1
Mayfair Cummings lay in her bed and studied the crown molding in her otherwise spartan room at Spindrift. It had been painted over with the same milky oil-based product used to whitewash the walls in the hallways of the converted Victorian mansion. Every bedroom was the same. The paint obviously had been applied with a roller, and in haste, probably completed by one of the maintenance men, who had no concept of what intricate, hand-carved work he was covering, she thought. He simply wanted to get the chore over and done.
She could still smell the fresh paint and concluded that it was probably redone for every new student. She regretted that. It was too bland. The paint job stole any character the room might have had and reinforced her theory that the whole place, Spindrift, the institution itself, was some kind of great experiment, a study of the exceptionally gifted, those with IQ scores over 180. It gave her the impression that she, along with the others, was in a giant test tube. Who could blame her or any of the students here for being a little paranoid? They would always be suspect. They all thought too much, didn’t they? And thinkers were dangerous. They challenged the status quo and too often asked “Why?”
She also would have liked to have discovered revealing personal evidence left by the former genius housed in the room, some etchings on the walls like the scribblings of a prisoner in a dungeon, even if it was only a wry comment about Einstein’s theory of relativity or a brilliant variation of the Pythagorean theorem. What did he or she think about when alone? Was there a thought about the place itself, the teachers? Did someone have a crush on someone? Did someone miss his or her family? Was there a lover left behind? Were they afraid, and afraid to say it in a more direct way?
Unlike in college dorms, there was no music thumping through the walls, no laughter, and no giggling over embarrassing statements or actions. Silence was the doorway to deep introspection about yourself, about where you were and why you were here. But there was no evidence of that in any of the rooms. It was as if the new layers of paint could cover ghosts as well. When she eventually left, she was sure the new tenant wouldn’t know she had been here either.
Well, maybe never knowing that she had been here was a good thing.
It had been more than three months since she had been brought to Spindrift, partly as punishment for how she had embarrassed her stepmother by cleverly planning revenge on her stepsister’s English teacher, Alan Taylor, the man with whom Mayfair had a . . . what should she call it? A brief affair? Sounded too romantic, she thought. It was definitely brief, but brief sex sounded more accurate now—a deflowering or simply a loss of virginity, even better.
Yet loss didn’t seem to be an accurate term, either. It implied it could be found again. Death was a more precise description. It was something gone forever . . . her innocence. Exciting as it might have been for a while, it left her with a bitter taste for relationships, a taste that she envisioned would last a lifetime in her bank of memories. Would she now always believe that romantic relationships demanded too much trust, too much risk?
Thinking back, she didn’t regret a moment of her revenge. Should she be proud of that?
Did every woman grow to hate the man who was responsible for that traumatic event—especially if he was an older man? How rare it was, especially in this day and age, for any of these men to marry the girl he seduces or even to carry on an extended relationship. What was that old expression? Wham bam, thank you, ma’am?
Maybe it didn’t quite apply, but somehow, even though she had consensual sex, she still felt abused. He should have been ready to give up his career, rearrange his life, and invest his whole future in her. Look at what she had given him. What greater trust could a woman invest in a man? What did he give her in return? Only a memory.
And one quite disturbingly vague, too.
Of course, she knew she was being unreasonable and, what was worse, illogical—a dumb, starry-eyed romantic—something she had scorned and ridiculed in other girls her whole life. She sat up, looked at herself in the mirror above her desk, and ran her fingers through her newly trimmed, medium-length wheat-colored hair.
Oh, poor, poor you, she thought, smirking at herself. Get over it. Leap out of your personal romance novel. You’re not the first, and for sure you’re not the last to feel like a victim of some man.
But how could she not feel like a victim? She wouldn’t admit it to anyone, certainly not Dr. Lester, the school therapist here, who knew the nitty-gritty details of her background. The bitter truth was that her assignation with Alan Taylor had left her with the fear that loving someone, finding that soul mate, was now impossible. The moment after she felt something for a man, that crust of pessimism surely would form and make her so impenetrable that any man would quickly retreat. Why make the extra effort for her? She wouldn’t even have the echo of his first words bouncing around in the caverns of her memory.
There was a knock on her door, a welcome interruption of her troubled musings. Indeed, she concluded, we all do think too much, but ironically, that makes us more dangerous to ourselves than to others.
“Entrare,” she called. She was suddenly feeling Italian this morning. Like almost everyone here, she was fluent in at least three languages.
A girl named Kelly Boson could rattle off in Latin, the so-called dead language, and was always reading mythology in ancient Greek. “Translators have us by the short hairs,” she declared when Mayfair asked her why she was so determined to read in the original tongue. “I don’t trust them as far as I could throw them. They’re just looking for a quick buck and choose cruddy expressions, losing the images and feelings.”
Corliss Simon thrust the door open with a deliberately exaggerated flair and stood gazing at her with those piercing black-diamond eyes. She wore a retro flame pre-tied head scarf, a white and black compression sports bra, and a pair of black cotton joggers with her black running shoes. Mayfair’s fellow “drifter,” as they called themselves because they were at Spindrift, this special and rather secret school for the exceptionally gifted, also wore a single pearl rope drop earring in her right ear.
Such affectation, Mayfair thought, but admittedly quite effective. Why didn’t she have any of those same feminine impulses? Was that where she would go now in retreat, into indifference? She wouldn’t deny it. Lately, Blah was her middle name.
“Are you in a play or something?” Mayfair asked. She didn’t have to explain; the students were all keen when it came to sarcasm and understatement.
“Always,” Corliss replied, and assumed a pose. Looking like a black Statue of Liberty, she recited, “?‘Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage.’?” She then put her hands on her hips and scowled. “We’re all in a play, Mayfairy.” Corliss had been calling her that almost from the beginning, and others had picked up on it. She smiled triumphantly. “It’s simply that most don’t realize it until after the curtain falls.”
“Don’t I know it?” Mayfair replied in a tone that made her seem aged. She sighed. “I’m not ready for breakfast.”
She waved at Corliss as though to dismiss her, as though she was on an ocean liner pulling away from the dock, saying good-bye to family and friends.
But then she was always pulling away from some dock or another, and she was always o