Ginny’s head is back with the last time she saw her mother. They ran down Montague toward Court, and then Marion Palm pulled her girls into a CVS. Ginny thought their mother was going to take out some cash from an ATM and go back to the diner to pay, but instead she stopped in the shampoo aisle. That’s where she told them that she was going to visit Shelley, and then she left. Marion didn’t say anything about going back to school, so her girls didn’t. Ginny took Jane home on the bus with her in the middle of the day. Jane didn’t have a MetroCard, but the driver was nice and let her ride for free. Ginny wasn’t supposed to have Jane there—she should have taken Jane back to school—but she didn’t know how to explain where they had been and what they had been doing. When Nathan didn’t ask about it, Ginny realized that she had been worried about the wrong stuff.
Still with her mother in the shampoo aisle, Ginny looks up, and she is in the wide arched entryway of her school. She doesn’t remember the walk from Jay Street. She pushes Jane in the direction of her classroom, and Jane goes willingly and happily. She waves bye-bye. Ginny looks at the clock; the sisters have been walking slowly, and now she is two minutes late for chapel, and another lateness means another detention, and so she begins to run up the stairs, panting under the weight of her backpack.
“No running,” the hall master calls out.
The chapel is on the third floor, and an out-of-breath Ginny pushes the door open. The eyes of the middle school turn to watch as she slides into the back pew reserved for latecomers. The dean of the middle school pauses his announcement to look over his lectern at her, and then he resumes.
She is embarrassed, of course, and there is the customary longing to disappear, but beneath or above the embarrassment she wonders if the dean looked at her too long, as if he knew that she and her mother and her sister had dined and dashed. She feels other teachers’ gazes on her; she is marked today. She must reason with herself: They can’t know about the diner. They can’t know that her mother didn’t come home last night.
Ginny is busy convincing herself that this is true, so she doesn’t see her homeroom teacher walk to the back of the chapel and stand behind her. The homeroom teacher has bent forward and rested her forearms on the wooden pew to whisper into Ginny’s ear. “See me after chapel,” she says, and Ginny manages to nod. It may be her lateness that will be discussed. It may be some other things. Her homeroom teacher wears Bible socks and long dangly earrings and hates cursing. She’s never not grinning, and even though Ginny is thirteen, she is taller than her homeroom teacher. It makes it difficult when the homeroom teacher is attempting to discipline her, because Ginny can see her white scalp through her thinning hair.
Ginny closes her eyes again, folds her hands in her lap, and touches her chin to her chest.
“Are you praying?” says the boy next to her.
Ginny opens her eyes, ready to counter the accusation, but the boy is smiling kindly. He is in the eighth grade and Ginny is in seventh, so his speaking to her is extraordinary. She smiles a different smile from her normal smile and coughs a laugh.
“Yeah, I’m praying,” she says.
“Okay, I’ll pray too,” he says, and the two edge forward in their pews, close their eyes, bend their heads, and try not to smile. At the lectern, the dean speaks passionately about the successes and failures of the school’s compost heap, and then chapel is over. The boy whispers “Amen” into Ginny’s ear and slides away. Ginny is now in love.
She waits in her pew for her homeroom teacher, who will demonstrate Ginny’s lack of punctuality and therefore respect by showing her an attendance book, and she will insist that Ginny approve of the punishment meted out to her. Ginny wishes she didn’t mind. She objectively understands that the detention is meaningless. There is no permanent record; her mother told her that. But now she is ashamed and in love. When she falls in love, she doesn’t understand what’s happening, and retreats. She knows girls who keep pictures of famous boys in their lockers, and Ginny finds this practice strange and a little distasteful. Why would anyone casually admit to these feelings? She doesn’t understand the girls who want the world to know that they are in love. She suspects that the love isn’t real, that these girls are just fans. But still, they go to the same movie over and over to see a large face they like on a screen. Where does that impulse come from? Why does it look to feel so different from what Ginny feels for the boy who shared her pew?
She suspects that he made her feel better about a bad time and she was grateful. But gratitude should not merit love. Gratitude should not get the better of her.
Mercury
The school is founded for girls. While it is more rigorous than other girls’ schools of the time, the focus is still on the more wifely arts: music, dance, painting, and languages. There are sepia photographs of young girls wearing bloomers doing calisthenics. Each day the girls pray to a Protestant god in the chapel.
There’s a fire. The well-trained girls rush from the flames; one dies, but the board of trustees chooses to carry on. When the school reopens, boys are allowed in.
The building must be entirely rebuilt. Red brick turrets go up. A cast iron gate surrounds the property: the school and a large courtyard where ginkgo trees will grow and loom. The chapel is redesigned, expanded to include a balcony, and Tiffany stained glass windows are donated. Divided by an aisle, the girls and boys sit in the chapel to pray. Staircases abound and do not complement each other. The board purchases a church on the corner of the block, and there are great plans, but it falls into disrepair from lack of funds and becomes a ghostly storage room. Inventive teaching methods are adopted. New math is inflicted. The school abandons its Protestantism, and the girls and boys no longer pray in the chapel. The chapel is used for community meetings, recitals, and awards ceremonies. When the students meet there, they call it chapel, and this hint of piety is nurtured by the school. Meanwhile, the old church morphs from “storage space” to “structurally unsound liability,” and the students sneak in to smoke cigarettes or experiment with each other’s bodies.
Brooklyn is changing, transforming, thriving, and now the school is known as a progressive lower and middle school. The high school, however, is different; it is a last chance to graduate for those who have been expelled from schools in Manhattan. These teenagers have brought weapons to their previous schools. They have juvenile records. They have had extended stays in mental institutions. They’ve overdosed. They’ve failed. Now they are enrolled in a school across the river from their wealthy parents. Or they are bright, quick, and poor. They’ve been offered scholarships for their brightness, and this school is better than the alternative.