The Broken Girls(20)
But Katie’s attention was drifting. In the back corner, Alison Garner and Sherri Koustapos were arguing at their table, their heads lowered. Sherri had an angry snarl on her lip. Katie watched them warily. She seemed to have a radar for trouble, as if she could detect it from any quarter.
CeCe tried to distract her. “Hey, there’s Roberta.”
Roberta was crossing the room, carrying her wooden tray with her dinner on it. She sat at a table with her field hockey team, the girls jostling and giggling while Roberta was quiet. CeCe looked down at her plate and realized she’d already eaten everything on it, so she put down her knife and fork.
“Do you ever wonder,” Katie said, “why Roberta is here? Her grades are good, and she’s an athlete. She doesn’t seem to belong.”
“Oh, that’s easy,” CeCe said without thinking. “Her uncle came home from the war and tried to kill himself. Roberta walked in on him doing it, so they sent her away.”
“What?” Katie stared at CeCe, and CeCe realized she’d scored an even bigger point than she had with Lady Chatterley’s Lover. “How do you know that?”
“Susan Brady isn’t just the dorm monitor, you know,” CeCe told her. “She knows everything. She heard Miss Maxwell telling Mrs. Peabody about it, and then she told me.”
Katie seemed to process this. “That doesn’t make any sense. If the uncle is crazy, why was Roberta the one who was sent away?”
“Maybe she saw blood,” CeCe said. “Maybe she had a nervous breakdown or something. If I saw something like that, I’d want to get as far away as possible.”
It was a fair point. They looked at Roberta, who was eating her dinner in silence, her face pale. “Keep your head down,” Katie warned after a minute. “Here comes Lady Loon.”
The argument at the back table had escalated, and Sherri Koustapos had jumped up, shoving the bench with the backs of her knees. Alison was still sitting, eating her creamed corn, but her face was red with silent fury. CeCe had felt Alison’s wrath only once, in her first month at Idlewild—Alison had called her a “fat cow” and hit her with one of the broken badminton rackets from the locker storage room—and she never wanted to feel it again. Alison hated everyone, and when she hit, she hit hard.
Striding across the room, heading for the commotion, was Miss London, the teacher everyone knew as Lady Loon. Her dirty blond hair was frizzing loose from its topknot, and the armpits of her flowered polyester dress were damp. She was in her twenties, Idlewild’s youngest teacher, and after only six months of teaching here she was still woefully unprepared. The girls’ moods drove her crazy, their dramas riled her up, and their lack of discipline always enraged her. With over a hundred teenage girls, most of them unsalvageable, riding her nerves every day, she spent most of her time in a crazy rage that would have been funny if it didn’t have an echo of hopelessness about it.
“Ladies!” CeCe heard her say over the din of the fighting rabble of girls. “Ladies. Sit down!”
The girls didn’t notice. With a gasp, CeCe watched Sherri lean over and spit on Alison’s plate. Alison barely paused before she jumped off her bench and hit as hard as she could, her heavy, waxy fist making contact with Sherri’s nose with an audible crack.
The other teachers, who had stood milling at the edge of the room, reluctantly began to move, muttering. Lady Loon—it was her habit of calling the girls ladies that gave her the title—wrenched Alison by the arm and dragged her from the table. The din was deafening. Girls were shouting, Sherri was screaming and bleeding, and the teachers were moving in as a group. CeCe couldn’t hear her voice, but she could see Lady Loon’s lipsticked mouth forming the words: Calm down, ladies! Calm down! She watched as blood dripped between Sherri’s fingers and spattered on the floor, and she inched a little closer to Katie. “I hate blood,” she said.
She followed Katie’s gaze, which had left the melee and focused on something else. Sonia was standing in front of one of the large windows, behind a knot of excited girls. The French girl was still, her face pale. How had CeCe never noticed how small she was? Sonia always seemed so strong, like a blade, narrow but impossible to break. Yet she was shorter than all the American girls around her, and when one of them bumped past her to get a better view, Sonia was knocked almost off-balance, like a rag doll.
But it was her face that made CeCe sit up in alarm. Sonia’s expression was empty, as blank as a piece of notepaper, her lips slack. Her usual look of quick, quiet intelligence, as if she was thinking fascinating things without saying them, had vanished. Her hands dangled at her sides. Her eyes, which were normally observant and a little wry, were open and seeing—they must have been seeing—but they contained nothing at all.
Lady Loon was restraining Alison, who was kicking and screaming now. Sherri had sagged to her knees, and one of her friends had fainted. The teachers had descended on the group, tugging at Sherri, trying to clear space around the fainted girl. Mrs. Peabody held Alison’s other arm, and CeCe could hear her booming voice. “It’s Special Detention for you, my girl. Do you hear? Get moving. Move!”
CeCe looked back at Sonia. She was watching, watching. Her skin had gone gray.
From the other corner of the room, CeCe saw Roberta get up from her table and try to make her way across the room toward Sonia, her face tight with fear.