“Lissie... what else?”
“You’re gonna get mad.”
“Why? What’d you do?”
“Nothing. But you’ll think it was terrible.”
“What was it?”
“We poured hot tea all over Hillary Frankel’s bed.”
“You what?” Jamie said.
“See?” Lissie said. “I told you you’d get mad.”
“Poured hot tea...”
“Well, Hillary wasn’t in the bed when we did it.”
“But why’d you...?”
“She’s a creep, Dad. She’s always writing things on our door slate, wrong things, like pretending she’s Jenny and writing that I should meet her in the library after eight, or sometimes using boys’ names and leaving a dorm number we should call, like that. And whenever we have the extreme unction sign out...”
“The what?”
“The extreme unction sign. That’s if we’re studying, we tack this little red sign to the door, and it means you’re not supposed to knock or anything under penalty of extreme unction. But she always knocks anyway, she’s a terrifying creep, believe me.”
“So you poured tea in her bed.”
“Yeah, hot tea,” Lissie said, and grinned.
He was tempted to grin with her. Instead, he kept a stern look on his face, and said, “When was this?”
“Just after the Thanksgiving long weekend.”
“Was that the end of the episode?”
“Well, no, not exactly.”
“How, exactly, did it end?”
“We told all the kids on the dorm that Hillary was a marine — you know, a bed-wetter. We told them the tea stains were piss.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So naturally, Hillary figured it was us who’d done it.”
“Naturally.”
“And she went to the house mother, and she gave us a little talk.”
“Was that the only incident?”
“Well, no.”
“What were the other incidents?”
“One other incident.”
“What was it, Lissie?”
“Well... remember when we had that light snow last month?”
“Yes?”
“Well, what we did, me and Jenny, we went on a sort of panty raid, taking panties from all the rooms on our floor, and then carrying them over to Baxter House — that’s on the boys’ side — and arranging them in the snow so they, you know, spelled out a word.”
“Don’t tell me what the word was,” Jamie said.
“Yeah, that was the word.”
“Are we thinking of the same word?”
“If you’re thinking of ‘fuck,’ that’s the word,” Lissie said.
“I didn’t realize that word was in your vocabulary.”
“Oh, come on, Dad.”
“I’m serious. When did you start using words like...?”
“Dad, all the kids say fuck.”
“Please lower your voice, Lissie.”
“Well, they do. In fact, ‘fuck, shit, piss, cunt’ is the favorite dormitory expletive.”
“Expletive, huh?”
“Yeah,” Lissie said, and grinned. “Cool word, huh?”
“Cooler than the others, that’s for sure.”
“Yeah, well, mmm.”
“So what happened?”
“After we put out the panties? Well, all the panties had name tags in them, we have to sew name tags in all our clothes so when we send them to the laundry—”
“Get to it, Liss.”
“Well, the boys in Baxter House considered it a sort of... invitation, I guess. They kept the phone ringing off the hook all afternoon, asking for the girls whose names were in the panties.” Lissie shrugged. “That’s all.”
“And did this lead to another little talk with the house mother?”
“A bigger talk this time. Mrs. Frawley and all the prefects. Because me and Jenny were the only two girls who didn’t get phone calls that afternoon — we hadn’t put out our own panties, naturally — so all the other girls in the dorm figured we were the ones who did it.”
“Elementary,” Jamie said.
“Yeah, we should’ve thought of that.” Lissie hesitated. She lifted her coffee cup to her lips, took a sip, and then said, “So what do you think?”
“I think I’d better talk to Mr. Holtzer,” Jamie said.
His talk with Holtzer had no effect on the sentence the headmaster had meted. For whereas Jamie argued that both incidents might be considered normal preparatory school pranks, especially prevalent during the long winter months, Holtzer maintained that the smoking of marijuana could hardly be considered a preparatory school prank (“But she wasn’t smoking mari—”) and neither did he consider the antisocial activities of Melissa and her roommate the sort of community-oriented behavior the Henderson School expected from its students, and especially its graduating seniors. Like a Philadelphia lawyer begging leniency for a client in a heinous ax-murder case, Jamie argued that the punishment did not fit the crime and that the hardship it entailed—
“It will not be a tremendous hardship,” Holtzer said.
“My wife and I both work hard during the week, Mr. Holtzer. I’m a photographer, as you may know, and my assignments—”
“Yes, I’m familiar with your work,” Holtzer said.
“Thank you,” Jamie said, although he wasn’t sure he’d been complimented. “The point is that my assignments frequently require working at night, which would mean that we’d have to visit Lissie only on weekends. My wife works with handicapped children three days a week, teaching speech, and by the weekend she’s as exhausted as I am. We live in a small town, our weekends are precious to us; they’re the only time we have to see our friends, to socialize, to take part in community activities that—”
“I don’t see what your weekends have to do with Melissa’s.”
“I’m suggesting that were she allowed to come home as usual on her nonacademic weekends, we could all pursue a more normal—”
“But that’s quite impossible, don’t you see?” Holtzer said.
“I’m suggesting that your punishment, though intended for Lissie alone, is including her parents as well.”
“Mr. Croft,” Holtzer said, “we have students here who come from places as far away as Hawaii. They never get to see their parents except during school recesses. The disciplinary action we’re taking against Melissa might, in fact, prove more salutary were you to plan on limiting your visits to her during the month of restriction to campus. She might otherwise consider this a lark rather than the very serious matter it in reality is.”
“I can’t agree with you that it’s quite as serious as you consider it,” Jamie said tightly.
“I’m sorry,” Holtzer said, “but neither is it you who are responsible for the welfare of the eight hundred and thirty-seven students here at Henderson. Your daughter among them, I might add.”
“Thank you then,” Jamie said, and rose.
“Thank you for stopping by,” Holtzer said.
On the first weekend of what Lissie termed her “solitary confinement,” both Jamie and Connie drove up to Shottsville on Friday night, ate dinner with her in the girls’ dining room, attended a student production of I Remember Mama in the new Merrill Greenleaf Arts Center (toward the construction of which Bobby Brecht’s father had contributed five thousand bucks, only to be rewarded with his son’s expulsion) and then went back to the town’s only hotel, where they watched Johnny Carson till midnight. Jamie said he wanted to make love. Connie told him she’d left her diaphragm at home, and this was a bad time of the month. On Saturday, they watched an ice hockey game between Henderson and Choate (Henderson lost) and then ate dinner again in the girls’ dining room, during which second meal on campus Jamie began to appreciate Lissie’s constant complaints about the “swill” the students were expected to eat. From the hotel room that night, he called the headmaster at home, apologized for breaking in on his privacy this way, and asked if it might not be possible for him and his wife to take Lissie out to lunch tomorrow.