Perennials, page 15
“Wouldn’t be telling you if we did now, would we?” She threw Nell a glance of female solidarity.
Nell stood. “Gotta use the ladies’.”
It was too warm in the staff lodge. She stepped outside onto the front porch and sat on the top step. It would be four A.M. at home in Surrey. Nell wanted to call her mother, but she would be asleep. She hadn’t wanted Nell to go to camp; instead, she had thought that Nell should have stayed home in the months leading up to university and taken an internship in the city, as if spending that extra time in the upstanding home she came from would literally set her straight.
Months earlier, Nell had been suspended from school, but her father didn’t know why. Only Nell’s mother knew; only Nell’s mother took her to that doctor. He prescribed an antidepressant, but she wasn’t depressed; she was just gay. For the remaining months of that spring, she worked at the local stables where she’d ridden as a girl. Nell carried the medication with her at all times, and every morning on her way to the horses, she threw a single pill into the dumpster.
A co-worker from the stables had worked at an American summer camp a few years earlier, and it sounded like the right kind of escape: warm weather, cheerful strangers, anonymity, horses. A chance to visit America for the first time. Nell was eighteen now; she could go where she wanted. She applied through an agency, and they placed her at Camp Marigold in the lower Berkshire Mountains of Connecticut, where she was given the role of head riding instructor. She was surprised, considering her young age and lack of camp experience, but her pedigreed English riding education seemed to be a major draw for wealthy American families. When Nell told her parents over dinner one night that she’d be going, that she had already bought her plane ticket, they begged her not to. “But we’re a team,” her mother had said. A team united against the wayward winds of homosexuality, which, her mother seemed to believe, were much stronger in America.
—
It was a family tradition to go away to boarding school at the age of fourteen, and Nell’s parents had sent her to Wentworth Academy, the same all-girls school that her mother had attended. It was a stuffy academy in the Midlands with several acres of land and—the reason Nell had agreed so readily—a fantastic number of purebred horses. As a fourth year, she was the student riding apprentice and had keys to the stables. She would have girls meet her there late at night; the mornings were reserved for her own riding with her favorite horse, Henry, a chestnut Arabian, when they would wander off campus onto trails and hills and back roads.
She became known for these late nights in the barn, which the other girls called “appointments.” For the others, the appointments were only physical, not an experiment, not love, just a way to make it from one coed dance to the next. One could say to one’s roommate, at eleven in the evening, “I have a French tutoring appointment in fifteen minutes,” and the unusual lateness of the meeting would never be questioned; perhaps the roommate had had a similar appointment just a week earlier.
Nell learned that her code name was “Red,” coined by a whispering bunkmate or a curious member of the tennis team. Not exactly original, but maybe that was the point—that her scandalous role in the school could be communicated through the mention of that seemingly innocuous color. It became known through the school’s more secretive channels that Red would meet with whomever, and would keep things quiet too.
One morning, she arrived at the barn to take Henry out, and Sasha was waiting there. She was a tall second year with gray eyes. She always wore her brown hair in a perfectly contained braid falling over one shoulder. They’d spoken only a few times, but Nell often had fantasies about the girl. She was so poised and proper on a horse, so in control.
“What are you doing here?” Nell asked, thinking that Sasha had come to ride or, even worse, to threaten her. She seemed posh enough, conservative enough, that she might have actually cared to stop it—as if an underground lesbian community at her own boarding school would bring scandal on her just by association. There was certainly a reigning old-fashioned homophobia at Wentworth; Nell’s appointments needed to be so secretive because the girls’ proper reputations were always at stake.
The girl walked toward Nell and said, sarcastically, “Hi, Red.”
Nell did not normally feel nervous, but Sasha made her nervous. It was something in the way she was looking so intensely into Nell’s eyes. It was imploring, but also challenging, the way those gray eyes squinted and studied Nell like the eyes of a cat ready to pounce.
“Nell is fine,” Nell said.
“I’m Sasha,” the girl said, not breaking the eye contact.
“I know.”
Nell looked around. Did she have backup, girls ready to attack, waiting just outside the stable doors?
Sasha approached Nell. She put a hand out and reached it toward Nell’s face. Nell flinched and closed her eyes, bracing herself for the contact, until she realized that the hand was moving through her own hair.
She opened her eyes and saw that Sasha’s intense look had gone away, and now it was nervous and unsure: all imploring, with no challenge, and at the mercy of whatever Nell decided to do next.
Normally Nell wouldn’t have taken the risk in the morning—it was about to be bright out, and time was limited before the school day started. But Nell had a feeling that Sasha was different, that she wanted this from Nell, not from Red, judging by how nervous she seemed. Or so this was what Nell told herself as she took Sasha by the hand and pulled her onto the ground in an empty stall.
Sasha leaned in to every touch. They kept their boots and tops on; Nell pulled Sasha’s jodhpurs down just past her knees and took her time. Sasha’s thighs smelled like baby oil and cardamom. When Sasha finished, she made a high-pitched squeal, which Nell thought was the most beautiful sound she’d ever heard.
Henry, in the stall next to them, stamped his feet. Sasha was standing, brushing the hay off her pants and pushing her hair behind her ears. Nell opened the door of the stall they were in and made her way around to give Henry a kiss on his wet nose.
“Should we ride?” Sasha said.
Most of the girls barely spoke afterward, embarrassed or ashamed.
Nell looked at her watch. “We don’t have much time.”
“That’s okay,” Sasha said. “Just a little jaunt could be fun.”
Sasha took Dove, the albino, and Nell led them behind the barn and through the thick woods that sat on the edge of campus. The horses seemed to awaken in the unfenced terrain. Henry was happy to lead the way, to navigate between trees and to jump over fallen logs. Nell hated seeing him later in the day in the arena, plodding around the circle. Now he stopped to drink from a mud puddle.
“Is that the headmistress’s house?” Sasha asked while they waited for Henry to finish drinking.
They were at the top of a hill. The tangled forest stopped at the bottom of the slope, butted by a tall brick wall and a manicured lawn on the other side. Nell checked her watch again—five minutes to seven. “She’ll be going up to the school soon,” she said. “We should get back.”
“I’m not worried.” Sasha looked away from the stone mansion and then did something Nell could have never hoped for: leaned over and gave her a kiss. A sweet, short kiss. The sort of kiss a real couple would share.
“Are you blushing, Red?” Sasha asked as she pulled away.
“No,” Nell lied; she could feel her face was warm.
“Okay,” Sasha said. They were both smiling like idiots. “Let’s go.”
—
The screen door creaked and shut behind Mo as she took a seat next to Nell. That morning, Mo had kissed Nell for the first time. She was wearing jeans and a hoodie and had her hair in a ponytail, the only way Nell had ever seen her wear it. Her tan had settled nicely over the four weeks they’d been there. Nell thought of her as “all-American”—athletic, wholesome, pert—even though she was also English.
“You wanna look at the stars with me?” Mo asked.
“Sure,” Nell said, and tilted her head toward the sky.
“No. Over here is better.”
Mo led them toward the middle of the green where the American flag was raised every morning. She lay down, and Nell lay next to her. The grass was damp, but neither of them complained about it.
“I can’t find the Plough,” Mo said.
“Me neither,” said Nell, though she wasn’t really looking for it. She felt distracted somehow by Mo’s presence. She had been lost in her thoughts about home and didn’t feel ready to come out of them.
“I think there’s the little one there”—Mo pointed—“so if I just trace along”—she moved her index finger aimlessly around the sky—“it’s got to be nearby.”
“Do you need to know where everything is?”
“I don’t need to.” Mo dropped her finger then. “I just like to,” she said sheepishly.
“Well, that’s the Milky Way,” Nell said, feeling bad now. She used her finger to trace the cloudy galaxy in her own line of vision, knowing that pointing out constellations was useless—that in an expanse as wide as the night sky, it was nearly impossible to show someone else what you were seeing.
“I know what the Milky Way looks like.”
Mo turned onto her side and faced her friend.
“Nell?” she said.
“Hm?”
“Do you want to go home?”
Nell felt alarmed, as if Mo had been attuned to her own thoughts about her family and Sasha just minutes earlier. “Do I want to go home?”
“Do you want me to say first?”
“No, that’s okay. I know you want to go home.”
Mo frowned. “No, I don’t.”
“You don’t?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know. I asked you first.”
“So my wanting or not wanting to go home would affect your wanting—or not wanting—to go home?”
“I don’t like it here anymore,” Mo said, quieter. “I just don’t want to leave you.”
It made Nell feel good and safe to know this, but the safeness also made her bristle, as if she had to quickly push her way out of it. She knew what had happened the last time she had allowed herself to feel safe. Here was this lovely, kind person, who did, in more than one way, make her feel safe; and up there was the night sky, open and endless and full of far more possibilities than the ones on this provincial earth.
“Do you want to leave because of Micah?” Nell forced herself to ask, though she really did not want to talk about the horse anymore.
“Micah. Sheera. All of it.” Mo swept a hand around the camp. “I swear this place is cursed.”
“Maybe it is,” Nell said. The idea of an escape had been faulty, of course. Here there was just another set of problems that required yet another escape.
—
Nell and Sasha met at six A.M. on every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, first in the barn, and then, if they had time, they went for a ride. Soon they started meeting at five-thirty instead in order to be able to go farther into the woods each time, staying out longer, arriving back later, coming upon streams and clearings and once at the fence of an oat farm. The sun was rising then, and Nell had a moment of reverence watching the fields turn gold.
“You’ll remember me when the west winds move.” Sasha started to jokingly sing the Sting song, and Nell laughed and felt (perhaps naïvely, she noted even at the time) that they understood each other in a deep and real way.
Nell began to make eye contact with Sasha in the dining hall. She tried to make their mornings last longer and longer. She asked Sasha questions about her life—about her divorced parents, her troubled younger brother, her stupid and trivial Wentworth friends. Sasha wanted to be an actress; she believed she was destined for much greater things, and Nell agreed with her. She entertained fantasies about the two of them riding Henry and Dove into the woods one morning and never coming back.
And most astonishingly, Sasha reciprocated favors in the barn, almost every time. The other Wentworth girls would only occasionally and, even then, not very well, but Sasha actually asked what Nell liked, what she wanted. As Sasha snaked down Nell’s bare stomach, kissing her belly button, her hips, her inner thighs, Nell felt entirely sure that she was desperately, unequivocally in love.
And then one morning late in the fall, after almost a full term of their appointments, Sasha wasn’t there. Nell took Henry out anyway, worrying the whole ride that Sasha had been caught leaving her dorm.
Nell tried to make eye contact with Sasha in the dining hall that night, but she looked away. She was with her friends, the girls who scrunched their kneesocks down to their ankles and wore baby blue bows at the bottoms of their braids.
She wasn’t at the barn the next morning either. A week later, a tiny first year was waiting outside the stable doors when Nell arrived. Nell asked her what she was doing there so early and sent her back to her dorm.
At the coed dance with St. Joseph’s that weekend, Sasha spent all night dancing with Charles Mitting, who was tall and famously rich. On Monday Nell’s roommate leaned over to her at breakfast, looking at Sasha standing tall with her lunch tray and her braid falling down over her shoulder.
“She and Charles Mitting are an item,” Nell’s roommate said.
“Is that so?” Nell sipped her coffee.
“Yeah.” The roommate stuffed a piece of toast into her mouth. “Lucky bitch.”
—
It was late. Counselors were walking out of the staff lodge and back to their sections, some looking curiously at Mo and Nell as they passed. Nell was sure that the counselors gossiped about them because they hadn’t made any other friends.
“Here,” Mo said, and pulled a handful of Laffy Taffys out of her pocket, placing them on the grass in front of them.
Nell unwrapped a yellow one, stuck the candy in her mouth, and read the joke on the inside of the wrapper with the light from her mini LED.
“What did the finger say to the thumb?” Nell asked.
“What?”
“I’m in glove with you.”
Sticky pieces of fake, plasticky banana lodged themselves in her molars.
“I’ve never asked,” Mo said. “Did you leave anyone back home?”
“Leave anyone?”
“You know, like a boyfriend,” Mo said. “Or girlfriend,” she added. This had been, up until then, the unspoken thing. Who do we like? Does it matter?
Nell chewed hard. “Free as a bird.”
“Same here,” Mo said.
Nell unwrapped a strawberry Laffy Taffy. “What’s brown and sticky?”
“A pile of shit?”
“Close,” Nell said. “A stick.”
Nell had not slept with anyone at camp, and neither had Mo. Becca and Logan had been sneaking into the vacant bunk rooms in the nurse’s office for six consecutive evenings. Steph and Brett had apparently fucked in the pool house around two the night before. Four weeks into camp and they had all regressed completely—like they had to act the way the kids did, like they were good only for gossiping and pushing boundaries in the most predictable of ways.
—
The last weeks of the semester, just before Christmas, most girls spent their nights in the library studying for exams. Nell spent hers in the stacks. It was too cold by then to meet in the stables.
She had an appointment with a blond second year late one night in the poetry stacks, authors A–D. The girl was quiet and jumpy, as they always were. Nell performed what was rote by then, the intimacies, if she could even call them that.
The girl’s eyes were shut so tight, presumably to help her forget where she was and whom she was with. Nell looked at the book spines while her hand worked. Baudelaire. Bishop. Blake. Just as the girl’s back started to arch and she started to make the sounds that signaled she was nearing the end, a soft and damp object grazed Nell’s shoulder and landed in her lap.
The blond girl opened her eyes and looked down at Nell’s lap, her face turned ashen. She stood up fast, straightened her skirt, and ran away from Nell, out of the aisle and out of the library.
Nell picked the thing up by its cotton string. It was soaked in blood, still wet. As she looked up, an anonymous hand launched a paper airplane over the bookshelf. She caught it before it landed, staining the paper with the blood on her fingers, and opened it.
“A gift for Red,” it said, “who loves pussy more than anyone we know.”
—
Nell looked at her watch. “We should be getting back.”
Mo was focusing on Nell intently now; she had this crazy look in her eyes and the batting eyelashes of a girl who didn’t know how to flirt. As they walked up the hill to their section, Mo stayed close and let the sides of their pinkies brush against each other, the sides of their knees.
When they got to their tent, Mo sat on the edge of her bed.
“Do you want to sleep in my bunk tonight?” she asked.
Of course, Nell did. She would be lying if she said she hadn’t often thought about the convenience of their living in the same tent and was partly surprised that she hadn’t propositioned Mo much earlier in the summer. But something had always stopped her: this understanding that, despite being much older than Nell, Mo was younger in so many ways. She was inexperienced and naïve. She needed a teacher.
“No, thank you,” Nell said. “I’m really tired.”
And they lay in their respective bunks, alone.
That morning, Nell had allowed herself to hook up with Mo—she too had been caught up in the drama and the danger of Sheera’s fall. And she had wanted Mo. But something about Mo’s continual closeness now, her transparent desire for intimacy, made Nell recoil. She didn’t want to have to get so close to just be the teacher again, this champion for confused girls. For them, it was a game, an experiment. But for her, it was all too real.
The silence settled uneasily between them.
“I don’t know what you think about me,” Nell said some minutes later—just for good measure, just to get her point across clearly. “But whatever it is, it’s wrong.”
She thought she heard Mo sniffling later that night—it was likely she was crying. Nell herself had trouble sleeping; she felt cruel pushing away her only friend there. But it needed to be done.
