The World Cannot Give, page 23
The thought doesn’t comfort her.
There are worse things to be, it turns out, than a fool.
The worst part? Laura didn’t even have the guts to betray Virginia straight out.
No, Laura thinks, she’d stored up, mouselike, her little nest of small resentments; she’d delighted—when the time came—in trading them in for one big transgression.
Virginia runs alone now.
* * *
Brad comes to Desmond on Friday afternoon.
“Strauss, please!” He has been knocking on the door to room 312 for ten minutes. “I know you’re in there. Mrs. Mesrin said—”
Virginia is sitting in bed, reading with her earbuds in. Laura is at her desk, trying to ignore the insistent thuds.
“Just let me explain!”
Laura can hear the music blasting through Virginia’s earbuds.
“Just give me one minute!”
Virginia yanks out her earbuds. She picks up her phone; she fiddles with it; she goes, at last, to the door.
“Fine,” she says. “One minute.”
Her phone is counting down.
“Look, Strauss, I swear—I have no idea who swapped the video.” He casts around wildly to Laura in appeal.
“Fifty-five seconds.”
“It wasn’t me, Strauss. I swear. I had nothing—nothing to do with what happened.”
“So who was it?”
“I don’t know! A hacker, maybe?”
“A hacker. Seriously?”
“Strauss, I swear!”
“Who was it, Noise? Was it Gallagher? I always knew he was a loose cannon. Or Ervin? Material for his novel, I bet.”
“It wasn’t anybody! Strauss, I swear, they promised….”
“Work it out. Do the math, Noise. If it wasn’t you, then it’s whoever you sent it to.” She lifts her chin. “You did send it to somebody, didn’t you?”
Brad doesn’t say anything.
“What, you sent it to Gallagher, for his wank bank? You sent it to Ng as a joke—what? Who did you send it to?”
“I don’t know,” he says.
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“All of them,” he says at last. “I sent it to all of them.”
Her silence curdles.
“Virginia, I—”
Virginia doesn’t let him finish.
“Five seconds.” Her face is bone white. Her spine is so straight Laura thinks it will snap. She lets the clock tick down to zero. A bell goes off. “Thank you. You can go now.”
He does.
Virginia watches the door long after he has gone.
“All of them,” she says softly. She bites her lower lip.
“Virginia, come on, you can’t think—”
“All of them,” she says.
She puts her earbuds back in.
* * *
Laura resigns from choir the next morning.
She tosses her robe and surplice onto the Keble table, where Brad sits alone with his chemistry textbook. There are bags under his eyes. His lips are gray.
“You don’t have to do this,” he says.
“I do.”
“We can’t have choir without any girls. We’ll have to bring in the Dewey Decibel System.” He tries and fails to smile.
She shoves the pile toward him.
“Why did you do it?” she says.
Brad grits his teeth.
“I’ve never pretended,” he says slowly, “to be better than I am. Strauss knew that.” His shrug slumps.
“She loved you.”
“She’s not capable of love.”
“She trusted you. She sent you that—that video because she trusted you.”
“You think that’s what that was? Trust?”
“She trusted you not to show it to the whole school.”
“I didn’t plan that.”
“Someone did.”
“Listen, Stearns. I’ve talked to the others. They all swear they had nothing to do with it.”
“And you believe them?”
“They’re my friends, Stearns!”
“And Virginia? She’s not?”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Of course it’s that simple!”
“Christ, Stearns, she should have known!”
“What, that you’d leak it?”
“That it’d get out. Somehow.” Brad sighs. “Sometimes people just do dumb shit—for no reason. Because they can. I don’t know. Because it feels good. Because—it makes you feel like you’ve got a semblance of control.”
“Is that why you leaked it? To show her you were in control?”
They stare at each other for a while.
“Come on, Stearns. You can’t pretend she didn’t enjoy it. She got off on the fact we all wanted her.”
“She chose you.”
“Is that what you think?”
His voice is hollow and cold.
“You’d have laughed at me, you know, if you’d known me freshman year. This idiotic freshman, barely five foot four, jumping off rocks, declaring my undying love: declaiming Webster, naked on the sands of Bethel Beach.” His laugh dies in his throat. “Oh, she was very nice about it, of course. She let me down easy. She had this whole explanation: pornography, profanation, God, World-History, revolution— I’m guessing you know the drill.”
He blows out his lips.
“I told myself I didn’t mind. It was good for me. Courtly love, right? Like those knights who used to joust for roses. Love without sex. Transcendence.” He grimaces. “I’d have done anything for her. Hell, I broke up with a sweet, kind girl—someone I actually, genuinely liked—via a goddamn text message because Virginia Strauss told me I could do better. I went along with her plans, her schemes, making a fool of myself, all of us making fools of ourselves, because Reverend Tipton was an unserious person, because we don’t hold Virginia Strauss to ordinary standards, do we?” He sighs. “Turns out—all it takes to get Virginia Strauss into bed is to stop caring what she thinks.”
Laura doesn’t say anything.
“I did love her,” he says. “But there’s only so much a person can put you through.”
“So now you got your revenge.”
“Jesus, Stearns, it’s not like I planned it! Gallagher came back from whatever the hell went on with you, ranting furiously about the unreliability of women; Ervin gets back from Desmond; we get to talking. Man to man. I didn’t plan to show it to anyone, at first; it was just a funny story. Guess what? Turns out the virgin queen’s grubby and horny as the rest of us. Only—they didn’t believe me. Ervin said I was making it up, dared me to show it to them, pics or it didn’t happen. Obviously I refused. Only Gallagher…” He leans his cheek on his palm. He keeps looking at Laura. A slight, mocking smile crosses his lips. “Well, Gallagher pointed out—very convincingly—quite how whipped I’d become.” He shrugs. “What’s a man to do? Right?” He swallows. “It’s what we do, isn’t it? Unserious boys and porn.”
“Anyway, we all watched it together,” he says. “The five of us. Cast it to the Cranmer common room television. Right after The Great British Bake Off.”
“Are you trying to make me hate you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Do you?”
Laura does.
“I just didn’t know,” she says at last, “how much you’d always hated her.”
Brad doesn’t say anything.
* * *
Virginia stops showering. She doesn’t comb her hair, or brush her teeth; her dirty clothes fester in the corner of their room. She sits, glowering and disheveled, in the corners of the classes she perfunctorily attends, handing in no homework, refusing to speak when called upon, even when Mrs. Mesrin throws her a softball about bird imagery in Macbeth.
She leaves earlier and earlier for her runs, now, dispensing altogether with the five-o’clock rule: sneaking out the Desmond common room window at four thirty, then four fifteen.
Also, she quits the American Institute for Civic Virtue.
“I wrote them an email,” she tells Laura, one day, as she tosses her running clothes on the floor between their beds. “I explained everything.”
“You told them?”
“They were going to find out sooner or later. They might as well hear it from me.”
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“It was a matter of principle.” She considers Laura, huddled on the bed. “I doubt you’d understand.”
* * *
Isobel turns down the student council presidency.
She writes an op-ed in the St. Dunstan’s Chronicle about it. Without getting into specifics, she informs the St. Dunstan’s student body that any election won by unjust or unethical means is illegitimate, and that any irregularities that may have occurred are further evidence of St. Dunstan’s brokenness as an institution, and a sign that it’s not worth governing at all.
The values of this institution, she concludes, can’t be reformed.
They can only be rejected.
It’s the first constitutional crisis in St. Dunstan’s history.
After days of deliberation, the administration announces it will rerun the election in Michaelmas.
Virginia spends an hour with the Chronicle on her lap, tracing the words with her fingers.
* * *
Laura is so lonely now.
She’d never noticed, in the choir days, how few her friendships had been. It hadn’t mattered.
It’s not that anybody is unkind to her. Some Desmond girls let her sit with them at lunch. Tamara Lynd walks with her from Topics in European History, and they make idle chatter about how Dr. Meyer spits when he talks. Teddy Kelting, learning Laura has dropped out of choir, asks her on an Evensong date. (She invents, on the spot, a Nevada boyfriend named John.)
There is nothing wrong with them, Laura knows, except that nobody shipwrecks her soul.
Tamara Lynd would never jump off a cliff at three in the morning; Teddy Kelting would never swear a blood oath in a crypt.
Nor can Laura bring herself to throw herself on the mercy of Miranda and Isobel. They would ask her, she knows, to mix together the things she loves with the things she cannot stand, to admit that the boys of choir shared the video because that’s just the kind of things that boys of choir do.
Laura can give up choir. She can’t give up remembering it. She can’t think of the time they sang Compline on Bethel Beach and think only that it was just the inevitable prelude to a bunch of boys laughing about a sex tape in Cranmer Hall.
Remembering is all Laura has left.
* * *
Laura takes to solitude.
She sits alone at Keble; she walks alone to class; she tries and fails to reread Webster, only now Robert and Gus and Shrimpy all have the boys’ faces; only now Webster has Virginia’s voice.
She sits alone, too, at Evensong: nestled in the back row, trying to pretend that Gabe Meltzer doesn’t have his hand underneath Tamara Lynd’s skirt, trying to pretend the boys don’t still sound beautiful.
Virginia doesn’t attend.
* * *
Brad’s prediction comes true. Reverend Tipton can’t convince any girls to commit to a full season of choir this late into term, and so instead they have a rotating cast of girls from the Dewey Decibel System subbing in each week. What they lack in seriousness, they make up for in skill. An ordinary student, sitting in a pew like this one, might never know there was any difference at all.
Maybe, Laura thinks, filing out of her second Evensong without Virginia, there never was any difference at all.
She opens the chapel doors right onto the boys. They are all milling on the steps, in their choir robes; Laura avoids their gaze, shuffling straight through them.
“Stearns,” Barry tries; she ignores him. “Listen, Stearns, please—”
Then a voice comes from behind them.
“Oi!”
Isobel is standing, waiting for them, on Devonshire Quad.
“Shit.” Ralph Ervin rolls his eyes. Laura scampers out of the way.
“Oi—I want to talk to you.”
“Come on,” Anton says. “Let’s get out of here.”
They make their way across the quad. Isobel follows them.
“Hey! I’m talking to you! Hey!”
She gets in Anton Gallagher’s face and shoves him.
He staggers back.
“What the fuck?”
“Which one of you did it?” She shoves Anton again. “Huh? Was it you, Anton?”
Ralph rolls his eyes. “Christ, Isobel, fuck off. Nobody did—”
“What—was it you?” She rounds on Ralph. “You wanted to impress your new girlfriend, is that it?”
“Hey, listen,” Barry cuts in. “What happened, we know it was awful, and we’re so sorry it happened, but it has nothing, nothing to do with us, okay? So just—”
Ivan is staring at the ground.
“Let me guess—you were all in on it? Did you decide together that it would be hilarious, just hilarious, to share the most intimate moments of a person’s life—”
“Yeah, sure,” Anton bellows. “Real intimate.”
“She deserved it? Really? That’s how you’re gonna play it?”
She shoves him a third time.
“Look, Zhao, I don’t like to hit women, but…” He shrugs. “God, like you even fucking count.”
“Go ahead!” Isobel spreads her arms wide. “Take a shot.” Her smile glints. “I dare you.”
Brad just stands there, his hands in his pockets, saying nothing.
He looks up at Laura; he lifts his shoulders in a barely perceptible shrug, as if to say, What else would you have me do?, as if Laura should have known this all along, about them, as if she should have always expected this of them.
“Go on,” Isobel says. “What would Sebastian Webster do?”
“Fuck it.” Anton throws up his hands. “Let’s get out of here.”
They all cross the quad toward Cranmer.
Isobel remains, her arms outstretched, on the quad. She looks up. A smile inches across her face; she touches her fingers to her forehead, in a parody of salute.
Laura follows her gaze to the Desmond windows.
Virginia is watching them.
* * *
Virginia does not say anything to Laura about what she has seen. She doesn’t say anything to Laura at all. She spends the evening curled up on her phone, her earbuds in, typing furiously, biting her lower lip.
At last, at three thirty in the morning, she turns to Laura, who is pretending to still be doing her Calculus homework.
“I’m going for a run,” she says. “Don’t wait up.”
“Now?”
“What’s the problem?”
Laura doesn’t say anything. She watches at the window as Virginia spikes across the quad.
Laura doesn’t sleep that night. She spends it sitting against the window, her textbook in her lap, her heart flinging itself against her ribs, dread clenching her lungs.
She knows, already, what she will see.
They come back together right before first period, sweat-drenched and exultant: Virginia’s tall, lanky frame and Isobel’s small, sprightly one, their shoulders touching.
They come to a stop in front of Latimer, directly across the quad.
Virginia takes Isobel’s hand. She squeezes it. They stand together, like that, for a moment, and then Isobel unlocks the door and goes inside.
* * *
“You’re running with Isobel now?” Laura tries to make it sound so casual.
Virginia shrugs. She takes off her running clothes. She folds them, neatly, and puts them away. “God,” she says. “It smells in here.” She shoves a few rancid sports bras into her laundry bag.
“I mean—you don’t even like her. Do you?”
Virginia doesn’t even bother to turn around.
“Isobel Zhao,” she says, “is a fine runner. One of the best in the school, in fact. You know, she did the New York marathon when she was fifteen?”
She wraps herself in a towel.
“It’s important,” she says, “to train with people who challenge you.” She pushes past Laura.
“I’m going to take a shower,” she says.
* * *
Virginia and Isobel run every morning after that. Laura watches them.
She watches them meet on Devonshire Quad. She watches Virginia take Isobel’s hands, rubbing them to warm them in the chill preceding dawn. She watches them turn together toward the water, toward the woods, maintaining the same quick and even pace, Virginia never outstripping Isobel for more than a moment. She watches them return, their faces flushed, their heads thrown back in laughter. She watches their bodies touch.
She watches them sit together, at breakfast, in the corner of Keble, leaning forehead to forehead over one of Virginia’s books of political theory; she watches Virginia vanish into Latimer Hall, on weeknight evenings, and not return until the curfew bell.
For weeks, Laura tries, in varying and inutile ways, to bring up the subject as lightly as she can manage, as if it is an ordinary thing that Virginia and Isobel spend all day, every day, together; for weeks, Virginia acts like she’s crazy for noticing.
“I don’t know what you’re so worked up about,” Virginia says. “I’m allowed to have other friends, you know.”
Laura tries to be brave about it. It’s not like Virginia’s wrong, she thinks—after everything she’s been through, maybe it’s good for her to have other friends, friends who have nothing to do with choir. And they were friends before—but when she remembers this she remembers, too, that Isobel was once in love with Virginia, remembers all the vague innuendo she has spent the past year shutting out.
It’s just that when she watches Isobel punch Virginia lightly on the arm; when she watches them sit together, side by side, on Devonshire Quad, Virginia’s hair falling over Isobel’s shoulders, all Laura can think is that there are two kinds of people in the world: people who watched the video and people who didn’t.
