"Troy Tatterton turned twenty-three only two weeks ago," stated Faith Morgantile. "Some of the students here are eighteen, and just right for a man of his age. Besides, we saw him with you on Sunday, and you are only sixteen."
It stunned me that in a giant city like Boston I'd be spotted with Troy!
So that was it! The reason for their sudden interest in me! They had seen me, or one of their friends had, in the coffee shop with Troy. I stood up. I dropped my napkin on their table. "Thank you for inviting me to your table," I said with real pain in my heart, for I'd so hoped to have friends here. All my life I'd never had a girlfriend, only Fanny, who had been kind of a family cross to bear. At my own table I picked up the books I'd left there and stalked from the dining room.
From that moment on I sensed a difference in their attitudes. They had been suspicious of me before just because I was new and different. Now I had challenged them, and without any effort at all, I had made enemies.
The very next morning I selected from my dresser drawer a beautiful cornflower blue cashmere sweater to wear with its matching skirt, and to my utter horror, my brand-new sweater had begun to unravel. And the wool skirt I'd laid out on my bed, brand new, was losing its hem, and very carefully someone had picked at the rows of stitches that held a front box pleat neatly in place. In the Willies I would have worn the sweater and skirt anyway, but not here, not here! Not when I knew that just yesterday both sweater and skirt had been perfect!
One sweater after another I took from the drawer and inspected! Five of my sweaters were ruined! I ran to the closet to check on my skirts and blouses and found them hanging as I'd left them, still in good shape. Whoever had done this hadn't had time to ruin everything I owned. That Tuesday morning I didn't have time to eat breakfast. I went to class wearing just as blouse with my skirt, and no sweater. None of the girls ever wore topcoats to class, scorning thoughts of colds and chills, even though most of them sat with their arms crossed over their breasts and shivered from time to time. Hardy, puritanical souls ruled Winterhaven, seeing that none of us experienced too much luxury. The classroom was not much warmer than the cabin in the hills had been in late October. All morning I shivered, thinking I'd run to my room at noon and pick up a lightweight jacket.
I ate my lunch so fast I almost choked on it, then I dashed upstairs to my room; the door was never locked. I ran to the closet to snatch from the rod one of the three warm jackets Tony had chosen for me. Two jackets were missing! The one remaining jacket was sopping wet!
Were they so rich and powerful they thought they could get away with vandalizing my possessions? Shivering as much from anger as from cold, I ran down the hall with the wet jacket extended before me. I barged into the bathroom. Six girls were in there smoking and giggling. The moment I came through the door a deadly quiet descended, while the cigarettes burned and created the worst kind of choking smoke. Using both hands I held up the wool jacket. "Did you have to put it in hot water?" I asked. "Wasn't it enough just to ruin my sweaters? What kind of monsters are you, anyway?"
"Whatever are you talking about?" asked Pru Carraway, her pale eyes innocently blank.
"My new sweaters are unraveled!" I yelled. I shook the water from the jacket so some of it flew into their faces. They drew back and formed a tight bunch. "You have taken two of my jackets and ruined the third! Do you think you'll get away with this unpunished?" I glared, with what I hoped was menace, into each pair of eyes that stared back at me. The very fact that they didn't seem intimidated by me or my puny threats made me even angrier. Their confidence grew as I hesitated, not knowing how to defeat them.
Turning, I thrust the sopping-wet jacket into one of the two clothes chutes. The heavyweight metal door had a very strong spring that slammed shut. There was a multisectioned bathroom on each one of the three floors. With two hundred girls bathing or showering daily, hundreds of white towels were used. Each day maids brought up stacks and stacks of clean white towels and put them neatly behind the glass doors of the linen closets. The chutes took the wet, soiled towels quickly to the basement, where they fell into huge baskets.
"Now," I said, whipping around and trying to build some fear into them, "that jacket will be found and reported to the headmistress. You can't take the evidence from me and destroy it, for the cellar is off limits to all of you."
Pru Carraway yawned. The other five girls followed suit.
"I hope they dismiss each and every one of you for willful destruction of property that didn't belong to you!"
"You sound like a lawyer," moaned Faith Morgantile. "You scare us, really you do. What does a wet jacket prove? Nothing but your own carelessness for being dumb enough to wash it in hot water."
I suspected as I stood there in that bathroom that no matter what I said they would not accept blame for what they had done. Then the sweet, pretty face of Miss Marianne Deale flashed behind my eyes, and her soft voice came to whisper in my ears: "It is
better to champion a losing cause that you believe in than to keep your silence and risk nothing. You can never tell what effect your argument will have later on."
"Right now I am going to the office of Mrs. Mallory," I stated with fire. "I am going to show her the tears in my brand-new sweaters, and I am going to tell her about the jacket you just ruined."
"You can't prove anything," said a small, plain girl named Amy Luckett, her hands moving in an agitated, betraying way. "You could have snagged your own sweaters, accidentally ruined your own jacket."
"Mrs. Mallory saw me wearing the jacket Monday morning, so at least she will know its former condition. And when it is found in the wet towel basket, that will also prove what you've done."
"You talk like a second-rate lawyer," sneered Pru Carraway. "The faculty here can't touch us. Two years ago we told our parents not to continue donating cash gifts to this school, which would go under without them. They didn't even appreciate all the money we saved them when we stopped wearing those crappy French schoolgirl uniforms. We always win when we unite and fight. We have our parents behind us. Our rich, rich parents. Our influential, political parents. You have no friends here. You are not one of us. No one will believe what you say. Mrs. Mallory will look down her nose at you and think you mean-spirited and spiteful because she knows we will never make you one of us. She will believe you damaged your clothes yourself, just so you could put the blame on us."
What she said made shivers race up and down my spine! Could anyone believe such a thing? I wasn't wise or experienced in the ways of the world. I hadn't been to school in Switzerland, and learned how to handle a situation like this. Still, I had to believe they were bluffing, and I had to bluff as well. "We'll see," I said, turning and leaving the bathroom.
With my arms full of ruined sweaters, I entered the dean's office. Mrs. Mallory looked up with annoyance clearly written on her round face. "Aren't you supposed to be in your social studies class, Miss Casteel?"
I dropped the sweaters on the floor, then picked up what had been a lovely blue one, and held it high for her to see. A finishing thread had been pulled so the neckline was half raveled. "I have never worn this sweater, Mrs. Mallory, and yet it is full of holes and raveling."
She frowned. "You really should take better care of your clothes. I hate to see money thrown away on ungrateful children."
"I take very good care of my clothes. This sweater was neatly folded in my second dresser drawer, along with others that are also falling apart because threads have been pulled or cut."
For the longest time she was silent. One by one I displayed the sweaters. "The jacket you commented on Monday morning when I checked in was soaked in hot water while I was in my morning classes today.
Her red lips pursed. She adjusted the halfglasses she wore on the tip of her nose. "Are you making accusations, Miss Casteel?"
"Yes. I am not liked here because I am different."
"If you want to be liked, Miss Casteel, you don't tattle on schoolmates who play tricks on all the new girls."