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Seeing her makes me think ugly thoughts. Zacharov’s story about Jenny. The words scrawled on the paper. Shards of glass shining at Lila’s feet.
“How could you?” Audrey spits when I get close, like she’s the one with a reason to be angry.
I’m taken aback. “What? You threw a rock—”
“So what? Lila took everything from me. Everything. From the first time she saw me with you, she hated me.” Her neck has gone red and blotchy, like it always does when she’s upset. “And then you’re there, in her room, in the middle of the night like you don’t care if you get caught. How could you do that after what she—what she—”
Tears stream down her cheeks.
“What?” I ask. “What did she do?”
She just shakes her head, incoherent with weeping.
I sigh and sit beside her on the steps. After a moment I put my arm around her shoulders, drawing her shaking body against me. She tucks her head into my neck, and I inhale the familiar floral scent of her shampoo. I know that she’d probably hate me if she knew what I was really like or what I could really do, but she was my girlfriend once. I can’t help caring.
“Hey,” I say softly, meaninglessly. “It’s okay. Whatever it is.”
“No, it’s not,” Audrey says. “I hate her. I hate her! I wish the rock smashed her face in.”
“You don’t mean that,” I say.
“She got Greg suspended, and then his parents wouldn’t let him come home.” She gives a wet gasp. “They saw those stupid pictures your friends took. He had to beg for his mother to—to even listen through the door.” She’s crying so hard that her breaths are more like big hiccupping gulps of air. She fights to get words out between sobs. “So they finally took him to get tested. And when they found out he wasn’t a worker, they decided to enroll him at Southwick Academy.”
Audrey stops trying to talk at that point. It’s as though she’s possessed by grief, as if something other than herself has hold of her body.
Southwick Academy is famously anti-worker. It’s in Florida, close to the Georgia border, and requires all student applications to come with a copy of their hyperbathygammic test. A test with clear negative results. If the student is accepted, then he or she is retested by the on-staff physician.
Sending Greg to Southwick means that his reputation, and presumably the reputation of his parents, is saved. I’d feel bad, if I didn’t think he’d enjoy being at a school where everyone feels the way he does about workers.
“We’ll all be out of high school in less than a year,” I say. “You’ll see him again.”
After a few moments Audrey pulls away and looks up at me with red-rimmed eyes. Then she shakes her head. “He told me about Lila before he left. How he cheated on me. That she worked him to make him want—”
“That’s not true,” I say.
She takes a long, shuddering breath. Then she wipes her cheeks with her kelly green gloves. “That just makes it worse. That you want her and he wants her and no one was forced and she’s not even nice.”
“Greg’s not nice,” I say.
“He was,” she says. “To me. When we were alone. But I guess it didn’t mean anything. Lila made it not mean anything.”
I get up. “No, she didn’t. Look, I get why you’re pissed. I even get why you smashed her window, but this has to stop. No more rocks. No more slurs.”
“She cheated on you, too,” Audrey says.
I just shake my head.
“Fine,” she says, standing and dusting off her skirt. “If you don’t tell anyone what I did, I won’t say that you were in her room.”
“And you’ll leave Lila alone?”
“I’ll keep your secret. This time. I’m not promising anything else.” Audrey stalks down the steps and across the quad without looking back once.
My shirt is still wet with her tears.
* * *
Classes go about as well as usual. Lately, I can’t seem to get it together. Emma Bovary and her basket of apricots blur together with information asymmetries and incomplete markets. I close my eyes in one class and when I open them, I’m in another.
