Chapter 7: Chapter 7
The dining hall felt different at dinner. Chloe noticed it before she understood it: the small silences that opened around her as she carried her tray past the long tables, the glances that broke apart when she looked back at them. Two second-years near the window leaned their heads together and one of them said something and they both looked at her, and it wasn't hostile exactly, but it wasn't nothing.
She sat with Dot and a girl from her composition class and ate her roast and potatoes and tried to read the room the way Voss had taught her to read a body. Dot, for once, was quiet.
"They're talking about you," Dot said finally, conspiratorial, tearing her napkin into strips. "All day. Even in the corridor outside the east wing, where nobody's supposed to talk about anything."
"What are they saying?"
"That you made Instructor Voss come." Dot said it in a whisper but said it plainly, and a girl two seats down snorted into her water. "That the subjects rated you better than staff. Third-years are telling second-years and second-years are telling us. It went through the whole building by lunch."
Chloe looked around the hall. Girls she'd never spoken to were watching her. One of them, a tall blonde she vaguely remembered from the social, held her gaze a second too long and didn't look away when she was caught. Another, older, senior uniform, made a small contemptuous motion with her fork and turned back to her table.
"Good and bad," Chloe said.
"There's always both," Dot said, with the flat wisdom of someone who'd been here two months longer. "That's what the school is for."
Marguerite appeared at the end of the meal and walked her to the stairwell, and even Marguerite had heard, and even Marguerite was looking at her with something new in her face, a kind of awe that made Chloe uncomfortable in a way praise from instructors hadn't.
"You did it Monday first," Marguerite said at the landing. "Before anyone knew what you were. I was there."
"You were there," Chloe agreed, and Marguerite smiled like that meant something private, and went up toward her own corridor.
The room was dark when Chloe got back to it. She did her reading at the window with the lamp on, and the looks from dinner kept surfacing in her mind, sorted and resorted, the jealous ones and the hungry ones, and she found she couldn't rank them with any confidence. The school had taught her one day of reading bodies and she still couldn't read a room.
Ruby came in at quarter past ten, later than usual, and she was smiling before the door was shut.
"You're famous," Ruby said. She dropped her bag on her bed and sat beside it, unlacing her shoes. "The whole third-year floor knows your name. Two of them asked me if you were seeing anyone. One of them asked me if you'd be at the winter social."
"Is that what this is. Everyone knows."
"Everyone knows." Ruby pulled off her second shoe and looked at her. "You got rated by curriculum subjects in your first week. You got an outstanding at the social. You put your fingers in Voss and made her forget she was an instructor. The stories got more exaggerated with every retelling, by the way. By dinner there were girls describing things you apparently did that you haven't done yet."
"The looks."
"Some of them hate you." Ruby said it comfortably, like weather. "You've been here six days and you have the ratings most girls don't have by spring of second year. There are girls in this building who've worked for three years for what you got handed. Some of them are going to be nasty about it. Some of them are going to be careful about it. And the rest," she smiled, "want you. Badly. You've become popular in both directions at the same time, which is the most powerful position in this school and also the most dangerous. Congratulations. My condolences."
Chloe turned her pen between her fingers. "Which one are you?"
"Me?" Ruby laughed. "I'm your roommate and I'm two years ahead of you and I have never once been rated like that by a man or a woman, so, yes. There's a little envy. But mostly." She hesitated, and it was the first hesitation Chloe had ever seen from her. "Mostly I'm annoyed about the wrong detail. Everyone's talking about the men from Tuesday and the rating. Nobody's talking about the important thing."
"Which is?"
"You ate Voss's pussy." Ruby said it low and reverent, and Chloe laughed before she could stop herself. "I'm serious. Don't laugh. I have spent two years in this school trying to get within ten feet of that woman with her clothes off and you did it in week one, in front of witnesses, for a grade." She flopped back on her bed and stared at the ceiling. "I hate you a little. Not enough to matter. But a little."
"You have a thing for her specifically?"
"I have a thing." Ruby was quiet a moment, and when she went on her voice had changed, lower, less performative. "I like older women. Mature women. Has anyone told you that about me?"
"No."
"Because I don't advertise it, and because the third-years I sleep with are just practice. But it's the true thing about me, so you can have it, since apparently we're telling truths tonight." She sat up, cross-legged, facing Chloe across the gap between the beds. "It started before I came here, actually. My piano teacher, when I was seventeen. She was forty-something and she never touched me, not once, and I used to sit through the lessons practically shaking. Then this place, and my second year I was assigned as practice partner for a forty-five-year-old instructor, and it all made sense at once."
"What is it about them?"
Ruby counted on her fingers. "They know what they want and they take it, and they make you feel taken. When a girl my age eats my pussy she's nervous, she's following a lesson she learned last Tuesday, she's checking my face every ten seconds for approval. A woman of fifty just eats you. She's decided what she's going to do and she does it, and she knows exactly how long to hold you at the edge before she lets you have it, because she's held a hundred women there and she knows precisely where the edge is." Her voice had gone soft and thick. "And when you go down on them, they don't perform. They don't moan the way they think you want. They just let you hear what you're actually doing to them, and it's filthy and honest and it makes me so wet I can't think."
Chloe felt heat climb her neck. Ruby noticed, and smiled, and kept going.
"The fifty-year-old yesterday. The one who gave the reports." Ruby fanned her hand vaguely. "I heard about her too. Know what I thought, all day? That's my exact type. Soft belly, grey at the temples, that unbothered smile. A woman like that doesn't apologize for her body. A girl my age is still deciding if she's allowed to want things. A woman of fifty decided decades ago and she wants them and she'll spread her legs in a classroom of twelve students and be bored by the scandal of it." She pressed her palm flat against her own stomach, absently, the way you touch yourself without admitting it. "Confidence is the whole thing. A confident woman turning me on is the strongest thing I feel. And I do really like fucking men, Chloe, I genuinely do, I like cock, I like the weight of one, I like being fucked by someone with an agenda. But women are the passion. Men are the hobby."
The room was very quiet. The lamp hissed faintly.
"You've never told anyone that?" Chloe asked.
"Vance probably knows. Vance knows everything. But no. Never out loud." Ruby shrugged, and it was a real shrug, unarmored. "This school trades in information and I've been hoarding mine. Doesn't seem fair to hoard from you when you're going to be running the place in three years."
Chloe set her pen down. The confession was sitting in her chest, and she found, surprisingly, that she wanted to give it.
"I turned two years ago," she said. "Two years before Serena. That's when I knew about women."
Ruby went still, listening, and didn't say anything at all, which was how Chloe knew she was being given room.
"There was a girl at my old school. Nothing happened. But I used to think about her constantly and I didn't have a word for why." Chloe pulled her knees up. "Then Serena married my father and moved into the house, and within about four months I wasn't thinking about the girl anymore."
"And then your birthday."
"And then my birthday." Chloe heard her own voice go quiet. "But it wasn't new. I'd been fantasizing about her for over a year before she kissed me. I'd lie in bed with my fingers in my pussy and think about her mouth. Think about what she'd look like undressed. What her breasts felt like when she hugged me, and how long I held on. How she'd taste." She swallowed. "More than once. A lot more than once. And when she finally did touch me, I came so hard I couldn't see straight, because I'd already come a hundred times to the idea of her."
"God." Ruby's voice was genuinely affected. "That's the hottest thing anyone's said to me in this room, and girls say things in this room."
"There's more, I suppose, if we're doing this." Chloe picked at the blanket. "I had a boyfriend back home. For most of last year. We had sex maybe six times, and I never came with him, and I didn't care, because halfway through every time I was somewhere else. I'd be under him fucking and in my head I was on my knees with my face in Serena, or with that girl from school, or with Serena and the girl together. That was how I got through it. Him moving on top of me and me thinking about women."
"Does he still exist? The boyfriend?"
Chloe laughed, and it came out rueful. "I barely remember his name. I forgot about him the day the taxi left the gate, honestly. He'd be beside himself if he knew what this week looked like. A man at Ashworth's cock was down my throat yesterday, another one in my mouth today was a forty-year-old woman's clit, and it's been six days. Six days, Ruby. And I have years of this ahead." She looked up, and found she was smiling and couldn't help it. "And I'm starting to love it. That's the part I keep circling. Not tolerating it. Loving it."
Ruby slid off her bed and came and sat on the end of Chloe's, close, warm through her nightclothes.
"Then listen to me, because this is the only advice worth anything in this building." She took Chloe's hand, loosely, no weight to it. "This school is going to do things to you that you don't expect. Things nobody warned you about, things you'll walk into blind, and by the time you understand what's happening you'll already be in the middle of it. There's no version of this where you stay ahead of it. The girls who try to stay ahead of it end up bitter or broken or transferred." She squeezed once. "So roll with it. Whatever it is. Don't freeze, don't fight the thing you can't change. Find the part of it you can enjoy, and enjoy it with everything you've got, and then take the information it gave you and bank it. That's the whole survival strategy here and nobody writes it down because the school prefers girls who figure it out late."
"Was there something you didn't expect?"
"There have been eleven things I didn't expect." Ruby grinned. "The twelfth is coming and I don't know what it is, which is the point." She stood and stretched, and the hem of her shirt rose, and Chloe noticed the motion and noticed herself noticing it and didn't look away fast enough. Ruby caught it and her grin deepened. "You'll do fine here, Bennett. You're already doing better than fine."
Ruby went into the bathroom and Chloe heard the water running, the ordinary sounds of a girl brushing her teeth, and she lay back on her bed with the lamp still on and thought about the room she'd been in six days ago, in another life, under a different ceiling.
When Ruby came out she turned off the main light and climbed into her own bed, and the dark settled.
"Bennett," she said, from across the room. "The tall blonde second-year who kept looking at you at dinner. Petra's year. Her name's Anneliese. If she approaches you, and she will, be nice to her. She has connections you'll want."
"Why are you telling me this now?"
"Because in the morning you'll be busy and I won't get credit for the tip."
Chloe laughed into her pillow, and the laughter turned into something looser, a full-body ease, and she lay there in the dark cataloguing the day again: the looks, good and bad, landing on her like weather on both sides of a window; Ruby's voice describing fifty-year-old mouths; her own voice saying Serena's name out loud to another person for the first time, and the sky not falling.
She fell asleep smiling, and it stayed on her face.
Somewhere down the corridor a door closed, and the mountain night went on without her, and Thursday was coming with whatever it carried. She was asleep before she could worry about it.