The St. Ambrose School for Girls by Jessica Ward EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
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- Author: Jessica Ward
- Language: English
- Genre: Historical Thrillers
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The St. Ambrose School for Girls
Greensboro Falls, Massachusetts
1991
My first view of the St. Ambrose School for Girls is from the back seat of my
mother’s 1981 Mercury Marquis. The ten-year-old car is utterly unremarkable
except for being reliable, and the reason I’m in the back is because I put the
laundry basket full of my bedding in the front passenger seat. My mother is a
smoker and I can’t stand the smell. I have a theory that I can put my head out the
rear window and get better air because I’m farther away from her.
I’m wrong.
We pull through a pair of stone pillars that are united by a graceful arch of
black iron ligree, a necklace overturned, the perfect welcome to a pearls-andsweater-set institution of learning. I’m being dropped o here for my
sophomore year of high school. I’m a fteen-year-old charity case on scholarship
because I won a spot I was not aware of having competed for. My mother lled
out the application and put a piece of writing of mine into the pool of
candidates. Those ve thousand words, which I had no intention of anyone ever
reading, coupled with my idiot savant grades, were the key to unlock this door I
do not want to enter.
“Look at this lawn,” my mother remarks. She gestures around with her left
hand, the lit cigarette between the fore- and middle ngers a laser pointer with
an angry orange end. “This is a lawn. I’ll bet they mow it every morning.”
I am not as impressed with the lawn. I am not impressed with any of the
brick buildings or the sidewalks that wind around the campus, either. All of this,
from the acceptance to the packed sheets in that basket to the two-hour trip
from where she and I live, has little to do with me, and everything to do with my
mother’s need to upgrade something in her life. Our tiny two-bedroom house is
cluttered with issues of People, Star, Us Weekly, the National Enquirer, the
Globe. Each one of them is a pulpy, soft-spined vacation into another, better
world for her, and after she’s done reading them, she keeps them like they’re
diaries of a trip she never wants to forget.
I wonder sometimes if she isn’t moving me out of her house so that she can
use my bedroom for storage space. I know this isn’t true. The real story is that
I’m the ninety-nine-cent houseplant she is shifting to a better, more sunny spot
on the sill by the sink. I’m the pragmatism that I doubt she will admit to
consciously, a recognition that her own life is a stagnation of going-nowhere, but
damn it, she can gure out how to get her fucked-up daughter into Ambrose.
“Look at this campus. I tell you, Sally.” She icks her Virginia Slim out of her
window, ashing onto the lawn and evidently missing the irony that she’s
crapping up the very thing she’s admiring. “They know how to do things at this
school.”
My mother puts a push into a lot of her words, as if her tongue is frantically
shoving the syllables out of her lipstick-slicked mouth, like someone trying to
bail out a boat. For her, an ocean of unspoken urgency surrounds the hull of her
leaky ski of nervous chatter, so there are always words for her, and rarely a
pause for consideration of content. She speaks like the magazines she reads,
everything headlined, drama manufactured out of her dull and endlessly
reconstituted reality of being a school lunch lady at Lincoln Elementary.
“Where are we going?” she asks. When I don’t answer her, she looks over her
shoulder. “Sally, help me here. Where are we going?”
My name is Sarah, not Sally. I’m not sure how I got the nickname, but I hate
it, and the rst thing I’m going to do here is introduce myself as Bo. Bo is a cool
name for a girl, unisex and unusual, just as I am fairly unisex and denitely
unusual. Unlike the other girls I see walking around the campus—who look like
they’ve stepped out of the rainbow page of a United Colors of Benetton ad—
I’m dressed in black and loose clothing. I’m also not wearing shoes, but lace-up
boots with steel toes. My hair is dyed jet black, although my mouse-brown roots
are starting to show already, a trail of mud at night.
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