“Thank you,” Jack replied, reaching for her hand. He was happy to have made a friend on his first day of school. Since Mrs. Wicksteed’s divorced daughter had also referred to Jack and his mom as rent-free boarders, Jack wondered if Emma’s mom might be divorced. Maybe women in that situation were particularly sympathetic to a good Old Girl like Mrs. Wicksteed taking Jack and Alice under her wing.
“Is your mother divorced?” Jack asked Emma Oastler. Unfortunately, Emma’s mother had been bitterly divorced for several years, and at least one consequence of her divorce had been so spectacularly ugly that she would permanently think of herself as Mrs. Oastler. For Emma, the subject was still as sore as a boil.
In what Jack misinterpreted as a gesture of intimacy and unspoken understanding, Emma squeezed his hand. He was sure she didn’t mean to hurt him, although her grip was as fierce as the handshake of the front-desk clerk at the Hotel Bristol in Oslo. “Are you Norwegian?” he asked her, but Emma was breathing too hard to hear him. Either in her concerted effort to crush his hand or because she was struggling to control her loathing of what a man-hating monster her mother had become in the aftermath of her divorce, Emma’s newly acquired chest was heaving. A tear, which Jack first mistook for a rivulet of sweat, had run down her cheek and now clung to her mustache—like a droplet of dew on new moss. Jack’s misgivings about attending St. Hilda’s momentarily evaporated. What a splendid idea it was to have the grade-six girls serve as guides to the younger children in the junior school!
On the stone stairs leading to the basement entrance, he stumbled, but Emma not only held him up; she hoisted him to her hip and carried him into his first day of school. Jack threw his arms around her in a flood of gratitude and affection; she returned his embrace so ferociously that he feared he might suffocate against her warm throat. They say that apparitions appear to those who are near fainting, which would explain why Jack first mistook The Gray Ghost for an apparition. There was Mrs. McQuat again—just as Emma Oastler was about to break his back or asphyxiate him with her twelve-year-old bosom.
“Let him go, Emma,” The Gray Ghost said. Jack’s shirt was untucked and hung almost to his bare knees, though it didn’t dangle as low as his tie. He was slightly dizzy and gasping for breath. “Help him tuck in his shirt, Emma,” The Gray Ghost said. As soon as she spoke, she was gone—returned to her world of the spirits.
Kneeling, Emma was Jack’s height. His gray Bermuda shorts were not only too short; they were too tight. Emma had to undo the top button and unzip the boy’s fly in order to tuck in his shirt. Under his shorts, her hands cupped and squeezed his buttocks as she whispered in his ear: “Nice tushy, Jack.”
Jack had caught his breath sufficiently to pay her a compliment in kind. “Nice mustache,” he said—thus cementing their friendship for his remaining years at St. Hilda’s, and beyond. Jack thought it must be a good school, as his mom had said, and here—in his first, exciting meeting with Emma Oastler—was probable evidence (at least to Jack) that he would be safe with the girls.
“Oh, Jack,” Emma whispered in his ear—her incredibly soft upper lip brushing his neck. “We’re gonna have such a good time together.”
The arched doorways in the junior-school corridor made Jack Burns think of Heaven. (If there were a passageway to Heaven, Jack used to think, surely it would have arches like that.) And the black-and-gray triangles on the linoleum floors made him feel that school and the grown-up life after it was a game to be played—maybe a game he hadn’t yet been exposed to, but a game nonetheless.
Another game was the miniature, broken-window view of the playground from the second-floor washroom—it was the only boys’ washroom at St. Hilda’s. The frosted-glass windowpanes were small and framed in black-iron squares. One of the panes was broken; it remained unrepaired through Jack’s fourth-grade year. And the low urinals in the boys’ washroom were not quite low enough when he was in kindergarten. He needed to stand on tiptoe and aim high.
There were the infrequent but intimidating appearances in that second-floor hallway of those older girls who were boarders; one could gain access to their residence through the junior school. Only girls in grade seven and up were admitted to residency, and there were no more than one hundred boarders out of the five hundred girls in the middle and senior school. (St. Hilda’s was a city school—most of the students lived at home.)
The older girls who were boarders struck Jack as much older. Their detectable sullenness wasn’t limited to the daughters of diplomats or the other foreign students, nor was their gloom regional in nature—the cousins who were called “the Nova Scotia sluts” were as depressed as the girl from British Columbia whom Emma Oastler called “the B.C. bitch.” The boarders had about them a noticeable air of being banished. The boarders’ choir made the most mournful music in the school.
Sightings of the girls in residency were unusual in the junior school, but once, in his grade-three year, Jack was emerging from the boys’ washroom (still zipping up his fly), when he saw a couple of grade-thirteen girls striding toward him—a flash of nail polish, kneesocks rolled down to their ankles, shapely legs, wide hips, full breasts. Jack panicked. In his haste, his penis got snagged in his zipper. Naturally, he screamed.
“Sweet Jesus, it’s a boy!” one of the big girls said.
“I’ll say it is, and he’s caught his miserable thing in his zipper,” the other replied.
“When do they start playing with their things?” the first girl asked. “Stop screaming!” she said sharply to Jack. “You haven’t cut it off, have you?”
“Let me do that,” the second girl said, kneeling beside Jack. “I have a little brother—I know how to handle this.”
“You have to handle it?” the first girl asked. She knelt beside Jack, too.
“Let me see it—get your hands off the thing!” the girl with the little brother told Jack.
“It hurts!” Jack cried.
“You’ve just pinched some skin—it’s not even bleeding.” The girl was at least seventeen or eighteen—maybe nineteen.
“When does it get big?” the first girl asked.
“It doesn’t feel like getting big when it’s stuck in a zipper, Meredith.”
“It gets big when it feels like it?” Meredith asked.
The grade-thirteen girl held Jack’s penis in her hand; with the thumb and index finger of her other hand, she gently tugged at his zipper.
“Ow!”
“Well, what do you want me to do?” the girl who’d come to his assistance asked. “Wait for you to grow up?”
“You’ve got lady-killer eyelashes,” Meredith told Jack. “When you’re old enough, you’re going to get your penis stuck in all kinds of places.”
“Ow!”
“Now it’s bleeding,” the second girl said. Jack was unstuck, but she went on holding his penis in her hand.
“What are you doing, Amanda?” Meredith asked.
“Just watch,” Amanda said. She didn’t mean for Jack to watch. Without looking, he could feel his penis getting big—or at least a little bigger.
“What’s your name?” Meredith asked him.
“Jack.”
“Feeling better, eh, Jack?” Amanda asked.