vulnerable.
That he had
lived.
Survived.
She wanted to see all his scars, see all of him, and she felt
suddenly,
intensely
certain
that he was a safe person to show her own scars to.
She thought, Maybe we have known each other always. Maybe our hearts encountered each other somehow,
like two hundred years ago at a cotillion, with him in a frock coat and me in whatever, some kind of elegant and complicated dress.
Or maybe our encounter was in another
possible world. That is,
in one of the countless other versions of this universe, the
worlds running parallel to this one,
we are already
in love.
Alabaster Preparatory Academy is a boarding school. It is the sort of place that offers classes like Eastern Religions, Theories of Popular Culture, and Microeconomic Theory. Students play lacrosse and row crew. They live in quaint residence halls that smell of wood and have no elevators. There is a chapel with large stained-glass windows. Most of the buildings are gray stone. There are woods on one side of the campus, and there’s a small town on the other.
The place is full of fairly smart, mostly moneyed kids, largely Protestant, largely white. As such, its history and biases are worthy of some interrogation, which shall not be done thoroughly here, but which has been done elsewhere, you can be sure.
In recent years the student body has become more socially active, and more diverse. Protest posters decorated the dormitory hallways, speaking out against voter suppression, in support of gun control laws and gender-neutral bathrooms. The cafeteria had a well-stocked salad bar and gluten-free options. There were multiple student affinity groups.
Still, the place smelled of old money. And a century of male dominance.
As a middle-class white Jewish “faculty brat” with a public school background, Adelaide was conscious of both fitting in and not fitting in.
Levi Buchwald, Adelaide’s father, had loved teaching public school. He got all passionate about pedagogical methods and presented his ideas at conferences. But when the family moved to Baltimore for Toby’s treatment, he had been hard-pressed to find a job. It was the middle of the school year. Nobody was hiring. And even for positions that would start in the fall, there were very few openings. Eventually he applied to teach at Alabaster, where an old colleague was head of the English department.
He got the job and it paid reassuringly well, more than he’d made before, which was needed, since Rebecca was focused on Toby and managing his care. Levi’s children could go to Alabaster for much-reduced tuition, so he and Adelaide had moved in late August, leaving Toby and Rebecca in Baltimore.
Adelaide lived in the dorms during the school year, but now, during the summer, she’d be with Levi in his two-bedroom house, sleeping in what was usually his office.
Adelaide’s experience at Alabaster had been all right. Good, in a number of ways, though disastrous in one. She marveled at the bright green of the lawns, the stone buildings, the cobblestone paths. The Alabaster students were sporty and arty and often lax about their homework in a way she found endearing. They forgot their binders or lost their books. They carried everything from building to building in enormous backpacks, never even thinking about using the lockers they supposedly had combinations to. Their clothing seemed to be at its peak of fashion when threadbare. Girls wore ancient jeans, scuffed winter boots, and T-shirts that looked handed down generations, loose at the neck.
The disaster was that because of the terrible stuff going on with Toby, Adelaide dreamed of him at night, bad dreams about Toby’s
babyish white tube socks, his
lime-green toothbrush, his
bluish mouth, and his
wheezy breath,
dreams where the only noise was that
sad, fragile Toby breath, wheezing, louder and louder.
Adelaide would wake up sweating.
And because her sleep was terrible and also because of the
massive distraction
of falling deeply and head-spinningly in love with Mikey Double L,
Adelaide did not do her schoolwork.
Alabaster was significantly more challenging than either of her previous high schools. She turned in papers that would have been deemed strong back in Baltimore, only to have them handed back as unacceptable. Science labs went okay, and she caught up in math, but she found herself unable to force herself to rework the already-written papers. She didn’t really understand what was wrong with them, and diving back in meant she had to relive the humiliation of having done badly. Plus Mikey Double L was around, texting “Come to my fencing match? 3 pm,” or “Let’s get pizza off campus,” or “There’s nobody in my suite for the next hour and I wish you were here please please please come see me please love Mikey.”
Mikey’s work came easy for him, and Adelaide didn’t want to tell him she had failed multiple essays. And her roommate/best friend, Stacey S, worked incredibly hard. Adelaide didn’t want to tell her about slacking off. Stacey could be very judgy.
In the end, Adelaide was put on academic probation for spring term, which meant she had to get her marks up or be kicked out, basically.
But spring term, things were even worse with Toby. Adelaide’s sleep got worse, too, and her relationship with Mikey was more intense than ever.
Although Levi sat down with her to go over her English papers, she still got a D in Global Studies for handing in half-finished work or no work at all. She flat-out failed the Set Design class. She just didn’t do the final project, which was building a model.
Every day, she told herself she’d start work on it.
Every day, she felt overwhelmed. Or
ashamed. Or
she let herself be distracted by Mikey, by
a Lego diorama she was building, or by
Stacey S, who had interesting romantic entanglements and fashion questions.
It didn’t help that you were supposed to build your set model in Kaspian-Lee’s studio classroom, where all the supplies were. When Adelaide went in there, people were putting finishing touches on their projects, while she hadn’t even started. And when the
shame washed over her, she responded by
sparkling. She had, for example, talked at length to Mikey’s suitemate Aldrich Nguyen, a pimply fencer whose design was both wobbly and frankly half-assed but was nearly finished. She distracted Aldrich for twenty minutes, convincing him to come to the vending machines with her, making jokes, using the photocopier to make pictures of her face and suggesting he use the copies as wallpaper for his design.