Christine Schutt - All Souls

Siddons

"Ah," Ufia said, "the sad consequences of culturally motivated depilation."

Alex was sitting on a bag of ice but she was leaking.

"Sit on the floor!" Suki said.

"I can't sit on something hard. I'm in pain!" Alex said. Brazilian bikini wax was the story Alex was telling over and over again to every girl who came into the lounge and asked, "What's the matter with you, what's with Alex, what's with the ice?" I was at the salon and bored and I figured, why not, but I didn't really know what a Brazilian bikini wax involved.

Unattached

"Honestly…" and then Anna Mazur didn't speak for a long time.

"Honestly, what?"

"I don't know." They were nearing her building, and she couldn't say what she wanted to say because there was so much to say, but here was a chance, and she said, I don't know.

"Yes," he said, walking backward away from her door, waving, saying, "Another day, another dollar," saying, "Good luck grading all those papers." And that was how the day ended, walking east on Eighty-second Street, past the barren beds around the twigs that passed for trees on the streets between Lex, Third, Second, First — all the way to her door. Anna Mazur knew what wishing good luck meant for her weekend. It meant the papers in her shopping bag, two classes of eight, one of seven, hours and hours of reading until she wasn't sure any more how to spell any word with doubled letters.

"Lucky you," Anna Mazur said to Tim Weeks, "your hands are empty."

Siddons

Madame Sagnier said the seniors in her AP French class were zombies, and she was not alone among the faculty at the class-twelve grade meeting with complaints. Absences, college visits, flagrant infractions, blithely walking down the hall with iced coffees, wearing sandals, wearing very high heels. Girls were late for classes or didn't show up for classes or abruptly left classes.

"They just stand up and leave."

"And you don't do anything?"

Miss F agreed. Some of the seniors were sullen about assignments. "Marlene Kovack, for all the improvements, can still make a face."

"Medusa."

"You know, don't you, what the girls do when they ask to go to the bathroom or when they just arbitrarily exit class? You know? I know. I've asked," Miss Hodd said. "There's a new hand dryer in the third-floor bathroom and they're in there playing with it. It's got jet power to make your skin jiggle."

"Please."

"I'm serious. Sometimes they go back to the lounge and complain about class, or they run errands, print out things for you, Mrs. Quirk."

"They've got college decisions to make."

Dr. D said he had found Alex Decrow in the computer room when she was supposed to be in class. "She said she was trying to get a date for the prom."

"Poor girls," Miss Hodd said. "Some of them have never had a date."

"Ellen," Phil Meeks said. Ellen, her name, Ellen Hodd. "Let's get out of the'D's," and he advanced the projector to shine the next report card onto the screen: Forestal.

"What's happening in French, Simone?"

"I told you," Madame Sagnier said. "They're the children of the corn."

Unattached

Only her small, bare feet, preternaturally pale in black rubber thongs, toes polished, gave away the recently sick part of Astra Dell. The rest of her — in a bush jacket, black jeans, and kerchief — looked armed, alert, and steady. Her red hair was boy-short and spiked, seeming darker, but was it the same color? Astra Dell come back as from up country was how it seemed to Anna Mazur, looking at the girl, happy to see her come to school, and just for the book fair. That was what Astra Dell said. She was on her way to the hospital but stopped at school to find a book to read. This part of getting well took up a lot of hours of every week. How could Astra smile at that, but she did and held up Anna Karenina, saying, "I'm thinking it's time for the Russians," and smiled. She read, "'All happy families are alike,'" and didn't bother to finish the sentence; she knew it was famous. "Yes." She said yes to most of Anna's questions: better, every day better, school, some of school manageable, and summer school and then. "I don't know," Astra Dell said. "I'm not sure. And you've had a good year, Miss Mazur?"

Yes, she had had a good year, but some of the best moments were due to Astra Dell's being sick, and she blushed when she talked to the girl, as if Astra Dell already knew how she had brought them together, Tim Weeks and Anna Mazur, but now Astra Dell was an outpatient and — however uneasily — on the mend at home. "And I won't visit her at home," Tim had said. He had said, "I'm actually a very shy person despite appearances. I'm fine around kids, but adults baffle me. I have nothing to say to the girl's father except how fucking sorry I am." In fact, Tim Weeks had been uncomfortable in the hospital, too; he had used the word obscene to describe what was happening: "I don't like to look at her" — his words—"and I don't feel comfortable not looking at her. It's obscene what's happening on that floor." His vehemence had frightened her, and he had apologized for it. He had said, "Look, I don't want to put myself in a situation where I have to experience death or loss."

"Yes," Anna Mazur said to Astra Dell, "I've had a pretty good year. I like my eighth-grade class." This she said loud enough for her nearby eighth-grade book browsers to hear. "They're very bookish," Anna said, and at that moment in the timely fashion she had about her, Gillian Warring came forward with a question.

"Do you think I'd like this?" she asked her teacher.

"Lolita is not what you think it's going to be," Anna Mazur began.

Siddons

"Nothing is," Lisa Van de Ven answered, "nothing is interesting to me or feels useful at all." She was taking three APs and she didn't know why she bothered: Their real purpose was over; she was in college. "When will I ever need to know how to use the antiderivative of a polynomial function to find the area between the curve, the x-axis, and the given bounds?"

Miss Wilkes asked Lisa if she had seen this: And she showed Lisa a painting of a sliver of a face in profile, the slight neck surmounted by the weight of an enormous turban, a bright red towel so carefully painted the fluffy part was visible. Astra Dell's self-portrait. "You could reach out and touch that towel, couldn't you?" Miss Wilkes said. Miss Wilkes looked at the painting with the same wonder she had felt when that poor sick girl — she still looked sick or fatal, didn't she? — when Astra Dell had brought it in. Done at home. Hardly a face, and what little of it there was, was very pale — eyelashes and eyebrows as if done in pencil. The uncertainty expressed in pencil; pencil, so evidently perishable. The towel was in acrylics.

"I could never in a million years paint like that. Do you remember my own self-portrait last year?"

Miss Wilkes remembered.

"I couldn't get my nose right." The nose, the mouth — even the eyes were off — weren't they? Didn't Miss Wilkes think so?

Miss Wilkes thought Lisa Van de Ven was tiresome. "The proportions were off a little, I remember." Miss Wilkes said, "Next time." Next time look at the person you address — meet her eye. Good god, how could this girl have hurt her, but she had — Lisa Van de Ven had made Miss Wilkes's school year unbearably hard for months; she, too, had rubbed her back against the towering wall of why bother, and even now she wished the month of May — her favorite month! — were over. She was uncomfortable in Lisa Van de Ven's company, confused, sad, embarrassed. Miss Wilkes had compromised herself to be in this girl's company, and now when she wanted it least, Lisa Van de Ven sought her out! Left notes in her mailbox asking to meet.