Set roughly the same time as my fic To Understand – the end of Mallory's freshman year in
high school. She's still at boarding school. This
makes the rest of the BSC (minus Jessi) at the end of
their junior years.
Now, this character thing is the hard part.
Marnie Skyedottir, Mallory's girlfriend in this story, is borrowed
without the knowledge or permission of her author and creator, Nancy Werlin. Marnie first appears in Werlin's novel
Locked Inside, which is a companion to her novel The Killer's Cousin,
both of which I recommend. According to
canon, Marnie attended a celebrity school around age
11, when her mother Skye died, and then when she was 16, she went to another
school called Halsett Academy for Girls, also in
Massachusetts, which is where Locked Inside takes place. I'm playing with the canon in that we'll
pretend that Marnie attended Mallory's boarding
school for this year, when they were both freshmen. Nancy Werlin isn't
a terribly well-known author, but I couldn't think of another famous literary
boarding-school girl.
Now, on to the fic.
* * *
Whenever Dawn sends a letter – and Mallory knows by now that her e-mails are usually updates and funny stories, her letters are reserved for serious things – she talks like she knows, and that scares the shit out of Mallory. She most certainly does not want anyone, particularly her friends from home, to know, and she's never told them, either. Besides, Dawn's been living in California for the last three years, in fact she had moved back out there before Mallory even left for boarding school, and so how would she have any idea?
Jessi, now – Jessi might know, although Mallory hasn't explicitly told her, either. She reads over her e-mails one last time before she sends them, making sure she hasn't mentioned Marnie too many times. She tells herself, as her keyboard-practiced fingers reach for CTRL + F, that she just wants to make sure that Jessi knows she doesn't have any better friend than her, even three years and several miles later. But she also knows that her best friend might guess, even fleetingly, and she doesn't want to take the chance.
Marnie doesn't mind Mallory's secretiveness, either, although Mal knows she wonders why it's such an issue. Sometimes she gets more direct and asks. "Why don't you want your friends to know?" she says sometimes, pulling lightly on one S-shaped red curl that Mallory has let grow long again – it's getting straighter as she gets older, more like classy waves and less like frizzy curls. "Is it such a big deal?"
"Yes," Mallory says some nights, playing with the long brown hair that is totally unlike hers – thick and smooth and heavy in its drape across Marnie's shoulders. Marnie's eyes are wide and her skin has a golden cast and sometimes Mallory feels terribly plain next to her girlfriend, a muddle of cinnamon freckles and carroty waves slapped onto buttermilk-colored skin. Marnie is beautiful and intelligent – much better with computers and hardware than she is with constructing a single expository sentence in MS Word, but intelligent nonetheless – and practically alone except for her guardian, Max, who does his best to look out for her now that her famous mother, Skye, is dead. So it's no wonder that she doesn't understand why it's such a big deal.
Mallory tries to explain, but she finds that she's not quite sure how. "I just don't want them to know. My parents are so proud of me because I've got this scholarship, and my little brothers and sisters – well, they look up to me. And my friends – " She hesitates, remembering the Baby-Sitters Club, which no longer exists, but whose former members are known as a group back in Stoneybrook. The group. The group of which Mallory is no longer a part, separated first by miles and now by this. "Well, I don't want to tell them."
Her girlfriend nods, and Mallory knows that even though Marnie has no idea about scholarships, or little brothers and sisters, or big groups of friends who have sleepovers and food fights, she's doing her best to understand.
So some nights, it is a big deal and Mallory tries to explain why.
Other nights, she simply replies "No" and rolls over in bed, bad dormitory springs squeaking quietly, until her mouth meets tanned skin.
Marnie tries to understand, and she tries the best she can because she's Mal's girlfriend, but she doesn't really. Mallory sits down sometimes and opens the special carved-wood box that Byron made for her in woodworking class, rereading everyone's letters. Mary Anne is still dating Logan. Kristy hooked up with Bart but decided he took too much time away from softball and soccer and the Krushers, so he's still trailing after her hopelessly and she just keeps him around for batting practice – not that Kristy herself told her any of this. It all came in the letter from Mary Anne that said she and Logan had decided not to go to the same college.
Stacey has been dating Sam Thomas, Kristy's brother, for the past two years, although it's been hard for them because he's finishing his first year at the University of Connecticut. Stacey says they send a lot of e-mail. Jessi's boyfriend is a professional danseur in the Stamford Ballet Company – he's from Panama, Jessi tells her, sounding impressed; there are even fewer Hispanic dancers than African-American ones. Claudia dates regularly, although whether it's Pete Black or Trevor Sandbourne or Alan Gray this weekend, Mallory has a hard time keeping track. Abby sometimes goes out with Reed Ellison, a senior who plays soccer for Stoneybrook High, although it's been a hard year for her allergies and she sometimes jokes that that's a turn-off. Dawn's letters and e-mails and occasional voice mail messages never mention an actual boyfriend, but she has a big group of friends – guys and girls – and there's one guy, Ducky, who she seems pretty close to.
So those are her friends, the ones she misses most, the ones she's been close to and thought she would always be close to, and the ones that she never, ever wants to know.
She closes the hinged lid that is lined with unevenly cut green velour from one of Claire's outgrown Christmas dresses and heads off to the dining hall for lunch.
In bed that night she is quiet, barely responding to Marnie's lengthy, technical-term-filled dissertation on the new web interface game she's designing, and it can run with less than a hundred megs of RAM, and requires only a dial-up internet connection, and Mallory looks really sexy tonight. Startled, Mal glances up into amused brown eyes. "Huh?"
"I was saying, you look totally out of it." Marnie leans down and kisses the side of Mallory's chin lightly, leaving a mark of shiny mint-flavored Chapstick and the taste of blue-gel toothpaste on her skin. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing." Mallory kisses her back and does her best to concentrate on the taste of mint rather than sadness and regret. "What were you saying, about Phobia?"
Marnie rolls her eyes, an annoyed gesture, but when she stops and focuses them on Mallory again, they are full of understanding. "I finished Phobia last week. This is Boomtown. Mallory, what's the matter?"
Mallory rolls over so that the only thing Marnie can see is the line of ridges that make up her spine. "Nothing's the matter."
She can hear Marnie sighing behind her, exasperation mixed with worry and care, and after a moment she feels the warmth of a gentle hand at the top of her neck. "I wish you wouldn't get so damn cranky about this, Mal. This isn't what I thought I'd be, either."
"Oh?" Mallory cranes her head back and glances over her shoulder, shyly, nearsighted eyes locking onto her girlfriend's. "What did you want to be?"
Marnie manages a grin. "Happy and married to a nice husband. Skye wasn't happy, you know. She wrote all those self-help books on how to be, but she was never in love. She never was. Max was in love with her, and she could never be in love with him." For a second her face transforms into a relief of golden smoothness, the valleys of her eyes, the ridge of her nose, every wrinkle and line full of pensive sadness. "Maybe I wanted that for her."
"My friend Mary Anne has this boyfriend Logan," Mallory tells her, rolling back over in acquiescence. "He's really cute, and he's got this Southern accent because he's from Kentucky." She smiles, remembering. "I always thought if I got contacts and a haircut and pierced ears, some cute guy would get a crush on me."
"And instead some girl got a crush on you." Marnie's voice is quietly amused, but wistful too. "I'm sorry."
She wants to tell her not to be, because she doesn't want Marnie to apologize, doesn't want her to be sorry, but she can't quite bring herself to say it like she means it. Instead she asks, "If your mother knew, do you think she'd care?"
Marnie laughs. "Are you kidding? Skye believed in creating your own identity. She sure did. I don't know anything about what she was like before she was 21. I don't even know her real name."
Mallory nods and tightens the pale white fingers of her right hand around Marnie's shoulder, which is bright and warm in the dim light of the study lamp on her desk. From everything Marnie has said, she knows that Skye was incredibly secretive about her past. She suspects that if Skye were sill alive, she'd understand Marnie having much bigger secrets than this. "So she might not think it's a big deal."
"Mally, it's not a big deal. At least not to me, and not to a lot of people. I don't know what's going to happen and neither do you. I might marry a guy someday. You might too. Or you might not. And either way, it's not such a bad thing, is it?"
She's not sure, but Marnie's hand is sliding along the hem of her lightweight summer-pajama top, and those honey-colored fingertips are surprisingly cool against her ribs. She takes a deep breath and feels the skin at her stomach quiver against Marnie's fingers, and when she finally whispers "Yes," it comes out in one low, drawn-out sigh.
The next day, after her creative writing workshop, she stops by her mailbox in the student center and flicks quickly through a notice about the end of the year in two weeks, an invitation from the Pottery Club to throw vases next Thursday, and a letter in Dawn's round, precise handwriting. A grin splits the pale freckled features, and she plops down on an uncomfortable, institutional green-and-gold couch to read it. Dawn is good. She's still not sure where she wants to go to college, she writes, so she's applying to a lot of schools in California and visiting some in June. Her brother Jeff is dating a girl named Holly. She's excited for summer vacation. She and her girlfriend Sunny and Maggie and Amalia are planning to rent a beach house together for a week in August.
It is a very un-Dawn-like letter, and the writer's section of her brain automatically jerks her back onto the couch that is digging a knot into her spine, forcing her to read and reread the words for whatever she might have missed. College? Jeff with a girlfriend? A beach house? No, those are all perfectly Dawn-like things to talk about when she e-mails Mallory. What is it, then; why is that niggling little part of her cerebrum pulling and insisting at the base of her neck, the way it does when she forgets to include a dedication at the end of her short stories?
She isn't sure, and so reluctantly she admits defeat and heads off to her dorm room, where she picks up her phone, checks the messages on her voice mail, and walks over to Marnie's room, which is cool and quiet in the late-spring afternoon and after a while the only sounds are of kisses and tiny giggling whispers.
It hits her later, on the cusp of wake and sleep, when Marnie's arms are around her, warm and lithe and graceful against her body. E-mail. Things that Dawn likes to talk about when she e-mails Mallory.
Gently she eases out of bed, sliding away from her girlfriend, who rolls over and grabs the pillow instead. She is quiet until the door snicks closed behind her; then she dashes, absolutely runs, back to her own room, careful not to wake her roommate, fumbling for the letter that is still in her bookbag, which she dropped in the middle of her bed. Her fingers, trembling with stress and surprise and hysterical laughter, scrabble against the pale green paper, nearly ripping it. There – there it is. "My girlfriend Sunny and Maggie and Amalia and I have decided to rent a beach house together for a week in August."
Just to be sure, she opens up the wooden box and burrows down to the bottom of the pile, to the earliest letters from the beginning of this year. This one is from Dawn as well, postmarked August 29, written on bright blue stationery with bold, decisive strokes of black ink. Mallory can barely see without her contacts in, and she has to squint in the dim glow of the small lamp that her roommate must have left on by accident when she fell asleep.
She's right, she knows she is before she even gets to the right line. "My best friend Sunny came home from France last night, she was there with her dad. It was so great to see her …"
She starts to laugh then, and she has to reach for her blanket and shove it over her mouth and nose, choking herself, nearly suffocating on her own giggles and acrylic thermal blanket, and it's really not funny at all but it is, it is because she's been so stupid and it is because she knew there was something funny about this letter and it is because, well, because she should have known. Because Dawn knew. And she should have realized it.
So Dawn knows. And now Mallory knows about her, too.
She's still laughing as her roommate kicks out restlessly in her sleep, and she leaves her room and relocks it and makes her way back down the stairwell to Marnie's room, where she curls up in a tangle of warm bronze-coloured arms and legs and sleeps.
finis