Chapter 2: Shocking News
"Come on, Blair. Tell us. What's the big secret? What are you doing next week that you don't want to tell us about?" Tootie continued to ask her as they all walked into the Eastland cafeteria together at around four-thirty that afternoon. Tootie was the youngest of the four girls – and the nosiest. She was the utter queen of gossip on the Eastland campus and everybody knew it. She had no problems whatsoever getting into another person's business.
"Tootie, haven't you got bigger fish to fry besides trying to dig up the dirt on what Blair's doing next week, like that big history exam I know you have to start studying for that's coming up in your class on Monday?" asked Jo. In reality, Jo knew Blair well enough to understand that she'd really meant it when she'd said that what she was doing next week was something personal she didn't want to talk about. And unlike Tootie, Jo well understood the importance of respecting another person's privacy and boundaries.
"Yeah, I guess you're right," Tootie sullenly admitted.
"Come on, Tootie. Let's go upstairs. I'll help you start studying for your test for a little while before we have to set up for supper," Natalie told her.
"Thanks, Nat," Tootie responded, and then they both left and went upstairs to the girls' room.
"Thank you, Jo," Blair said after they were gone. "Like I said back at Clark Road, this thing I'm doing next week is something personal, and I don't really feel comfortable talking about it."
Jo nodded and said, "I understand. Tootie may not always respect a person's right to privacy, but I do."
Blair gave an understanding nod and said, "Thank you."
In the next moment, Jo responded with a smile before she decided to go outside and polish the bike she was so proud of. After Jo left, Blair stumbled into the lounge, laid down on the couch, and quickly slipped into a deep sleep. She had managed to hide her fatigue from the others incredibly well during the big race today, and in fact she had had a wonderful time, but she was still terribly exhausted and had been feeling that way for quite a while now, for reasons she did not want to discuss with anyone.
A little while later, Mrs. Garrett came in and found Blair practically passed out in the lounge, and it worried her. Ever since school had started back, Mrs. Garrett noticed that Blair had been sleeping twelve hours a night, and she'd also noticed the exhaustion and trepidation in her eyes during the daytime. Blair had been trying her best to hide it from everyone and go on as if everything was normal, and she'd been able to fool the girls for the most part. Natalie and Tootie were still busy readjusting to school life and they mostly had their minds on their new classes and school activities, and Jo was also pretty wrapped up in her schoolwork and in her attempts to convince a sexist mechanic in Peekskill, Mr. Garroll, to hire her despite her gender. For those reasons, the other girls had really been too busy to pay very much attention to Blair's unusual sleepiness and exhaustion. However, it had been impossible for someone like Mrs. Garrett not to pay attention to it and be concerned.
While the girls were far away from their own "parents" at Eastland during the school year, it was Mrs. Garrett who saw them, spent time with them, listened to them when they needed to talk, and was a true parent to them day in and day out. Mrs. Garrett always remained perfectly respectful of the girls' relationships with their parents and she never openly tried to take their place, but the cold, hard fact of the matter was, she was the one who was there for them constantly in all the ways their own mothers and fathers should have been but weren't, and she was the one who was really raising the girls most of the time. Mrs. Garrett never came right out and admitted it to anyone, but the truth was, she really did think of them as the daughters she never had, and like any true mother, she was very quick to pick up on it when something wasn't right with one of her girls. She knew this wasn't normal for Blair at all. Blair didn't usually like to lie around and sleep all the time. Like a lot of other seventeen-year-olds, she was typically active and outgoing, and as everyone well knew, she loved to date. Nobody at Eastland played the field better or more often than Blair Warner. She was usually going out with boys nearly every night, so when Blair turned down several guys and refused to go out on a single date ever since classes resumed four days ago, it really began setting off alarm bells in Mrs. Garrett's head. Being a registered nurse herself, Mrs. Garrett assumed that Blair had some kind of virus or was perhaps coming down with the flu, but it still concerned her when she knew something wasn't right with one of her girls.
In that next second, the payphone in the lounge started ringing, which brought Mrs. Garrett out of her thoughts and back to the present moment.
"Hello?" Mrs. Garrett answered. Then the male voice on the other end of the line asked to speak to Blair Warner, and as Mrs. Garrett stared at a clearly exhausted Blair sleeping soundly on the couch, she just didn't have the heart to wake her. "I'm sorry, but Blair isn't available at the moment. May I take a message?" Over the next minute or so, the voice went on to explain that Blair had signed up to take her first skydiving class next Friday, and he asked Mrs. Garrett to tell her that it had been rescheduled and would be starting at two-thirty rather than three-thirty in the afternoon. "Oh, yes. Yes, I'll tell her," a very stunned Mrs. Garrett told him then, unable to believe her ears. "Thank you for calling. Goodbye," she said, and then she hung up the phone.
Now, Mrs. Garrett was even more concerned, because this did not sound like Blair at all. Blair was not an adrenaline junkie by any means, and she was not the kind of person to take crazy risks with her safety. It was now more than obvious to her that something wasn't right, and she knew she had to get to the bottom of things.
Since Mrs. Garrett could easily see how exhausted Blair was, she decided to allow her to continue sleeping in the lounge while she and the other girls prepared and set up for supper that night. However, Mrs. Garrett did get Blair up so she could eat supper with everyone, of course. Later on, Blair said she felt well enough to help everyone clean up after supper, so she did, and then once everything was squared away in the kitchen and cafeteria for the evening, Jo, Natalie, and Tootie decided to go upstairs to their room to finish their homework. By then, Blair was more than ready to go upstairs and pass out on her bed for the rest of the night, but before she could leave the kitchen and head up to their room, Mrs. Garrett stopped her.
"Blair, wait up. I'd like to talk to you alone for a moment," Mrs. Garrett told her just before her foot reached the first step of the staircase in the kitchen.
Blair turned around then and said, "Yes, Mrs. Garrett?"
"Blair, I got a call from a skydiving instructor today, Mr. Thomas." The instant Mrs. Garrett said that, Blair's face fell, because she knew what that meant: Mrs. Garrett knew one of her secrets that she had very much wanted to keep to herself. She had not been ready at all for Mrs. Garrett or anyone in her Eastland family to find out about that yet. "He said to tell you that your first class had been rescheduled. It begins at two-thirty next Friday afternoon now and not at three-thirty."
"Oh, I see," Blair said quietly. "Thanks for telling me, Mrs. Garrett," she told her, and then immediately afterwards, she put her foot on the first step of the staircase, hoping desperately to be able to make her getaway in enough time before Mrs. Garrett stopped her.
Unfortunately for Blair, though, Mrs. Garrett quickly put her right hand on Blair's right arm before she could get away from her, and she asked, "Blair, what's going on? What's all this about?"
Blair turned around to face Mrs. Garrett in that moment, and then she answered unconvincingly, "It's not about anything, Mrs. Garrett. I just suddenly realized that I wanted a little adventure in my life. That's all. And anyway, you should be able to understand the need for adventure better than anyone. You're the one who won a bet jumping off your family's barn into a bale of hay when you were nine."
"I don't have any problem with seeking a little adventure every now and then, Blair, but I do have a problem with taking unnecessary risks with your life. Are your parents aware that you're doing this?"
"I haven't been able to get in touch with them. Daddy's got a bunch of big business meetings lined up in cities all over the world. I believe today he was in Chicago, and tomorrow, he's going to be in L.A., and in Tokyo the day after that. And I have no idea where my mother is or what she's doing right now," Blair admitted, which was a deeply sad truth. The Warners' business meetings and travels all over the world meant far more to them than their daughter did.
"Well it's obvious that you can't take the class now since it meets at two-thirty. You'll still be in class then and you know your schoolwork comes first."
"I know," Blair said quietly once again, knowing that ever since Mrs. Garrett found out about what she was doing, the battle had been lost before it even began. And the fact of the matter was, she was simply too exhausted, both physically and emotionally, to even try to fight for what she wanted now.
"And on top of that, I think your parents should be involved in a decision like this. You can sign up for another skydiving class in the future if you want, but not without talking to your parents about it and getting their permission first. Understood?"
"Understood," Blair responded in a rather sullen voice, just barely above a whisper.
"And I don't want you to think about signing up for another skydiving lesson again until you're feeling better. Right now, you're not in any kind of shape to take something like that on."
"Okay," Blair said in the same resigned tone of voice, which again, really concerned Mrs. Garrett. Whenever there was something that was important to Blair or to any of her girls that Mrs. Garrett didn't agree with and didn't want them to do, none of them would hesitate for a second to argue with her and try to get their way. Now, it was quite obvious that Blair was too exhausted to even try to persuade her to change her mind, and that deeply worried Mrs. Garrett. She knew it beyond the shadow of a doubt now that something really was very wrong with Blair.
After a long pause in which Mrs. Garrett's blue eyes were locked with Blair's chestnut eyes, Mrs. Garrett told her, "Blair, I want you to sleep in tomorrow. The girls and I will handle breakfast. Once we've cleaned everything up in the kitchen and the cafeteria after breakfast tomorrow morning, I'm taking you straight to the infirmary so that the school nurse can have a look at you."
"Why?" Blair asked nervously. Although she had been so exhausted lately, Mrs. Garrett hadn't voiced her concern about it until now, and Blair had hoped that she wouldn't make a big fuss about it. But now, there was a good chance that her secret just might get out, and that was the last thing she wanted to happen. She was far from being ready inside for the others to know about it. She wanted, and truly felt that she needed, to keep her secret for as long as she possibly could.
"Because I can take one look at you and tell that something's not right. Ever since you've come back to school, you haven't been yourself at all. You're constantly too weak and tired to do the things you normally do. You haven't gone out on a single date since you've come back, and you're so exhausted that you didn't even feel like trying to change my mind about your skydiving lessons a minute ago. That's not like you at all, so I know that something's wrong. You may have simply come down with a virus or a case of the flu, but whatever it is, we're going to get to the bottom of it. Now go upstairs and get some rest," she told her kindly as she put her hand on Blair's upper arm and gave it an affectionate squeeze. "I can tell that you need it."
Things really started caving in on Blair inside in that moment, and suddenly, she felt so trapped. As she started thinking about the possibility of going through an examination in the infirmary tomorrow, she became more and more afraid that the school nurse would send her for blood tests and that the truth would come out, and she couldn't bear for them to know. Not yet. She knew that the instant they found out, they wouldn't understand her side of things, and they would relentlessly try to push her into doing things that she couldn't bear to do, especially Mrs. Garrett. In the following second, her chestnut eyes locked with Mrs. Garrett's blue ones once again, and it was then that she made up her mind. It was typically Jo who took off and ran away whenever things got too hard for her to deal with, but now, it was Blair who was going to run, because she knew that if she didn't, she would be trapped in an impossible situation that would simply too difficult and painful for her to bear.
"I will," Blair said to Mrs. Garrett then. "Thank you."
"Of course," Mrs. Garrett responded, and then Blair turned around again and headed up the stairs.
Mrs. Garrett was the first person to wake up early the next morning while the girls were still in bed, sleeping in as they usually liked to do on the weekends. Breakfast was at seven o'clock on Monday through Friday, so Mrs. Garrett and the girls always had to be up pretty early during the week, but it wasn't until nine o'clock on Saturday mornings, which allowed them all to enjoy a little extra sleep. It was now seven o'clock, and Mrs. Garrett knew she'd have to get the girls up soon so they could get showered and dressed because they'd have to start preparing breakfast at eight.
Before she could go across the hall and wake them up, though, she heard the phone start ringing in the kitchen, so she went downstairs to answer it. Jo, Natalie, and Tootie were already awake when they heard it too, so Natalie and Tootie came out of their room and decided to follow Mrs. Garrett downstairs while Jo decided to stay in their room and mind her own business. However, the moment Natalie and Tootie left, Jo spotted what appeared to be a corner of a page of notebook paper sticking out from underneath the covers of Blair's bed. When she pulled back the covers, she discovered that there was indeed a letter from Blair addressed to her, Natalie, Tootie, and Mrs. Garrett, so she read it.
Meanwhile, Tootie, the reigning Queen of Gossip and Snooping, and the first runner-up to the crown, Natalie, stuck close to Mrs. Garrett as she answered the phone.
"Hello? Eastland School," she said in her usual pleasant tone of voice, with Natalie and Tootie standing close by.
The male voice on the other end of the line told her that his name was Dr. Sid Wyman, and that he needed to speak to either Blair Warner or to her guardian at the school, Mrs. Edna Garrett.
"This is Mrs. Garrett," she told him. "How may I help you this morning, Dr. Wyman?"
He then went on to apologize for calling her so early, but he explained that it was urgent. He told her that it was terribly important that she bring Blair in to see him at the hospital in Manhattan just as soon as she could.
The typical friendly and pleasant expression on Mrs. Garrett's face changed in that instant, and Natalie and Tootie could easily see it that she was upset about something.
"May I ask why, doctor?" she questioned.
Over the course of the next several moments, Mrs. Garrett's face fell, and Natalie and Tootie could see it that whatever it was that Dr. Wyman was telling her was a real kick in her gut. For a couple of moments, she almost looked as though she was trying to catch her breath, as if someone had literally just punched her in the stomach.
As Natalie and Tootie continued to wait anxiously for the phone call to end so that they could ask Mrs. Garrett what was going on, Jo came downstairs with Blair's note in her hand. The three girls just stood with Mrs. Garrett in silence for what felt like the longest time, waiting for the opportunity to talk with her, and watching as her face became more and more filled with worry. The ordinarily calm-and-in-control Mrs. Garrett now actually looked as if she was on the verge of panic, and that really frightened Natalie and Tootie and even someone as tough as Jo, their resident Bronx barbarian. Edna Garrett had always been their rock and their pillar of strength whenever things got tough. She was always the person they turned to for help, the strong one, the leader, the protector, the guardian. Edna Garrett didn't get scared, and she certainly didn't panic, or if she ever actually did, she certainly never allowed her girls to see it in her like this before. The fact that she was too upset to even try to hide it from them now only confirmed it that whatever was going on had to be something pretty bad.
"Yes. Yes, I'm still here," she said quietly, obviously shocked by whatever it was he'd just told her. "Yes, I understand how important this is. I'll bring her in as soon as possible." Pause. "Yes, thank you so much for calling me and letting me know. I had no idea about any of this until just now." Pause. "Yes, thank you again. Goodbye."
Mrs. Garrett then hung up the phone, and practically staggered out into the cafeteria in a daze, covering her mouth with her hand so she could hold back the sobs that were threatening to escape from her throat. Natalie, Tootie, and Jo followed closely behind, and they didn't say anything for several long seconds as they waited anxiously for Mrs. Garrett to regain her composure enough to tell them what was going on.
Finally, Jo put her hand on Mrs. Garrett's shoulder and gently asked, "Mrs. G., what is it? What's the matter?"
Jo's kind gesture and her question were enough to remind Mrs. Garrett that no matter how shocked and worried she was feeling inside, she still had four girls in her care she had to think about, one of whom needed her now more than ever before. Mrs. Garrett quickly removed her hand from her mouth, swallowed back the lump in her throat, and turned to face her girls.
"Girls, that was Dr. Sidney Wyman, Mrs. Warner's gynecologist," she started to explain to them in a deep, serious voice and not her usual quivering one. As Mrs. Garrett thought about it in those moments, she realized that as hard as this was going to be for their family now, the best possible thing she could do for her girls was to be completely honest with them at all times, so she decided that she wasn't going to hold anything back; that she was going to tell them absolutely everything up front.
"Why would Blair's mother's gynecologist be calling Eastland at seven o'clock on a Saturday morning?" questioned the ever-inquiring Natalie who was a budding journalist.
"He called because one of his colleagues and close friends, Dr. Paul Hastings, ran some tests on Blair a couple of weeks ago. It seems that right after she got back from our stay in Paris and went to spend the rest of her summer vacation in her mother's beach house in Hawaii, she started experiencing flu-like symptoms that dragged on for several weeks and never improved. Her mother finally talked her into going back to Manhattan to see their family doctor, and after running several blood tests, he admitted her into the hospital and transferred her case to Dr. Hastings. Dr. Hastings ran further tests and…girls…" Mrs. Garrett said in the same deep tone of voice, allowing the sentence to trail, unable to bring herself to say the words out loud.
"What is it, Mrs. Garrett?" asked Tootie.
"Girls…Blair has leukemia."
Now that the words had actually been spoken out loud, the girls were experiencing the exact same kick in the gut that had just happened to Mrs. Garrett moments before. They all felt as though the wind had just been kicked out of them, even Jo, who was always fighting with Blair and exchanging zingers with her.
"Blair has cancer?" a very shocked Tootie said moments later, finally breaking the long silence.
"Geez Louise," Jo gasped.
Natalie shook her head and said, "I can't believe it, you guys. I just can't believe it. I can't believe that something like that has actually happened to one of us."
"That's the way it always works, isn't it? You always think terrible things like car accidents or heart attacks or cancer happen to other people, not to you or to someone you really care about," Jo observed.
"Yeah," Mrs. Garrett sighed. "You're absolutely right, Jo. We do always think things like that can never happen to us or to someone we're close to…until they actually do happen to us or to someone we're close to."
"I don't understand, Mrs. Garrett. Since Blair's been diagnosed with leukemia, shouldn't she be in the hospital getting treatment? What is she doing here?" Natalie asked.
"Yeah, why hasn't she said anything about it?" Tootie chimed in. "Why has she been trying to go on as if everything was normal?"
"I don't know why, Tootie. For whatever reason, right after they learned of the diagnosis and got several more opinions from other specialists, Mr. and Mrs. Warner just up and left the hospital, and the doctors haven't heard from either one of them since. Then the morning Blair was supposed to begin her first round of chemotherapy treatment, she suddenly left as well. Dr. Hastings and his colleagues have been trying to track Blair and her parents down for the past two weeks. They haven't been able to get in touch with her parents, but the idea suddenly occurred to Dr. Wyman this morning to try the school and see if she came here. That's why he called. Her doctors have been calling all the Warners' different homes all over the world, but they didn't think until today to try Eastland."
"Sheesh, that's rough," Jo said quietly. "She's literally beginning a battle for her life now and the moment the battle starts, her own parents just leave her to face it alone. Any way you slice it, that's pretty cold."
"That's awful," Natalie concurred.
"Yeah! How could Mr. and Mrs. Warner do that to her?!" Tootie angrily cried out.
As a parent herself, Mrs. Garrett was even more outraged at Mr. and Mrs. Warner's behavior than the girls were. However, the anger she constantly felt towards the girls' parents for abandoning them to Eastland was a side of herself that she never showed to them. Deep down, she'd known it all along that the girls were getting the short end of the stick from their parents, being shipped away to boarding school so that they could be raised by others instead of getting any real parenting from their own mothers and fathers. Mrs. Garrett had always known how pitifully sad it was that she saw the girls twice, even three or four times as often as their own parents did. She knew way deep down that she was their one and only true parent and how wrong that was. But the fact that she clearly loved and cared for her girls much more than their own parents did had always been something far too painful for her to face, so whenever her girls tried to express their hurt and anger at being shipped away to Eastland, she would shut them down with the lame excuse that their parents were simply trying to give them a good education, despite the fact that she knew perfectly well that it was a load of bull. She also constantly sided with her girls' parents rather than with her girls whenever one of them had a fight with her mom and dad because she knew that there had been plenty of times in the past when her own parenting had been less than perfect, so she hadn't felt it would be fair for her to be too judgmental of other mothers and fathers. And even though she was absolutely furious with Mr. and Mrs. Warner now for abandoning their child right at the very point in her life when she needed them the most, she still didn't want to show that side of herself to her girls because she didn't want to think about how little their parents loved them, so instead, she chose to shut down that avenue of conversation.
"I don't know how Blair's parents could do what they did, girls, but at the moment, it doesn't matter. Right now, we just have to focus on helping Blair as much as we can. Jo, Natalie, Tootie, go upstairs and get dressed, and then the three of us will take care of breakfast. Then after Blair's eaten, I'll have a long talk with her, and afterwards, I'll pack some things for her and take her back to the hospital."
"Mrs. G., you can't do that," Jo said in a low, serious tone of voice.
"What do you mean I can't do that, Jo? I have to. I have to get Blair to the hospital as soon as possible. Dr. Wyman couldn't have made that any clearer."
"Mrs. G., what I mean is, you can't take Blair to the hospital because…Blair's not here. She's gone, and I have no idea where she is."
"What?" Mrs. Garrett gasped, unable to believe her ears. A second ago, it truly seemed as though things couldn't possibly get any worse, and now, incredibly enough, they actually did.
Jo then unfolded the note Blair had left behind and explained, "Blair must've gotten in her Porsche and driven away sometime in the middle of the night last night while we were all asleep. She left this note."
"Let me see that," Mrs. Garrett said, and then Jo handed her the piece of paper. In the next moment, Mrs. Garrett read it out loud. It said:
Dear Mrs. Garrett, Jo, Natalie, and Tootie,
I'm sorry, but I really need to leave for a little while. There are things going on in my life that are just too hard to talk about, that I can't explain to all of you at the moment, but because of everything that's happening, I just feel so trapped and I really need to get away. I can't tell you where I'll be going because to be perfectly honest, I don't even know where I'm going, myself, and I can't tell you when I'll be back because I know I can only come back when I feel ready to face everything, and I don't know when that's going to be. I'm going to be alright, so please don't worry, and please don't try and find me. I need to be alone right now, and I need all of you to respect that. Please.
Blair
"Mrs. Garrett, what are we going to do?! What's going to happen to Blair out there, all alone?!" asked a clearly panicked Tootie.
"Just calm down, Tootie," Jo told her. "Panicking isn't going to help anybody, least of all Blair."
"That's right," Mrs. Garrett agreed, just barely managing to keep a lid on her own raging emotions of fear and panic herself, although those emotions could clearly be seen on her face and in her eyes.
"We should go to the police," Tootie suggested.
"Tootie, the police only go out looking for people who have been missing for at least twenty-four hours," Natalie informed her.
"Yeah, but Blair's still a minor. She's only seventeen, so the cops may go out looking for her sooner," said Jo.
"You girls take care of breakfast. In the meantime, I'll go to the police station and talk to the police myself," Mrs. Garrett told them.
"What do we do after you're done talking to the cops and after we're done taking care of breakfast, Mrs. Garrett?" asked Tootie.
Mrs. Garrett then thought back to a time several months before when Blair, Jo, and Natalie had gone to Manhattan together to see a Broadway play, and Tootie had had to stay behind because her parents felt she was too young to be running around in New York City without an adult. Anxious to prove to her parents and everyone else that she was mature enough to be on her own in Manhattan, she'd run away from the Eastland campus and gotten on the next train to Manhattan, planning to meet the girls in front of the theatre. Unfortunately, things hadn't gone as planned and the girls missed the play, and therefore, Tootie missed meeting up with them. Mrs. Garrett ended up driving to Manhattan to help the girls find Tootie, and she remembered what she had told them then, and she repeated those words now.
"We will find her," Mrs. Garrett answered with the same determination now that she'd shown then. "We'll just keep looking until we do."