That was another thing, the bus. I’ve already said I don’t make friends easily, and being a day girl didn’t help either. There are about four hundred students at Sherborne Girls, and all of them were boarding at the school, living in one or another of the eight houses there, except maybe twenty who went home every day, like me. So I missed out on that bonding experience, too: The thing that happens when people spend months living and eating and studying, and being together all the time. You don’t work up that kind of school spirit on a bus—anyway, I don’t. We were all assigned to the different houses, just like real boarders, but it wasn’t the same thing.
Meena Chari was a day girl, too, but I didn’t notice her much on the bus. She wasn’t one of the ones who came to sit next to me and ask me about life in the States, and did I ever see this or that band, this or that movie star. They tried me out one after another, for a while, but they all gave up pretty quickly. Which was too bad, because some of them were nice, and they never really spoke to me again, ever. My loss, I know that.
Sherborne Girls sits on forty acres of green hill at the western outskirts of town, and it looks like a real manor—just this side of a palace, even—with its two wings spreading out from a central tower. Evan calls places like those “stately piles,” but all I can say is that it impressed the hell out of me that first day, and I was not planning to be impressed. It still does.
The work was so much tougher than Gaynor, I don’t even want to go into it. I’d always gotten pretty good grades at Gaynor (which is different from being a good student, and I knew it then); but this was a different world, no comparison at all. Third form, and they had me taking stuff I wouldn’t have had to deal with until high school—and half of it would have been elective then. English literature, maths, world history, British history, three different science classes, a language (I took Spanish because of Marta) —and we’re not even talking about Games or Information Technology. I was over my head, out of my league, and practically paralyzed that whole first term. And it didn’t help a bit to know what my education was costing Evan and Sally. Tony and Julian both had partial scholarships at the boys’ school—not me. Nobody ever said a word about it.
And everyone was so damn terminally sweet, you could scream. New girls each have an older girl—she’s called your “shadow”—to go around with you for a while and help you get used to the way things are done at Sherborne. My shadow was named Barbara, and even now, writing this, I wish I could think of one single nice thing I ever did for her or said to her. The best I can come up with is that I hardly talked at all while she was showing me where my form room would be—like a homeroom at Gaynor—and introducing me to my teachers, and to everyone in the house I was assigned to. She and all of them kept telling me that my being a day girl didn’t matter, that I was still going to be a real part of the house, fully involved in all the social activities, always invited to stay for dinner after classes—only I’d miss the bus, and Sally would have to come and get me—never a moment of feeling like an outsider. They meant it, too. I always knew they meant it.
And if I was a sulky, silent mess in school, I was worse at home. I dragged my feet, helped out exactly as much as I absolutely had to, and bitched every waking moment, when I wasn’t brooding and moping. I really try not to remember things I said to people in those days—to Evan especially—because they make me cringe in my skin. I was sort of halfway decent to Julian, because somehow he wouldn’t let me be any other way, but to everyone else… no, that’s enough about that. I said I wouldn’t lie in my own book, and I’m not lying, but that’s enough.
No, there’s one thing that I do like to remember, something that happened just before Christmas. That was an even edgier time than usual, with Sally and me being Jewish, the boys being used to trees and stockings and carols, and Evan being really nervous. Of course I let them all know that I didn’t want anything to do with killing a tree for Jesus, and I made a thing out of stomping off to find the menorah Grandma Paula’d given to Sally before we left. Julian tagged along with me. I’d given up telling him not to by then.
Actually, he was the one who dug out the menorah, down at the bottom of a box in the second-floor room where Sally stashed all the stuff she was planning to deal with on the very first weekend after hell froze over. It’s at least a hundred years old, and it’s silver, though you couldn’t have told that at first sight, tarnished and scratched as it was. But I showed Julian the silversmith’s mark on the base, and told him how my great-grandparents used to hide the menorah in the barn when the soldiers came through town. “In the cow’s stall,” I said, “under half a ton of cowshit. Even the Cossacks weren’t about to rummage through that.” Julian loved it. Two of the candleholders were bent to the side, and I said that was because the cow had stepped on them. I don’t know if that’s true or not.
Julian wanted to know how the menorah worked, so I sent him downstairs to get some candles while I tried to polish it up a bit. We had all kinds of candles all over the place back then, because of the power failing every ten minutes. The ones Julian got back with didn’t quite fit, but I made them fit, and I told him about Chanukah—about the Syrians and the Maccabees, and the one last little cup of consecrated oil for the new temple altar in Jerusalem burning miraculously for eight days, until somebody finally showed up with fresh oil. It’s a good story, and while I was telling it, I almost forgot that I was pissed at everyone in the world.
When Julian asked me if Jews had Chanukah carols, I went completely blank for a moment—Sally and I weren’t exactly the most observant family on the West Side—and then I remembered the blessing that you chant when you’re lighting the candles. That one I know, because Grandma Paula taught me, and I sang it for Julian.
Julian’s always been quick with songs. He had this one in no time, his Hebrew pronunciation no worse than mine, and we sang it together while I lighted the lead candle, the shammes, and then lighted the first-night candle from it, just to show him how it was done. So there we were, Julian and me, kneeling on the floor in that cold, cobwebby room, the walls lined halfway around with Sally’s boxes, and with tattered old trunks and valises from some other Sally, who always meant to get around to going through them, one day soon. There we were, the two of us, chanting our heads off, praising a God neither one of us believed in for commanding us to light the Chanukah candles. You have to see us, it’s important.
Because that was when I smelled vanilla.