“That’s okay,” Sasha said. “Just a little jaunt could be fun.”
Sasha took Dove, the albino, and Nell led them behind the barn and through the thick woods that sat on the edge of campus. The horses seemed to awaken in the unfenced terrain. Henry was happy to lead the way, to navigate between trees and to jump over fallen logs. Nell hated seeing him later in the day in the arena, plodding around the circle. Now he stopped to drink from a mud puddle.
“Is that the headmistress’s house?” Sasha asked while they waited for Henry to finish drinking.
They were at the top of a hill. The tangled forest stopped at the bottom of the slope, butted by a tall brick wall and a manicured lawn on the other side. Nell checked her watch again—five minutes to seven. “She’ll be going up to the school soon,” she said. “We should get back.”
“I’m not worried.” Sasha looked away from the stone mansion and then did something Nell could have never hoped for: leaned over and gave her a kiss. A sweet, short kiss. The sort of kiss a real couple would share.
“Are you blushing, Red?” Sasha asked as she pulled away.
“No,” Nell lied; she could feel her face was warm.
“Okay,” Sasha said. They were both smiling like idiots. “Let’s go.”
—
The screen door creaked and shut behind Mo as she took a seat next to Nell. That morning, Mo had kissed Nell for the first time. She was wearing jeans and a hoodie and had her hair in a ponytail, the only way Nell had ever seen her wear it. Her tan had settled nicely over the four weeks they’d been there. Nell thought of her as “all-American”—athletic, wholesome, pert—even though she was also English.
“You wanna look at the stars with me?” Mo asked.
“Sure,” Nell said, and tilted her head toward the sky.
“No. Over here is better.”
Mo led them toward the middle of the green where the American flag was raised every morning. She lay down, and Nell lay next to her. The grass was damp, but neither of them complained about it.
“I can’t find the Plough,” Mo said.
“Me neither,” said Nell, though she wasn’t really looking for it. She felt distracted somehow by Mo’s presence. She had been lost in her thoughts about home and didn’t feel ready to come out of them.
“I think there’s the little one there”—Mo pointed—“so if I just trace along”—she moved her index finger aimlessly around the sky—“it’s got to be nearby.”
“Do you need to know where everything is?”
“I don’t need to.” Mo dropped her finger then. “I just like to,” she said sheepishly.
“Well, that’s the Milky Way,” Nell said, feeling bad now. She used her finger to trace the cloudy galaxy in her own line of vision, knowing that pointing out constellations was useless—that in an expanse as wide as the night sky, it was nearly impossible to show someone else what you were seeing.
“I know what the Milky Way looks like.”
Mo turned onto her side and faced her friend.
“Nell?” she said.
“Hm?”
“Do you want to go home?”
Nell felt alarmed, as if Mo had been attuned to her own thoughts about her family and Sasha just minutes earlier. “Do I want to go home?”
“Do you want me to say first?”
“No, that’s okay. I know you want to go home.”
Mo frowned. “No, I don’t.”
“You don’t?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know. I asked you first.”
“So my wanting or not wanting to go home would affect your wanting—or not wanting—to go home?”
“I don’t like it here anymore,” Mo said, quieter. “I just don’t want to leave you.”
It made Nell feel good and safe to know this, but the safeness also made her bristle, as if she had to quickly push her way out of it. She knew what had happened the last time she had allowed herself to feel safe. Here was this lovely, kind person, who did, in more than one way, make her feel safe; and up there was the night sky, open and endless and full of far more possibilities than the ones on this provincial earth.
“Do you want to leave because of Micah?” Nell forced herself to ask, though she really did not want to talk about the horse anymore.
“Micah. Sheera. All of it.” Mo swept a hand around the camp. “I swear this place is cursed.”
“Maybe it is,” Nell said. The idea of an escape had been faulty, of course. Here there was just another set of problems that required yet another escape.
—
Nell and Sasha met at six A.M. on every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, first in the barn, and then, if they had time, they went for a ride. Soon they started meeting at five-thirty instead in order to be able to go farther into the woods each time, staying out longer, arriving back later, coming upon streams and clearings and once at the fence of an oat farm. The sun was rising then, and Nell had a moment of reverence watching the fields turn gold.
“You’ll remember me when the west winds move.” Sasha started to jokingly sing the Sting song, and Nell laughed and felt (perhaps na?vely, she noted even at the time) that they understood each other in a deep and real way.
Nell began to make eye contact with Sasha in the dining hall. She tried to make their mornings last longer and longer. She asked Sasha questions about her life—about her divorced parents, her troubled younger brother, her stupid and trivial Wentworth friends. Sasha wanted to be an actress; she believed she was destined for much greater things, and Nell agreed with her. She entertained fantasies about the two of them riding Henry and Dove into the woods one morning and never coming back.
And most astonishingly, Sasha reciprocated favors in the barn, almost every time. The other Wentworth girls would only occasionally and, even then, not very well, but Sasha actually asked what Nell liked, what she wanted. As Sasha snaked down Nell’s bare stomach, kissing her belly button, her hips, her inner thighs, Nell felt entirely sure that she was desperately, unequivocally in love.
And then one morning late in the fall, after almost a full term of their appointments, Sasha wasn’t there. Nell took Henry out anyway, worrying the whole ride that Sasha had been caught leaving her dorm.
Nell tried to make eye contact with Sasha in the dining hall that night, but she looked away. She was with her friends, the girls who scrunched their kneesocks down to their ankles and wore baby blue bows at the bottoms of their braids.
She wasn’t at the barn the next morning either. A week later, a tiny first year was waiting outside the stable doors when Nell arrived. Nell asked her what she was doing there so early and sent her back to her dorm.
At the coed dance with St. Joseph’s that weekend, Sasha spent all night dancing with Charles Mitting, who was tall and famously rich. On Monday Nell’s roommate leaned over to her at breakfast, looking at Sasha standing tall with her lunch tray and her braid falling down over her shoulder.
“She and Charles Mitting are an item,” Nell’s roommate said.
“Is that so?” Nell sipped her coffee.
“Yeah.” The roommate stuffed a piece of toast into her mouth. “Lucky bitch.”