The Sixes

***

IT WAS IN January that she first sensed she was in some kind of trouble.

The school was buried under two feet of snow, and everyone on campus seemed possessed by cabin fever, glum from endless term papers, soggy boots, and the biting cold. But none of that had bothered her. She loved the boarding school and everything about it, especially in comparison to her big, sprawling high school. For her there was nothing more pleasurable than sitting cocooned in a carrel in the library, reading and writing to the muffled sounds of girls outdoors calling out to each other as they hurried across campus in the snow.

The work was tough, but she didn’t care. She’d gotten straight A’s her first term, had four poems published in the literary magazine, and was up for a spot as an editor of the newspaper. Someone had whispered that she was a shoo-in. She’d written tons already for the paper, and her stuff barely needed editing.

But the spot went to another girl, one who had barely contributed to the paper. It had stung to hear the news.

She tried to pump herself up. There would be another opening at some point, she told herself, and she’d go for it. Until then she’d just contribute more ideas, write even more pieces.

Suddenly, however, her story ideas were routinely rejected, and she was given only one assignment in a whole month—a totally lame little story. It was as if she’d ended up on somebody’s bad side.

The third-quarter literary magazine came out, and this time there was nothing of hers inside. What did I do wrong? she wondered. Her poems had seemed so good to her.

And then the study group thing happened. She’d been meeting once a week with three other girls from her American history class, preparing for the frequent and awful pop quizzes the teacher was famous for. One afternoon, a member of the group told her that she and the two others had decided to disband and study on their own. But a week later, she stumbled on the three of them working in a lounge without her. It was as if they wanted her to see them. She hurried quickly by, as the blood rushed to her cheeks.

People have stopped liking me, she realized with a horrible sense of dread. And she didn’t know why.