Stella smiled in spite of her pounding head. The Rabbit School was a competitive place, one of the few all-girls private schools left in Boston, and Juliet Aronson was the only other charity case in her grade. Birds of a feather flocked together, that was true enough; Juliet and Stella were lucky to have each other. As a team they made certain to reject everyone else before they themselves were cut to the quick. Neither, after all, could afford to shop on Newbury Street or go to summer camp in Maine. Stella’s mother had a steady but small salary, and her father earned very little at the music school where he taught sporadically. The other girls at Rabbit had whispered about Will Avery for days when he’d come to the Harvest Fair Fund-raiser so obviously loaded, turning on the charm for Señorita Smith, who was a fool for any man who remotely resembled her vision of Don Quixote.
Don’t let them see if you’re hurting, Juliet had advised just last week. Neither one had received an invitation to Hillary Endicott’s birthday party at the Museum of Fine Arts—I don’t think you’d fit in, Hillary had told them after the Harvest Fair, her tone friendly, as if her pronouncement of what they were lacking had been an act of mercy, until Juliet spat on her expensive leather boots. To make up for Hillary’s party, they’d gone off to snag some silk scarves at Saks instead. Act like you don’t care, Juliet had told Stella as they ducked into the Boston Public Library, where they could sit comfortably in the reading room and sift through their loot. And after a while you won’t feel a thing.
Not caring was Juliet’s real expertise. Ten years earlier, in a well-publicized criminal case, Juliet’s mother had poisoned her father. After several years of foster care, Juliet now lived with her mother’s youngest sister, a graduate student at Emerson College, in an apartment in Charlestown. The aunt was the one who’d finagled the scholarship to the Rabbit School when Juliet was in sixth grade, not that Juliet had cared whether or not they accepted her. She was miles past acceptance, years beyond anything remotely resembling hope.
“Go ahead, open it,” Juliet said of the present she’d given to Stella. “You’re going to love it.”
Inside was a black dress, stolen from the designer department on Saks’ second floor, perfect in every way, skimpy and sheer, the sort of thing Stella’s mother would never allow her to wear. This beautiful dress belonged to another universe, light-years away from the pink cashmere sweater, which she hoped would spend the rest of its natural life boxed up, relegated to the bottom of a dresser drawer.
Stella threw her arms around her friend. “I absolutely love it!”
“Actually, it’s a good thing I got you something to wear.”
Stella looked at Juliet blankly. The pounding in her head was simply miserable.
“Earth to Stella. What is wrong with you? Ever hear of the curse? You’re leaking.”
They rushed into the bathroom, well aware that they’d be late for Miss Hewitt’s math class and the exam they both feared.
“Oh, shit.” This was the first time Stella had menstruated and she was near tears. “Why today of all days? I have the worst luck in the world.”
“Actually, I think that would be me.”
Juliet visited her father’s grave every other Sunday, and therefore would not have been available for birthday parties even if she’d been asked. She regularly tore up her mother’s letters from Framingham State Prison without reading them. She’d heard it all before: the excuses, the reasons why. None of it mattered to Juliet Aronson. She signed her own report cards, made her own lunches, and kept a rope ladder under her bed, in case a fire should break out in her apartment, for her aunt smoked when she studied and often fell asleep in bed, books open, a cigarette still burning in the ashtray. Juliet was used to disaster, and could therefore always be depended upon to be ready for the next catastrophe to come. Now, for instance, she pulled an extra pair of panties out of her backpack. Always be prepared, that was her motto. Always expect the worst.
“You think this is bad? I got my period for the first time when I was on the T going to Cambridge and I just had to sit there on the train and bleed until we got to the station in Harvard Square. I went to the Coop and refused to leave until they gave me a pair of sweatpants.”
Juliet sat on the sink and lit up a cigarette from a pack she’d bought at the corner store; she’d recently convinced the shop owner that she was a twenty-three-year-old graduate student, with a bit of help from her aunt’s pilfered ID. “I think I’m supposed to slap you or something. Welcome you into the world of women. My aunt slapped me, but maybe that was because it was her white jeans I was wearing, and I had to throw them away.”