The Eliot Girls by Krista Bridge

tell.”
    â€œThat’s impossible!” Ruth’s long hair was still wet from the shower, and she was combing it with her fingers to work out the tangles. She wore a plain white T-shirt and the faded Levi’s she claimed to have bought in 1985, and around her neck was the necklace she always wore, a sapphire necklace from her mother, the most ornate thing she owned and the only jewellery she ever wore aside from her slim platinum wedding band. 
    Audrey’s disquiet shifted into a clearer shape. Like most little girls, she had always wanted to look like her mother. Lately, though, an unsettling awareness had begun to encircle this once-innocent desire. The sight of Ruth that morning in the quad had roused it. Now she was hit again. Ruth and Audrey had never much felt the imbalance of being adult and child—their relationship had always been one of conscientious equality—but Audrey was starting to perceive another force sabotaging their fragile parity. She was unable to ignore the hierarchy that attended the presence of beauty. How could they continue to talk openly when one was a beautiful woman and the other was, clearly, not on her way to becoming beautiful? And when each of them was so aware of this difference?
    Ruth leaned forward brightly, waiting for the confidence she had always considered her due. But Audrey couldn’t bring herself to divulge the dispiriting particulars of her day. Certainly, she longed for the catharsis that might come from confessing everything, from her vast disappointment to her fear of failure—her certainty of failure—but when she studied Ruth’s face, it no longer seemed a face that welcomed confession, too much did it want for her what seemed out of reach. Confronted by Ruth’s curiosity, Audrey felt a fresh rush of the burden of being the only child. People didn’t realize, when they lamented the lot of such a child, that the main difficulty wasn’t the lack of a sibling; it was the exposure. In the flurry of a bigger family, there would be countless places to conceal one’s failures. Here, there was always Ruth, wanting too much.
    Ruth rose from the window seat and got into bed next to Audrey, curling up her legs under the duvet. “Come on. It can’t have been that bad.”
    There was no easy way of explaining how bad it had been. The truth was that nothing much had happened at all, and in that nothingness lay a bleakness impossible to evoke. In the days leading up to school, Audrey had imagined so many scenarios of failure that she had grown accustomed to waking in the morning under a cloud of ill-defined alarm. But she was learning now that disaster wasn’t necessarily acute and conclusive. It didn’t have to be a fall over a cliff. It could stretch over a long and twisty scenic road, with a landscape of unexpected hills and turnoffs, but a desert’s interminability.
    Audrey knew that her despair was out of all proportion. It was just one day. It need not represent all the ones that would follow. But for so long she had believed that Eliot would launch her real life. How could she square herself to the lunacy of her prodigious expectations? She had longed for nothing short of a baptism.
    Never had she understood how hostile indifference could feel. Except for Seeta Prasad and the laughing girls in the bathroom, no one had talked to her. From assembly in the morning, through lunchtime, to that final bell: not a word. At her old school, she’d had friends to eat with and sit next to in class, a small cluster of girls inside which she was sheltered from the hurtling noise in the hallways. How she now regretted the meagre investment she’d made in those friendships, so certain had she been that a more dynamic life lay ahead of her at Eliot. Stripped of that social buffer, she was astounded by how everything could get at her. The laughter was almost unbearable. It hadn’t been directed towards her