Mrs. Wasserman steeples her fingers in front of her as a signal we’re getting down to business. “I’m told that you’re facing some interpersonal challenges with one of your classmates.”
It’s all I can do to not roll my eyes at her euphemistic, bullshit tone. The thing is, 95 percent of this school is made up of kids who are very rich and very WASPy. The 5 percent who aren’t are either here on scholarship or because their parents work at the UN. The others don’t like us Five-Percenters, as we’re known, but we help people like Mrs. Wasserman pretend Danton Academy is something other than an elitist bitch factory.
Mrs. Wasserman consults a file folder. “Do you go by Gwen or Gwendolyn, dear?”
“Gwendolyn,” I say. “Only my dad calls me Gwen.”
“Gwendolyn it is, then,” Mrs. Wasserman says with a cookie-sweet smile. “And is what it says here correct, Gwendolyn—you tested out of the AP exams in, my goodness, five foreign languages?”
I shrug. “We move a lot.”
“I see that. Moscow. Dubai. Still—quite a talent.” She runs her finger along a line in the file. “Must be tough, having a stepfather in the State Department. New city every couple of years. New country.”
“You can just say ‘father.’”
“Sorry?”
“He’s not my stepfather. He adopted me when he married my mom. I was two.”
“Father, yes. If you like.” Mrs. Wasserman shakes her head as she makes a note on the paper in front of her. “Now to why you’re here: Danton is a safe space, Gwendolyn, and we have a zero-tolerance policy on emotionally abusive behavior.”
“Right. Just like the handbook says.”
“That includes cursing at faculty or students, which means when you swore at another girl in French, you were in violation.”
“Astrid didn’t understand a word of what I said until Chelsea Bunchman translated it.”
“The point is you said something hurtful, Gwendolyn. Whether you said it in French or Swahili it doesn’t matter.”
“It matters if she didn’t understand it.”
“That’s just semantics,” she says. “Do you know that word, ‘semantics’?”
“The study of what words mean. Which would seem to apply.”
I see the muscles in her face tighten. She picks up a pen and holds it so tightly I think it might break. “I understand it’s the anniversary of your mother’s passing. I’m sorry to hear about that,” Mrs. Wasserman says gently. I can see the idea of it makes her uncomfortable, makes her wonder what to do with me. Punish the girl because of her interpersonal challenges on the anniversary of her mother’s passing?
Mrs. Wasserman coughs into her hand and continues. “The normal consequence for swearing at another student is a day’s suspension. But under the circumstances, I’m willing to forgo that if you issue a written apology to Miss Foogle.”
“You want me to apologize to Astrid?”
“Yes, dear.”
It’s an easy out and the obvious choice. I lean back in the chair and try to smile. “No thanks,” I say. “I’ll take the suspension.”
*
It’s still raining, the cold kind that might turn to snow later. March is bad this year, no sunshine at all and not even a hint of spring. Just skies the color of steel and the stink of New York’s own garbage soup running through the gutters. Black SUVs are lined up at the curb, Danton Academy’s version of school buses. The very richest kids use these—private mini limos that pick them up at the end of the day so they don’t have to suffer the indignity of walking home or taking the subway.
I’m headed for the station a few blocks away. I don’t have an umbrella, so I pull up the hood of my old army jacket. It used to be my mom’s from when she was a lieutenant way before I was born. When my dad and I were moving a few years ago—Dubai to Moscow, maybe, our two most recent posts—I found it in a box. My dad got teary when I put it on, so I started to take it off. Then he said it looked good on me, told me I could have it if I wanted.
My mom. I’d been avoiding the subject all day and mostly succeeded until World Lit. Hard not to think about it when you spend an hour talking about Algerian justice.
The rain patters against my face, and it makes me calm. A guy with a black-and-green kaffiyeh around his neck shelters beneath the awning of his gyro cart on Lexington just outside the subway station. I order my food in Arabic—a gyro with everything, I tell him, and don’t be cheap with the lamb.
He squints at me with a surprised smile, and I wonder if he understood me. My Arabic is rusty as hell, and the formal kind no one really speaks except on TV.
“You Egyptian?” he says as he takes a pair of tongs and starts arranging pieces of lamb on a pita.
“No,” I answer. “I’m—from here.”
I get variations of that are you x? question a lot, though. My eyes are umber brown, while my skin is a pale, translucent sheath pulled over something else—brass under tracing paper, a stoned boy on the Moscow subway told me once. What x is, though, I have no idea. My mom’s not around to ask, and the dad I call dad, because he is my dad legally and in every sense but one, says he doesn’t know. My bio father’s name isn’t even listed on my original birth certificate from Landstuhl, the American military hospital in Germany where I was born.
“Special for Cleopatra,” the man says, tossing on some onions and smothering the whole mess with the bitter white sauce that I love so much I would drink it by the gallon if I could.
On the subway platform, I devour the gyro. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was. Maybe getting slapped like a peasant does that to you. I’m waiting for the N or Q out to Queens. I wish a train would come already. I wish it would come so that I could put some physical distance between me and this island and the memories Camus dredged up.
Just then, as if I’d willed it to come, the Q train screeches mournfully to a stop in front of me. I shoot the soggy tinfoil-and-paper wrapping of the gyro into a trash can and climb on board.
Most people hate the subway, but not me. It’s a strange, wonderful thing to be alone among the hundred or so other people in the car. I pull a book out of my backpack and lean against the door as the train shoots through the tunnel under the river toward Queens. It’s a novel with a teenage heroine set in a dystopian future. Which novel in particular doesn’t matter because they’re all the same. Poor teenage heroine, having to march off to war when all she really wants to do is run away with that beautiful boy and live off wild berries and love. Paper worlds where heroes are real.
But as the train screeches and scrapes along in the dark, rocking back and forth as if any moment it might fly off the rails, I find myself suddenly unable to follow the story or even translate the symbols on the page into words. The memories just aren’t going to let me get away this time. They demand to be recognized, insistent as Astrid’s slap.