Persephone was filled with a sense of wonder, and she reached out with both hands to take hold of the pretty plaything. And the earth, full of roads leading every which way, opened up under her. —Homer, Hymn to Demeter, translation by Alan Nagy
This story begins on the afternoon Emmy fell through the library ceiling. The sound of her body cleaving through the aching plaster announced the coming of spring. It had been cold for so long we had forgotten the smell of grass, only knew the mossy stench of each other. Months had passed since the cherry blossoms lining the schoolyard had bloomed, their pink flowers bulging like pimples. Winter had cracked the skin on our knuckles, thinned the meat of our fingers so that our rings threatened to fall off at any moment. Our lips were dry and unkissable; we had an embarrassing amount of split ends.
When Emmy fell, she fell hard.
Spring usually came to us gradually. First in ponds of melted snow that left the ground feeling like springboards, then the first dismissal where the sun parted its lips just above the peak of the Atrium, finally, a day warm enough that the middle schoolers—who still had to wear uniforms—came to school in their pleated yellow skirts. After Emmy fell, spring appeared in one long sob.
None of us were in the library when it happened. We were answering the last of math questions, or pulling up our hair for gym. We were on the phone with The Moms. They asked us what we had eaten for lunch. We had just left the Dining Hall, crossed into the Atrium. It wasn’t loud but it also wasn’t quiet. The Atrium tables, the most desirable location in the entire school, were empty, save for the one belonging to the Atrium Girls. They checked their phones; laughed about something. We hoped it wasn’t about us.
Teachers sat huddled around lunch tables. Sometimes they sat by subject, but when they didn’t we had no idea what they talked about. That day the English teachers sat together. Someone said something underneath their breath, and Mr. Vance, the eleventh-grade English teacher, with a massive whale on his right forearm (an ode to his favorite text) let out a laugh that sounded like a finger running across a brass railing.
In Old Building East, Godley, Dean of Students, was rigging her hair to the nape of her neck. It was the fifth time that day she had stopped to fix her chignon. She bit down on the bobby pins between her lips, dug one after the next into the base of her skull. The chignon had become her signature after she had realized that it lent her the authority lacking from her unlined face. It gave her an air of seriousness. A chignon lacked the severity of a French braid, but wasn’t as juvenile as a bun.
The librarian had finished lunch early and returned to work. She wasn’t doing much. She was newer than the other teachers, a recent transplant from Brooklyn; she had been friends with Mr. Vance in college, had been with him when he got his tattoo, had cringed internally at his insistence on the whale, despite her suggestions that he consider a less fraught text—why not Dickens? He loved Dickens!—but supported him nonetheless.
The librarian affixed one eye to her computer screen, the other on a student who sat picking at her nail beds. She liked to keep an eye on the students who spent their lunchtime in the library. She had been watching this student all week, examining the veins in her neck, how they struggled to hold her head up.
Bulimia, the librarian assumed, but changed her mind when a few days ago, the girl had meekly flashed her a smile full of orthodontized teeth. The librarian had once promised herself that she would be the kind of teacher that provided love—small, appropriate bites of it. She heard other teachers call the school a pressure cooker, the parents total psychos; she would do what she could to help the girls understand that a life existed beyond, beautiful and horrible, but it would be theirs.
She was surprised that she liked high school when she wasn’t in it. She wasn’t scared of the Atrium Girls; she didn’t worry if anyone thought her loafers were weird.
It felt good to walk down the halls with the distance afforded to her as an adult woman. It wasn’t that she didn’t feel like she had as a teenager, but just that the feelings appeared more muted, manageable. She had once worried that the taming of her feelings would usher in a decline in senses. But her senses had become sharper; she began making her way towards the student.
When she heard the crash, the librarian imagined, if only for a second, the summertime sound of the high dive, the bare skin slap of belly flops sending O’s across the pool’s surface. Those of us further away, in the Dining Hall or on the other side of the Old Building East, thought at first that the snow piling all winter had finally softened the roof like putty, collapsing it, erasing the barrier between us and the inhospitable outdoors. But later, those in the library, some who claimed to be sitting not too far from the librarian and the girl she had been approaching, said they could hear the distinct crunch of a body, followed by the soft yowl of a teenage girl.
We, who had been mid-sentence, stopped. The words in our mouths gathered beneath our tongues. We looked at each other, unblinking. We pressed our fingers to our lips. We swiveled our heads like owls, attempting to study the teachers’ reaction. But upon seeing the mirror of our own confused expressions, the words beneath our tongues awoke, started moving across our gums and then up to our lips and then, suddenly, all at once, we were screaming, screaming and running down the hallway, across the carpeted floors and towards the library.
Uniforms were for primary and middle school. In upper school, Godley said, you are adults now, and instead gave us a dress code. No blue jeans, no straps thinner than three fingers, no shirts with words—no LOVE, no GIRL POWER—no skirts above the knee, no shirts baring midriff, no pants below the hip bone, no sweatshirts with their hoods up, no pants with holes or frays. No pajama pants. No sweatpants. And certainly no yoga pants. It makes your male teachers uncomfortable when you wear yoga pants.
But Godley was only so powerful. We had lawyers for parents. When we ran down the hall to locate the cause of the crash, our legs were clad in pink jeans, green jeans, every color except for blue jeans. It could have been a rave.
It was one o’clock on a Thursday.
Those who witnessed the fall insisted that Emmy seemed fine. She stood up and dusted the cracked plaster off her shirt like cat hair. She had lost a shoe. She requested the help of the librarian in locating her shoe. The librarian seemed dazed, as if her mind was elsewhere, and it took several moments before she finally cleared her throat, looked down at Emmy and asked, Where did you come from?
*
The insignia carved into the front entrance of Old Building East read 1876. At the start, we were Brooks School for Ladies. Headmaster Bryce told the origin story each Thanksgiving; he spoke like he was leading a sermon. He spoke of mythological women, constrained in corsets, demanding education. Brooks School for Ladies had been around for ten years when the first headmistress bought it, renamed it after herself: Miss Anne H. Hathaway Brown’s School for Girls. The name changed with each new wave of feminism. To us, it was the Hath.
Many of us grew up here. We treated it less like a school and more like a house. There were girls who started attending the Hath at the age of four: we called them lifers and shared whispers that they were the dumb—they had gotten in without an entrance exam. We had been together for long enough to know who was stupid, who was smart. Those were the options.
In primary school, we assumed it was our home. We made up stories: the Moms had left us. We lived here together, held barbecues and spent hot afternoons with the sprinklers on. We used the decaying fountain as our swimming pool; we refilled the defunct stables with horses, dappled gray and brown, spent cool spring afternoons galloping down the sidewalks. We grew fruits in the greenhouse; we dismissed all the babies in the daycare and used the extra room as closet space. Each night, we took turns taking baths in the chipped clawfoot tub in the fourth-grade bathroom.
By upper school we walked barefoot and changed in the hallways, we swore and farted out loud. When we didn’t want to do work, we hid beneath classroom tables. Once, Annie spent an entire English class underneath the table, tickling people’s ankles. She almost made it through the entire class unnoticed by the teacher until one girl looked down and screamed.
The ceilings were older than our grandmothers, who were as old as we understood time could be. And not only were the ceilings old, but so were the walls, and the murmuring fans that swung carelessly in the summertime, so that we knew, in some classrooms, never to sit beneath one unless we were interested in a very gruesome, premature death. We knew it like we knew that no one could sit at the Atrium Tables except for the Atrium Girls, although Godley had made several announcements declaring otherwise. No one owns any place in this school, she said, which was both right and very, very wrong.
The Atrium Girls did in fact own the Atrium Tables. They owned it with their eyes, with their withering gazes, with the simple fact that their existence as an entity was borne from this ownership, and we know that fucking with that would bring about a fate worse than being fileted by a ceiling fan. Plus, sitting at the Atrium tables wouldn’t actually change anything: the Atrium Girls would always be the Atrium Girls. Even when school was out and summer laid out bare and long, we liked their photos, we studied their wall posts, we gossiped amongst each other on the bits and pieces we could reconstruct from what they shared online. So when Godley said, No one owns any place in this school, she forgot that you could own someone’s attention, that in fact this was the most powerful thing to possess: another person’s interest.
In the years leading up to Emmy’s crash, she didn’t pique our interest. We just knew her face. We recognized it close-eyed on the swing set and lips curled elbowing her way through the lunchroom. We knew it in slanted sunlight, across the Atrium, and didn’t think much of it when we passed it flipping through the glossy yearbook pages. If we had ever touched her, it had been by accident, hips bumping in the hallway or wet hands simultaneously reaching for the soap dispenser.
But after she fell, she was all we could think about. We went home wondering what she had been doing, and came back the next day still thinking about it. Every morning, we greeted each other with new questions, new hypotheses of how she had done it, whether she had meant to come crashing down, but most of all, why had she decided to do it, to climb up into the vents on the winter afternoon that had begun like every other day.
They say Emmy was skipping gym class. She scaled the old metal ladder leading to the vents because there weren’t many places to properly conceal oneself. Faced with the impending doom of playing matball, a gym class hybrid involving the rules of kickball and the use of gymnastics mats, Emmy had made the decision to burrow in the vents like a hibernating animal.
Actually, Emmy was just curious. She already knew that she was going to be expelled. The headmaster had called her mom three weeks earlier and told her that Emmy’s teacher didn’t feel like it was a good idea for her to return next year. The expulsion was crushing, felt like being pushed off the playground into the salty wood chips.
But really, Emmy wanted to be expelled. She had been here since she was four, and she had enough of this school. She fucking hated us. She knew that if she didn’t do something drastic, she would be trapped here forever, would grow old and boring in a sea of pastels, would name her child after some inanimate object like Stick, would tuck Stick’s shirt into his khakis and push back his long hair with her own spit.
But hadn’t Emmy been going into the vents for months? She had accrued quite the collection: hair ties, math tests, the rotting skeleton of a field mouse, a tampon dipped in glitter, a book on ancient Greece. The lip-stained coffee mug of a substitute teacher everyone hated. Three guitar picks from the music teacher. The collected ChapSticks of fifteen different classmates. She was collecting things because she was practicing witchcraft. Her spells were only sometimes effective, although they were steadily gaining improvement.
No, it had actually never been gym class, surprisingly, she liked gym class, liked to move her body wildly and freely, and found matball to be a compelling and underrated sport. She had a quiz in English class and she couldn’t remember the difference between a transitive and intransitive verb. She panicked. The ladder to the vents had appeared to her in a dream. Like Jacob, she climbed it.
She was the smallest-limbed member of her friend group. She had gotten into a fight with her mother the night before. She was seeking redemption; she was looking for love. The steel sneezed under her unexpected weight, the familiar voices of classmates warbled like a river below.
We, who had walked by the vent every day for ten years, but had never dreamed of actually climbing it. We, who just watched, who observed, who licked the grease off our fingers from the dining hall pizza and planned, assiduously, what dress we would wear to Homecoming. We, who were mostly bored, who were mostly uncertain, who understood that the world we lived in was itself a story, and that at some point, it would be up to us to decide whether or not to keep living it, to climb into the vents, to discover the edges of the myths we had been telling ourselves, to let its sharp ends pierce our stomachs or to eat, forever, from the hands that fed us, to keep telling stories, to know, to really know, that inside the vents we may not find what we were ever looking for, and to be okay with that.
*
Spring joined us soon after Emmy’s fall. The cherry blossoms grew rich and dark like cotton candy. All over town, signs warned us of the seven-year return of the cicadas. Some called it an infestation, others an omen. The fans overhead shook in their effort to give us some reprieve from the thick, Midwestern air that threatened to swallow up each classroom, that left our underarms damp and glued our bangs to our foreheads. Even Mr. Vance began showing up to school in short sleeves, and we began, in passionate whispers, to imagine what it would feel like to trace the whale’s outline with our tongues. Springtime made us horny: the thawed wet earth, how the sun remembered our skin.
Emmy returned to school with a thick cast on her right arm. Within the week, there were enough signatures that they all became illegible, a kind of alphabet soup of names and wishes for a quick recovery. Even a few of the Atrium Girls signed it. And although Emmy certainly wouldn’t be asked back to school the following year, we still claimed her as our hero. We applauded when she passed us in the hallways. We high-fived her unbroken arm. We answered the questions that came from the other private schools with the fervor of an intimate friend. We waited for another person to climb up the ladder into the vents, to crash down and bring to us, at long last, the summer. But it never happened, and we waited as the days unfolded, as long and boring as they had been before Emmy’s crash.
Two weeks before the end of the school year, Emmy’s cast was taken off. The hole in the library ceiling was successfully patched over. And without the physical reminder of what had happened, we began to move on. The Atrium magnified the early summer sun, washing everyone in a honeyed yellow. Even the Atrium Girls looked angelic.
June appeared stuffed with foreboding. The cheerful parade of cicadas, their discarded shells clogging the filters of public and backyard pools alike. A syrupy heat that gorged bike tires and swelled up dog’s tongues. A storm that had nearly unzipped the sky, snapped the fingers off the willow tree. At night, lightning bugs traced the sky like a loose chandelier. And like the cicadas, we too lost our shells. School no longer held us together, and, one by one, we unclasped ourselves, falling like baby teeth out of the mouth of ninth grade.
