Scandalous

Chapter 5

The day had a particular quality to it that Shae could only describe as horizontal.

Not bad, exactly. Not eventful enough to be bad. Just flat — the grey, unremarkable flatness of a day that was happening to her rather than with her, each period sliding into the next with the mild inevitability of a conveyor belt, carrying her forward whether she was paying attention or not.

Second period was AP Chemistry, which she was good at in the same detached way she was good at most things — not because she loved it, but because understanding how something worked was always preferable to not understanding it, and the logic of molecular behavior was at least honest about its rules. The teacher, Mr. Vásquez, had a habit of writing formulas on the board with the enthusiasm of someone who had not noticed that the room had moved on. She took notes in the margins of her notebook and thought about Baldwin.

Third period was AP History, which was more interesting than it had any right to be under Daniel Holt, who had the rare gift of making the movement of power through institutions feel like something that had happened to actual human beings rather than a series of dates. She sat near the window. The jacaranda trees outside had lost more of their leaves overnight. She noticed this and then noticed herself noticing it and looked back at the board.

Fourth period was French, which she spoke well enough to coast through and did.

By the time the lunch bell rang she had been awake for seven hours and had consumed one cup of coffee, one piece of toast, and half an apple, and was now experiencing the specific mid-afternoon deficit of a person who eats breakfast at seven-fifteen and then forgets about it. She filed out of French with the rest of the class and made her way downstairs to the cafeteria with the energy of someone conserving their resources for something she hadn't yet identified.

The Crestwood cafeteria was, like everything at Crestwood, designed to look better than it functioned.

High ceilings, long windows along one wall, round tables arranged with enough space between them to suggest an institution that valued the personal. The food was better than most school cafeterias — there was an actual salad bar, an actual hot entrée option that was occasionally not terrible — but the social geography of the room was exactly what you'd expect: the same invisible zoning that exists in every cafeteria in every school in every country, the precise clustering of people who had sorted themselves into the taxonomy of adolescence and were maintaining their positions with the diligence of border guards.

Shae collected her tray — soup, bread, water, a container of yogurt she probably wouldn't finish — and moved to the back corner table.

It was the table nobody wanted, which was why she had claimed it. Too far from the windows, too close to the kitchen exit, slightly sticky on one side no matter how many times the custodial staff wiped it down. It seated six comfortably. On most days it seated two.

She set her tray down, sat with her back to the wall, and opened Giovanni's Room beside her soup.

The cafeteria filled around her in its usual patterns. She was aware of it the way she was always aware of the room — peripherally, accurately, without particular interest. Sloane's table, center-left, already fully populated, already loud. The athletic contingent near the windows. The various clusters of the comfortable middle. The teachers' table along the far wall, where faculty ate with varying degrees of visible enthusiasm for the arrangement.

She looked, without meaning to, at the teachers' table.

Mr. Kingston was sitting at the far end of it.

He had a coffee — of course he had a coffee, she had never seen him without one — and what appeared to be a sandwich he was eating while reading something, a paperback held open with one hand in the way people hold books when they've been reading their whole lives and have developed the muscle memory for it. He wasn't talking to anyone. The teacher beside him — one of the science faculty, she thought, a woman whose name she didn't know — was engaged in a conversation with someone else, and he appeared to be entirely content with this arrangement, which was to say he appeared not to have noticed it.

He was different from the other teachers. She'd thought so on Friday and she thought so now, watching him from across a cafeteria without technically watching him. The others had a particular quality that she'd been around long enough to recognize — the institutional quality, the residue of a place that had shaped them or that they had shaped themselves to fit. Some of them wore Crestwood the way Crestwood wanted to be worn: with pride, with investment, with the mild self-satisfaction of people who had chosen correctly.

Mr. Kingston wore it the way he wore everything, she suspected — because it was where he was, not because it was what he was. There was a distinction there and she was not sure she could have articulated it to anyone, but it was visible to her the way certain things were visible to her that other people seemed to look at and see nothing.

And he was — she was going to be honest with herself, because she had a long-standing policy of honesty with herself in proportion to how much honesty she permitted herself with other people, which was to say she was extremely honest with herself — he was extraordinarily attractive. Not in an obvious way. Not in the way of people who were attractive and knew it and used it. In the way of people who were attractive and had apparently decided it was not the most interesting thing about them and had moved on accordingly. The dark hair, the jaw, the blue-green eyes that went very still when he was thinking. The way he sat — slightly forward, both forearms on the table, the posture of someone who was engaged with what was in front of them rather than performing relaxation.

She was seventeen — almost eighteen — not blind.

She looked back at her book.

"Okay so I have news—"

Claire dropped into the seat beside her with the momentum of someone who had been carrying news for at least fifteen minutes and had been restrained for the entirety of that time, which was pushing the outer limits of her capacity. Her tray landed. Her bag hit the floor. Her curls were doing something complicated and energetic that matched the rest of her.

Shae closed Giovanni's Room on her finger.

"Tyler Beckham," Claire said, with the gravity of someone delivering a verdict, "smiled at me in the hallway between third and fourth period."

"Okay."

"Not a regular smile, Shae. A specific smile. A smile with intent behind it."

"How do you determine intent from a smile."

"You just know." Claire opened her water bottle and took a long drink, as if the recounting had been physically taxing. "He's been in my history class since September and this is the first time he has voluntarily used his face muscles in my direction and I think this is significant."

"It might be significant," Shae allowed.

"It's significant." Claire stabbed her fork into her salad with conviction. "I'm choosing to treat it as significant." She chewed, looked at Shae's soup, looked at Giovanni's Room. "Did you eat this morning?"

"Toast."

"Shae."

"And an apple."

"Half an apple," Claire said, with the accuracy of someone who had been paying attention to this particular pattern for long enough to know the details. "You had half an apple. I saw you this morning." She pushed her bread roll across the table. "Eat this."

Shae looked at the bread roll. Then at Claire. She picked it up and ate it, which was easier than the alternative.

"Thank you," Claire said, as though she had won something.

She then proceeded to cover, in the approximately twenty-two minutes that remained of the lunch period: Tyler Beckham's general history as a person of interest, the ongoing situation with her cousin from San Diego who had apparently texted three times already this morning, a jacket she had seen on someone in third period that she was determined to find the origin of, and the strong opinion that Crestwood's hot entrée option today — something described on the board as a Mediterranean grain bowl — was neither Mediterranean nor a grain bowl and was at minimum two of three of those things being used incorrectly.

Shae ate her soup and listened and said the things that needed saying and did not look at the teachers' table again.

Or she looked once more. Briefly. He was still reading.

She looked away.

The bell rang.

Gym was fourth from last on a Monday, which meant it occupied the precise position in the school day where the body had been sitting for long enough to resent being asked to move but hadn't yet crossed into the final resignation of the last period. Shae changed in the locker room with the efficient minimalism of someone who had reduced this process to its essential steps: sneakers, black shorts, black t-shirt, hair tied back with the elastic she kept on her wrist. She had no feelings about gym class specifically, only the mild, specific displeasure of a person who preferred her body's movement to be purposeful rather than institutional.

She was pulling the t-shirt over her head, back to the row of lockers, when she heard them.

She recognized the quality of the noise before she registered the individuals — the specific social register of Sloane Hartley's orbit, that particular mixture of performance and solidarity that traveled in a pack. She kept her eyes forward and finished straightening her shirt and reached for her bag.

The shove came from behind, fast and glancing, a shoulder into her back that sent her forward hard into the locker with a flat metallic sound that was louder than the contact warranted.

She caught herself on the door. Hands flat against cold metal, the same as this morning. Same palm, same locker edge, slightly different angle.

She heard Sloane's voice, already fading, not even bothering to stop: "Watch where you're standing, Madison."

A ripple of laughter, retreating toward the exit.

Shae stood with her hands flat against the locker for a moment. Just a moment. She took a breath — slow, even, the breath of a person deciding not to give something the weight it was asking for — and then she picked up her bag and followed the rest of the class outside.

The track ran around the perimeter of Crestwood's eastern grounds — a quarter mile of red all-weather surface that on a clear Pasadena afternoon received more direct sun than was strictly comfortable. The class spread across it in the usual configurations — the runners in the front, the sociable walkers in the middle, the reluctant participants at the back.

Coach Harris, who taught gym with the weary pragmatism of a man two years from retirement and entirely out of illusions about the athletic ambitions of private school juniors, clicked his stopwatch and told the class they had twenty minutes on the track and he expected to see movement.

Shae walked.

She did not jog. She did not make a show of walking slowly or quickly — she simply walked, at her own pace, hands in her pockets, eyes on the middle distance, her sneakers landing with the unhurried rhythm of someone on an early morning path through the woods rather than a high school gym class.

She had made it halfway around the first lap before she heard the whistle.

"Madison." Coach Harris, from the infield, not moving from where he was standing because he had long since decided that moving was optional. "We're running today."

"I'm aware," she said, without breaking stride or raising her voice — she didn't need to, she was close enough. "I'm walking."

He looked at her with the expression of a man who has had this conversation before, with this particular student, and has never yet found a version of it that went the way he intended. "This is a running class."

"The assignment is to complete the track in twenty minutes," she said, still walking, now slightly past him. "I'll complete it in twenty minutes."

A beat.

"At a walk," he said.

"Yes."

He clicked his stopwatch. Then he made the sound — not a sigh exactly, more the controlled exhalation of a man recalibrating — and wrote something on his clipboard.

Shae walked.

The sun was warm on the back of her neck. The track curved around toward the far side where the jacaranda trees edged the fence, and from here she could see the second floor of the East Wing building, the row of south-facing windows. Room 214 was up there somewhere, empty now until tomorrow, the whiteboard probably still carrying whatever Mr. Kingston had written last. The jacaranda trees had dropped more petals onto the path below the fence.

She noticed this, and kept walking, and didn't think about anything in particular.

Or she thought about a lot of things. About the way a room went quiet after someone said something precise. About the difference between wanting to be seen and wanting to be understood and whether those were the same thing or just adjacent.

The track curved back toward the start. She kept her pace.

Ahead of her, near the front of the pack, she could hear Sloane Hartley's group in its usual orbit — the laughter, the names. She didn't listen to the specifics. It was background noise by now, like traffic, like weather. Something that was there and had to be moved through.

She turned her face toward the sun for a moment. Closed her eyes.

Kept walking.