All Souls

Romance

Marlene

Marlene looked into Astra's letter basket and saw Car Forestal's hand, and she read the note because Astra was out of the room on some test. Marlene read:

A—

I've fixed this. I think it's better. I think you'll

understand it now. Please do. Not everything can

be funny.

I'm not even bothering to study.

kisses,

C

Marlene was still in Astra's room, so she took up Car's latest letter, and she put it in her pocket. A note on a note card: It wouldn't be missed. Would it, would it, would it?

Sometimes when Astra turned the white radiance of her attention onto Marlene, when Marlene saw Astra considering her openly and clearly and fairly, then Marlene knew what it was about Astra Dell that made her feel possessive of the sick girl. Marlene wanted Astra to herself and resented even the intrusion of Astra's father, although she was polite enough when she saw him.

"Hello, Mr. Dell. Astra's a little sleepy today."

A Daughter

Lisa told Josh (he had asked was she gay or not) that she was only experimenting with Janet Wilkes and Queens and all of it. "It turned me on for a while, but my mother ruined it. What happened was I'd be with Janet somewhere and I'd think I'd see my mother."

Siddons

"What's in the bag, Mr. Weeks?"

"A present for your girlfriend?"

"Try a bag of tests." Whenever he spoke, Mr. Weeks smiled or seemed to smile or was just about to smile, and the little girls and big girls, girls of all sizes, loud and silly, guileless and gentle, smiled back. The youngest faces were clean as how they came; the older were subject to hormones. Oh, hormones! That klieg light word they knew; hormones meant adolescence and suffering. "My hormones, Mr. Weeks!" Girls were bleeding all over the place, or that was how it sometimes seemed to him.

"Why are you crying?" one girl to another. "What did I say?"

"Why are you crying?" another to another.

"Why?"

"We didn't know you were coming."

"I tried to save you a place."

"She couldn't invite you; she could only have six friends."

"My parents are going to kill me."

"My grandmother is really sick."

The hallway's backdrop of posters: roundly muscled, oily heroines on the GAA board, drawings of the family—ma mère, mon père—from French V class. In-school polls and graphs for math. Popular after-school activities: Look at the pie and see what the middle schoolers do after school.

"Mr. Weeks? Do we really have to have a test on the explorers?"

"We do the explorers every year, Mr. Weeks."

"Why can't we just have a discussion?"

"You're so unfair!" said smiling.

"Why aren't you married, Mr. Weeks?"

"Do you have someone in mind?" he asked.

Unattached

Tim Weeks said his best and favorite year in school had been sixth grade, and he still felt like a sixth grader, which went some way in explaining his delight in the company of sixth-grade girls of all sizes: middle school, a mishmashed time, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, class by class, grossly uneven rows of dangerous bodies, bodies in motion, sharply angled, full of feelings, bawdy, brazen children asking anything. "Was that your girlfriend?" — pointing to someone pretty when they had surrounded Tim Weeks on the street outside of school. In some ways, he was always in school. "We knew it was you on the street, Mr. Weeks."

"It was your walk."

"Sexy," from someone in the back, in a small voice but heard.

"What's in the bag, Mr. Weeks?"

"Is it something for us?"

"Yes." Yes, yes, yes, yes, from many sides, and each girl laughing and jouncing closer. Mr. Weeks, ringed by girls, girls jamming sidewalk traffic. Everyone in the middle school knew that Gillian Warring, the Sarah Bernhardt of the eighth grade, was going to marry Mr. Weeks. Even Tim Weeks knew of Gillian's plans. He had seen Gillian in the lunchroom looking at him as she spoke, insisting on herself. I am. Watch me.

He is so cute! from the entire eighth-grade class.

Mrs. Archibald, head of the middle school, told Mr. Weeks that Gillian was too smart for her own good. Mrs. Archibald liked best the girls who still wore undershirts and read mysteries. If not mysteries, then something funny. Funny. As far as Mrs. Archibald could see, funny did not much enter into the English department's curriculum. Had Miss Mazur ever considered reading Wodehouse? Why did Miss Mazur insist on that depressing Lord of the Flies? Mr. Weeks, on the other hand, loved P. G. Wodehouse. He liked mysteries and crosswords, Scrabble and show tunes. He knew a lot about Jane Eyre because the eighth-grade girls read it every year, and they told Tim Weeks about it. They told him they did not think, as Miss Mazur thought, that every object was phallic. That was a sexy word to know, wasn't it? Some of the eighth-grade girls believed Miss Mazur was oversexed, and some of them believed she was really sex starved!

Tim Weeks told the girls he didn't want to hear them disparage their teachers.

"Disparage? What does that mean?"

"We weren't bad-mouthing her."

"It's true though, Mr. Weeks. All we talk about are the sex parts."

"Sex, sex, sex. Why do you girls think you can talk to me like this?" Tim Weeks asked these eighth-grade girls, and they said, "Because," and laughed. They had trailed him in school and out of school, girls past and present. Mr. Weeks! The best!

"Do you like the present sixes better than you liked us?"

"You never liked us, Mr. Weeks. Admit it!"

"You don't like us anymore."

"That's right," Mr. Weeks said. "I like the others better."

Ha-ha-ha, from all the eighth-grade girls, who said, "You love us, Mr. Weeks. Admit it!"

"Mr. Weeks, be careful you don't disappoint anyone by marrying."

Anna Mazur saw him surrounded by sixth-grade girls and eighth-grade girls, all of whom seemed to be teasing him at once for his new tie, the blue tie with hot-air balloons that he said was a gift from his mother. When he smiled, the under-folds of his eyes turned down sweetly. Anna Mazur watched as students pressed him, circled about, said, "We'll get you some elf shoes, Mr. Weeks."

The middle-school girls laughed and laughed, but ask what seniors had thought of middle school, and they gagged and howled and said it was the worst time of their lives. Older girls would say they didn't laugh much in middle school, but here was middle school in front of Anna Mazur. Middle-school girls laughing; middle-school girls, an acquired taste, an age of elbows and knees, at once knockabout and full of shyness, streakers on the sleepover, always out of fashion, over- or under-dressed — here they were laughing. Middle-school girls: Anna Mazur did not really love them, but Tim Weeks did and his love was returned.

If you asked a Siddons girl what a Siddons girl was, she invariably replied, "We're nice."

"Different ones of us taught different chapters."

"That's an idea."

"He assigned us."

The eighth-grade girls were giving Miss Mazur suggestions.

"Why can't we read a book like To Kill a Mocking-bird again?" from the same blinking back of the room, Gillian's constellation.

Marlene

Marlene sat at the foot of Astra's bed and talked about school. Marlene reported on what she was listening to in the senior lounge. The Billie Holiday that Ufia put on with a flourish, the Rolling Stones, Smashing Pumpkins. Music was school, the best of it for Marlene, although she had graveled her voice with smoke. What else had Marlene been listening to? What stories? Edie Cohen was wild for Brad Pitt and had his face all over the walls in the senior lounge. Ufia said, "Why do you have to have these idiot movie stars all over the lounge?"

"Ufia is such an intellectual," Astra said.

What else was there to say? Suki and Alex looked for Will Bliss every weekend. "But you knew that already. They think he's still not back at boarding school. For a while they thought he might have been kicked out, but they couldn't find anyone reliable enough to confirm it. Mondays we get the Bliss Report. It's boring." What else? "Dr. Meltzer is expecting a baby."

"He has a dozen kids already."

"Sarah Saperstein says it's humanizing. Whatever that means."

"She would know."

"She's his pet." And? "You probably already know this," Marlene said. "Lisa Van de Ven and Miss Wilkes."

Astra made motion of a yes. Lisa Van de Ven and Astra Dell were in Dance Club together, and in that way were friends, but Marlene had to tell Astra. After all those years, years of hurts, middle school especially, eighth grade. Why would Kovack think to ever come up to us? Lisa to her gang. Astra had not been in anyone's gang; she had been, was still in a way, exclusive with Car Forestal.

"Do you talk to her?"

"Lisa?" Astra said.

"Car."

"Yes."

"She's never in the lounge."

"Car studies a lot at her dad's. It's quiet there. It's like being on the moon. Everything floats and looks romantic. There is no dust there whatsoever."

"No dust," Marlene said. "I'm shedding all the time," and she only had to look down to find a long strand of hair somewhere on her person.

Astra said, "Me, too." She said, "Not now, of course," and she laughed. The truth of it wasn't horrible or it was; only Astra was determined to get better. "I have faith," she said. "I have a community behind me. A lot of people visit — you among them — and it makes a difference." The doctors were applying things, and their cruelly mechanical equipment still hurt, silvery and sharp and cold; the machinery made her shake and run, want to run away, tear the IV from her arm, run open armed to sleep. "I'm waiting for the day when I wake up and feel nothing but a pleasant consciousness. I used to wake up that way. In Car's father's apartment, I didn't feel my body at all. That's what a perfect place it is. Maintained but unlived in for months at a time."

Siddons

Astra Dell and Car Forestal, for all of their temperamental differences, had been best friends since nursery school. Suki and Alex were baby birthday party friends. (Suki said anyone she met after sixth grade did not count as a friend.) Kitty Johnson and Edie Cohen turned exclusive in their tenth-grade year on Swiss Semester. Sarah Saperstein and Ny Song were nerds in love. They admitted it! They had the same favorite classes, the same favorite teachers. They thought Dr. Meltzer was funny and trailed after Dr. D asking about Catullus.

A lot of students loved — they used that word often, generously, fervently — they absolutely loved Miss F. Miss F was kind and accessible. She made math almost interesting even for the weaker students. She held math contests that carried prizes of bags of jelly beans and chocolate Kisses. Other teachers were kind. Mrs. Nicholson was especially forgiving of late papers and absences, and Mr. Philips was known to offer makeup tests in history. Miss Hodd — who taught the creative writing elective, as well as tenth-, eleventh-, and twelfth-grade English — had a dinner last June and let her seniors drink sangria.

Kitty Johnson was on a student panel for prospective Siddons parents, and along with Sarah Saperstein and Ufia Abiola, she spoke about the best of the Siddons experience, which included remarks on "the support and affection students feel from their teachers." Kitty read from a talk she had used before. "I never considered myself a 'mathy' person simply because I hated fractions with an unhealthy passion. So it took me by surprise when my physics teacher suggested that I pursue the Advanced Placement course in senior year."

Miss Brigham sometimes remarked on how many of the teachers gave over weekends to class trips and social service projects and fund-raising fairs and baseball and basketball and badminton contests. She did not mention the chaperones needed for the chorus trips. Miss Brigham also did not remark on Miss Mazur's visits with Tim Weeks to Astra Dell. She did not know about them any more than she knew about Mr. Rhine-lander's generous habit of slipping Greta Varislyvski, his genius chess player, a twenty for a cab after tournaments. Keep the change was his message.

Miss Brigham didn't know that Mr. O'Brien was in love with Kitty Johnson and that he told her of his love every time they met in advisory. He got mad at Kitty, too; they had fights. Kitty didn't always show up for their meetings. "Imagine," Kitty had told Edie, "imagine the intensest sex without sex, and that is my relationship with Mr. O'Brien." Wednesday advisory they sat together at a lunch table pressed against the wall and talked. Sometimes they talked for hours after school. Mr. O'Brien sometimes cried. He had a young wife and a baby in New Jersey.

"He is exhausting," Kitty said. "After all my applications are in, I'm going to put my life in order."

Miss Brigham did not know about Kitty Johnson and Mr. O'Brien. She was not a woman for romance; she liked emotional business kept at home. What would she have said to Mr. Rhinelander's Keep the change, Greta?

"Keep the copy of The Scarlet Letter" Miss Hodd said as much to any girl who seemed halfway interested in any book in her homeroom bookcase. "The school has more than enough copies, and you should read it." School was ongoing Christmas: something always to take home. Lost-and-found freebies could be had at the end of every term, and early birds to the table of clothes could sometimes find expensive labels. One year Marlene Kovack went home with a black Nicole Miller blouse — surely someone's mother's. There were fleeces and scarves and gloves and sweats, umbrellas and flip-flops and pencil cases, all unclaimed and free to student and teacher shoppers on the last day of school before the holidays. The rule was that if a student later recognized an item as being hers, she would have to think of it as still lost or else negotiate for its return.

Part of the experience of school was the daily reward: rewards of flattery and affection, signals of success, prizes, gold stars and smiley faces, exuberant marginalia on essays and tests—very smart, insightful, terrific, exactly, yes, yippee!!!!

Siddons

Alex had her camcorder on yearbook's lit editors and "guest editors" gassing in the lounge. Wallowing in their wit was how Suki put it. Why was Suki there? She stuck her face up close to the camera and said, "I am contributing."

One of the two Elizabeths, Elizabeth G., was telling her own significant teacher story. Fifth grade and for some reason she couldn't do her history homework. "So Miss Bell stapled my hair." That was good. Everyone agreed they should use that on the "Indelible Memories" page. Definitely. Worst academic experience? "Too many," Alex said, "they blur." Edie said, "The most grief I ever got out of an assignment in high school was definitely tenth grade's research paper. Having the most obscure topic imaginable, mathematical achievements in non-Western cultures during the Renaissance, made it worse."

"I didn't really like my topic either," Alex said, "but I got stuck with it. Calvin's Geneva. I couldn't figure out what my thesis should be."

"That's a problem," Kitty said.

A Daughter

Re: Dance Concert seniors

To: Katherine Johnson

cc: Ufia Abiola, Edwina Cohen, Alex Decrow,

Krystle Cruz, Suki Morton

Astra Dell isn't up to choreographing a dance.

Not really. We should be prepared to finish it

for her.

Any thoughts? Be realistic.

Lisa

Re: Dance Concert seniors

To: Katherine Johnson

I'm really, really sad that we didn't get around to

making a dance with Astra. She's too sick to ask

now. I feel awful, then I wonder what must Astra

feel?

Edie

P.S. Lisa dropped the ball.

Re: Dance Concert seniors

To: Lisa Van de Ven

cc: Ufia Abiola, Edwina Cohen, Alex Decrow,

Katherine Johnson, Suki Morton

Astra Dell is probably writing an amazing book

about life in the hospital bed with an IV and

pale clothes with tiny flowers on them.

xoxoxoxoxo

Krystle

Re: Dance Concert seniors

To: Lisa Van de Ven

cc: Edwina Cohen, Alex Decrow, Krystle Cruz,

Katherine Johnson, Suki Morton

Ladies,

I wish you would all stop being so ghoulish. Astra

is in a treatment that razes the disease, so of

course she looks like hell, but she is strong. She

has a strong heart and a will to live, and we should

celebrate that drive with a dance in her honor, one

of the dances in the program, the most joyous and

energetic dance. My dance might be appropriate.

Ufia

Lisa turned away from the computer and looked up at Miss Wilkes. They were in school, so it was Miss Wilkes.

"Ufia is so conceited, isn't she?" Lisa asked.

"Are you surprised I found you?"

"No." Lisa turned back to the computer screen.

"Why didn't you show up yesterday?"

"I told you." Lisa logged out and went on talking to the dark screen. "I forgot." She turned to Miss Wilkes. "Don't act like my mother."

"What I don't understand is, how could you forget when you made the date yourself?"

"How? I'm applying to college, that's how. I've got February deadlines. What's the big deal, anyway? I forget all the time. I know who you want me to be, but I'm a little screwed up."

"You're more than a little because it's not just yesterday, and you are the one who insists we meet. Wasn't that you last night in tears?"

And when the girl didn't respond, Miss Wilkes spoke again, in a gentler voice. "I know it's hard to be kind," she said, "but it wasn't hard to begin with." Miss Wilkes was speaking as Janet, as a woman in love, un-titled, unembellished, a woman with wide hips in peg-legged pants and some kind of scuffed-up loafers. This woman said, "I don't know. You tell me. We don't have to meet. "

"No," Lisa said, "I know. I'm sorry."

Miss Wilkes felt as if she were passing through curtains of feeling. "I'm in a bit of a swoon here, but if you don't want to see me anymore, and you're not in any of my classes next semester—" Miss Wilkes began, but Lisa interrupted.

"I don't."

Miss Wilkes stepped back just as Alex and Suki tussled through the door into the computer room. The girls stopped shouldering each other when they saw Miss Wilkes and Lisa alone at the other end of the room.

"Look," Lisa spoke impatiently, "could we not do this here?"

"Here's as good a place as any." Miss Wilkes stood between Lisa and the two girls, but her voice was growing louder. "We can talk here."

Lisa appraised her. Lisa stood up and hitched her book bag over her shoulder and said, "You just said we didn't…," but even before Lisa had finished, Miss Wilkes had begun to move away. Suki and Alex watched Miss Wilkes and Lisa, and when Miss Wilkes, in the doorway, dared to look back at them, Suki and Alex were still watching. They were smiling.

Suki and Alex

"Where's my camcorder when I need it?" Alex said. "Let's go after."

"I told you ages ago," Suki said. "I told you I saw them on York. They had to be coming from the hospital."

"When did you? Why did you? Oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god" — Alex, in the middle of the empty hallway, hopped as if she had water in her ear. She was making goofy expressions and Suki was laughing. "I mean it. I don't know what I'm doing half of the time. What am I doing? Where's my camcorder?"

Dr. Meltzer, looking down the hall at Suki and Alex, said, "Why haven't the two of you been shot yet?"

They stood on the landing to the fifth floor and discussed what distinguished them, Alex and Suki, from people like Lisa, from most of their classmates really. They were, both of them, naturally thin. Thin to begin with. "Absolutely no cellulite, Alex." They were distinguished by their slender bodies and their disregard for their bodies, their purebred bone structure, their incongruously elegant good looks, also their money, their snobbery, their wayward society swagger. They pushed their names together saying, "SukiandAlex, Alexand-Suki, we're perfect. That's why Meltzer can't stand us."

Suki and Alex were late to class meeting.

"I thought we did this in October," Suki said when she saw they were nominating speakers for commencement.

"We did," whispered from the floor. "She canceled."

Alex made the same suggestion she had made in October. Why not Al Pacino? Somebody had to know him.

"Great!" from the room. The same response made in October.

Suki said, "He'd be so great!"

Ny Song said, "Who we pick says a lot about us."

"Yeah," Alex said. "It says we like sexy actors, older men."

"Yeah."

"Al Pacino is hot."

Other suggestions were Sarah Saperstein's uncle, who happened to be a very important doctor at Sloan-Kettering, and Patricia Friebourg, an art historian at NYU, best friend of Edie Cohen's mother, and part owner of the Friebourg-Johannasan Gallery on Mercer. Someone called out, "Brad Pitt!" and there were other suggestions for anyone with only one name. Miss Brigham wanted the seniors to know the school had connections with Verlyn Klinkenborg, and he might agree to speak at commencement. "Great," Alex stage whispered, "but who the fuck is he?" Sarah Saperstein knew just who Verlyn Klinkenborg was; in fact, several of the girls knew who he was. Ufia pronounced, mock grandly, that his prose was pellucid.

"Will you turn the camcorder off?" Ny yelled at Alex.

"She's right."

"Get serious."

"I thought a reminder of who we were, the fat-headed class of 1997, would amuse Astra Dell."

Sarah Saperstein was counting raised hands. Verlyn Klinkenborg was elected.

"Over Al Pacino! Unreal."

"What did you expect?" Suki asked Alex. "We've got a lot of nerds in our class."

"Oh god! I hate my class."

"A little something on meatballs or snow, that's what some guy named Klinkenborg will talk about."

"I just thought of Astra." Astra Dell had not been mentioned in the class meeting. Astra Dell was very sick. The rumors of blazing radioactive rods being sewn into arms persisted. The futureless future their friend faced was horrible, so it wasn't any wonder Astra Dell was a nighttime topic and rarely mentioned in class, not this day, when the class elected its graduation speaker, or in the days that followed when yearbook ads were due.

Mothers

Theta Kovack watched over the island of her station as Max Fuise fought the young woman who had brought Max to his appointment. The young woman repeated that Max was to come home with her. He could not visit his friend. They were loud, and Theta made a hushing gesture toward Max and his sitter and also toward the twins, the brothers Beller, who seemed to have the same crooked teeth and menacing hilarity. To the brothers Theta said, "This is an office, boys, not a playground." Theta called out to them, and they shrugged at her voice: So what? All day Theta answered the phone and looked up records and sent out reminders. Forget your teeth and they will go away. From time to time, she reprimanded the rowdier children in the waiting room. Often she felt sorry for them, saw the children hopped up on sweets and overloaded with lessons. Their mouths looked sore; but at least they were young mouths, red and wet and young. An old mouth was death. Her own dingy mouth she hoped to keep shut, and Theta never looked directly at Mr. Scott when he came in. How could she? He was at least thirty. He looked like the kind of young man who should have experienced braces and private school, but when he opened his mouth, his family's economies were evident.

Wasn't he ashamed to have braces now? she wondered.

Theta was fifty; she had never needed braces — a blessing — but her daughter, Marlene, had needed them, so that Theta's job was a blessing when just the everyday expenses were wearing. Theta answered the phone and looked up records and sent out reminders and in this way kept up her own modest home and made payments on the money she was borrowing for Marlene's tuition.

Theta made some mistakes in the afternoon; a woman with an expensive camel-colored feed bag on her shoulder questioned the cost of a procedure. Theta was right, but she addressed the woman rudely. Theta penciled in a wrong date, then said it aloud, but a hooded sweatshirt with a mouth brace corrected her. Theta broke her pencil in a passing fury, one of the small rages out of nowhere that beset her; she misplaced a statement; she did not have lunch. Her biggest mistake of the day was when she walked through Bloomingdale's to get to the subway. Weaving through the mezzanine's bazaar could be cathartic and airy, especially in the summer, but in January, clobbered by the weight of her wet winter coat, the perfume halls were oppressively bright; every surface was a mirror, and her skin, she glimpsed, looked patchy and chapped; she felt dirty. Then on the subway, there was only one seat left between her and a young man. She said, "I've been sitting all day," and it seemed he didn't doubt her because he took the seat. She was surprised at his alacrity, and hurt. Someone at the Food Emporium took her place in line, but she was too tired to argue and went down another aisle sure that some product would beckon. She bought midget Brillos and Bounce fabric softener.

Theta's evening at home grew worse.

"Your manners!" Theta said to Marlene when she discovered her daughter had mauled the ice cream she meant to have for dessert.

Dessert already? After the grocery shopping, after the hazardous whump of the burners igniting came dinner, but she had no memory of dinner. What did they eat? Had they talked? Theta remembered what she had wanted for dessert was ice cream. After Bloomingdale's came the butter pecan. But what was butter pecan ice cream when all the pecans were missing?

"You've gouged out all the nuts and left a mush."

"I'm sorry."

"I mean really. Your spoon's been all over this. Who's going to want to eat it now?"

"I said I'm sorry."

"But this is a habit of yours, Marlene."

"I'll stop."

"I was looking forward to butter pecan ice cream. I think more than anything else, I wanted butter pecan ice cream tonight."

"Oh, for heaven's sake, Mother" — Marlene pushed away from the table—"get a grip," and she pushed the swinging door open and set it swinging back and forth.

Theta did not move from the table; she stirred the ice cream to milk shake consistency and sipped it to soothe all that was sore. Now she remembered they had talked at dinner about Astra Dell's tooth, how it broke apart and powdered like a clay pot when Astra merely smiled. The kiln of chemotherapy had brittled every part, and she was fragile and feverish. All day Theta saw red, wet, young mouths, rawed by braces and retainers and bands, mouths tirelessly open in the way of good health. She did not want to think of a sick mouth, and she numbed her lips with ice cream and forgot the sick girl.

Siddons

The two Elizabeths, yearbook coeditors, told Alex that so far this year's photographs of clubs and sports were clearer than in other years, and what the two Elizabeths had wanted all along were really, really clear pictures and fewer of them on a page. "We don't want another ugly yearbook."

Alex said the book was going to be ugly no matter what they did. "If you'd just let me take candids."

"I don't think you hear what we're saying, Alex."

"Why, what are you saying?"

The two Elizabeths, sturdy students, knew enough not to argue with Alex.

"I don't have to get up too close for group shots," Alex said. "The fat people are always easy to identify."

"Don't we know it," said the two Elizabeths, as alike and plump as pears.

Alex and Suki

"Yearbook ads are the best part of yearbooks, don't you think?" Suki and Alex were sitting on the stoop composing their ad to each other, a full-page good-bye. It was a matter of design. There wasn't any text.

"We've already said everything."

Astra Dell took out an ad for Car, a modest quarter-page ad with a modest photo of two girls in front of a modest house. The girls are arm in arm in bathing suits. More text is on the page than photo. A long quotation from Virginia Woolf.

How then, she had asked herself, did one know one

thing or another thing about people, sealed as they

were? Only like a bee, drawn by some sweetness or

sharpness in the air intangible to touch or taste, one

haunted the dome-shaped hive, ranged the wastes

of the air over the countries of the world alone, and

then haunted the hives with their murmurs and

their stirrings; the hives, which were people.

***

Quirky the college counselor told Alex, "I'm going to mention your senior page in my letter to RISD. It's terrific." Ufia, looking on, agreed.

On a white page, pleasing margins, was a dark cube made up of two pictures of Alex. The pictures were arranged so the little and the big versions of Alex looked to each other; everything converged in a satisfying cube reminiscent of a Rubik's Cube. One version of the two Alexes had been printed in some tricky way and looked silvered.

"Looks modern," Ufia said. She read the quotation. "Serious," she said.

"It was going to be Nirvana," Alex said. "I was going to have 'I think I'm dumb, or maybe just happy,' but then Suki showed me the Toni Morrison."

Lisa looked at Kitty Johnson's senior page and pronounced it as good as Alex's page. Better for its simplicity. A mirror image of herself in a deeply shadowed modest profile. Lisa said she looked like Grace Kelly, which pleased Kitty because she did look like her — white blond pretty — and because Grace Kelly was one of Kitty's crushes. She and Edie were also obsessed with Jackie O. They had made Kitty's mother pull over to the side of the road in the country when the radio announced Jackie Kennedy Onassis had died. Edie and Kitty got out of the car and ran into a field and shouted and cried until Mrs. Johnson threatened to drive away. Kitty bought up all the magazines from the time.

Kitty's yearbook picture had blue shadows and a quality like pearl.

"I guess it says it all about each of us, yes," Ufia said, standing just behind. Ufia saw everything; she was the ultimate layout editor.

After the table of contents came the dedication. This year to Miss Hodd. Then a picture of the staff section and explanation of the theme. This year detectives. Alex in the picture is wearing dark glasses; Ufia, a beret. The background — a brownstone stoop, a bare tree — looked rained on. They carried umbrellas. "With perseverance and craftiness, we've uncovered every mystery and solved every problem we encountered along the way at Siddons." Next page a double spread of baby pictures with clues to each baby's identity; then a "Remember When" section. The two Elizabeths, already fleshy, smiling in a tropical setting at a booth eating ice cream; Kitty as Amelia Earhart on Famous Women's Day; then the in-crowd again, Alex, Suki, Car, Astra, Kitty — the five of them seated on the edge of the stage, legs identically crossed, hair identically swooped to one side, long, side parted. Only the tights and tops are different. Astra is the smallest. A steeple of pictures had girls in twos, in school uniform, in party dress, and in costume.

"Who's the sexy six-year-old with the cigarette holder?"

"Alex?"

First-grade or second-grade class picture, all the girls with two hairstyles: pulled back or side parted. Ufia's is the only black face then; her hair is elaborately, tightly braided. The sisters and the cousins and the aunts in straw hats: Gilbert and Sullivan, seventh grade.

Alex took a half page and Suki took the other half to congratulate each other on surviving without Will Bliss and, it seemed, without parents. Where were their mothers and fathers? Only Mrs. Morton's arms appeared in one of Suki's ads holding out a cake with one enormous candle erupting from the middle. Under the photograph Suki had captioned: "Everywhere phallic!" Arrows, a small map of upper Park Avenue, pictures of the entranceway to 1088. A smudged head of what might have been a boy. More arrows. "The minute she walked in, Minta had her glow" — from Suki again. Alex's message is "Smootchies." Even in black and white, the evening dress-up pictures from this year seemed lit up, two sticks in spangled tubes, Suki and Alex, bright as beads.