Charlie had assumed that the majority of students would be boarders, but the cafeteria was only half full when they arrived, with probably about seventy-five students altogether. There were a few tables of younger students with their dormkeepers; the smallest were still puffy-eyed from crying, but the rest of the kids seemed to know one another and were falling back into their old rhythms. Charlie wondered what she would have been like at their age—would she have cried as her parents drove away, or been glad she was in a place where she could understand everything? She scanned the faces of the older elementary students; no tears there. A school week would feel a lot shorter to them than a little kid, and anyway, they’d probably gotten used to goodbyes. Or perhaps, for them, the meaning of “home” had transformed and their families’ houses were just “home” on a technicality.
Across the room was a table of middle schoolers, most of them gathered tight around a girl playing a video on her phone, elbowing one another to get in for a closer look. And then there were her classmates—a few coupled off and holding hands, some just chatting in pairs, but all clustered around a boy she could see only from the back, constellations within his gravitational pull.
The headmistress had recommended that Charlie stay at school to facilitate her language development, but from what Charlie could tell, most of the kids there signed quickly and fluidly, and she wondered why they’d chosen to board. She resolved to ask Kayla about it when they got back to the room, but after dinner her roommate went out into the common area to watch Netflix on one of the other girls’ computers. Charlie stood in the doorway, seeing the group greet each other after a summer apart with hugs and emphatic signs, but when one of them made eye contact with her, she got flustered and slammed the door. Being alone in the room just made Charlie feel worse, claustrophobic, but she didn’t dare go out there. She could barely understand her roommate one-on-one, never mind a whole group of girls going at top speed. Now they probably thought she was an asshole, but at least they didn’t think she was stupid. That was tomorrow’s problem.
From deep in her backpack, she retrieved a baggie containing the last of the weed gummies Kyle, a boy from Jefferson she sometimes hooked up with, had given her the last time they’d been together. She wondered what he was doing now, considered texting him, but stopped herself. Her mother had been right in one regard—coming to River Valley was her chance for a clean break. She popped the little yellow bear into her mouth, put on her pajamas, and waited for the abatement of her anxiety or for sleep, whichever came first.
both of Austin’s parents came to drop-off, his mom picking at the pilling upholstery on the couch out in the common room while he and his dad unloaded his gear. He was on a different floor than last year, but the room looked the same. Austin always arrived early and chose the side of the room where the videophone was installed. He used it more than his roommates anyway; most kids were from hearing families and didn’t call home much. His parents kissed him on the forehead and made to leave, but he walked with them back to their car.
Swear you’ll call when the baby is coming?
They promised, and he stood on the curb and watched them pull away, then returned to the dorm, missing them fiercely. The fact that he had done this many times before mitigated the length of the homesickness, but not its intensity. When he was in elementary school, he’d cried each time his parents left; as a first grader he’d been damn near inconsolable for two days. If he thought about it long enough, he could still transport himself back there and relive the gnawing anxiety that he’d felt in the moment, though he pushed away the urge to do so now. Instead he tried to remember his classmates in their first hours at school. Had they, too, been upset, or had the fact that he’d had more to lose made it harder on him? In his mind’s eye, he conjured up his first breakfast in the cafeteria, tried to scan the faces of his peers, but they were all a blur.
Back in the dorm, he opened his door to a blast of humid air and the smell of cigarette smoke. Across the room, Eliot Quinn had arrived, removed their screen, and was leaning out the open window, tapping ash into the grass.
When Headmistress Waters had approached him at the end of last school year about having Eliot as his roommate, he was happy to oblige. He didn’t know Eliot well—he was a grade above Austin, but over the years, Austin had learned that it was much better to be cordial with your roommate than to be best friends. It lessened the chance you’d really get on each other’s nerves. Austin had heard the rumors about what happened to Eliot, and nodded along with the rest of his friends when they discussed how fucked up it was, but now he worried that the problems of the boy sleeping in the bed five feet away from him were about to become his problems, too.
What are you doing?
Eliot looked at him like he was an alien.
Smoking? You mind?
Austin considered how to answer without coming off prudish. Did he want to get in trouble, or catch some secondhand lung pustule? Not particularly, though that wasn’t the real question. What Eliot was really asking was whether he was a snitch.
You’re gonna get caught.
He motioned with his head at the alarm above their door.
Am not, Eliot said, and turned back toward the window to exhale.
Austin studied the rutted skin running down from Eliot’s ear. On his cheek, a strip of stubble had been permanently razed away, and an ugly splay of vesicles disappeared beneath the neck of his T-shirt. But so what? Even if the stories were true, that didn’t give him free rein to be a dick.
Whatever. I’m going to dinner.
Heard she’s already looking for you.
What? From who?
Eliot laughed, a bit too heartily for Austin’s liking.
I’m messing with you. I haven’t talked to anyone yet. Should’ve seen your face though.
He dropped the cigarette butt into an old Gatorade bottle, and Austin kept his eye on it until he was sure it had burned out completely.
the morning of the first day of school, Charlie brushed her teeth twice. A neurotic tic of hers, too much time spent staring at people’s mouths. She was late because of it, which was particularly annoying given that she had barely slept at all, had finally drifted off just before dawn only to be woken a couple hours later by her bed shaker, an older model than the one she had at home, with a more aggressive vibration pattern that scared her awake. She hadn’t given herself a buffer for the bathroom line—there were four sinks for twelve girls, and some had doubled up but Charlie didn’t know how to ask. Then, even after all that she’d still gone back for a final, extra brush. Now she bolted down the path to the upper school building. That was simple at least—the girls’ and boys’ upper dorms sat on opposite sides of Cannon, the building where her ASL class was held. She found her homeroom with merciful ease, but when she went inside the other students were already in their seats.
She approached the teacher, who signed something so quick and smooth that any of the ASL Charlie knew from night class drained right out her feet.
Sorry, what? she said, but it was the teacher’s turn to look bemused.
Oh god, Charlie thought—she’s deaf, too. Shit. The teacher signed the thing again, slower, the equivalent of the patronizing voice in which hearing teachers had spoken to her at Jefferson. Charlie was sure she’d seen one of the signs before—had the dormkeeper said it?—but could not dredge up the meaning.
Shit, she said aloud.
The teacher launched herself, via rolling chair, toward the chalkboard.
Introduce yourself, she wrote.
Me name C-h-a-r-l-i-e, she said.
But obviously I’m a girl, so…she said.
A few kids, the lipreaders, snickered. The teacher made the introduction sign again, and Charlie was puzzled—had she done it wrong? But then the teacher smiled and wrote, Welcome, Charlie, beneath her first line.
She pointed to the “welcome” with her chalk and made the sign again. Funny, Charlie thought, that the sign meant these two things. In hearing school, they’d always seemed like opposites.
* * *