Evelyn herself was neither eccentric, nor cool, nor anything at Sheffield. That was clear on her second day there, Tryout Day: the Key Association in the library, the Ben Jonson Players in the experimental theater, the Federalist Society in the Academy Building, the Indian dance troupe Aananda in the JV squash courts. Evelyn, with her piano background, had long had hopes of being in the theater. One bad morning in Bibville, though, Barbara had said that she was singing flat, and Evelyn had stopped singing. She went from chorus roles in Bibville middle-school musicals to painting the backdrops, thinking maybe she could direct or something someday. Before eighth grade, she’d tried once more, as she’d wanted to attend music camp in Virginia, but her mother took one look at the brochure’s cover, showing a plump girl singing, and said that these theater people needed to spend some time getting exercise outdoors. Babs enrolled Evelyn in tennis camp again that summer instead.
Evelyn worked up the nerve on that second day of Sheffield to go to the arts center and hear about the upcoming theater season, but when her hand was on the auditorium door, she heard a girl talking about how she had played Young Cosette in the touring production of Les Miz over the summer. She almost ran back to her dorm. It was clear to Evelyn by the end of the tryouts that a handful of students was already picked for stardom. A freshman in Wyckoff had done an amazing job as a soccer forward that morning and was going to be a three-sport prep. The Cosette girl, a prep in McGeorge, was favored for Sarah in the fall production of Guys and Dolls. Evelyn sensed she had been cast in her Sheffield role without attending a single tryout: Girl in Background #4.
Barbara had somehow procured her own copy of the Sheffield student directory, and in addition to asking about Preston, she would quiz Evelyn about James Scripps Robinson or Sarah Monaghan Lowell. “The Scrippses started the art museum in Detroit,” she would say. Or, “We had a Lowell girl at Hollins a year or two ahead of me. I think she went on to marry a de Puy.” Preparing for her mother’s inquiries, Evelyn learned the signs—the Tuxedo Park addresses, the old-money family names even for towns like Cleveland—that worked as a decoder ring for this world. Sometimes, on scraps of paper she’d tear and throw away immediately afterward, she’d try out her name with some of the more august surnames: Evelyn Beegan Cushing, Mrs. James Cady Robinson (Evelyn). But she mostly sat in front of Reality Bites or Four Weddings and a Funeral or whatever the dorm head had gotten from the video store that week and listened to the knots of girls in the common room next door singing Lisa Loeb.
It was Sarennes that changed Evelyn’s social fate at Sheffield. Barbara observed Evelyn over the summer break after her prep year, Evelyn’s nose in a book and fingers on the piano keys, and determined that her daughter was, if anything, even less social than she had been prior to Sheffield. Barbara decided immersion therapy would work best, tracked down Mrs. Germont, who headed the fall term-abroad program in Sarennes, France, in Alsace, and petitioned for Evelyn to be a last-minute addition to the program. The idea almost paralyzed Evelyn when her mother told her about it, as she knew who was going on the term, namely Preston Hacking and his pals.
Evelyn was placed with a baker’s family above the small town bakery, with a stern matriarch who would get up at 4:00 A.M. and acted as though Evelyn was her paid assistant. The matriarch spoke French initially, apparently in order to get the fees for a boarder, but it was all Alsatian once the Sheffield faculty had gone, and Evelyn could barely understand anything the woman was saying. Evelyn’s first day with them was a Sunday, when the bakery was closed and, despite being dragged to a long and boring Lutheran service, Evelyn didn’t have to do much. On the second day, the woman woke Evelyn at five o’clock so Evelyn could stand guard downstairs and accept the pots of stew from the ladies of the town. The baker then covered them in rounds of raw dough, and the ladies would return after doing their washing and chores for their baeckeoffe, and Evelyn, smelling of fatty meat and flour, wondered how quickly she could get out of this.
On her third morning as an indentured Alsatian servant, Evelyn decided she would sneak into town and use the phone at the restaurants to find out about flights home. The street at dawn looked empty, but then she saw Preston Hacking loosely leaning on a broom handle in front of a door frame down the street. Evelyn’s instinct was to turn and go toward town in the other direction, so she wouldn’t have to embarrass herself with a strangled hello. But that would add several minutes to her trip, and she had to be back before Madame returned from her morning errands. So she pushed herself forward, waved her hand inelegantly from across the narrow cobblestone street, and, in a voice that sounded false and high to her, shouted, “Hello!”
They had not spoken so far on the trip, Preston hobnobbing with his own group of friends, but he looked up with something like interest.
“What a place,” he said, in his lockjaw dialect. “What on earth am I doing with a broom in my hand this early in the morning?”
She had to fight her urge to give a flat smile and jog away. She sucked in the cool air. “Manual labor?”
“Manual labor. That is correct. We’re paying these Frenchmen to let us stay here, and they not only don’t appreciate the money, they wake me at the crack of dawn and put this item in my hand. Do I look like a street sweeper?”
“A well-dressed one.” Evelyn waited for Preston to ignore her comment, but instead Preston smiled and kept the conversation going.
“There is no such thing. No such man. Certainly not I. What are you doing at this ungodly hour? Off to wring the neck of a chicken?”