Kersti pinched her and they were all laughing and then all of a sudden Angela Zumpt shoved her head inside the bathroom. “I can hear you in my room!” she snapped, her face red. The smell of her body odor quickly filled the bathroom, cutting through all the smoke.
“Close the door!” Rafaella said, covering her nose.
“Be quiet or I go to Madame Hamidou,” Angela threatened.
Angela Zumpt’s hygiene was already a state of emergency at the Lycée. One morning, Kersti and Cressida were roused from sleep by a shriek of laughter on the second floor. They went downstairs to check on the commotion and discovered a cluster of girls standing in front of Angela’s room. Her door was covered with yellow police tape and a crudely handmade sign of skull and crossbones with the word quarantined above it.
“Here,” Nastia Panagakos said, handing Kersti a clipboard. “Sign our petition to force Angela to bathe or be suspended.”
The other girls standing outside Angela’s room started chanting, “Bathe! Bathe! Bathe! Bathe!” Kersti was reminded of her family’s chanting around the bonfire at the festival of St. John.
Angela’s door opened and she popped out, looking confused. She took it all in, almost in slow motion, her eyes blinking, her mouth half open. First the police tape, then the sign Scotch-taped to her door. “Vass iss mean quarantine?” she asked, staring blankly at her tormentors. She wasn’t very bright. She was in the Econome program, which meant she was learning how to iron, sew, can fruit, and fold linens for her future. There were only a handful of girls left in the program—it was outrageously outdated—and most of them were from Japan.
“Iss mean you stink!” Nastia told her. “Everyone is going to sign that petition, so why don’t you just have a goddamn shower?”
“I’m not going to sign it,” Cressida said defiantly, shocking the rest of them. And then she strode heroically across the landing. In one swift movement, she ripped the yellow police tape off Angela’s door and crumpled it into a big ball, which she dropped at her feet. “Leave her alone.”
Someone at the other end of the hall whipped a stick of deodorant at Angela. It smacked her in the forehead, leaving a purplish mark, and then landed on the floor with a bounce.
The other girls whooped and laughed. “Bull’s-eye!” someone yelled.
“Who threw that?” It was Mme. Hamidou. She had appeared midway up the stairs.
The girls’ chanting tapered off into contrite mumbling. Angela’s pale oblong face was blank, but her eyes were filling with glassy tears.
“Madame,” Nastia said, mounting her defense, “Angela doesn’t shower or wear deodorant. I’ve tried speaking to her nicely, but she doesn’t care. It’s not fair to the rest of us—”
Mme. Hamidou looked from Angela to Nastia, her lips pursed into a taut thread. She picked up the deodorant and tucked it into the pocket of her robe. “Miss Zumpt,” she said, “Komm mit mir.” They disappeared inside Angela’s room, closing the door behind them.
With the show over, everyone retreated. Cressida said nothing, but she seemed upset. Kersti was impressed once again by her unexpected compassion for Angela Zumpt. A girl like Angela was utterly beneath Cressida, not even worthy of her kindness, yet she’d jumped in to protect her, ripped the sign off her door, showed her solidarity for no apparent reason. Just as she had done for Kersti. She had a good heart beneath her beautiful surface, which made Kersti love her all the more.
Since then, these girls have become Kersti’s best friends, each one special in her own way. Beautiful, brilliant, fractured. There’s a palpable brokenness in each one of them, a lonely interior life or a penchant for drama. Kersti occasionally tries to figure out her place in the group, but all she can come up with is that she’s their mascot for Reality.
Alison immediately opens the window again, letting in a rush of frigid air.
“Close the fecken window!” Noa cries. “It’s minus a thousand out there.”
“I have a game tomorrow,” Alison says. “I’ll close it if you Eurotrash put out your butts.”
No one does.
“Did you see Magnus tonight?” Rafaella says. Magnus Foley attends the day school and lives with his uncle a few blocks from the Lycée. He has spiky blond hair and blue eyes, both the gift of phenomenal genes from his Swedish mother and Irish, music producer father. He lives in Malibu during the summer, where he spends his time surfing and playing guitar. He’s smart and sarcastic, too, which, if you put it all together, basically makes him perfect.
“I love his new haircut,” Noa says, sucking on her misshapen hand-rolled cigarette.
“He still likes Cress,” Lille reminds them. “There’s no hope for any of you.”
Kersti is stung but doesn’t say anything. She likes Magnus, too. Has quietly liked him since their first math class together. And she thought, given how he always talks to her in class and how he looked at her all night tonight, that he might like her back.
“Magnus is not my type,” Cressida says, and Kersti is secretly overjoyed. She was sure he’d been staring at her most of the night at the Brasserie. “I like someone else anyway.”
“Who?”
Before Cressida can answer, the door flies open and Mme. Harzenmoser appears. Lille lets out a soft gasp and they all drop their cigarettes in the toilet.
Chapter 5
TORONTO—October 2015
Kersti is lying on her bed with her laptop on her chest. She opens the link that Dr. Gliberman emailed her with information about a new donor agency in Minnesota and, after scrolling through the potential donors—most of them blond, rosy, and descended from Vikings—she actually starts to feel excited. She stops at one she really likes, a twenty-four-year-old with white-blond hair and prerequisite blue eyes, a perfectly shaped oval face, a straight nose with a slightly upturned tip, and full lips. No feature that would be jarringly different from Kersti’s, if the child was to look like her real mother.
The donor is wearing a tank top and shorts in her photo, her skin sun-kissed. Her hands are on her hips and her expression is one of self-satisfaction, as though she’s just finished running a marathon or climbing a rock or producing a shitload of viable eggs. An overachieving reproductive savior, that’s what she is.
Kersti saves the profile and shoots an email to Dr. Gliberman. I found her. Finally, this is one she can show Jay with confidence. She grabs her laptop and runs downstairs to Jay’s office. He’s sitting at his desk, sifting through contact sheets from a recent photo shoot, surrounded by all the things that make him Jay. His framed ADCC Scarlett Letter Award for best ad agency 2009; a signed poster of George Lois’s 1969 Esquire cover with Andy Warhol drowning in a can of Campbell’s tomato soup; Lois’s book Damn Good Advice.
“Look at her,” Kersti says, opening her laptop.
“You’re finally agreeing to a ménage-à-trois?”
“She’s a donor, Jay.”
His mood instantly changes and she can feel his shoulders tensing in her arms.
“You’ve been doing this behind my back?” he says.