Adrienne Celt - Invitation to a Bonfire

The Herald is firm in our opinion that the Mix-n-Match Fling indicates triumphant future endeavors for the entire Donne School community. After all, if we can make gentlemen out of ladies, what can’t we transform to our advantage?

Editor’s note: Found in the Andropov diary, with several passages underlined in felt pen.

A few times in the following months, Cindy and Adeline badgered me back into the library to try and contact more spirits, though we didn’t have much luck. They pared down the people and the accessories, so it was just the three of us, and instead of candles they brought cigarettes. Mostly we sat around while they smoked. There was just one other occasion worth mentioning. It was early in the spring of my second and final year, when the grass was still covered with frozen dew in the mornings, and they made me show up before first bell, slipping a note under my door to indicate the time and place. I walked over with a scarf pulled tight around my neck, coat hanging off my shoulders, grumbling inwardly about missing breakfast. I’d become very fond of morning coffee, and without it I felt sluggish and low. Scratchy throat, itchy nose. Icy wind and early pollen. As I approached the library Cindy poked her head out of the door and indicated I should hurry, so I picked up into a jog and followed her to the basement, rolling my eyes just a bit.

There was another girl there, no one I knew, who introduced herself as Caroline Geiss. A fellow fourth-year and an aficionado of field hockey, hailing from Minnesota. Her legs were covered in bruises, which she wore with pride.

“What are we doing here so early?” I asked, throwing my bag down and shaking the cold morning out of my hair. “Grades? Peeking into the future?” I looked at Cindy and waved my fingers. “Woo-ooh?”

“Why don’t you tell her?” Cindy said to Caroline. The girl colored, which was unexpected. All those muscles and wounds, she seemed like the type who could hold her own.

“My friend,” she said. “I miss her.” Apparently, before her parents shipped her off to New Jersey, Caroline had been close with a girl named Laura Shipman, who she’d known since childhood. During the first week of classes at the Donne School, Caroline found out that Laura had had a bad reaction to a bee sting, and had died following a severe attack of anaphylactic shock. Her parents wouldn’t agree to bring her back for the funeral, for financial reasons or something else that Caroline wouldn’t go into. Now here she was, and as she looked at me her spine straightened out with hope and sincerity. “They said you could talk to her.”

“I don’t know.” I frowned. It seemed unkind to promise anything when my past attempts had ended so badly.

“But you can at least try , right?” Adeline tugged my hair until it hurt, and I slapped her hand away. Then I nodded. Because really, why not?

“We better hurry, though, if we want to get out of here before classes start.”

The four of us sat in a circle, Caroline fidgeting beside me. Cindy and Adeline started reciting that same strange poem that always sent me into a stupor, and I closed my eyes, waiting. I didn’t expect anything to happen, not again. I thought we’d sit there for five or six minutes growing increasingly bored, until someone stood up and said they were going to get an apple before the caf closed, and that would be that. But then there was a breeze on my face, the scent of clover and cut grass. I reached out and took Caroline’s hand, and she squeezed it, tightly.

“Laura?” she asked. “Is it you?”

“Yes,” I said.

I knew it was really me, but then again, I didn’t. I was playing the game the way they wanted me to, and for a second it was sweet. A rush of familiarity and bubblegum, swimming pools full of chlorine and toys that could float. It fuzzed around my awareness, bleaching out parts of me I knew to be basic: language, history, loss. And the girls surrounded me with sudden interest, whispering, “Laura, Laura,” as if they all knew and adored me. When I peeked out at their faces to see again if they were joking, they opened their eyes one by one and beamed at me with total love. A moment in which we were infatuated with each other. And then, the room grew uneasy. Maybe I smiled too wide. Maybe they just came to their senses. When I started squeezing back on Caroline’s hand, I felt the bones beneath her skin crunching together like a fistful of crab’s legs, and she tried to tug it away. But I tightened my fingers and pulled her towards me, crashing her head into my shoulder a bit harder than I intended to, and holding her there.

“Ouch,” she said. First a whisper in my ear, and then a yelp, a shout, as the others came to her rescue. “Ouch! Get off me!” I gave her one last tug, then let go.

Those girls, they liked me so easily and so much the second they saw me as one of their own. Laura, Laura . A girl from their same world, where houses got drafty from size instead of poor craftsmanship, and your uncle came by just to take you and your girlfriends out for chocolate milkshakes, which you sucked up through colored straws. Where you slept in on Saturdays, and could accomplish anything you set your mind to, and where you were given a bright red bicycle with streamers on the handlebars, which whistled as you rode. They’d never known how to make do, to sew the covers back onto old schoolbooks. To sneak into the cloakroom at restaurants and gather tobacco from men’s coat pockets in order to make a cigarette with which to bribe the greengrocer. To watch their parents turn into strangers before their eyes, and then be told by those strangers that they didn’t deserve any more than what others had, because why would they? The girls didn’t want to know those things. And they were equally afraid of the fact that I did, and that I could shed the appearance of that knowledge so quickly. Like slipping out of a skin.

Or maybe they were just scared about the tightness of my grip, the red lines I left on Caroline’s hand, and the bruise that formed there the next morning. Not my chameleon face but my strong fingers. None of them ever talked to me again after that. But it didn’t occur to me for some time how ordinary and impersonal their fear might have been.

As it turned out, I had bigger problems at school that year than rooming or even ghosts. I had to think about graduation. A concept that had somehow never occurred to me until it was almost on top of me: a hasty exeunt to an invisible offstage. Where could I go? What expertise could I offer? Other girls, I knew, were planning on college or secretarial school, or being set up in New York by their parents. A few were going home to Boston to help their mothers throw DAR parties, and at least one from our class married a dentist and moved to Detroit, having first spent three months showing off her ring and moaning about the impossibility of wedding dinner place cards. One joined the circus, I think. The actual circus. She said she was starting out as a makeup girl but planned to work her way up to an acrobat. I couldn’t tell if she was serious, but like the rest she disappeared in a car after graduation and never came back.

Whatever wartime good graces landed me in Maple Hill to begin with had long since worn off. As the date of my dorm eviction loomed I haunted the mailroom, hoping for a letter from the Office of Orphans that had paid my tuition. Perhaps, I thought, they knew a wealthy benefactor. Perhaps they could set me up as someone’s assistant. I could make a passable campfire with twigs and leaves and a single match; I could negotiate black-market transactions using only nylon stockings for currency. There had to be something I could contribute to, but despite my fine secondary school education I had no idea what this might be. A university was out of the question, because it cost money, and I thought with some bitterness about the wealthy Moscow girls who’d fled ahead of me to Europe and the new world, their furs and jewel earrings one day scattering to the wind as if they expected to be next in line for a bludgeoning now that the Romanovs were gone. At first I had been glad to be rid of them, elated to skate through a Moscow magically lightened of its bratty debutantes. But as winter lifted and my father disappeared, I did come to find some pity for them, deep within me—pity that they had been forced to leave home and all that they found dear. Now, thousands of miles away and years later, I realized they were fine. Probably getting ready to matriculate at Radcliffe or Sarah Lawrence, or else perhaps the Sorbonne. The revolution having changed—nothing. Vera once took issue with me on this point, arguing about lost estates and bank accounts absorbed into the national fund, but I’m fairly certain she arrived in Paris with diamonds sewn into her skirt hems.