Lock and Key(18)

It wasn’t like it was so shocking, anyway. My sister had made a break for it, gotten over the wall and escaped. It was what we both wanted. Which was why I understood, even appreciated, why she didn’t want to return for a day or even an hour. It wasn’t worth the risk.

There were so many times during those years, though, as we moved from one house to another, that I would find myself thinking about my sister. Usually it was late at night, when I couldn’t sleep, and I’d try to picture her in her dorm room forty-odd miles and a world away. I wondered if she was happy, what it was like out there. And if maybe, just maybe, she ever thought of me.





Chapter Three


“Ruby, welcome. Come join us, there’s a free seat right over here.”

I could feel everyone in the room watching me as I followed the outstretched finger of the teacher, a slight, blonde woman who looked barely out of college, to the end of a long table where there was an empty chair.

According to my new schedule, this was Literature in Practice with an M. Conyers. Back at Jackson, the classes all had basic names: English, Geometry, World History. If you weren’t one of the few golden children, anointed early for the AP-Ivy League fast track, you made your choices with the minimal and usually disinterested help of one of the three guidance counselors allotted for the entire class. Here, though, Mr. Thackray had spent a full hour consulting my transcript, reading descriptions aloud from the thick course catalog, and conferring with me about my interests and goals. Maybe it was for Jamie’s benefit—he was super donor, after all—but somehow, I doubted it. Clearly, they did things differently here.

Once I sat down, I read over my list of classes, separated into neat blocks—Intro to Calculus, Global Cultures and Practices, Drawing: Life and Form—twice, figuring that would give people adequate time to stare at me before moving on to something else. Sure enough, by the time I lifted my head a couple of minutes later to turn my attention to the teacher, a cursory check revealed everyone else was pretty much doing the same.

“As you know,” she was saying, walking over to a table in front of a large dry-erase board and hopping up onto it, “we’ll be doing several assignments over the course of the rest of the year. You’ll have your research project on the novel of your choosing, and we’ll also be reading a series of memoirs and oral histories.”

I took a minute, now that I felt a bit more comfortable, to look around the room. It was large, with three big windows on one side that looked out onto the common green, some new-looking computers in the back of the room, and instead of desks, a series of tables, arranged in three rows. The class itself was small—twelve or fourteen people, tops. To my left, there was a girl with long, strawberry-blonde hair, twisted into one of those effortlessly perfect knots, a pencil sticking through it. She was pretty, in that cheer-leader student-council presidentfuture nuclear physicist kind of way, and sitting with her posture ramrod straight, a Jump Java cup centered on the table in front of her. To my right, there was a huge backpack—about fourteen key chains hanging off of it—that was blocking my view of whoever was on the other side.

Ms. Conyers hopped off her desk and walked around it, pulling out a drawer. With her jeans, simple oxford shirt, and red clogs, she looked about twelve, which I figured had to make it difficult to keep control in her classroom. Then again, this didn’t seem like an especially challenging group. Even the row of guys at the back table—pumped-up jock types, slumped over or leaning back in their chairs—looked more sleepy than rowdy.

“So today,” she said, shutting the desk drawer, “you’re going to begin your own oral history project. Although it isn’t exactly a history, as much as a compilation.”

She started walking down the aisle between the tables, and I saw now she had a small plastic bowl in her hand, which she offered to a heavyset girl with a ponytail. The girl reached in, pulling out a slip of paper, and Ms. Conyers told her to read what was on it out loud. The girl squinted at it. “Advice,” she said.

“Advice,” Ms. Conyers repeated, moving on to the next person, a guy in glasses, holding out the bowl to him. “What is advice?”

No one said anything for a moment, during which time she kept distributing slips of paper, one person at a time. Finally the blonde to my left said, “Wisdom. Given by others.”

“Good, Heather,” Ms. Conyers said to her, holding the bowl out to a skinny girl in a turtleneck. “What’s another definition? ”

Silence. More people had their slips now, and a slight murmur became audible as they began to discuss them. Finally a guy in the back said in a flat voice, “The last thing you want to get from some people.”

“Nice,” Ms. Conyers said. By now, she’d gotten to me, and smiled as I reached into the bowl, grabbing the first slip I touched. I pulled it back, not opening it as she moved past the huge backpack to whoever was on the other side. “What else? ”

“Sometimes,” the girl who’d picked the word said, “you go looking for it when you can’t make a decision on your own.”

“Exactly,” Ms. Conyers said, moving down the row of boys in the back. As she passed one—a guy with shaggy hair who was slumped over his books, his eyes closed—she nudged him, and he jerked to attention, looking around until she pointed at the bowl and he reached in for a slip. “So for instance, if I was going to give Jake here some advice, it would be what?”