Another Faust (25 page)

Madame Vileroy smoothed her golden hair with a delicate ivory hand. The next bestowal was for Valentin — the writer. A writer believes anything, living a life of lies. For him, she had an old and precious gift. One that a desperate soul would surely embrace. A great lie for one who has yet to become a great liar.

March was a dying and dreary month, full of nothing but aborted promises. The New York weather was wet and unblooming. Madame Vileroy was ever-present, and for the most part, the Fausts were still not very welcome at Marlowe. Belle was undisputed queen bee, but nobody likes queen bees. Her baths were so painful that she’d need days to recover. Though she could control how others felt, her own moods would swing wildly out of control. She’d leave her bathroom broken, her nails dug into her forearm. She’d become irritated after initial recovery, then angry at the world. Those were the times she’d make mistakes, when the pain had made her bitter. And even if she was set to make you love her, she couldn’t make herself play the part, even a little. One day she made a teacher cry. His big blubbering face looked ghoulish as he wailed in the middle of class, saying he loved Belle, calling his wife on his cell phone right there in front of them all to tell her he wanted out. It was such a ridiculous scene, a grown man on his knees, so desperate and lustful that the other students were grossed out. And the indecency of it made Belle look ugly.

Victoria’s hatred for Marlowe had eased after she had won class president, joined the debate team, and settled into a calendar full of other activities. She found plenty to hate, though, like the frog-ugly ladies of the counselors’ office who thought about ice cream a shocking amount of the time, the winning streak Thomas was on in debate, the wannabe gangsta rappers in the Investment Banking Club — and of course, there was an unhealthy dose of hate for Lucy Spencer.

Still, no Faust was more depressed during the endless March than Christian, who had lost his only friend after the hallway incident with Lucy. Connor had kept his distance after that. He didn’t offer to play golf or to show Christian around school. Christian went on with his life, but he didn’t handle friendlessness as well as Bicé. Once Bicé walked into his room with everything stopped and she saw Christian frozen in the middle of an awkward high five. Buddy’s plasticine smile, after a nice shot, was the only human contact he had. Christian was leaning out to make the maneuver work since Buddy didn’t know what a high five was and Christian seemed to be slapping his wave good-bye.

Bicé kept a low profile. Kids would laugh, saying she was retarded, the way she’d forget things you’d just told her, the way she’d almost screech if you touched her, the way she talked to herself in the middle of class while the teacher was talking. Even in public, Bicé acted like she’d been shipwrecked on a deserted island. She could have been insane or schizophrenic, until suddenly she’d translate Cicero’s Latin as if it were Seuss’s English, catch the Asian kids making fun of her in Cantonese and correct their grammar, or spend a whole hour explaining the inside jokes in
Finnegans Wake.
In those moments, she’d be magnanimous, and then she’d see the eyes staring at her and shrink. It was like being “in the monkey cage,” she said, which was an idiom in Swahili. She had become famous. Teaching her was like excavating the library of Alexandria — you didn’t have anything to add, only hoped to discover what was already there, hidden under a sea.

The attention made her unpopular, so much that she’d become infamous. If she had ridden the bus, she would have been the girl huddling in the seat directly behind the bus driver. Her brothers and sisters were busy with their hectic lives, so she spent more lunches and break periods by herself, reading and eating alone. While her siblings struggled for their prizes, as they drove toward their certain dreams, Bicé struggled to find a friend — anywhere, even in books. She kept thinking that if she could just learn more and more languages, maybe she’d even find one somewhere on the planet.

Most days, the other kids teased her, knowing that she wouldn’t fight back. Somehow, they couldn’t dig all the way down to that part of themselves that understood a girl like Bicé. And so, they found ways to use her as a toy, a raven-headed plaything that would keep her head bowed, except for those rare and delicious moments when she would respond so cleverly that they could laugh at her even more. Sometimes, Valentin would say, Bicé was so careless that it was like she was asking for it, setting herself up. Like the time she was caught reading the
Kama Sutra
in the original Sanskrit in the hallway between classes, right out in the open, lurid cover facing the hall traffic, pages flipping loudly. The way she furrowed her brows, trying to understand every word on the page — such concentration. Valentin said she had it coming.

In truth, Bicé had no choice but to concentrate like that. Because she was doing so much more than just learning languages. She was deciphering them. Undoing them, and putting them back together from scratch. She would spend hours poring over syntax and origin, using one language to learn another. That’s why most of the international kids didn’t like her. “So arrogant,” they would call her. Like the incident with Pamposh Koul and his band of gorgeous South Asian imports — girls who had transferred to Marlowe from top Indian and Pakistani schools, most of whom were in training to compete for Miss Universe and packed themselves tightly by Pamposh’s side. That was the day that Pamposh had asked her if she spoke Kashmiri and she said no, because she didn’t. A few hours later, he and three of his girlfriends had sat around one of the tables at the library, a few feet away from Bicé, whispering cruel remarks in Kashmiri, making sure to emphasize the fact that, yes, they were making fun of her, and no, she could not understand for once.

Then, one of them had walked over to her table waving a piece of paper.

“Hey, you’re that language girl, right?”

Bicé didn’t say anything.

“We thought you’d like to learn Kashmiri. We wrote down some words. Here, have a look.”

She showed Bicé her list, handwritten in pretty girlish loops. “Come and sit with us, and we’ll teach you how to say it.”

Bicé, who was looking at the paper with deep concentration, barely looked up as she allowed the girl to lead her to their table. She sat silently as they coaxed her to say a few phrases, as they told her to repeat this or to enunciate that. “This is the word for
hello.
” “This is how you ask for a nearby restaurant.” “This is how you introduce your family.”

Finally, after about ten minutes, Bicé looked up.

“This word doesn’t mean
restaurant.
”

“Yeah, it does,” Pamposh said innocently.

“Well, if it does, then I bet Urdu-speaking tourists don’t eat out in Kashmir too often . . .”

“What?”

“And that part there, that doesn’t mean ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you.’ It’s really gross.” Bicé kept reading. “And I’m not saying any of that stuff about a big ape — that’s obviously about Christian.”

Pamposh, who, instead of feeling embarrassed, had decided to focus on the injustice of Bicé’s apparent deception, crossed his arms and sat back. He watched as Bicé kept poring over his hilarious Kashmiri insults, deciphering each one slowly, sometimes writing notes. She was like an archeologist digging through petrified excrement (which he had inadvertently provided). He didn’t exactly cherish the position.

“What, so you picked up Kashmiri in the last three hours?”

At times like this, when Bicé thought that her classmates really wanted an explanation, when she assumed that a reasonable answer would make her loved, these were the moments when she felt happy — and then, afterward, the most alone. The applause-winning defense argument just before the guilty verdict. But no matter how often it happened, she never saw it coming.

She folded the paper, a bit too excitedly.

“No, no! See, once you know seven or eight languages in the same family, the ninth one comes easy. You don’t need a class or anything. Just a good conversation and an hour with a dictionary . . .”

They weren’t impressed. Bicé went on.

“You can use the other languages — the syntax and roots and common words . . .”

When no one answered, Bicé faltered, thinking that they didn’t understand.

“There are families of languages, see? Spanish, Italian, Portuguese.” She counted on her fingers. “Those are Romance languages.”

Still no response.

“Well, you have yours, right? The Indo-Aryan languages? Punjabi, Gujarati, Kashmiri? You see?”

After a moment, she saw that they didn’t care. That they weren’t looking for a lesson. That she had once again misread the moment. So she cleared her throat and whispered in a faint, singsong voice, “Klingon, Wookie, Elvish . . .”

No one got the joke.

At lunchtime, Marlowe’s halls filled with popped collars, hot-pink cell phones, and
bento
boxes full of
unagi.
Bicé stood aimlessly outside the library, surveying the chatting teenagers in their Marlowe uniforms, their gray-and-navy blazers, slacks and skirts, and crisp white shirts. She was tempted to turn around and go home. Or to stop everything and explore the school alone. Or to just hide right there for a few more minutes. More than anything, Bicé hated crowds. She thought she’d return to the library, spend the lunch hour reading or deciphering another family of languages, maybe some Native American ones. But then from the corner of her eye, she spotted Belle walking urgently toward the girls’ room. Forgetting about her pathetically short list of lunch options, Bicé got an overwhelming desire to look out for her sister. She followed her into the bathroom, shrinking back into the corner as Belle entered a stall. The door to the bathroom suddenly opened again, and Bicé had to duck behind it as a bouncy blonde with a ponytail walked in and started knocking on each stall.

“I’m in here, Mags,” Bicé heard her sister’s hoarse voice coming out of the stall. “Don’t worry. There’s no one else in here.”

Bicé wondered what they were doing lingering in a bathroom. Shouldn’t Belle be off making her lunchtime entrance? Belle’s dining hall entrances were never discreet. When she drifted through the heavy double doors, the whole school turned to watch, dropping their half-eaten sandwiches, abandoning their candy bars and conversations. When she approached a table, people made room, desperate to be closer to her. She was Marlowe’s collective addiction, permeating the heart of the school with every gust of wind.