ALL GIRLS

Emily Layden

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www.johnmurraypress.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by John Murray (Publishers)

An Hachette UK company

Copyright © Emily Layden 2021

The right of Emily Layden to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

eBook ISBN 9781529330113

John Murray (Publishers)

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

www.johnmurraypress.co.uk

Young women deserve to have their experiences seen more fully.
This book is dedicated to them.

I stepped from Plank to Plank

A slow and cautious way

The Stars about my Head I felt

About my Feet the Sea—

I knew not but the next

Would be my final inch—

This gave me that precarious Gait

Some call Experience—

EMILY DICKINSON

Here

There are no major highways into the northwest corner of Connecticut that comprises Litchfield County. Travelers from the more densely populated suburbs of New York—from Westchester and Long Island, from Danbury and Greenwich—find themselves frustrated by the path of winnowing thoroughfares, turnpikes and interstates splitting again and again like capillaries from an artery. No matter the starting point, the final approach to Atwater requires navigating Litchfield’s web of two-lane county roads, flanked in most cases by farmland and medium-thick deciduous forest, the only signage suggesting lowered speeds around particularly treacherous curves. In this corner of New England—like the PCH in certain parts of Southern California; like the pavement that cuts between oil fields outside Odessa—these are the roads meant for windows down and music on loud. This is where teenagers wrap themselves around telephone poles.

The vandal—if vandalism is what you wanted to call it—clearly knew this when she considered her options. (Unlike the question of whether the act was vandalism, there was near-unanimous agreement that the culprit was, in fact, a she.) She clearly knew that families dropping their daughters off at school had their pick of county routes to zig and zag across, like ants to the nest. She might have also known that the nearest billboards were at the interchanges and highway overpasses near Waterbury and Hartford; she might have further estimated the number of students who drove that way and decided: Not enough. When she placed her order with Vistaprint—the label was printed neatly on the back of each poster board—for one hundred eighteen-by-twenty-seven-inch signs and one hundred stands, it was with the understanding that the best approach was a scattershot one, shrapnel blasted across the entire county. She likely researched Connecticut laws and local ordinances regarding yard signs and public property and determined that what she was planning was probably not illegal, not exactly, but that it was best to plant the signs under the cover of darkness on a night as close to Opening Day as possible.

And so when the residents of Kent and Goshen and Roxbury woke one morning in late August, the day the boarding school at the heart of their suburban-rural community was set to open for the academic year, and made their way to the little main streets and intersections that held their corner stores and gas stations, they found their roads peppered with little black rectangles, low and squat and set thirty feet from the pavement. It wasn’t until they passed two or three that the words coalesced into meaning, the rs and ps sorted and organized by a fogged morning brain. Longer still it took to identify the purpose of these campaign signs in a nonelection year, and so the phrasing of the placards planted like seeds in a fifteen-mile radius from The Atwater School settled confusedly onto the surrounding community. A RAPIST WORKS HERE, they read, the message positioned next to a sepia-toned photo of a schoolhouse steeple, haloed in black like an antique portrait.

They were gone almost as soon as they’d popped up, lingering only for a day or two, so that those that remained withered like mailbox balloons after a birthday party, wilted and random, more frequent the farther you traveled from campus. They guessed the school came around and tore them up, or maybe it was their neighbors for whom the vulgarity of the signs was too much: Who wanted to look at that word every day? Who wanted to think about that kind of violence? Because of this, few of them had the chance to look up the URL that slugged the bottom of each sign, the one that might have directed them to a petition to extend Connecticut’s statute of limitations on rape and sexual assault, a kind of activism that might have struck them as surprisingly reasonable given the shock of the headline and the tabloidishness of the signs. In time, the townspeople for whom Atwater was a kind of ivory tower would decide the words on the yard signs weren’t meant for them, not really, and the act of vigilante justice would fade in their memories to a kind of sad and misguided prank. They were used to this kind of thing, the whispers of scandal that accompany the very, very privileged. It was never any of their business.

Orientation

Lauren Triplett has vomited in a lot of public places: on the sidelines of a soccer field; in the parking lot of a Dunkin’ Donuts; at Six Flags; at Disney World; once, even, at the edges of a black-diamond run on a mountain in the Adirondacks, orange-pink throw-up melting the powder on contact. And now: Somewhere on the Side of the Road in Rural Connecticut.

Her mother has not bothered to get out of the car. Susan Triplett has a spectacularly weak stomach of her own, and while a person might think that would make her more sympathetic to her daughter’s propensity for motion sickness, in fact it does not.

Instead, Lauren’s dad hangs a few feet off, hands on his hips: “Sorry, kid.”

Lauren spits, her hands still braced against her knees. She eyes her shins for flecks of stray vomit. She’ll need to find a place to brush her teeth. Did she pack mouthwash? That would be easier. “Not your fault,” she says, her eyes not quite meeting her dad’s as she peels herself up, unfurling her vertebrae one at a time. “How much longer?”

“Not much. Fifteen minutes.”

Lauren nods. A large SUV zips past them, its draft shaking the Tripletts’ own Forester and kicking up dead leaves settled at the shoulder. “I hope that’s not one of my classmates.”

Her dad shrugs. “No way they got a good-enough look.”

Lauren rolls her eyes. “Not helpful.”

As they climb back into the car, Lauren’s mother extends a hand into the back seat, passing a tin of mints in her daughter’s direction. “D’you guys see that?” she says, nodding her chin toward the windshield.

“Hmm?” Lauren’s dad starts the car and checks his mirror.

“There,” her mom says, pointing now, the tin of mints aimed at a small poster twenty yards up the road.

Her dad sighs and shakes his head. “What do you think that’s about?”

“I hope it doesn’t have anything to do with your school,” Susan says.

The mint opens Lauren’s nasal passages, and she chokes back a sneeze.

“Mom,” she says, by way of rebuke.

“I’m just saying. These places are all dealing with this stuff now.”

“Sue.”

“What?”

Her father turns on his blinker and eases the car out onto the road. They are quiet as they roll past the sign, all three of them engaged in a kind of mental matching game. The tower in the photo is perfectly nondescript, as though the sign’s creator did a standard image search for steeples and selected randomly from the algorithm’s assortment. There could be another prep school here, Lauren thinks. She remembers from her search that there are a dozen of them in western Connecticut, maybe more, all multisyllabic and old-moneyed: Westminster, Canterbury, Loomis Chaffee. But as their car draws even with the yard sign and Lauren cranes her neck toward the window, tapping her nose accidentally against the glass, she feels the familiar sink of disappointment, of a false hope not borne out. When she decided to apply to Atwater, her desk at home was covered with marketing and admissions materials from the school, thick-papered pamphlets and flyers and viewbooks dipped in navy and white. Almost all of them featured a low-angled shot of an open-air steeple, looming like a fortress watchtower. After she was accepted, she kept the viewbooks and flyers and pamphlets in their haphazard pile like a casual reminder. She absorbed them through the periphery of her mornings and evenings every day for months.

She would know that clock tower anywhere.

The truth is that this whole thing, really, was Grace’s idea. Grace’s mom and grandmother and great-grandmother (and probably great-great-grandmother, back and back until before women were even allowed to go to school) all went to the same all-girls boarding school in Massachusetts. It was never a question that Grace would, in eighth grade, apply there as well. Grace was Lauren’s best friend, but Grace—knowing that she would leave their prison-compound-like middle school in upstate New York for the hallowed halls of a historic boarding school—always treated their friendship like a temporary arrangement, like Lauren was a placeholder until Grace could make real friends, the ones she’d have for life. Grace’s mother went to Napa every year with her classmates; Grace’s grandmother, in her late eighties, never missed Alumnae Weekend.

It was a whole world Lauren knew nothing about. Her parents went to public high schools and respectable-but-public colleges and graduate schools. It wasn’t like they were poor and Grace was rich—in their modest-size town, they lived in the same subdivision and their moms went to the same gym and the biggest difference Lauren could see was that Grace’s family went to Nantucket in the summer and Lauren’s went to Cape Cod. But Grace’s family had something Lauren’s dad called pedigree, and it set their otherwise identical suburban lives apart from one another.

By the start of eighth grade, boarding school was all Grace would talk about. When her locker got stuck, she’d roll her eyes and say that next year she wouldn’t have to deal with nuisances like lockers. When she was bored in study hall, she’d say that next year she’d have “frees.” Pushing iceberg lettuce around her sectioned lunch tray, she’d longingly sigh: The food’s going to be so good next year.

And so one day during study hall Lauren googled “best boarding schools” (the predictive search added “in America”) and started scrolling. Grace’s school was on all the top-fifty lists, as high as number twenty-seven on a list of the most elite boarding schools, whatever that means. They were all beautiful. Most of them were in New England, although there was one in Santa Barbara where each student had her own pet horse. Literally. They called it the Horse Program, capital H, capital P, just like that—and it was, according to the website, an essential bonding experience for the freshman class. For the most part, though, the schools looked less like world-class resorts and more like baby colleges: small campuses nestled in leafy valleys or below lazily rolling hills with neatly arranged quads and coordinated Gothic or colonial architecture. At some of them, the students wore uniforms—plaid skirts and sweater vests for the girls; blazers for the boys—but at others the students dressed like Lauren’s classmates on their better days: jeans, sweaters, combat boots.

“Lauren?” The girl in front of Lauren is very tall, and she leans over and forward slightly as she says her name. She is also impossibly beautiful, so ridiculously flawless that Lauren is temporarily speechless. Her skin is smooth and poreless. Her eyes are almond-shaped and flecked with gold. Her hair is curly in the way of hair let out of loose braids, deeply parted, and tossed over one side. Lauren had been expecting the girls at Atwater to be pretty, but Standard American Rich Girl pretty: tall and white with Hamptons tans and shiny hair. This girl, the one saying Lauren’s name with a question mark, is movie-star gorgeous.

“I’m Olivia Anderson,” she continues, extending a hand from a long and lithe arm. “I’m your Proctor.”

“Um, hey,” Lauren says, jostling the duffel bag she has over one shoulder to reach toward Olivia. Olivia’s palm is soft and the smooth kind of dry, like baby powder.

“A proctor? What’s that?” Susan stops riffling through the trunk of the car and stands next to her daughter. “Hi,” she adds, extending her own hand. “I’m Lauren’s mom.”

“Hi, Lauren’s Mom,” Olivia says. She smiles like an old friend: big, generous, knowing. “Every Hall has a kind of leadership team,” Olivia explains, “made up of a Dorm Parent and two upperclasswomen: a Proctor and Peer Educator.”

“I thought this was the underclass … women dorm?” Lauren’s mother asks, fumbling her way through a valiant attempt to speak Olivia’s language. Twinned lines tunnel between her eyes, creasing the skin behind the bridge of her sunglasses.

“It is,” Olivia says, “with the exception of the student leaders.”

She pauses, assessing Susan’s furrowed brow. “Can I tell you a secret?” she says, leaning in slightly.

Lauren can’t tell whether the question’s directed at her or her mother. In the beat she takes to consider, Susan answers, also leaning in: “What?”

“We say we want to be student leaders because we want to help ‘foster community,’” Olivia says, her voice hushed, grinning, “but the truth is: we really just want to live closer to the dining hall.”

At this, Lauren’s mom cackles, her head craned back. She reaches an arm out and rests a hand on Olivia’s shoulder, and in the brief moment that Susan’s head knocks back, her sunglassed eyes tilted to the clouds, Olivia half winks at Lauren.

“Anyway, as I was saying: your Peer Educator is a junior who runs bimonthly health and wellness programs during Hall Meeting. On our floor, the Peer Ed is Tate McKenzie.” Olivia cranes her head over Lauren’s shoulder, scanning the parking lot. “I’ll introduce you when I see her. The Dorm Parent is a faculty or staff member assigned to live in the Hall apartment, and she’s the adult in charge of things like sign-outs and chores and nightly check-in.”

“And who’s that?”

“Our Dorm Parent is Ms. Daniels. She teaches history.” Olivia directs her gaze at Lauren. “She’s chill. You’ll really like her. And then, finally, there’s me, your Proctor. You can come to me for anything: directions to your classes, insider info on teachers, where to find the best Korean food in a hundred miles—anything. So,” she says, pausing as if coming up for air, “can I show you your room?”

It is clear that Susan Triplett is thoroughly charmed. She thinks she and Olivia are already confidantes, old friends. Her voice lowered, she asks, “Do you know anything about those yard signs? The ones”—here she drops to almost a whisper—“about the rapist?”

Lauren is temporarily stunned. Her eyes widen so quickly that she can feel her lids tuck into the farthest reaches of her ocular bone. “Mom,” she hisses.

“Oh, those,” Olivia says, pursing her lips into a tight, bemused smile. “So upsetting, aren’t they?”

Susan nods emphatically.

“I don’t know much about it, to be honest. I haven’t even seen one yet. They popped up this morning, I guess, and we—the Proctors—got to school a couple of days ago.”

“I see. But you’ve heard about them?”

Olivia’s eyes flicker to Lauren, and Lauren imagines they say: Your mother is a handful, isn’t she? I see why you wanted to come here.

“Mom,” Lauren says. “Drop it.”

“Oh no, it’s fine!” Olivia flashes Lauren’s mother her biggest, most generous smile. “The administration told us about them this morning and said we might get questions about it. They’re still fact-gathering, but Admin plans to send out a letter to parents as soon as they have the correct information.”

“So it does have to do with Atwater,” Susan says, and for a moment Olivia’s face contracts, confused.

“Well, yes. It appears that way, given the photograph.”

A snapshot of Lauren’s desk at home slides across her brain, the glossed cardstock reflecting the lamp glow, obscuring the image.

“But I don’t really know much else about it.”

Susan Triplett looks chided, although Olivia continues to smile warmly at both of them. When Lauren’s mother does not press the issue, Olivia’s shoulders seem to drop and her smile transforms into a grin. Grabbing a bag from the trunk, she begins to rattle off a series of expectations regarding dorm life (she uses that word, “expectations,” and it is not until much later that Lauren learns that “expectation” is Atwater code for “rule”). Study hall is from seven to nine. Quiet hours begin at nine thirty, but some of their hallmates may like to get to bed before then and they should be respectful of that. Check-in is by ten on weekdays, eleven on weekends. Lights-out is at ten thirty during the week—“which sucks, I know,” Olivia adds sympathetically—and eleven thirty on weekends. Do not empty your personal trash in the common-room trash; bring it outside to the dumpsters. Do not leave dirty dishes in the common-room sink. Chores are typically completed on Sunday evening after study hall, and will be assigned by Ms. Daniels.

Although the details are businesslike, Olivia talks as though she has known Lauren and her family for years. She seems to listen with her entire being. When she is not pointing out landmarks and holding doors open and motioning directions, she looks Lauren directly in the eyes. Lauren imagines the conversations they’ll have by the soft glow of their desk lamps, late into the night.

When she thinks about it now, Lauren wants to say that on the scale of decisions, coming to Atwater was really a shrug. Her best friend was leaving, and so Lauren thought maybe she should, too. When she first asked her father about boarding school, he laughed. When he realized she was serious, he kept laughing, adding a “no-fucking-way” for clarity. The no-fucking-way was his mistake: he should have known his daughter had inherited his stubbornness and that his refusal to even have a conversation would turn a passing idea into a capital-G Goal. She applied to six schools—not a halfhearted number like three, and not an insane number like ten. Four of them were girls’ schools. She got in everywhere, and Atwater threw the most scholarship money her way. (Not very much, her dad would remind her.) It was her mother who diligently printed out the suggested packing list and who drove to Target almost daily during the final days of summer, buying extra of nearly everything (four towels instead of two, six washcloths instead of four; ten days’ worth of socks and underwear; double packs of toothpaste and deodorant and, humiliatingly, the hundred-count box of tampons). Shopping was how Lauren’s mother expressed her love, which was not to say that she took Lauren to the mall or that they went on day trips to New York City like Grace and her mom, but rather that a to-do list that involved spending money was Susan Triplett’s love language.

She kept everything in the guest room, where the Target bags accumulated as if it were Christmastime (the guest room was off-limits to Lauren and her brother, Max, during the holidays). As the days until move-in shrunk to the single digits—four, then three, then two—Susan unpacked each shopping bag, organizing the items into two large Rubbermaid-type containers because, she said, they would pack easier. She said this from her knees in the guest bedroom as she smoothed out a towel, folded it in thirds lengthwise, and then rolled it tightly, like a sleeping bag.

“Bryce! This must be your roommate!” The woman standing in the doorway of Lauren’s new room is thin with spindly ankles and tight, radiant skin. The few wrinkles she has strike Lauren, somehow, as the right kind of wrinkles: a delicate crinkling at the corners of the eyes, barely there curves parenthesizing her lips. “Come say hello, why don’t you.”

“Mom,” says the girl as she emerges from behind her mother’s shoulder, “I’m not five. I know how to introduce myself.” She steps around the woman angling her hip in the doorframe and extends a perfectly manicured hand with the same certainty as Olivia had in the parking lot.

“Hi,” she breathes. “I’m Bryce.” Unlike Olivia, Bryce is Standard American Rich Girl pretty. She has straight brown hair and perfect bone structure and a smattering of neat freckles across her nose. While so many of Lauren’s friends from home are middle-school skinny, Bryce is naturally thin, grown-up thin. “You must be Lauren. Olivia told me your name when she showed us to our room. Where are you from?”

“Albany,” Lauren says, and when Bryce’s little nose wrinkles confusedly she adds, “upstate New York.”

Bryce nods. “Oh, cool. I’m from Danbury, but my dad lives in Chappaqua. That’s upstate, right?”

“If you’re from Manhattan, it is!” Susan waves from the hallway. “It’s so nice to meet you. I’m Susan, Lauren’s mom.”

“Lillian Engel,” Bryce’s mother replies.

The two moms shake hands, and Lauren feels a reflexive embarrassment at her mother’s mere existence. She cannot imagine her own mother in tight cropped jeans and minimalist sandals; Lillian seems sophisticated in a way Lauren’s mom never has.

“Is it okay that Bryce took this side of the room?” She motions to her right. “I’m sure she wouldn’t mind switching to over by the window if you wanted,” she adds.

Their room runs long and narrow and parallel to the hallway, one bed positioned against the wall that buffers the hall and the other against the exterior, beneath the edge of their window. Although they are technically on the first floor, Lathrop is built into a hill; rooms in the back of the building stand a story higher above ground than rooms in the front, so Lauren and Bryce still have a view.

“Oh, no,” Lauren says. “It’s fine.”

“Lauren’s bed at home is under a window, too,” Lauren’s mom adds. “Right, sweetie?”

“Excellent,” Mrs. Engel says, her hands clasped as if in prayer.

Lauren is not much help as they do the actual moving in. Her dad shuttles things up from where the car is parked. Her mother unpacks: she lines the dresser with floral-printed dresser paper; she finds the outlet behind the desk; she organizes Lauren’s shoes on the floor of her closet in neat rows. Lillian Engel does not get on her knees and line her daughter’s underwear drawer with floral-printed paper. It makes Lauren embarrassed, and she finds herself hurrying her mother through the last bit of unpacking.

The rules are the rules: Parents must leave by 4:30 P.M. on Move-In Day, and so at quarter past Lauren stands in the parking lot with her mother and father with the confused feeling of an anticlimax. They hug and remind each other that she’ll be home in just a few weeks, over the fall Long Weekend. Lauren’s mother holds her a beat too long, and Lauren is gripped briefly with the cynical suspicion that this goodbye is performative. Not wanting to make a scene, Lauren pulls her phone out of her pocket and taps into her messages as the car pulls away.

Just said bye to Sue and Brett. How’s your move-in?

Lauren waits in the parking lot until her parents’ car is out of sight, disappeared down the hill they drove up hours before. When Grace doesn’t respond, she’s left with no choice: she slides her phone into her back pocket and turns back toward the dorm.

That night they have their first Hall Meeting. Olivia and their Peer Educator, Tate McKenzie, and Ms. Daniels review dorm expectations and lead them through some icebreakers. They begin by sharing “roses and thorns”: something that has gone well—a rose—and something that went or is going less well. They’ll do this each night for the next three days, and most of the thorns will involve getting lost, and most of the roses will involve not getting lost. Lauren tries to remember her hallmates’ names: Natalie Howard is pretty like Bryce and spends the week in coordinated athleisure; her roommate is Brianna Heller, but she’s from Texas and within a month they’ll be calling her “Tex” instead. Macy Grant and Jade Wright share the room across the hall from Bryce and Lauren, and Lauren thinks she’ll like them, based on the fact that they, too, don’t say much during Hall Meetings.

At the end of the meeting, Ms. Daniels takes a deep breath and lowers her tone to something Lauren recognizes as more teacherly: empathetic but stern, nurturing but authoritative. She’s pretty, Lauren thinks, with clear skin and honey-blond hair. She could be a college student, in her faded Williams crewneck.

“I want to give you guys a little bit of time to finish unpacking before lights out,” she begins, “but I need to say one more thing before we wrap up Meeting.” She looks around the room, leaning forward off the edge of the couch she shares with Olivia and Tate, who each lean back and train their eyes on the ground at their feet.

“This is a hard thing to talk about, and I want to say in advance that I’m sorry that we have to have this conversation on your first night at your new school. I hope it doesn’t dampen your enthusiasm for being here, because I promise you that this is a special place and that you’re going to love it.” She smiles. She has straight white teeth and tiny dimples. “Some of you may have driven past some disturbing yard signs on your way to school this morning. Like campaign signs you might see during an election, but not. Am I right?”

There is a beat before someone volunteers. “Yeah,” Tessa DeGroff says, a little bit too loudly for the stillness that has settled over the group. Tessa is from D.C., the daughter of lawyers-turned-lobbyists.

“Anybody else? Or just Tessa?”

Lauren wonders if Ms. Daniels knows her name, too. Around her, her hallmates nod, one after another, in half shrugs and chin flicks.

“Right. Well, I want to tell you everything I know about the signs, but I also want you to know that it’s not much. They were planted overnight, and the administration just hasn’t quite had enough time to sort it all out. But I can tell you that they were likely placed by an alum, not a current student or a staff member.”

“A recent alum?” Tessa asks.

“Not a recent graduate, no,” Ms. Daniels replies. “But there is an alum who has made an accusation of sexual assault against a faculty member she worked with as a student. And she is—clearly—unhappy with how the school has responded to this allegation.” Ms. Daniels pauses, and Lauren watches how she seems to chew on the inside of her lower lip, curling it in slightly.

“So … but … the teacher still works here?”

Ms. Daniels holds her response for a moment. “The individual in question has a long history of service and dedication to the school and its students. We do not have any reason to believe that the alum is telling the truth about this.”

“When did this alum graduate?” Daphne Martin, Tessa’s roommate, is from London, and—accordingly—has an accent that endears her to the entire hallway.

“I’m afraid I can’t answer that question. We cannot provide any details that might identify either the alum or the faculty member. I know that must be frustrating and confusing, and I’m sorry. I don’t mean to begin our relationship here in a way that seems to lack transparency.”

Next to Ms. Daniels, Tate picks at her cuticles, her middle finger flicking against the curved corner of her thumbnail.

“So what’s the school going to do?”

“For now, they are trying to work with the alumna to get a clearer picture of her motive and desired outcome. Once they have more information, they’ll communicate their findings and next steps to the broader community.”

There’s a beat of quiet, and Ms. Daniels scans the room again, her eyes wide and unblinking.

“Was it rape?” Tessa has tiny, deep-set eyes.

Ms. Daniels cocks her head to one side, her shoulders rising with an outsize inhale. “I don’t think I can answer that question, either. I’m so sorry.”

“So, what are you telling us?” Tessa asks, her voice short and sharp. Next to Lauren, Bryce leans forward, her lips pursed, undeniably intrigued.

“Can I say something?”

Lauren realizes why Olivia Anderson’s voice feels so familiar: She sounds like a politician, or a television anchor, firm and even-paced.

“Of course,” Ms. Daniels says without taking her eyes off Tessa.

“This school is my home. Three years ago, I sat in this very common room and listened to my proctor—Delaney Mathis—tell us about all that we had to look forward to. And not just our classes and sports, but also all these traditions that sounded so exotic to me at first”—Olivia uses her hands when she talks, and when she says “exotic” she elongates the oh in the middle—“like Ringing and Fall Fest and Vespers and Founder’s Day.” She pauses, turning her mouth into a kind of pleading smile. “I remember the only one I recognized was prom. It was like I’d dropped into a fantasy world, you know? I felt like I’d have to learn a whole different language to survive here.”

Lauren has already started to pick up on the Atwater shorthand: Trask is the arts center; Avery is the library; most faculty live in the on-campus housing in “Professorville.” They live in Lathrop; the upperclasswomen live in Whitney.

“So what you’re saying is that Atwater is magical,” Tate adds.

“Well, I’m supposed to be a cool and jaded senior now, and I don’t want any of you ruining my reputation, but—”

“Oh, don’t worry, nobody thinks you’re cool.” Tate winks.

Olivia reaches across the couch and gives her Peer Educator a shove on the shoulder. Tate pretends the blow is more than it is, bouncing off the couch arm on her other side. Around her, Lauren’s classmates laugh a little nervously, reasonably sure they’re in on the joke. It only works because Olivia is so obviously, untouchably cool.

“But yeah,” Olivia continues, “I’m saying that I’m sorry your first night here hasn’t been like when Harry falls through Platform Nine and Three-Quarters, because that’s what you deserve.”

Between them, Ms. Daniels uncrosses her legs, resting her socked feet back on the carpet beneath them. “I know this might be difficult to process, and I want you to know that these two”—she waves an arm across the couch, gesturing vaguely at the young women on either side of her—“are here for exactly this kind of thing.” Ms. Daniels pauses.

“Well, not exactly this kind of thing,” Tate interjects. “More like, this kind of social-emotional processing.”

Lauren wonders where someone would learn a phrase like that—“social-emotional processing”—and then she realizes: Here. Atwater.

“Yes, that. If any of this has been at all triggering for any of you, I want you to know that my door is open,” Ms. Daniels says.

“And so is mine,” Tate adds.

“Mine too, except not right now, because I’m going to bed.”

The room laughs.

“I’m serious,” Olivia says, and even Lauren laughs this time.

That night, Lauren stays awake for a while, her body alert to the sounds of her new home. The blinds cord catches in the late-summer breeze, and the plastic taps gently against itself in a rhythm too irregular to ignore as white noise; footsteps pad up and down the hallways, personless shadows skirting in the hall light that creeps beneath the base of their door. She tries to imagine this as a place where a girl could be raped, pinned down, a hand over her mouth to muffle her screams. Eventually her ears catch the thrum of the cicadas, like cheap toy-store whistles or a band of the world’s tiniest maracas, the same night symphony she hears in upstate New York, and she is able to fall asleep.

The three days before classes begin is called Opening Week. It’s a mix of orientation and bonding activities and, for those students who play a fall sport, preseason practice. Lauren takes her French placement exam and receives a perfectly adequate score. She makes the varsity field hockey squad, but the team is so much obviously worse than the public school at home that she has a hard time feeling all that triumphant. She knew this when she applied—that Atwater was not one of the athletic powerhouses; those were the coed schools in New Hampshire and Maine that recruited postgraduates to play on their football and hockey and basketball teams—but still she found the lack of talent during tryouts vaguely alarming. It’s sort of a cliché, isn’t it, she thought, as Chloe Eaton flubbed a free hit, the girls’ school that isn’t any good at sports. But the idea is too complicated to wrangle in the middle of all the rest, and she sweeps it from the synapses of her brain.

In the afternoon on the second day, they play a game that involves rubber chickens. Outside on the Bowl, they’re organized into circles according to Hall. Their Proctors distribute bean bags among them, beginning with just two to a circle. They pass the bean bags to one another per Olivia’s rules: You cannot pass to either of the people next to you, nor can you pass back to the person from whom you just received a bean bag. You have to say the name of the person to whom you are passing. The little pouches feel damp and dusty in Lauren’s hand, the first dirty thing she’s touched at Atwater. Olivia allows them a minute or two to get into a rhythm, and Lauren finds that they more or less pass in a pattern—she receives from Jade Wright across the circle to her left, and passes on to Daphne Martin to the right—until Olivia hurls a rubber chicken at Natalie Howard, who—in her surprise—lets the chicken smack against her chest and fall to the ground. Macy Grant, who had been in the habit of passing a bean bag to Natalie, tries to withdraw her pass mid-throw, and sends the bean bag in a lame arc halfway across the circle.

“Oops!” she says, embarrassed.

“New rule!” Olivia explains. “When I throw a rubber chicken at you, you have to catch it and throw it back to me, outside the circle. I’ll also be adding more bean bags.”

They look at one another, squinting in the afternoon sun, all a little nervous and none wanting to be the next Natalie (or Macy, for that matter). At Olivia’s urging, they start passing their bean bags again, one at a time, and then Olivia begins tossing rubber chickens into their midst. She has a mesh bag of a half dozen of them, and in the course of their game four or five make their way into rotation. At first the chickens mess up the rhythm: they come at the same time as a bean bag, so the receiver of the chicken also gives a bad pass; they cause rule violations (through some combination of bad luck and timing, Brianna Heller’s only option is to pass to the person right next to her, which is against the rules). Each time they make a mistake, Olivia pauses and allows them to regroup.

Eventually she explains that the game is a metaphor. The bean bags represent your daily routine, she says: classes, homework, practice, meals, chores, et cetera. The chickens are the things that interrupt your routine: The flu, a migraine; a fight with your parents; special events, like Atwater traditions. Success in boarding school—and in life!—is a matter of managing the interruptions, of planning for the unplanned-for.

Olivia smiles at them. “Get it?”

At meals Bryce and Lauren sit together with a group of freshmen, and Bryce narrates the dining hall. Bryce, as it turns out, is Atwater’s version of Grace: the fourth generation in her family to attend Atwater. Partly because she has been tagging along at Alumnae Weekend since her infancy and partly because her grandmother spent a decade on the Board of Trustees, Bryce is an encyclopedia of Atwater lore. A cluster of juniors sit together by the windows in the back corner; from the way Bryce talks about them—and the way her new classmates lean in, committing the details to memory—Lauren has the sense that these girls are who she might have classified as the popular girls at her school back home. The one with the long, matte-brown hair and lived-in eyeliner is Sloane Beck, and she was a professional dancer before her father shipped her off to Connecticut. She goes before the Disciplinary Committee every year but she will never, ever be kicked out of school because her family has promised to donate enough money to name a building once Sloane graduates. She’s sitting next to Brie Feldman, who has curly blond hair and a doll-like complexion; Brie’s roommate is Chloe Eaton, a round-faced Marylander with dimples and a deep tan. Sloane’s best friend is Blake Trude, another dancer, who takes the train into the city twice a week and most weekends to dance with a company uptown. People who don’t know that Sloane played the role of Marie in the New York City Ballet’s Nutcracker at eleven think that Blake is the real prodigy, and that the story Sloane tells about her father forcing her to give up professional dancing is just a cover for the fact that she just wasn’t good enough to cut it in New York.

The seniors filter in and out of meals, wandering in long after the initial rush. Unlike the other grades, they do not eat in large groups, twelve girls packed around a table meant to sit comfortably only eight. They eat in pairs or trios or even, sometimes, alone, with a book or a newspaper in hand, and never with trays—only plates. The fact that they are rarely witnessed as a group makes it harder for Lauren to keep track of them. Although they arrive straight from practice, Collier Ludington and Addison Bowlsby look like they have not broken a sweat. Their skin gleams like Gwyneth Paltrow’s. They are the kinds of girls Lauren assumed she would meet at boarding school; they are, it seems to Lauren, older versions of Bryce. Hitomi Sakano joins Louisa Manning, a junior and coeditor of the school paper, at a table near the front of the dining hall. Hitomi is the daughter of two diplomats, and the newspaper’s fiercely incisive Opinion editor. When Olivia Anderson comes to dinner—still in her soccer gear, baggy shorts with a hooded sweatshirt and knee-high socks scrunched down around her ankles—it’s with Emma Towne, who is not not pretty but who, next to Olivia, looks like an average high school senior. She has soft features and brown-almost-blond hair. Bryce explains that Emma is Olivia’s girlfriend, and they’ve been dating since their sophomore year. They are most definitely not Atwater’s first on-campus same-sex couple, but they might very well be the first couple to live that identity completely out in the open, with the full knowledge of faculty and staff. Their relationship has created some challenges for Atwater, Bryce says, and when Lauren asks for elaboration Bryce explains that, well, for example, if Bryce were dating someone, she could not have him sleep over in her dorm room, because boys are not allowed to sleep over. (They are not even allowed in the dorms.) But girls are allowed to have sleepovers, and so far no exception has been made for Olivia and Emma.

Atwater has a rotating schedule, and at Hall Meeting on the third evening it’s explained to her. There is no possible way to memorize it save a photographic memory. Every Monday is the same. Tuesdays are different from Mondays, but every Tuesday is the same. Wednesdays are different still, but every Wednesday is the same, and so on. She prints out copies of the schedule and tapes them to her agenda and to the inside of her notebook and takes a screenshot to keep in her phone for easy reference. There will be a special schedule on Opening Day (which is the last day of Opening Week) to accommodate the Opening Assembly. She takes a picture of that one, too.

After meeting, she and Bryce linger in the common room, comparing schedules. They have half of their classes together. Bryce doesn’t know much about the new English teacher, Ms. Ryan, but they’ve seen her around: She’s the Dorm Parent on the second floor of Lathrop, where she lives in the faculty apartment with her husband, Owen. She is young and pretty, petite with big eyes, and graduated from Yale two years ago. Lauren wonders about the presence of Ms. Ryan’s husband in the dorms: Do the girls on Ms. Ryan’s hall still walk back from the bathrooms in their towels, like they do on Lauren’s hall, even though Owen might see them?

For French, Lauren has Inès DuBois, the actually French French teacher. Ms. Daniels is also their history teacher. To fulfill her art requirement, she signed up for Drawing and Painting with Mr. Breslin. Bryce says she should think about switching to Photography with Mr. Zarzynski. It’s easier, she says. Plus, Drawing and Painting is for the, you know, art kids.

Although Ms. Ryan’s husband is objectively handsome, it’s Emmett Morgan, Lauren’s algebra teacher, who is the mutual crush of almost every straight student on campus. At twenty-four, he has the wide-shouldered softness of an overgrown frat boy. He played lacrosse at Dartmouth and spent two years at a failing start-up in San Francisco. Atwater has an unofficial policy against hiring single men, Bryce explains, but they got in a bind last year when the previous algebra teacher quit just weeks before the start of the new school year. Emmett is both the son of a former trustee and the best they could find with no time to actually search.

“But,” she says, “the timing couldn’t be worse.”

“What do you mean?” Lauren asks.

“Well, with this rape accusation, you know?”

Lauren doesn’t know. She wrinkles her nose. Bryce looks around the common room, confirming that they’re alone. Their hallmates are all busy with late-stage unpacking: organizing their books on their shelves, hanging twinkle lights from their windows, tacking pictures to their walls in neat rows.

“Look, I don’t know the entire story, because my grandmother isn’t on the Board anymore—but she still hears things.”

“So you know what happened? With the—the yard signs?”

“I mean, I know the gist. It’s weird that they’re calling the girl an alum, because technically she didn’t graduate.”

“What do you mean?”

Bryce slides a teal Lululemon scrunchie from her wrist and twists it twice around a bun fastened at the nape of her neck. Her hair tendrils around her ear, and she tucks the stray pieces away from her face. “This alum—or almost-alum, I guess—says that she told the school she was raped in the fall of her senior year, right after it happened, and that they kicked her out.”

Lauren feels like she’s missing something. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why would they do that?”

“I don’t know. I mean, some things don’t add up, for sure. First of all, she didn’t and has never pressed charges against this guy, which my grandmother says is in part because her case is so shaky that no lawyer worth his salt would take it.”

“She’s suing the school, though?”

“Threatening to, I guess.”

“Why? I mean—what does she want?”

“I don’t know,” Bryce shrugs. “But anyway, that’s why it’s kind of awkward about Mr. Morgan. They stopped hiring single male teachers after exactly this incident in the nineties—again, unofficially—and it’s just not an ideal moment for them to start back up.”

“Because it doesn’t look good?”

“It just doesn’t look like they’re taking any of this all that seriously,” Bryce says.

Before bed Lauren calls home for the second time. The first time was only briefly, when she could not find where her mother packed the razors (she put all the extra toiletries in the small duffel bag beneath her bed, including the supersize Tampax box). She calls again because she promised on the first call that she would make a second call to let them know how everything was going. They switch briefly to FaceTime so she can show them her room; she points out that they’ve already seen it, to which her mother replies, “But not all moved in!” Already they have begun to speak different languages: Lauren finds herself using words like “Dorm Parent” and “Proctor” and “Hall Meeting” and as she does her parents say things like, “Now what does she do again?” and “Was that the pretty Black girl we met in the parking lot?” and “Is your ‘hall’ the same thing as your dorm?” And Lauren finds herself getting frustrated and so she tells them she has to go brush her teeth and get ready for bed, even though it’s nine forty-five and the truth is she already flossed, too.

“Wait—sweetie?” Lauren recognizes her mother’s tone, the way she speaks when she’s been looking for a window to say something.

“Yeah?”

“Have there been any updates about the … you know … the sign we saw when we dropped you off?”

Across the room, Bryce is embroiled in detangling a set of necklaces that she hangs, one by one, from a golden jewelry stand—a doll-size garment rack. If she heard Lauren’s mother through the speaker, she does not react. Their room is coming together, Lauren thinks: It’s clean and organized but not sterile, like Leah Stern’s room down the hall. There are places where their things mingle side by side as if they’d planned it: Two towels rumpled on the railing across the closet door above two sets of kicked-off shower flip-flops.

“No, Mom,” Lauren says. “Not really.”

As soon as she hangs up she feels vaguely guilty. It is the same sensation she has when she squishes a bug that is not a spider, or when she’s caught not washing her hands after peeing, or when Charlie, their golden retriever, comes into Lauren’s room with a toy and she is too busy to play.

In bed she pulls her comforter up around her shoulders, tucking her elbows in next to her ribs, her face and her hands the only parts of her body outside the covers. She pulls her phone close to her nose and opens Instagram.

Grace has blond hair and blue eyes, high cheekbones and tan skin. She’s pretty on paper, but in reality she looks a little bit young, frozen in sixth grade, soft at the edges. This is painfully obvious in the picture she’s posted, her face framed on either side by two girls who look a lot like Bryce: button-nosed and symmetrical. They’re outside in the deep blue of a late-summer night, glowing in the not-quite dusk. It’s one of those almost-candids, all three girls laughing, Grace’s mouth directly at the camera, her hair falling across her forehead.

we hate it here, the caption reads, punctuated with a yellow heart emoji.

Lauren holds her thumb over the image square for a beat, thinks about coming back to it later. Instead, she moves her finger to the comment box and types:

omg sameee

She watches her comment fall in line; a beat passes, and a red alert pops into the app’s right corner.

gracelostinspace: miss u lady!

Laurennotatriplett: miss you too!

gracelostinspace: tell me everything!

gracelostinspace: do u love it

Lauren types, deletes, retypes. There was a time when Grace would have gotten all the details Lauren’s mother didn’t: about Mr. Morgan, about Ms. Daniels, about Olivia and Tate and Bryce. She would have asked her if she thought the girl who planted the yard signs was telling the truth.

Lauren imagines Grace on the other side of the screen, in her own bed in her new school in Massachusetts, the one that was her destiny, watching the ellipses dance in their DM. There’s only one way to answer now, Lauren knows.

Laurennotatriplett: it’s perfect

To: Atwater Parents Association <<APA@TheAtwaterSchool.org>>

From: brodiep@TheAtwaterSchool.org

Date: Sep 4, 2015, 5:28 P.M.

Subject: Welcome!

Atwater Families,

It was my great pleasure and privilege to welcome our community to campus for Opening Week. The festivities marked the start of my twelfth year at Atwater, and yet the thrill of these first days has not worn off: from the enthusiasm of the new freshmen to the wisdom of the seniors, I love watching and guessing how this cohort will shape the semesters to come.

These celebratory days before classes start play a critical role in establishing the broader tone for the year, which is why I was particularly sorry to have them marred by an act of vandalism. On your drive to campus on Opening Day, you might have noticed a scattering of yard signs targeting Atwater; I want to reassure you that we are treating the placement of these signs with the appropriate seriousness, and that we anticipate no further interruption to our school year and our students’ lives.

Moving forward, I want to state very clearly two things: first, we intend to execute a thorough investigation of the incident to determine with certainty the perpetrator and their motivation; second, Atwater has always been and remains a place that prioritizes above all else the safety of its students. I believe that there is no faculty better equipped to help lead our students in social-emotional growth and discovery, and that we are well prepared on campus to guide our student body in the processing that might naturally accompany something of this sensitivity and complexity.

Our students pride themselves on their capacity to manage their multitudinous responsibilities with diligence and dedication. As the key adults in their lives, it is our job to continually model this behavior. I believe we can empathetically navigate this moment without losing sight of our ultimate, perpetual goal: the providing of a world-class education. I look forward to partnering with you in this effort.

Be well,

Patricia Brodie

Head of School