The Finishing School



When she looks up from her phone, she spots Noa coming through the door, smiling and waving boisterously, two long braids swinging out behind her. She’s wearing a loose poncho shirt, torn jeans, and Havaianas flip-flops. She looks plump and happy. She hugs Kersti hard.

“Don’t crush the boys!” Kersti teases.

“Hello in there!” Noa says, crouching down so she’s eye level with Kersti’s belly. “Leuk je te ontmoeten!”

“You still look sixteen,” Kersti tells her, fibbing to make her feel good.

“You look very well yourself,” Noa says.

They sit down and Noa pulls out her phone to share photos of her kids—four apple-cheeked blonds, the spitting image of Noa’s younger self.

“This is all I’ve got for the moment,” Kersti says, pulling out her eighteen-week sonogram picture.

“I’m so happy for you,” Noa says. “I have a lot of friends who went through the same thing with not such happy endings.”

“We’re grateful,” Kersti says, withholding the bit about Cressida’s eggs.

Rafaella shows up a few minutes later in a DVF wrap dress that accentuates her new fake breasts and her tiny waist. Her hair is slicked back in a ponytail, her lips inflated with collagen, her skin waxy and wrinkle-free. As with Deirdre, all the work she’s had done has rendered her age a blur, contingent upon the angle at which you catch her or the lighting in the room.

“Bonjour!” she sings, hugging and air-kissing both of them. “Holy shit! Look at us.”

“We’re grown-ups.”

“Speak for yourself,” Raf says, smiling. Lipstick on her two front teeth.

They spend the first hour catching up in much greater depth than Facebook can accommodate. As Kersti gleaned, Noa is a full-time mom—hands-on, attentive, endlessly involved in her kids’ lives. She bakes her own bread and forbids screens, choosing instead to fully engage with them when they’re home. By her account, she’s always at their schools—volunteering, fund-raising, being the class parent, going on the class trips. And in her small amount of free time, she’s usually crusading to make the world a better place for them.

Raf, for all her wealth and privilege, doesn’t seem to have made much of her life. She has no permanent address, no real career aside from a social column she writes for a Paris daily, no current or significant past relationship.

“Are you happy?” Noa asks Raf, leaning across the table.

“What does that mean, anyway?”

“Are you fulfilled, content? Comfortable with yourself?”

“Of course not.” Raf laughs. “Are you?”

“Yes,” Noa responds.

“And you, Kersti?”

“Yes,” Kersti says. And in this moment, she is.

They sit in silence for a few moments, happy to be reunited even though they’re a lifetime away from who they were at the Lycée.

“I saw Madame Hamidou today,” Kersti tells them. “She doesn’t live at Huber anymore.”

“Really? I can’t picture her not living there.”

“Maybe she got married,” Raf says.

“She wasn’t wearing a ring—”

“She’s asexual,” Noa says. “She’s married to the Lycée.”

“She’s moving back to Huber in the fall.”

“Which proves my point,” Noa says smugly.

Kersti suddenly gets that fluttering butterfly sensation in her belly. She shifts in her chair and lets out a surprised giggle. “The babies are on the move,” she says.

“I miss that,” Noa laments. “Seeing you like this makes me want to have another one.”

“Four isn’t enough?” Raf says.

“Nils and I have always talked about having six.”

“Six?” Raf rolls her eyes. “Are you going to send them all to boarding school?”

“Of course not,” Noa says, sounding offended. “I was only sent to the Lycée as a matter of safety. Because of my brother’s kidnapping.”

“Are you implying the rest of us were sent there because our parents didn’t want us?”

“I’m not implying anything.”

“It’s true, though,” Raf says. “That’s why we were all so fucked up. Look at Cress.”

“I prefer not to,” Noa says.

“I think she tried to kill herself,” Raf blurts. “No way she fell off that balcony by accident. What do you think, Kerst?”

Kersti thinks about it for a split second and then decides to tell them everything, right from the beginning. “Lille wrote to me before she died,” she begins.

Raf and Noa fall silent. She’s got their full attention now. She tells them about Lille’s letter, her first meeting with Deirdre, their suspicions that someone might have pushed Cressida off her balcony. The subsequent conversations with Magnus, the Fitherns, M. Bueche. The half-assed police investigation. Cressida’s pregnancy.

“He got her pregnant?” Noa cries.

“Wait. What if Bueche and Mrs. Fithern were having an affair?” Raf says excitedly. “Maybe Mrs. Fithern pushed Cressida and Bueche covered it up to protect her?”

“That’s ridiculous,” Noa says.

“Plus it doesn’t explain the ledger—”

“Maybe the ledger has nothing to do with Cressida’s fall,” Raf says. “Or with those girls getting expelled.”

“I agree,” Noa says. “If anyone pushed Cressida off her balcony it was because she was sleeping with Mr. Fithern.”

“Here’s the suicide note,” Kersti says, retrieving it from her purse. She hands it to Raf first, who reads it and makes a strange face, and then to Noa.

I will mi? you. Im sorry

Noa looks up, frowning. “Who wrote this?” she asks.

“Cressida, supposedly.”

“No. It wasn’t Cressida.”

“How do you know?”

“This is an eszett.”

“A what?”

“Eszett. A ‘sharp s.’” Noa points to the misspelling of the word miss, which Kersti always figured was a drunken scribble. “It says ‘I will “mi?” you,’ the old German way.”

“Are you sure?”

“It’s the eszett,” Noa states. “Only the German alphabet has that letter. Before ’96, the eszett was always used instead of ss. Words like dass and strass were spelled with a sharp s, just like in Cressida’s note.”

“So the person who write the note was German?”

“Yes.”

“It could just be a messy double s. Cress was drunk—”

“It’s an eszett.”

“Isn’t Bueche German?” Raf says.

“No. Swiss French.”

“Mahler was German,” Kersti says. And it hits her like the kaleidoscope of blindness that precedes a migraine. Could Bueche be covering up for Mahler?

The next day, Kersti takes a taxi up to the Lycée and waits outside the chemistry lab for Mme. Hamidou. When she finally emerges in her lab coat and protective goggles, Kersti pulls her aside and asks if they can speak.

“Bien sur,” she says, stuffing the goggles in her pocket.

They go outside into the sunshine, where a crowd of young smokers has gathered between classes. “They still allow smoking?” Kersti says, incredulous.

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