The Eliot Girls by Krista Bridge Page A

yet, not that she knew, but the sound of it, the suddenness, knocked the air right out of her. In moments, she had felt she might go crazy as it closed in, engulfing her without including her, the dissonant frenzy of it.
    â€œI can’t explain,” she said.
    â€œWhat’s to explain?” Ruth asked. “Just tell me what happened.”
    Audrey let her eyes go in and out of focus on the page of Oedipus rex . “No one talked to me,” she said at last.
    â€œNot one person?”
    â€œI guess the other new girl.”
    â€œWell, that’s not no one.”
    â€œYou haven’t seen her.”
    â€œIs she ugly?”
    â€œNo, not exactly. It’s hard to explain.”
    â€œWell, don’t be so picky! You’re making up your mind too quickly. About everything. More people will talk to you. That I can guarantee.”
    The optimism in Ruth’s face only made Audrey feel more glum. She wanted to be happy, to retain her faith in that future whose details were so hazy as to constitute little more than a romantic vapour, but she supposed that she had also always seen her unhappiness as essential, even protective. To exist in a mild state of gloom was to stave off a deeper melancholia. How awful it was to hope for too much.
    â€œArriving in grade ten, I think it’s just…it’s too late for me,” Audrey said.
    Ruth took a handful of Audrey’s hair and shook her head playfully. “Listen to your mother! Kate Gibson didn’t start until grade nine. Would I have sent you to Eliot if it hadn’t been the best thing for you?”
    Audrey stared intently at the diagonals on her duvet, willing the tears away. Over the blanket, Ruth put a hand on Audrey’s knee and looked away, as though reluctant to witness such a moment. “I promise you,” Ruth said. “You’re going to love Eliot so much, you’ll forget you ever felt this way.”
    But for the first time, Audrey’s future was not a pretty delusion, not a utopia peopled according to her brightest thoughts, but rather a reality standing darkly in front of her. And it no longer mattered what Ruth had to say about it.

 
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    Cha p ter Fi ve
    THE FOLLOWING WEEKS AT Eliot unfolded for Audrey in much the same way as the first day. Like a dying watch, she kept falling out of time: lagging imperceptibly, then noticeably. All of a sudden, like a watch reset, she would land back in the present, dazed by the sudden travel, but within minutes she was lagging again, the battery still failing. Normalcy was descending—the perpetual excitement of the girls had softened, the rigours of study asserted themselves—but for Audrey there was little pleasure in the warm tedium of routine. Each day was a locked vault. She could find no way to get inside.
    Life at Eliot demanded a new language. It was this, perhaps, more than anything, that made Audrey certain her exile would be an unchanging condition. Sometimes she could barely understand what was being said around her. This defiant new syntax—built on inside jokes and scornful hyperbole, the unrelenting rhythms of mockery—was so puzzling that she thought it must be no less hard to decipher than Mandarin. Audrey tried to smile good-naturedly as the words flew past her. She hoped to give the impression of a kind of den mother affection, as though her exclusion were a choice she had made, stemming from maturity rather than cluelessness. At the most basic level were the popular words— la toilette for bathroom; danke schön for thank you; “rad,” used ironically, as a throwback to the eighties; “scruff,” invented by the most popular girl in the class, Arabella Quincy, to convey a messy, unattractive feeling.
    Even more mystifying than the vogue words was everything that wasn’t expressed directly, the cryptic outcries and varieties of laughter. Audrey was often certain, when she heard a muffled snicker