Inside Madeleine by Paula Bomer Read Free Book Online Page A

she did the only thing she could do—stare above at the heavens and pretend they were the taillights on the strip.

• outsiders •
    R UTHIE W ATERS ENTERED HER DORM ROOM AT L YNDON P REPARATORY A CADEMY WITH A SUITCASE FULL OF WRONG CLOTHES AND HEAVY METAL ALBUMS . She sported thick black eyeliner, a lumpy, obviously padded bra, and perfectly feathered hair. She was fourteen years old, from South Bend, Indiana, and when she spoke, her Midwestern accent marked her out. But all of this had changed by Thanksgiving. The curling iron she’d feathered her hair with was buried in the closet, the albums quietly placed in a Dumpster. She had tried desperately to speak differently, and eventually she had.
    In Condon Hall, there were sixty girls: the lower mid class, to which she belonged, and the mid class, which was much larger. Her roommate, Alicia Camp, was the only black girl in the dorm. They were the only two not from Park Avenue or Greenwich. Ruthie’s grandmother from Memphis was paying her tuition while Alicia was full scholarship. In fact, Alicia had grown up oftentimes homeless on the streets of Atlanta, her mother mentally ill, or occasionally taken in by her grandmother. She neverknew her father. While Ruthie had very little in common with the Park Avenue girls, she didn’t exactly have much in common with Alicia. And yet, they were both outsiders. Which was something.
    That they had both been star students at their respective schools and now struggled at Lyndon was another. Alicia worked very hard and still got poor marks. This crushed her. Ruthie, not accustomed to working hard, fell in with a few girls in the mid class that liked to smoke pot all the time. She worked very little which never had been a problem before, but didn’t do the trick at Lyndon. Nancy White and Melissa Carter, a year older than Ruthie but a lifetime ahead of her, lived across the hall and schooled Ruthie on how to smoke weed in boarding school, which was very different than standing in some alley in South Bend, passing a joint around.
    They introduced her to the bong. What a wonderful device! They showed her how to use a hit towel. This involved rolling up a bath or hand towel into a tightly coiled tube, and after sucking down a bong hit, pressing your lips firmly against the towel to exhale. This left a perfect brown impression of lips on the towel, but kept the room free of the aroma of weed, which of course was necessary if one did not want to get expelled. And for all the bitching about Lyndon that went on, no one really wanted to get expelled.
    One Friday night, after the hall teacher, a sour middle-aged woman named Miss Cranch, who was both the field hockey coach and a lousy math teacher, had checked all the rooms andturned in, Ruthie, as planned, snuck over to Nancy and Melissa’s room. The bong hits of boarding school! There was nothing like it. The wealthy simply had better drugs. The weed was expensive and beautiful—tightly coiled balls of bright green with tiny threads of red in it. They all got incredibly stoned. Both Nancy, from Park Avenue, and Melissa, from New Canaan, wore Lanz nightgowns. Ruthie was in a pink T-shirt from JC Penney and her white cotton underwear. They all sat cross-legged on the floor in an intimate circle and whispered, just in case, but also because they were high as kites which for some reason made people whisper.
    “We need to get you a nightgown,” said Nancy, leaning toward Ruthie, her dark eyes focused but not unfriendly. She had the shiniest, thickest, black hair. Ruthie stared at her hair. She was beginning to understand so much at Lyndon. Like how the thickness of one’s hair was a testament to coming from a “good” family.
    “I have a nightgown, I just hate wearing it,” said Ruthie. It was true, she had one. A synthetic fabric, embarrassing, nothing like the thick cotton of the Lanz nightgowns. Also, she always had hated wearing it; she preferred sleeping in T-shirts and underwear.