And everyone was so damn terminally sweet, you could scream. New girls each have an older girl—she’s called your “shadow”—to go around with you for a while and help you get used to the way things are done at Sherborne. My shadow was named Barbara, and even now, writing this, I wish I could think of one single nice thing I ever did for her or said to her. The best I can come up with is that I hardly talked at all while she was showing me where my form room would be—like a homeroom at Gaynor—and introducing me to my teachers, and to everyone in the house I was assigned to. She and all of them kept telling me that my being a day girl didn’t matter, that I was still going to be a real part of the house, fully involved in all the social activities, always invited to stay for dinner after classes—only I’d miss the bus, and Sally would have to come and get me—never a moment of feeling like an outsider. They meant it, too. I always knew they meant it.
And if I was a sulky, silent mess in school, I was worse at home. I dragged my feet, helped out exactly as much as I absolutely had to, and bitched every waking moment, when I wasn’t brooding and moping. I really try not to remember things I said to people in those days—to Evan especially—because they make me cringe in my skin. I was sort of halfway decent to Julian, because somehow he wouldn’t let me be any other way, but to everyone else… no, that’s enough about that. I said I wouldn’t lie in my own book, and I’m not lying, but that’s enough.
No, there’s one thing that I do like to remember, something that happened just before Christmas. That was an even edgier time than usual, with Sally and me being Jewish, the boys being used to trees and stockings and carols, and Evan being really nervous. Of course I let them all know that I didn’t want anything to do with killing a tree for Jesus, and I made a thing out of stomping off to find the menorah Grandma Paula’d given to Sally before we left. Julian tagged along with me. I’d given up telling him not to by then.
Actually, he was the one who dug out the menorah, down at the bottom of a box in the second-floor room where Sally stashed all the stuff she was planning to deal with on the very first weekend after hell froze over. It’s at least a hundred years old, and it’s silver, though you couldn’t have told that at first sight, tarnished and scratched as it was. But I showed Julian the silversmith’s mark on the base, and told him how my great-grandparents used to hide the menorah in the barn when the soldiers came through town. “In the cow’s stall,” I said, “under half a ton of cowshit. Even the Cossacks weren’t about to rummage through that.” Julian loved it. Two of the candleholders were bent to the side, and I said that was because the cow had stepped on them. I don’t know if that’s true or not.
Julian wanted to know how the menorah worked, so I sent him downstairs to get some candles while I tried to polish it up a bit. We had all kinds of candles all over the place back then, because of the power failing every ten minutes. The ones Julian got back with didn’t quite fit, but I made them fit, and I told him about Chanukah—about the Syrians and the Maccabees, and the one last little cup of consecrated oil for the new temple altar in Jerusalem burning miraculously for eight days, until somebody finally showed up with fresh oil. It’s a good story, and while I was telling it, I almost forgot that I was pissed at everyone in the world.
When Julian asked me if Jews had Chanukah carols, I went completely blank for a moment—Sally and I weren’t exactly the most observant family on the West Side—and then I remembered the blessing that you chant when you’re lighting the candles. That one I know, because Grandma Paula taught me, and I sang it for Julian.
Julian’s always been quick with songs. He had this one in no time, his Hebrew pronunciation no worse than mine, and we sang it together while I lighted the lead candle, the shammes, and then lighted the first-night candle from it, just to show him how it was done. So there we were, Julian and me, kneeling on the floor in that cold, cobwebby room, the walls lined halfway around with Sally’s boxes, and with tattered old trunks and valises from some other Sally, who always meant to get around to going through them, one day soon. There we were, the two of us, chanting our heads off, praising a God neither one of us believed in for commanding us to light the Chanukah candles. You have to see us, it’s important.
Because that was when I smelled vanilla.
Eight
Meena, if you’re the least bit cool you’ll skip this part. I’m going to have to pretend you’ll mind me, because otherwise I’m never going to be able to write it. Okay?
Okay. In the spring, the girl who’d sat next to me in Lower Third form room dropped out because her father got a job in Namibia or somewhere, and Meena Chari moved down a row. We hadn’t spoken two words to each other that whole first term, even on the bus. Not because she was Indian or anything, but because she was so pretty. I don’t mean knock-down, drop-dead, movie-star gorgeous, like Stacy Altieri back home—Meena doesn’t look like that at all. But she’s got this incredibly smooth brown skin, which wouldn’t know a zit from a jelly bean, and big dark eyes like pansies, even behind her glasses. And even in that school uniform, Meena’s always really wearing some elegant sari—you can tell by the way she moves. You had just better not be reading this, Meena!
I don’t go around with girls who look like Meena, that’s one decision I made early on. A lot of girls do—at Gaynor, people like Tracy and Vanessa had their own little packs of groupies, all hoping it would rub off on them somehow, or that boys would try to get to the pretty ones through them. Which happened, I’m not saying it didn’t work, but I couldn’t. I just hung with Jake and Marta and was glad I had them.
But Meena. What are you going to do with someone like Meena, who doesn’t know the rules about things, who doesn’t act pretty? I know, right—when you look the way Meena looks, you can afford not to care, but she really doesn’t. Girls mostly think she’s conceited, and boys are mostly afraid of her, because she gets perfect marks and she’s going to be a doctor, like her grandfather. She’s as cool and neat as I’m hot-tempered and sloppy, and it was a long time before I could start to believe that she actually wanted to be friends with me. Nothing to do with modesty—I just understand the rules.
We’ve talked about it a couple of times. The first time, she took forever to get what I was asking. She kept saying, “Why shouldn’t we be friends, tell me that? We like the same books, the same kind of music, we laugh the same—we have so much in common, you might as well have been born in Madras, or I in New York.” Meena talks like that. Her mother and father have Indian accents, but with Meena it’s not the way her English sounds, but the way she uses it. Same thing as the uniform—you see one thing, or you hear one thing, but you feel something else. And Meena doesn’t even think about it.