Christine Schutt - All Souls

"It was your walk."

"Sexy," from someone in the back, in a small voice but heard.

"What's in the bag, Mr. Weeks?"

"Is it something for us?"

"Yes." Yes, yes, yes, yes, from many sides, and each girl laughing and jouncing closer. Mr. Weeks, ringed by girls, girls jamming sidewalk traffic. Everyone in the middle school knew that Gillian Warring, the Sarah Bernhardt of the eighth grade, was going to marry Mr. Weeks. Even Tim Weeks knew of Gillian's plans. He had seen Gillian in the lunchroom looking at him as she spoke, insisting on herself. I am. Watch me.

He is so cute! from the entire eighth-grade class.

Mrs. Archibald, head of the middle school, told Mr. Weeks that Gillian was too smart for her own good. Mrs. Archibald liked best the girls who still wore undershirts and read mysteries. If not mysteries, then something funny. Funny. As far as Mrs. Archibald could see, funny did not much enter into the English department's curriculum. Had Miss Mazur ever considered reading Wodehouse? Why did Miss Mazur insist on that depressing Lord of the Flies? Mr. Weeks, on the other hand, loved P. G. Wodehouse. He liked mysteries and crosswords, Scrabble and show tunes. He knew a lot about Jane Eyre because the eighth-grade girls read it every year, and they told Tim Weeks about it. They told him they did not think, as Miss Mazur thought, that every object was phallic. That was a sexy word to know, wasn't it? Some of the eighth-grade girls believed Miss Mazur was oversexed, and some of them believed she was really sex starved!

Tim Weeks told the girls he didn't want to hear them disparage their teachers.

" Disparage? What does that mean?"

"We weren't bad-mouthing her."

"It's true though, Mr. Weeks. All we talk about are the sex parts."

"Sex, sex, sex. Why do you girls think you can talk to me like this?" Tim Weeks asked these eighth-grade girls, and they said, "Because," and laughed. They had trailed him in school and out of school, girls past and present. Mr. Weeks! The best!

"Do you like the present sixes better than you liked us?"

"You never liked us, Mr. Weeks. Admit it!"

"You don't like us anymore."

"That's right," Mr. Weeks said. "I like the others better."

Ha-ha-ha, from all the eighth-grade girls, who said, "You love us, Mr. Weeks. Admit it!"

"Mr. Weeks, be careful you don't disappoint anyone by marrying."

Anna Mazur saw him surrounded by sixth-grade girls and eighth-grade girls, all of whom seemed to be teasing him at once for his new tie, the blue tie with hot-air balloons that he said was a gift from his mother. When he smiled, the under-folds of his eyes turned down sweetly. Anna Mazur watched as students pressed him, circled about, said, "We'll get you some elf shoes, Mr. Weeks."

The middle-school girls laughed and laughed, but ask what seniors had thought of middle school, and they gagged and howled and said it was the worst time of their lives. Older girls would say they didn't laugh much in middle school, but here was middle school in front of Anna Mazur. Middle-school girls laughing; middle-school girls, an acquired taste, an age of elbows and knees, at once knockabout and full of shyness, streakers on the sleepover, always out of fashion, over- or under-dressed — here they were laughing. Middle-school girls: Anna Mazur did not really love them, but Tim Weeks did and his love was returned.

If you asked a Siddons girl what a Siddons girl was, she invariably replied, "We're nice."

"Different ones of us taught different chapters."

"That's an idea."

"He assigned us."

The eighth-grade girls were giving Miss Mazur suggestions.

"Why can't we read a book like To Kill a Mocking-bird again?" from the same blinking back of the room, Gillian's constellation.

Marlene

Marlene sat at the foot of Astra's bed and talked about school. Marlene reported on what she was listening to in the senior lounge. The Billie Holiday that Ufia put on with a flourish, the Rolling Stones, Smashing Pumpkins. Music was school, the best of it for Marlene, although she had graveled her voice with smoke. What else had Marlene been listening to? What stories? Edie Cohen was wild for Brad Pitt and had his face all over the walls in the senior lounge. Ufia said, "Why do you have to have these idiot movie stars all over the lounge?"

"Ufia is such an intellectual," Astra said.

What else was there to say? Suki and Alex looked for Will Bliss every weekend. "But you knew that already. They think he's still not back at boarding school. For a while they thought he might have been kicked out, but they couldn't find anyone reliable enough to confirm it. Mondays we get the Bliss Report. It's boring." What else? "Dr. Meltzer is expecting a baby."

"He has a dozen kids already."

"Sarah Saperstein says it's humanizing. Whatever that means."

"She would know."

"She's his pet." And? "You probably already know this," Marlene said. "Lisa Van de Ven and Miss Wilkes."

Astra made motion of a yes. Lisa Van de Ven and Astra Dell were in Dance Club together, and in that way were friends, but Marlene had to tell Astra. After all those years, years of hurts, middle school especially, eighth grade. Why would Kovack think to ever come up to us? Lisa to her gang. Astra had not been in anyone's gang; she had been, was still in a way, exclusive with Car Forestal.

"Do you talk to her?"

"Lisa?" Astra said.

"Car."

"Yes."

"She's never in the lounge."

"Car studies a lot at her dad's. It's quiet there. It's like being on the moon. Everything floats and looks romantic. There is no dust there whatsoever."

"No dust," Marlene said. "I'm shedding all the time," and she only had to look down to find a long strand of hair somewhere on her person.

Astra said, "Me, too." She said, "Not now, of course," and she laughed. The truth of it wasn't horrible or it was; only Astra was determined to get better. "I have faith," she said. "I have a community behind me. A lot of people visit — you among them — and it makes a difference." The doctors were applying things, and their cruelly mechanical equipment still hurt, silvery and sharp and cold; the machinery made her shake and run, want to run away, tear the IV from her arm, run open armed to sleep. "I'm waiting for the day when I wake up and feel nothing but a pleasant consciousness. I used to wake up that way. In Car's father's apartment, I didn't feel my body at all. That's what a perfect place it is. Maintained but unlived in for months at a time."

Siddons

Astra Dell and Car Forestal, for all of their temperamental differences, had been best friends since nursery school. Suki and Alex were baby birthday party friends. (Suki said anyone she met after sixth grade did not count as a friend.) Kitty Johnson and Edie Cohen turned exclusive in their tenth-grade year on Swiss Semester. Sarah Saperstein and Ny Song were nerds in love. They admitted it! They had the same favorite classes, the same favorite teachers. They thought Dr. Meltzer was funny and trailed after Dr. D asking about Catullus.

A lot of students loved — they used that word often, generously, fervently — they absolutely loved Miss F. Miss F was kind and accessible. She made math almost interesting even for the weaker students. She held math contests that carried prizes of bags of jelly beans and chocolate Kisses. Other teachers were kind. Mrs. Nicholson was especially forgiving of late papers and absences, and Mr. Philips was known to offer makeup tests in history. Miss Hodd — who taught the creative writing elective, as well as tenth-, eleventh-, and twelfth-grade English — had a dinner last June and let her seniors drink sangria.