Morning by Nancy Thayer Read Free Book Online Page A

many-stalled bathroom we all shared. I raced for a stall and entered, locking the door, grateful for privacy. I was cramping with a fierce attack of diarrhea brought on by nothing I had eaten. As I sat there, racked with every kind of torment, I heard the doors open and the eastern girls came in, their assured voices floating unabashed in the air.
“… Jeremy can’t possibly like her. It’s just her big tits.”
“Tits, my dear, udders !”
A scream of laughter. “She is such a cow.”
“I think she’s beautiful. Like Elizabeth Taylor.”
“Oh, God, I suppose, but her ‘beauty’ is so tacky.”
“I think you’ll discover, darling, that what you call tacky is what men like.”
“Exactly.”
More laughter.
I was bent double in my stall, trying not to make any noise that would embarrass me and make them aware of my presence. All around me doors slammed, toilets flushed, girls laughed.
“I don’t think Jean has anything to worry about. I can’t imagine that he’d ever be unfaithful to Jean.”
“Still, perhaps we should write her?”
On this note, they left. I sat in my stall, paralyzed, really ill. I tried to console myself, to do what my mother would tell me to do: to “be sensible.” It wasn’t that those girls disliked me, it was that they were championing a friend, I told myself. And no one likes a girl who steals someone else’s guy. I tried not to take it personally.
But it was a very personal summer. Everything came close, too close. All the other Outsiders were in math or sciences; I was the only literature Outsider, and so I walked from my room or the dining hall to the classroom and back to my room alone; and while the group of eastern girls who walked in a cluster just in front of or behind me were not within touching distance, their presence pressed in on me like the Kansas heat. My face burned. I would shrivel into myself, wishing I could pull my ears right into my head so that I wouldn’t hear the low hum of their laughter,their whispers, which I was sure were all about me. I would carry my books against my chest, my arms crossed over my books hard, trying to crush my offending bosom flat. Olivia DeWitt spent every evening until lights-out in the other girls’ rooms; at lights-out she’d run into our room, jump into bed, and go to sleep without a word to me. Her absolute avoidance of me was as vivid and visceral as insults or blows, and I lay quaking in my bed, sick at my stomach, as if physically attacked.
But what came closest that summer was Jeremy Gardner. That summer I wrote for my class a short story about a woman who wore around her neck a heart-shaped locket with an intricate design like an arabesque on the front. If one looked closely, he could see that the design was really a keyhole, and in truth the locket was her heart and she was living her life waiting to meet the man who carried in the lapel of his jacket a small gold key. That key would unlock her heart and the man and woman would know they were meant for each other, had been sent to each other by fate. But no one came to the town where the woman lived, and no one wore jackets, let alone anything extraordinary in their lapels. So the woman traveled, saved her money, took jobs that would enable her to travel and to live among men who wore jackets. Still she did not meet the man with the key to her heart. And it embarrassed her so, as she grew older, to wear that heart-shaped locket, and it kept her from knowing other men. Finally, when she turned thirty (which to me at sixteen seemed infinitely far away), she gave up in despair and went to a jeweler to have the locket and chain broken, and her neck was free. As she turned to leave, a wonderfully handsome man entered. He had a gold key in his lapel. The woman cried “Oh!” and smiled at him. She almost threw herself on him. The man looked at her face, then looked down at her neck, and, as it was bare, his face went blank and he walked on past her without speaking.
It was a