Scandalous

Chapter 4

Shae heard Claire before she saw her.

That was always how it went. Claire Monroe operated at a frequency that most people needed a moment to adjust to — loud in the way that certain people are loud without being aware of it, her laugh arriving before she did, her energy preceding her like a weather system. Shae had known her for two years and had never once succeeded in being already in the right headspace when Claire appeared.

She came through the side gate thirty seconds behind Shae, curly hair pulling loose from whatever she'd done to it this morning, backpack half-zipped, one earbud in and one out, already talking.

"Okay so I need you to know," Claire said, falling into step beside her as if they had already been walking together for several minutes, "that my cousin from San Diego is absolutely exhausting and I love her and I also need her to go back to San Diego immediately."

"How long is she staying?"

"Through Wednesday. Which is two days too long." She pulled the earbud fully out and shoved it in her pocket. "She talked about her boyfriend for four hours on Saturday. Four. I timed it."

"Did you actually time it."

"On my phone. I have the screenshot." Claire looked at her sideways. "How was your weekend? Wait — did you finish the essay?"

"Saturday night."

Claire stopped walking for half a second. "Saturday night?"

"It wasn't that hard."

"Shae." Claire resumed walking, shaking her head with the expression of someone who has accepted that their best friend is a different species and has made peace with it. "Normal people have not even thought about that essay yet."

"It's due Thursday."

"That's my point. Thursday. Which is not Saturday." She gestured broadly at nothing. "You need a hobby that isn't books."

"Books are a hobby."

"Books are a personality. There's a difference." But she was grinning, and Shae's mouth pulled at the corner in the way it did around Claire — not quite a smile, but something adjacent to one, something warmer than her default. Claire was the only person who could reliably produce that effect and they both knew it.

They pushed through the main entrance into the school's wide central corridor, the morning noise rising around them — locker doors, sneakers on polished floors, the particular chaos of three hundred students funneling toward first period. Shae adjusted the strap of her bag and moved along the right side of the hallway, close to the lockers, her preferred route — less exposure, fewer people to navigate around.

They had made it approximately forty feet before the corridor ahead shifted.

Not visibly. Not in any way that would have been obvious to someone who hadn't learned to read it. But Shae felt it the way she always felt it — a slight change in the social weather, a cooling, the specific quality of attention that meant a particular group of people had noticed her and were deciding what to do about it.

She kept walking.

They were standing in the center of the hallway the way they always stood — deliberately, occupying the space with the comfortable ease of people who had never once been told to move and had therefore never considered it. Four of them, arranged with unconscious hierarchy. Three orbiting one.

The one was Sloane Hartley.

Sloane was the kind of girl that a certain type of expensive private school seemed to produce reliably — tall, blonde, engineered to photograph well, her Crestwood uniform worn with the practiced precision of someone who understood that compliance could be made to look like a choice. Her hair was the pale gold that came either from genetics or a very good colorist, kept long and straight and always somehow perfect, the way things are perfect when maintaining them is someone's actual priority. She had blue eyes that were cool rather than warm and a mouth that smiled frequently and meant it rarely. She was, by the social mathematics of Crestwood Academy, untouchable — the daughter of a film producer father and a mother who sat on the school's board of trustees, which meant that the usual institutional mechanisms for addressing her behavior had never quite functioned the way they were designed to.

She had decided, at some point during the first week of sophomore year, that Shae Madison was a problem that needed solving. Shae had never been given a satisfying explanation for this. She had eventually stopped looking for one.

Sloane's gaze found her now from twenty feet away with the ease of long practice — that particular, targeting quality, the look of someone selecting something.

"Oh good," Sloane said, loudly enough to be heard over the corridor noise, addressing her orbit without looking away from Shae. "Wednesday Addams made it in."

A ripple of laughter from the three around her.

Shae kept walking. This was the protocol she had developed — not invisible, not confrontational, just moving, just passing through, just refusing to provide whatever it was that made engaging worthwhile.

"Love the boots," Sloane continued, as she drew level. "Very Hot Topic circa two thousand and seven." She said it sweetly, with the tone of a compliment, which was the technique — always sweet enough that plausible deniability was available. She stepped slightly to the side as Shae passed, and her foot moved just enough.

Shae caught herself on the locker. One hand out, palm flat against the metal, the small indignity absorbed and filed away in the place she kept those things, which was somewhere she didn't look at too closely.

Claire made a sound low in her throat. "Are you kidding me—"

"Claire." Shae's voice was quiet and even.

Claire pressed her mouth shut, which cost her something.

Shae straightened up, resettled her bag, and kept walking.

Behind her, she heard Sloane say something to her group in a lower voice, followed by another ripple of laughter. She didn't turn around. She had learned, some time ago, that turning around was the only thing that gave the moment any weight, and she was not prepared to do that.

They were ten feet further down the corridor when she heard Sloane's voice shift — the specific register change of a girl switching from cruelty to performance.

"Oh my God, though," Sloane said, and even without seeing her Shae could hear the expression change, the animation coming into it. "English class. Mr. Kingston."

"He is so—" one of the orbit girls started.

"That accent," another one said. "I'm going to lose my mind."

"I would absolutely let him fail me," said the first one, and all four of them dissolved into the kind of laughter that only works in groups.

"I'm going to get him to notice me today," Sloane announced, with the confidence of a person who has never had difficulty getting noticed and does not expect to start. "Mark my words."

Their voices faded as they turned toward the stairwell.

Claire waited exactly two seconds. Then: "I genuinely cannot stand her."

"I know."

"One day I'm going to say something."

"You're going to make it worse."

"How could it possibly be worse—"

"Claire."

Claire exhaled through her nose, a controlled, deeply dissatisfied sound. She looked at Shae's hand, which had a faint red mark across the palm from the locker. "You okay?"

"Fine," Shae said. And she was, in the way she was always fine — meaning she had absorbed it and moved on and was not going to spend the walk to English class doing anything as useful as feeling something about it.

They climbed the stairs to the second floor.

Room 214 was already half-full when they arrived.

Shae moved to the back left corner without looking at anyone in particular, dropped her bag, and sat. She pulled out The Great Gatsby — already annotated, already read, the weekend's marginalia running up the sides of several pages in her small angular handwriting — and set it on the desk. Claire pulled out her own copy, notably less annotated, and set it beside her with the energy of someone who had read exactly the chapters required and not one sentence more.

The room filled around them. Mr. Kingston arrived at thirty seconds to the bell — not hurried, not performatively calm, just present, the leather bag on the desk, the thermos on the corner, the same quiet readiness as Friday. He stood at the front for a moment while the last students settled, his gaze moving across the room with the unhurried efficiency she'd noticed before. Not assessing for compliance. Just — taking inventory. Knowing his room.

She looked back down at her book.

The bell rang.

"Chapters three and four," Nathan said, without preamble. "You were supposed to read them over the weekend." He let a brief pause sit in the air — the kind of pause that was not a question but functioned as one. "Let's find out how many of you did."

A predictable tension moved through the room. The front-row students sat up slightly. The center rows developed a sudden interest in their copies of the text. The back rows made themselves still in the way that things make themselves still when they are hoping not to be noticed.

"Chapter three opens with one of the most famous party sequences in American literature," Nathan said, moving to stand beside the whiteboard rather than in front of it. "Fitzgerald spends three pages describing a party at Gatsby's mansion before Gatsby himself appears in the scene. Why?"

Silence.

"Anyone who actually read the chapters."

A hand near the front. A girl Nathan had clocked on Friday as reliable. "To show how big his world is? Like, the scale of everything he has?"

"Closer. What else?"

Silence again.

"He's building mystery," Shae said, without raising her hand. She was looking at the page. "Gatsby throws the party but he doesn't participate in it. He watches it. Fitzgerald keeps him apart from everything — physically above the crowd, on his own, looking out at something the reader can't see yet. The party is excess. Gatsby is separate from it. That separation is the point."

Nathan looked at her. "Why is the separation the point?"

She looked up. "Because he's not celebrating. He's waiting."

The room was quiet in a different way than it had been a moment before.

"Yes," Nathan said simply. He turned back to the board. "Gatsby throws parties he doesn't attend for a woman who hasn't arrived. Everything he builds is a signal fire. The excess isn't joy — it's desperation at a very high thread count." He wrote spectacle vs. solitude on the board. "That's the tension Fitzgerald is working with. Keep it in mind."

He turned back to the room. "Chapter four. Gatsby takes Nick to lunch and tells him the story of his life. What's wrong with the story?"

A hand went up in the third row. Sloane Hartley, sitting with the studied ease of someone who had chosen her seat carefully — center of the room, visible from the front, the optimal position for being seen without appearing to try. She had one elbow on the desk and her chin resting on her hand, which angled her face in a way that was either accidental or wasn't.

"He's telling Nick he's the son of wealthy people who all died," she said, with the slight lift of someone delivering an answer they're not entirely confident in. "But like — it's kind of dramatic? The whole thing sounds made up."

"That's correct," Nathan said. "It does sound made up. Because it is. Jordan Baker says as much, later. Why does Fitzgerald have Gatsby construct such an obviously thin lie?"

Sloane blinked. "Because he's... embarrassed about being poor?"

"He's concealing his origins, yes. But the lie he constructs is so extravagant it barely holds up to a single question. A man of Gatsby's supposed intelligence could have built a more convincing story. So why didn't he?"

Sloane opened her mouth. Closed it. She laughed slightly — the recovery laugh, the one that acknowledged the limit of the answer and chose charm over correctness. "I'll be honest, Mr. Kingston, I've never really been great at English." She tilted her head, and the smile she produced was the particular smile she produced when she was certain it would work. "Do you do private tutoring? Like after school? I feel like I could really benefit from some one-on-one time."

The room temperature shifted slightly. A few people near the front went carefully still. Someone in the middle rows made a sound that was almost a laugh and then wasn't.

Nathan's expression did not change. Not even slightly. He looked at Sloane with the same level, unimpressed attention he directed at everything, the blue-green eyes entirely neutral, and he said, "I don't, no." He said it without embarrassment, without amusement, without any of the discomfort she had clearly been counting on producing. "But I'd suggest asking a classmate. There are students in this room who have a strong enough grasp of the material to be genuinely useful to you, if you were to ask them." He held her gaze for one additional, entirely unremarkable second. "I'd recommend doing so before Thursday."

Then he turned back to the board.

Sloane's smile held for exactly as long as it needed to and then dissolved into something more controlled. She looked down at her copy of the book. Her jaw was set in the precise configuration of a person recalibrating.

In the back left corner, Claire leaned two inches toward Shae and made the smallest possible sound — something that was not quite a word but was unmistakably commentary.

Shae did not look up from her book.

But the corner of her mouth moved. Just slightly. Just enough.

The rest of the class moved through the machinery of close reading — The Great Gatsby, chapter by chapter, the color symbolism, the geography, East Egg and West Egg and the valley of ashes between them, the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg watching everything from the billboard like a god who has stopped intervening but hasn't stopped seeing. Nathan moved through it the way he moved through most things — without performance, without filler, with the direct efficiency of a person who found the material genuinely interesting and had no patience for pretending otherwise.

He called on people at random, not cruelly but without warning, the kind of teaching that required presence rather than preparation. Most students managed. A few didn't. He was not unkind about it either way.

He did not call on Shae again, which she had no particular feelings about.

Or she told herself she had no particular feelings about it, which was not quite the same thing.

When the bell rang she gathered her things without hurry, tucked her annotated copy of Gatsby into her bag beside Giovanni's Room, and stood.

"He completely shut her down," Claire said, sotto voce, as they moved toward the door. "Did you see her face?"

"I saw it."

"Icon behavior." Claire glanced toward the front of the room, where Nathan was already looking back at the papers on his desk, apparently having moved on entirely. "He's kind of intense, right? Like. In a way that's not annoying."

Shae didn't say anything.

"That's a yes," Claire said.

"That's a nothing," Shae said. "Let's go."

They went.