Morning by Nancy Thayer Read Free Book Online

headmaster, touched my arm.
“Why don’t you sit at that table, Miss White?” he asked. “That’s where the other midwesterners are.”
The other “midwesterners” were Trudy, a shy pretty girl from Indiana; Allen, a boy with bottle-opener teeth from Nebraska; Larry, a boy from Oregon, who could have been handsome were it not for a case of red-and-black screaming acne; Odessa, from Mississippi; George, from Arizona; and Hilda, a terrified, six-foot-tall cornfed Amazon of a girl from Iowa.
Sitting down next to them that first day, introducing myself, I thought in a panic: My God, we’re all Outsiders. This is the Outsiders’ table. I babbled and smiled and hoped that perhaps we could somehow all find a way to cohere into a group as happy and superior as those at the other tables. But this was not to happen; we were doomed from the start. We knew we were Outsiders. Hilda and Trudy were sitting next to each other, already partners against the world; they formed a bond early and never let anyone else in. Odessa, whom I sat next to and tried to be friends with, was, I soon came to discover, a real intellectual, also poor, also ambitious, and she had little time for fun. We Outsiders always ate together, but other than that were not a real group—which was really all right with me. I only wanted to be with Jeremy.
My life quickly fell into a pattern. Classes in the morning, swimming with the Outsiders in the pond in the afternoon—we didn’t know how to play tennis, and I didn’t like to ride because I didn’t do it properly, the English way. Dinner with the Outsiders, and then the evenings, which were sometimes filled with lectures on wildlife or astronomy walks, and sometimes left open. Then all the students wouldgather in the cleared dining hall to watch a movie or dance or just talk.
That was when I got to be with Jeremy. I will always believe that he really did like me, liked me . He liked hearing me talk about our farm and the animals, cows, horses, dogs, cats, hens, geese. My pet rabbits. His parents had an apartment in New York City, but he had lived most of his life at boarding schools and summer camps. He loved animals but had never been able to have a pet. It was an old story about a rich boy: his parents never spent any time with him. They sent him away as much as possible. Much later, I was to think back on that time and wonder if Jeremy had been drawn to me because in my voluptuousness I seemed maternal, and certainly I was more responsive than the other girls there. More corny. He was a handsome rich boy but he needed something from me. And God knows I needed anything he could give me during those six weeks when I lived among strangers.
It was on the very first night that I knew I would always be among strangers there. During our painful dinner I tried to chat and laugh with the other Outsiders, tried to pretend that we hadn’t been ostracized, that we weren’t different. I heard my silly voice trilling out far too loudly, carrying raucously through the dining hall, and I knew I was overdoing it and couldn’t stop myself. The girls at the other table laughed low, as if humming. The only person at my table who tried to join in my pitiful ruse was acned Larry, and he was very nice. Still, there was at our table such an aroma of sweating misery that it tainted the food we ate. Now I suppose we were only victims of some adult’s theory of “geographical distribution,” just as black children were victims of busing twenty years later.
Jeremy Gardner left the dining hall, punching another guy in the shoulder as he went, but not without looking over at me and mouthing, “See you later!” I threw him a smile, pretending that I was having a wonderful time. At last, when I had sat through the meal for what I considered a decent amount of time, I sprang from my untouched food and my untouchable clan and headed for the bathroom.
The girls’ rooms were on the second floor of the building, and sowas the large