seat where a middle-aged man wearing a red cap, possibly a trainer or a manager of some kind, drove her away to a nearby ice rink. Judging by the attention she paid to her clothes, the makeup she wore, we all assumed that Gerry had some sort of crush on this driver, a man old enough to be her father, that he was even her boyfriend. The same person deposited her back on school grounds four hours later in time for supper. After which she was allowed to skip the line, fill up her tray, and scoff down plates piled with chicken vol-au-vent, cheese and crackers, chocolate pudding with a skin on its surrounding custard that was thick as a tectonic plate. The dinner ladies, sensing that she was more one of them than Divine, typically saved the coveted corner sections just for Gerry.
“So what do you do then”—the KE circled a finger in the direction of the boarding house across the road—“at weekends, or whatever?”
I turned my head, feeling where my shirt was slow to unpeel from my back, tacky with sweat. I was sure somehow she’d discover the photo, or worse, that one of my peers would catch me there alone, talking to a King Edmund. My feet were beginning to go numb. But I still didn’t stand up. When was she going to leave?
“Isn’t your brother waiting for you?” I asked pointedly.
“Nah.” The KE shrugged. “So go on, what do you lot get up to?”
I felt it was an idiotic question. What did anyone our age actually do? We made mix tapes for each other and swapped clothes. We examined our underwhelming bodies in the narrow strip of mirror above each dorm door handle, standing on our desks and contorting our necks, or pressing our faces up against the speckled glass to probe at blackheads under magnification, pores craterous and oily as a tar pit. We smoked, of course, pierced each other’s upper ears with a needle and cork, talked about moose, daydreamt about crossing over to the Other Side, bitched about other girls we knew, some of them former Divines who’d left for one reason or another and now attended day schools or co-eds where, the way we pictured it, there were boys on tap. Prolific letter writers, we spent hours crafting ten-, fifteen-, twenty-page shared missives to our pen pals, passing them from dorm to dorm like a religious scroll. These letters were a roll call of who had lost their virginity, or was about to.
“Not a lot really,” I told the King Edmund.
“Shit.” The KE adjusted her bag strap as if she was leaving finally. “No wonder.”
“No wonder what?”
An all-girls school, we knew what the townies accused us of getting up to at night.
The KE girl stared intently at me, arms crossed, one thumb still running across the spotty patch on her lip. I was unconsciously pressing my finger into the sharp point of the Polaroid, spiking it into my skin. Just then we heard a voice yelling from the maintenance shed, a car horn chirped, then footsteps.
“Lauren,” someone shouted.
“Yeah, what?”
A man pushed through the branches. He was dressed in the blue overalls of our maintenance men, folded down at the waist. Like the pinups that papered our dormitory walls that year—Brad and Leo and Johnny—his hair was a curtain, parted down the middle.
“Hurry the fuck up will you,” he said, then stopped dead.
He looked me up and down—the baggy men’s shirt I was wearing, a castoff from my father, the shoes my mother had forced me to polish—and his jaw stiffened. I sat awkwardly on the beanbag, hugging my knees.
“Lauren. Move it,” he ordered.
Then he was gone.
Lauren rolled her eyes. She pulled her bag over her shoulder, her white hair swinging down her back.
“That’s my brother, Stuart. See you around . . . what’s your name?”
“Joe.”
The townie rolled her eyes once again.
“Seriously, what’s your actual name?”
Our habit of using boys’ names was one of the peculiarities of the Divine that was to be heavily reported in the press later that summer. The tabloids in particular dedicated an entire page to the subject of our nicknames, lingering on the fact that in the three years Gerry spent at our school she never received nor gave herself an alternative moniker, pointing, or so they said, to social ostracism. The truth of the matter was Gerry already had a boyish name; she was one letter away from being a Jerry. Unlike my mother, say, whose Divine chums affectionately still call her Rod, it wouldn’t have taken much for Gerry to play the game. But that was typical of her.