Weird Girl (10 page)

10

The Hat Man parked at the entrance and removed her suitcase
from the trunk before opening her door. With his hand firmly gripping her upper
arm, he led her through the heavy wooden doors of the main building. A stern
woman in a gray suit stepped forward and took the suitcase to search it (which,
luckily for Cleo, involved a cursory toss of the contents and a quick sweep
with a metal detector wand). Meanwhile, the Hat Man led Cleo into a carpeted
waiting area and pushed a buzzer discreetly hidden in the wallpaper pattern
beside a set of walnut pocket doors. Moments later, a ridiculously beautiful blonde
woman opened the doors and smiled at them.

“Welcome,” she said merrily, as though this were the Emerald
City of Oz. “Right this way!” She turned and gestured for them to follow her
into a large office. After moving behind the biggest desk Cleo had ever seen,
the woman indicated that everyone should sit, and so they did.

“Always good to see you, Jackson,” said the woman as she
unconsciously tugged on an earring that was the same green as her eyes. The Hat
Man removed his sunglasses and winked as he hooked them onto the collar of his
shirt. “And you, Ms. Adams,” he replied, his accent and his grit suddenly
missing when he spoke. Cleo gaped at him.

Then they both looked at Cleo. “And who do we have here?”
asked Ms. Adams.

Defiantly, Cleo said nothing.

Pursing her lips, the woman narrowed her eyes at Cleo. “I
see,” was all that she said before pressing a button on her telephone. “Please
send in Ms. Blue.”

They sat in silence until a woman entered the room through a
door that Cleo hadn’t noticed before. She was thin, six feet tall, had large,
impossibly perky breasts, and was shaved completely bald. A spiderweb tattoo
covered her scalp, and she had the bluest eyes that Cleo had ever seen.
Somewhat alarmingly, when the woman spoke, it was with the voice of a little
girl (or perhaps a very creepy doll). Cleo wondered if Ms. Blue had been
huffing helium in the other room.

“Yes, Ms. Adams?” said Blue.

The woman behind the desk smiled. “Please take Cleo to her
quarters and see that she gets settled. Jackson and I have some paperwork to
complete.”

The Amazon turned to Cleo and held out her hand. Rather than
take it, Cleo edged sideways in a half circle, until she was able to reach the
door without ever turning her back on the trio of adults. Blue just smiled and
reached above Cleo’s head to buzz open the door. “If you’ll just follow me,”
she said in her doll voice.

Strangely, Cleo heard the door lock behind them, followed by
a woman’s sultry laugh and the seductive melodies of late 1940s jazz. The
otherwise-silent waiting room was suddenly permeated with muffled sighs and
groans drifting through the hardwood, and Cleo raised an eyebrow and looked up
(way up) at Blue. “Jackson is a charming man,” was all that was said, and the
pair continued out of the building and down a well-manicured path to another brick
structure.

The housing for students was dormitory style, with eight
girls to a room. A pair of bunk beds nestled in each of the four corners, and
the center of the room held a long table and chairs for the girls to use as a
desk. There were nine rooms and one communal bathroom on each of the building’s
ten floors. Cleo’s suitcase was already waiting on a lower bunk when Blue led
her into what was to be her home for the foreseeable future. Classes were in
session, so Cleo’s roommates were absent for the time being. This gave her
plenty of uninterrupted opportunities to pester Blue with questions as they
toured the facilities.

The campus had four brick buildings: Main Hall, which
contained administrative offices, the infirmary, the library, and a few
classrooms; Stein Hall, which housed classrooms, laboratories, and a small
gymnasium; Concord Hall, the dormitory (which everyone referred to as “the
Convent”); and the dining hall (no special name here). Cottages for faculty and
staff dotted the perimeter of the property, and stone paths connected the
structures. The grounds were landscaped and immaculately kept, with rose bushes
and hedges and crape myrtle trees with wrought iron benches situated perfectly
beneath their branches. Currently, there were approximately six hundred
students enrolled at the school, slightly lower than previous years. The girls
ranged in age from six to eighteen, and all came from families with a lot of
disposable income (the annual tuition was $100,000—no scholarship students were
accepted). The uniform varied from navy shorts with a matching polo shirt in
the warmer months, to navy pants and a matching wool sweater in the winter.
(There were no accent colors. Even the school flag was a monochromatic
nightmare: a plain field of navy blue with the school’s name embroidered in
matching thread. You could only read it from twelve inches away in bright
light. Because of this, Cleo’s red sneakers would be the first casualty of her
wardrobe.)

After her orientation, Blue led Cleo back to her room in the
dormitory. From the sounds drifting up through the four floors below them, Cleo
assumed that classes had finally dismissed for the day. Blue claimed to have
work to attend to, and she left Cleo to unpack her things. Her uniforms were
neatly folded in separate piles on the bed, three versions of each outfit (for
laundry purposes). Working quickly, Cleo slipped the two notebooks out of her
bag and stuck them under the mattress of her bunk. The candy, she hid in a
mound of underwear in her top drawer. Footsteps were drawing dangerously near
the open doorway when she reached into the pocket of her trench coat and pulled
Waldorf out of his dark prison. Sensing that this wasn’t a good time to
introduce him to the girls, since Cleo had not yet introduced herself, she
rolled him up in a navy blue sweater and was just nudging the drawer closed
with her knee when her roommates flew into the room chattering. As soon as they
saw her, they skidded to a stop and huddled there, staring.

“Hi, I’m Cleo,” she said with a small wave. There was no
reply. “Umm…I’m your new roomie!” she said brightly. Again, nothing. Finally,
the other seven girls exchanged a look and broke apart to go to their separate
bunks. Still, nobody spoke to Cleo. This would be the norm for her first ten
days at the school.

***

The Harper Valley School for Girls was a misleading name, as
the institution was actually situated near the top of a mountain in northern California. Cleo learned that not only were there no boys, there were no male employees
either. It was like being trapped on an island of Amazons, surrounded by an
ocean of hormones. Other than the occasional visiting father or aging family
chauffeur, Jackson was the only man permitted free access to the building and
grounds. Being handsome, mysterious, and seemingly unavailable made him quite
popular, and every female over the age of thirteen was hopelessly in love with
him (including Blue).

Everyone assumed that Jackson was nineteen or twenty, but he
was actually twenty-five. If he were to take off his hat, it could be noted
that his closely buzzed hair was the color of espresso. His clothes were
stylish and expensive, but with a vintage flair (he sometimes wore spats), his
eyes were Sinatra blue, and he wore an understated cologne that lingered in the
hallways, causing palpitations in even the most matronly staff. He was addicted
to peppermint candy, leaving behind a hint of winter wherever he went. But,
everyone knew about Jackson and Ms. Adams, and this added an element of danger
to his presence that elevated him even more. He was the Forbidden Fruit, and
they all wanted a taste. Even worse, he knew it. Jackson was, indeed, a very
charming man, and he used it as a weapon to bring this community of women to
their knees. A wink, a compliment, greeting by name, holding doors—these were
all second nature to Jackson. And, since he was the only male they ever saw,
and he happened to be quite handsome, Jackson was essentially a new form of cocaine.
They would do anything for him, as long as Ms. Adams never found out. He was
the perfect predator on a hunting preserve designed specifically to suit his
talents (although he did utilize just enough self control to ensure that the
term “jailbait” would never apply to his…relationships among the school
population—but this meant that he was still all the rage with the senior
class).

Cleo was the only one who was immune to his charms. In fact,
she hated him with a fire that burned steadily and consistently—and this
fascinated Jackson. For the first three months of her time at the school, it
seemed like the mysterious Jackson was always watching Cleo. It made her angry,
but it made everyone else insanely jealous. He always managed to open the door
just when she was in danger of dropping an armload of books, or caution her
about a puddle down the path, or ask her about her day, or walk behind her and
make small talk. The fact that she absolutely ignored him every single time,
even if it meant walking straight through the puddle and suffering the rest of
the day with wet socks and frigid toes, just seemed to excite Jackson. But to
the others, Cleo was nothing more than a snob who was too stupid to appreciate
such personal attention. Like a cat, Cleo avoided interactions with others, and
seemed finicky and superior. So, they whispered about her, and called her “Puss,”
and occasionally hid sardines in her mattress.

It didn’t help her case that she was so far ahead of them
academically. On her second day at the school, Cleo was taken to a windowless
room that smelled like cinnamon and peaches, where Blue proctored a series of
placement tests. The fact that she had not been given breakfast, coupled with
the odor of cobbler, made Cleo’s stomach growl within the first ten minutes. By
two hours in, she felt like it was gnawing a hole in itself, which made it
difficult to concentrate on the exam questions. What she didn’t know, however,
was that this was purely intentional. All incoming students took their
placements while hungry, because Ms. Adams liked to see how well they performed
under stress. The smell was piped in to enhance the effects of the semi-starved
state. Filing cabinets in the next room held decades of placement tests with
dried saliva spots from drooling, delirious girls.

Luckily, Cleo was incredibly smart. Not only did this apply
to her work on the exams, but when Blue left the room with the first stack of
exams, giving Cleo a moment to work the kinks out of her pencil-bearing hand,
Cleo immediately pulled out the pieces of candy that she had secreted on her
person earlier that morning. Many of them had melted slightly under the
influence of her body heat, but the resulting sugar rush when they landed on
her tongue was so divine that it was worth the sticky fingers. She sucked,
chewed, and swallowed at high speed, even squeezing a whole piece of candy down
her gullet when she thought she heard footsteps headed her way. The empty candy
wrappers disappeared into her pockets, and Cleo was sitting with a figurative
halo above her head when Blue returned with the second round of tests.

Cleo’s placement was borderline eighth and ninth grade, which
was on par with what she had been doing with her tutor, so she would finish out
the Spring term as an eighth grader, and begin the high school level in the
fall, just before her tenth birthday. It was now early March, so she would have
three and a half months of classes before summer break, when her parents would
have the option to take her back or pay a fee to leave her at the school until
August classes began. She really hoped they would take her back.

11

In addition to regular classes, there were three additional
criteria for students to complete while at the school. First, every girl was
required to learn at least two foreign languages, of her choice, and pass a
conversational proficiency exam for each. Second, each student was required to
meet a standard of penmanship, so certain assignments were to be completed with
a fountain pen and submitted for grading of not only the content, but the
neatness of hand. Third, due to the fact that most, if not all, of the students
were sent to boarding school because of a behavioral problem, a social problem,
or some other problem that their parents never could explain very well, all of
the girls were required to spend their first year on campus in a sort of
“internship” program. Upon matriculation, every girl would be assigned to work
in one of four areas: landscaping, administration, the dining hall, or the
library. There would be a three month stint in the designated field, and then
the girl would rotate to another job, completing three-month intervals in each
of the four areas during her first year at the school. If the girl received
positive feedback from all four supervisors, then her labor contract was
complete. However, if one (or more) of the supervisors offered a negative
review of the girl’s performance, then she would spend the next
year
completing
a mandatory rotation in that area. If there were bad reviews from multiple
areas, then she may well spend the rest of her school career as an indentured
servant on campus. It was advertised as the perfect way to teach discipline,
self control, and the value of hard work, but it also meant that Ms. Adams had
a large staff who basically paid her a hundred grand a year to let them work
for her.

Cleo’s first rotation was in the dining hall, where she
worked three hours a day, four days a week on the evening serving line. As she
hadn’t quite hit her growth spurt yet, she had to stand on a plastic milk crate
so that she could reach the food with her long aluminum spoon. She had to wear
an apron (navy, of course) and a hair net, and she was instructed to greet each
diner with a smile and the phrase, “How may I serve you today?” If she was
caught without her protective gear or her smile, if she failed to ask the
correct question, or if she gave either too much or too little food, she would
be reprimanded. Adjusting for a learning curve, the cafeteria manager allowed 3
strikes before submitting a bad performance report.

Every school, especially an all-girls school, is going to
have an alpha female. At Harper Valley, this was Mae. And she had decided not
to welcome Cleo into the pack.

Mae Fordham was the seventeen-year-old daughter of one of Hollywood’s most prolific producers. Her mother was a model/actress who had married and
divorced a billionaire by the time she was twenty-three, and since her beauty
(and her body) were so captivating, the poor shmuck had told his attorneys to
shut up about the pre-nuptial agreement before the happy couple eloped in Greece. Needless to say, she took him to the cleaners in the divorce, and came into her
current marriage already filthy rich. Mae was at Harper Valley because the
stresses of raising a teenager were just too much for an ex-model trying to
avoid wrinkles. As beautiful as her mother, with jet black hair and green eyes,
Mae was also a slut, and right now she had her sights set on Jackson.
Annoyingly, he seemed to pay more attention to Cleo than anyone else, and this
kind of crap didn’t happen in Mae’s world.

Mae and her entourage of harpies ate together at every meal.
They were delighted to see Cleo in her hair net and apron, in the role they
felt she deserved: servant. It didn’t matter that everyone at the school,
including Cleo, had to meet a baseline income range of somewhere between
“ridiculously rich” and “super-friggin’ rich.” For some reason, Cleo seemed
poor, like a little Oliver Twist in their midst (the Senior English teacher had
a thing for Dickens). Add to this Cleo’s nebulous relationship with Jackson, and she was officially a pest species in their ecosystem. And pests must be
eradicated, or at least taught a lesson in a very public way.

So, when Mae slid her tray straight down the line to Cleo,
and Cleo smiled and said, “How may I serve you today?”, Mae smiled back
malevolently and responded, “Oh my God! Is that kitty litter under your
fingernails?” The entourage snickered and she raised her voice, “I refuse to
eat that swill unless Puss washes her dirty little paws. Who knows what she’s
been doing with those hands?” Her loyal followers cackled and loudly agreed.

Cleo tried to breathe through the rage. She counted slowly
to twenty and back down to zero. Plastering a smile on her face, she said,
“Why, certainly.” Climbing down from her milk crate, she went to the sink and
washed her hands. Slowly. Thoroughly. The line backed up behind Mae, and people
started to complain. Cleo looked over her shoulder at the girls and then held
up her hands as if to inspect them. “Nope! Still not clean enough. I’d better
wash them again!” Ten minutes later, her supervisor yanked her back from the
sink and demanded to know why a hundred people were still waiting for mashed
potatoes. As innocently as possible, Cleo told her that she was just trying to
please her customer, as she had been trained to do. Scowling at her chapped,
scarlet hands, the supervisor told her to take off early for the day and get
some cream from the infirmary. Cheerfully, Cleo waved at Mae and the girls on
her way out the staff entrance.

***

The next day, Mae tried a different scheme. Allowing Cleo to
serve her potatoes, she walked toward her table and then shrieked and dropped
her tray. All activity stopped. Having planned this so that she would be
standing in the best possible light, Mae turned slightly to offer her best
angle to the crowd and yelled, “There’s cat hair in my potatoes! It’s
disgusting!” Pointing dramatically at Cleo, Mae then yelled, “Hey, Puss! Did
you cough up a hair ball in the food?”

Everyone held their breath waiting for Cleo’s response. She
was new, and didn’t have any friends, but most people had already concluded
that she was really weird. Some were hoping for a fight. Others crouched down
just a little waiting for the pig blood to start raining down.

Finally, Cleo smiled and called out in a loud, clear voice,
“My apologies, Mae. Perhaps I could serve you some fresh potatoes?” She climbed
down off of her crate and wrestled a new pan of potatoes out of the warmer. Her
head reappeared above the sneeze protector and she held up her aluminum spoon.
“Ready?” she called.

Mae smiled and walked slowly back to the serving line,
leaving her tray and splattered food in the floor. After all, cleaning was
somebody else’s job. Aware that she still had a captive audience, Mae was
plotting her next move as she slid a clean tray down to Cleo’s station. The
glob of (very hot) potatoes hit her in the chest and slid down her navy polo
shirt before she had a chance to think.

“Whoops!” said Cleo. “Fresh mashed potatoes are so
slippery.”

An ungodly sound echoed in all four corners of the building
as Mae lifted her Tiffany necklace out of the starchy goop that still clung to
her shirt. Everyone held their breath as the cafeteria manager charged like a
bull from the kitchen. One of the French instructors (the one who always wore
sunglasses) came forward to pull Mae away from the mess before she killed Cleo.

Cleo, feeling quite pleased with herself, stepped down from
the milk crate and waited for the cafeteria manager to stop yelling long enough
to take a breath. When the interval finally came, Cleo asked, “I get three
strikes, right?”

Reluctantly, the large woman lowered her fist and nodded.
Cleo nodded back, removed her apron, and said, “Well, I think one strike is
enough for today, don’t you? So, I’m just gonna take off early. I kind of
burned myself on the potato pan.” She was gone before the woman could think of
a reply.

***

Cleo and Mae managed to avoid one another for the next
several days, partially because of their differing schedules, and partially
because Cleo’s supervisor stuck her in the kitchen chopping salad components
for the rest of the week. Cleo stuck to her usual routine: class, homework,
surveillance. This week, she was documenting the grooming habits of the girls
who lived on her floor in the dormitory. (They had some fascinatingly
complicated morning rituals.) It wasn’t until the Friday assembly that she and
Mae were reunited. But, where Cleo had forgotten about Mae entirely, Mae had
certainly not forgotten about Cleo.

Ms. Adams was addressing the student body about upcoming
events, including a dance (which the girls nicknamed LesbiFest, since there
were no guys and everyone had to wear polo shirts and shorts), and an Easter
egg hunt/picnic. It was late March at this point, about three weeks into Cleo’s
time at the school, and she was excited about the observations that could come
out of LesbiFest (she had only recently learned what a lesbian was, and figured
that the odds were good that the school had a few—her money was on a couple of
faculty members in particular). For some reason, it made her think of Santo,
and her daydream distracted her just enough that she didn’t notice the shift in
the atmosphere until the hum of conversation changed. Looking up, she realized
that Mae had been invited to the podium to discuss the dance (she was chair of
the committee), and people had started to sit up straighter during the first
few lines of her speech.

“…And therefore, the Spring Dance committee, of which I am
honored to serve as Chairwoman, has not only decided on this year’s theme of
“Scat Cats,” complete with jazz music and a forties dance contest, but we have
unanimously selected the student who will serve as Dance Mascot. Although we
have never had a mascot before, we, the committee, feel that it will truly make
this a night to remember. From the dance decoration budget, we have set aside
the funds to purchase a costume, which the mascot will wear for the duration of
the event. And now, let’s hear it for our Pussssy Cat—Cleo St. James!” She
smirked and began clapping until the entire audience joined the applause.
Except for Cleo, who was slack-jawed at the idea of being stuck in a cat
costume at a lady dance.

Weaving her way through the crowd and out of the gymnasium,
she walked into one of the gardens and sat on a shaded bench to wait for the
burning in her cheeks to fade away. She closed her eyes and tried to focus on
the chirping of the birds, and the slight breeze in her hair, and the smell of
the roses at her back and the crape myrtle blossoms above her head, but just
kept coming back to incredibly graphic images of things she could do to punish
Mae. The voice from the bushes didn’t help matters.

“Well, that was quite an expression,” said Jackson. “What
were you thinking about just then?” he asked as he casually leaned against the
crape myrtle at her side, a navy fedora tilted back on his head.

Cleo gritted her teeth. “Go. Away.”

Jackson smiled and put his hands in his pockets, adjusting
his position slightly for better support against the tree trunk. “Cat mascot,
huh? I heard about you and Mae the other day. What has she got against you?”

Cleo took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I don’t
know. Honestly.”

“Well, you might want to figure it out,” he said. Taking his
sunglasses out of his jacket pocket, he slipped them on and added, “If you want
to figure out how to stop her.” Then, he sauntered up the path, leaving her
alone with her tree.

Huh.
Although she would rip out her fingernails
before saying it out loud, maybe Jackson was onto something. It was time to spy
on Mae.

***

Having an excellent memory, and a certain proficiency in
Gregg Shorthand, allowed Cleo to merely eavesdrop on Mae and her posse during
the day, and quickly transfer the information to her notebook while her
roommates were fighting for mirror space down the hall. It was tricky for the
first few days, but she figured out that:

1. Mae was a slut.
   
2. Mae was an only child of very rich parents, and often
   wondered how soon they would die so that she could inherit.
   
3. Mae terrorized other girls into doing all of her homework
   for her.
   
4. Mae’s eighteenth birthday was coming up.
   
5. Mae wanted to have sex with somebody for her birthday (see
   #1).
   

None of this information was helpful to Cleo’s immediate
problem. Why did Mae hate her? Of course, she hated Mae right back, but she
knew exactly why that was.

Meanwhile, the battle between the two girls continued. In
the library one afternoon, Cleo crawled underneath a row of tables in order to
eavesdrop on Mae and the girls. If she happened to also have a White Out pen
handy, and if Mae’s navy suede satchel with her initials embroidered on the
side happened to gain a few extra letters, it was just multitasking, really.
Unfortunately, Mae decided to leave the library before Cleo was finished, so
the other library patrons had to think for a minute about the meaning of the
MOTHER FUC that Mae was sporting. (She was always so trendy, even in uniform.)

At the dining hall that evening, Mae once again staged a
scene. Cleo had earned her way back onto the serving line (possibly by
pretending to cut herself on the salad chopping job—a lot of pomegranates died
to make those stains), and she pretended not to notice Mae glaring at her as
she moved past the other servers. With a brilliant smile, Cleo said, “How may I
serve you today?” and braced for the worst. Instead, Mae just said, “I’ll have
some potatoes, thanks.”