Desktop Google Chrome Windows 8. Plugin W. Media Player Winamp. Editar playlist. Tem certeza que deseja excluir esta playlist? Cancelar Excluir. Cancelar Sair sem salvar. Excluir playlist Cancelar Salvar. Monday 2 August Tuesday 3 August Wednesday 4 August Thursday 5 August Friday 6 August Saturday 7 August Sunday 8 August Monday 9 August Tuesday 10 August Wednesday 11 August Thursday 12 August Friday 13 August Saturday 14 August Sunday 15 August Monday 16 August Tuesday 17 August Wednesday 18 August Thursday 19 August Friday 20 August Saturday 21 August Sunday 22 August Monday 23 August Tuesday 24 August Wednesday 25 August Thursday 26 August Friday 27 August Saturday 28 August Sunday 29 August Monday 30 August Tuesday 31 August Wednesday 1 September Thursday 2 September Friday 3 September Saturday 4 September Sunday 5 September Monday 6 September Tuesday 7 September Wednesday 8 September Thursday 9 September Friday 10 September Saturday 11 September Sunday 12 September Monday 13 September Tuesday 14 September Wednesday 15 September Thursday 16 September Friday 17 September Saturday 18 September Sunday 19 September Monday 20 September Tuesday 21 September Wednesday 22 September Thursday 23 September Friday 24 September Saturday 25 September Sunday 26 September Monday 27 September Tuesday 28 September Wednesday 29 September Thursday 30 September Friday 1 October Saturday 2 October Sunday 3 October Monday 4 October Tuesday 5 October Wednesday 6 October Thursday 7 October Friday 8 October Saturday 9 October Sunday 10 October Monday 11 October Do other people get goose-bumps when you sing, the way I used to?
Annie, the other day I saw a woman who reminded me of your grandmother, and I thought of you, and your room, and the cats, and your father telling stories in his cab when we went for that drive on Thanksgiving. Then your last letter came, saying you're not going to write any more till you hear from me.
It's true I haven't written since the second week you were in music camp this summer. The trouble is that I kept thinking about what happened--thinking around it, really--and I couldn't write you. I'm sorry. I know it's not fair. It's especially not fair because your letters have been wonderful, and I know I'm going to miss them.
But I don't blame you for not writing any more, really I don't. Annie, I still can't write, I guess, for I already know I'm not going to mail this. Liza closed her eyes, absently running her hand through her short, already touseled brownish hair. Her shoulders were hunched tensely in a way that made her look, even when she stood up, shorter than the 5'3" she really was. She moved her shoulders forward, then back, in an unconscious attempt to ease the ache that had come from sitting too long at her drawing board and afterwards at her desk.
The girl who lived across the hall teased her for being a perfectionist, but since many of the other freshman architecture students had arrived at MIT--Massachusetts Institute of Technology--fresh from summer internships with large firms, Liza had spent her first weeks trying doggedly to catch up.
Even so, there was still an unfinished floor plan on her drawing board, and the unfinished Frank Lloyd Wright paper on her desk. Liza put down her pen, but in a few moments picked it up again.
What I have to do, I think, before I can mail you a letter, is sort out what happened. I have to work through it all again--everything--the bad parts, but the good ones toous and the house and Ms. Stevenson and Ms. Widmer, and Sally and Walt, and Ms. Baxter and Mrs. Poindexter and the trustees, and my parents and poor bewildered Chad. Annie--there are things I'm going to have to work hard at remembering. But I do want to remember, Liza thought, going to her window. I do want to, now.
The rain hid the Charles River and most of the campus; she could barely see the building opposite hers. She looked across at it nonetheless, willing it to blur into--what? Her street in Brooklyn Heights, New York, where she'd lived all her life till now?
Her old school, Foster Academy, a few blocks away from her parents' apartment? Annie's street in Manhattan; Annie's school? Annie herself, as she'd looked that first November day Widmer, who taught English at Foster Academy, always said that the best way to begin a story is to start with the first important or exciting incident and then fill in the background.
I've wanted to be an architect since long before I could spell the word, so I've always spent a lot of time at museums. That day, to help focus my ideas for the solar house I was designing for my senior project, I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to visit the Temple of Dendur and the American Wing. The museum was so full of people I decided to start with the American Wing, because it's sometimes less crowded, especially up on the third floor where I wanted to go.
And at first it seemed as if that was going to be true. When I got to the top of the stairs, everything was so quiet that I thought there might even be no one there at all--but as I started walking toward the colonial rooms, I heard someone singing. I remember I stood and listened for a minute and then went toward the sound, mostly out of curiosity, but also because whoever it was had a wonderful voice.
There was a girl about my age--seventeen--sitting at a window in one of the oldest colonial rooms, singing and gazing outside. Even though I knew that the only thing outside that window was a painted backdrop, there was something about the girl, the gray cape she was wearing, and the song she was singing, that made it easy to imagine "Plimoth" Plantation or Massachusetts Bay Colony outside instead.
The girl looked as if she could have been a young colonial woman, and her song seemed sad, at least the feeling behind it did; I didn't pay much attention to the words.
After a moment or two, the girl stopped singing, although she still kept looking out the window. She had very long black hair, and a round face with a small little-kid's nose and a sad-looking mouth but it was her eyes I noticed most. They were as black as her hair and they looked as if there was more behind them than another person could possibly ever know. I didn't know anyone was there.
I smiled at her; she smiled back, tentatively, as if she were still getting over being startled. I was pretending that I was a colonial girl who missed England--you know, her best friend, things like that. And her dog--she'd been allowed to take her cat but not her dog. The girl walked to the door as if she were going to leave, so I quickly said, "Do you come here often?
She didn't seem to think it was dumb. She shook her head as if it were a serious question and said, "No. I have to spend a lot of time practicing, only that gets dull sometimes. The cape fell open a little and I could see that under it she was wearing a very uncolonial pair of green corduroy jeans and a brown sweater.
We keep having to give recitals. Do you come here often? I told her I did and explained about wanting to be an architect and about the solar house. When I said I was going to the Temple of Dendur, she said she'd never seen it except from outside the museum, and asked, "Mind if I come?
We'd just gotten to the medieval art section, which is a big open room with a magnificent choir screen--an enormous gold-painted wrought-iron grating--running across the whole back section. Annie stood in front of it, her eyes very bright. She stood there silently, as if in awe of the screen, and then bowed her head. Two or three people coming in glanced at her curiously and I tried to tell myself it was ridiculous for me to feel uneasy.
You could walk away, I remember thinking; you don't know this person at all. Maybe she's crazy. Maybe she's some kind of religious fanatic. But I didn't walk away, and in a couple of seconds she turned, smiling. Even so, I led Annie fairly quickly to the Hall of Arms and Armor, which I usually go through on my way to the temple. The Hall is one of my favorite parts of the museum--one is greeted at its door by a life-sized procession of knights in full armor, on horseback.
The first knight has his lance at the ready, pointed straight ahead, which means right at whoever walks in. Annie seemed to love it. I think that's one of the first things that made me decide I really did like her, even though she seemed a little strange. Part of me wanted to join in; as I said, I've always loved those knights myself, and besides, I'd been a King Arthur nut when I was little.
But the other part of me was stiff with embarrassment. But by then Annie had pretended to fall off her horse, dropping her lance. She drew an imaginary sword so convincingly I knew I was admiring her skill in spite of myself, and then when she cried, "En garde!
Stand and fight or I'll run you through! Besides, by then I'd noticed that the only other people around were a couple of little boys at the opposite end of the Hall. In the next minute I completely stopped resisting. I imagined a horse and leapt down from it, crying in my best King Arthur style, "I will not fight an unhorsed knight and me mounted.
But now that I am on the ground, you will not live to tell the tale of this day's battle! In another minute we were both hopping in and out of the procession of knights, laying about with our imaginary swords and shouting chivalrous insults at each other.
After about the third insult, the little boys left the other end of the Hall and came over to watch us. The only trouble was, I wasn't sure how we were going to signal each other which one of us was going to die and when. Stop that, you two, this instant--old enough to know better, aren't you? I've never seen them before--I got carried away. When they were gone, the guard scowled at us again--he scowled, that is, but his eyes didn't look angry.
But no more, he said, shaking his finger. The second he was gone, we both burst out laughing. I wasn't even embarrassed, except right at the beginning. We looked at each other, really looked, I mean, for the first time, and for a moment or two I don't think I could have told anyone my name, let alone where I was.
Nothing like that had ever happened to me before, and I think--I know--it scared me. It was a bit longer before I could speak, and even then all I could say was, "Come on--the temple's this way.
It's a sight that stuns most people, and it still stuns me, even though I've been there many times. It's the absence of shadows, I think, and the brightness-- stark and pure, even on a day as rainy as that one was.
Light streams in through glass panels that are as open as the sky and reflects from the pool, making the temple's present setting seem as vast and changeable as its original one on the river Nile must have been thousands of years ago. Annie gasped as soon as we walked in. But--but exactly like it. Then, her back very straight, she walked slowly around the pool and up to the temple as if she were the goddess Isis herself, inspecting it for the first time and approving.
When she came back, she stood so close to me our hands would have touched if we'd moved them. The choir screen, too. Not somber like me and the choir screen. Annie's smile deepened as if she'd heard my thought, but then she turned away. But there didn't seem any reason not to ask. She scribbled her address and phone number, tore the page off, and handed it to me. I don't remember what we said; but I do remember feeling that something important had happened, and that words didn't matter much.
In a few more minutes, Annie was on a cross town bus, and I was heading in the opposite direction to get the IRT subway home to Brooklyn. I was halfway home before I realized I hadn't done any thinking about my solar-house project at all. The leaves on the street were almost dry, at least the top layer of them, and my brother Chad and I shuffled through them as we walked to school.
Chad's two years younger than I, and he's supposed to look like me: square, and blue-eyed, with what Mom calls a "heart-shaped face. The Heights isn't at all like Manhattan, the part of New York that most people visit--in many ways it's more like a town than a city.
It has more trees and flowers and bushes than Manhattan, and it doesn't have lots of big fancy stores, or vast office buildings, or the same bustling atmosphere. Most of the buildings in the Heights are residential--four- or five-story brownstones with little back and front gardens. I've always liked living there, although it does have a tendency to be a bit dull in that nearly everyone is white, and most people's parents have jobs as doctors, lawyers, professors--or VIP's in brokerage firms, publishing houses, or the advertising business.
Anyway, as Chad and I shuffled through the leaves to school that Monday morning, Chad was muttering the Powers of Congress and I was thinking about Annie. I wondered if I'd hear from her and if I'd have the nerve to call her if I didn't. I had put the scrap of paper with her address on it in the corner of my mirror where I would see it whenever I had to brush my hair, so I thought I probably would call her if she didn't call me first. Chad tugged my arm he looked annoyed--no, exasperated.
I just went through the whole list of the Powers of Congress and then asked you if it was right and you didn't even say anything. What's the point of learning something sophomore year if you're only going to forget it by the time you're a senior? Then he went back to my real name and chanted, "Liza's in love, Liza's in love By then we were almost at school, but I slung my book bag over my shoulder and pelted him with leaves the rest of the way to the door.
Foster Academy looks like an old wooden Victorian mansion, which is exactly what it was before it was made into an independent--private--school running from kindergarten through twelfth grade. Some of the turrets and gingerbready decorations on its dingy white main building had begun to crumble away since I'd been in Upper School high school , and each year more kids had left to go to public school.
Since most of Foster's money came from tuition and there were only about thirty kids per class, losing more than a couple of students a year was a major disaster. So that fall the Board of Trustees had consulted a professional fund raiser who had helped "launch" a "major campaign," as Mrs.
Poindexter, the headmistress, was fond of saying. By November, the parents' publicity committee had put posters all over the Heights asking people to give money to help the school survive, and there were regular newspaper ads, and plans for a student recruitment drive in the spring.
As a matter of fact, when I threw my last handful of leaves at Chad that morning, I almost hit the publicity chairman for the fund drive instead--Mr. Piccolo, father of one of the freshmen. I said, "Good morning, Mr. Piccolo," quickly, to cover what I'd done. He nodded and gave us both a kind of ostrichy smile.
Like his daughter Jennifer, he was tall and thin, and I could see Chad pretending to play a tune as he went down the hall. It was a school joke that both Mr. Piccolo and Jennifer looked like the musical instrument they were named for.
I grinned, making piccolo-playing motions back to Chad, and then threaded my way down to my locker through knots of kids talking about their weekends. We were as different from each other as two people can be--I think the main thing we had in common was that neither of us quite fit in at Foster.
I don't want to say that Foster is snobby, because that's what people always think about private schools, but I guess it's true that a lot of kids thought they were pretty special. And there were a lot of cliques, only Sally and I weren't in any of them.
The thing I liked best about her, until everything changed, was that she always went her own way. In a world of people who seemed to have come out of duplicating machines, Sally Jarrell was no one's copy, not that fall anyway. I swear I didn't notice the sign even when I walked past it a second time--and that time Sally was right in front of it, peering at my left ear as if there were a bug on it, and murmuring something that sounded like "posts.
That time I heard her clearly, but before I could ask her what she was talking about, the first bell rang and the hall suddenly filled with sharp elbows and the din of banging lockers.
I went to chemistry, and Sally flounced mysteriously off to gym. And I forgot the whole thing till lunchtime, when I went back down to my locker for my physics book--I was taking a heavy science load that year because of wanting to go to MIT. The basement hall was three deep with girls, looking as if they were lined up for something. There were a few boys, too, standing near Sally's boyfriend, Walt, who was next to a table with a white cloth on it.
Neatly arranged on the cloth were a bottle of alcohol, a bowl of ice, a spool of white thread, a package of needles, and two halves of a raw potato, peeled. Three or four? I've never quite figured out why, but at election time, one of the kids in my class had nominated me for student-council president, and I'd won. Student council, representing the student body, was supposed to run the school, instead of the faculty or the administration running it.
As far as I was concerned, my main responsibility as council president was to preside at meetings every other week.
But Mrs. Poindexter, the headmistress, had other ideas. Back in September, she'd given me an embarrassing lecture about setting an example and being her "good right hand" and making sure everyone followed "both the spirit and the letter" of the school rules, some of which were a little screwy. Do step this way, Madame Poindexter might think applied specifically to ear piercing. Walt shrugged, putting his hand under my elbow and ushering me to the head of the line.
Walt shot the cuffs of his blue shirt--he was a very snappy dresser, and that day he was wearing a tan three-piece suit--and bowed. I shall return. Jarrell told me she would take care of you gentlemen after she haser--accommodated a few of the ladies. I went into the girls' room just in time to hear Jennifer Piccolo squeal "Ouch! I closed the door quicky--Chuck was trying to peer in--and worked my way through the five or six girls standing around the table Sally had set up in front of the row of sinks.
It had the same stuff on it that the one in the hall did. Sally shrugged. Ready for the next one, Jen? Four kids reached for the ice while Jennifer closed her eyes again, looking more or less like my idea of what Joan of Arc must have looked like on her way to the stake. I'm not going to describe the whole process, mostly because it was a bit gory, but even though Jennifer gave a sort of squeak when the needle went in, and even though she reeled dizzily out of the girls' room scattering most of the boys, Walt said afterwards , she insisted it hadn't hurt much.
I stayed long enough to see that Sally was trying to be careful, given the limits of her equipment. The potato really did prevent the needle from going too far, and the ice, which was for numbing the ear, did seem to reduce both the pain and the bleeding.
Sally even sterilized the ear as well as the needle and thread. The whole thing looked pretty safe, and so I decided that all I had to do in my official capacity was remind Sally to use the alcohol each time. But that afternoon there were a great many bloody Kleenexes being held to earlobes in various classes, and right after the last bell, when I was standing in the hall talking to Ms. Stevenson, who taught art and was also faculty adviser to student council, a breathless freshman came running up and said, "Oh, good, Liza, you're still here.
Poindexter wants to see you. Stevenson raised her eyebrows. Stevenson was very tall and pale, with blond hair that she usually wore in a not-terribly-neat pageboy. My father always called her the "Renaissance woman," because besides teaching art she coached the debate team, sang in a community chorus, and tutored kids in just about any subject if they were sick for a long time.
She also had a fierce temper, but along with that went a reputation for being fair, so no one minded very much, at least not among the kids. I tried to ignore Ms.
Stevenson's raised eyebrows and concentrate on the freshman. Piccolo and Jennifer come out of the nurse's office and then go into Mrs. Poindexter's, and Jennifer was crying and her ears were all bloody. When she left, Ms. Stevenson turned to me and said dryly, "Your ears, I'm glad to see, look the same as ever.
Stevenson's small silver post earrings. My doctor, Liza. I wish I'd known about it in time to stop it. Poindexter's office. I knew that Ms. Stevenson, even though she never made herself obnoxious about it, was usually right.
And by the time the whole thing was over with, I wished she'd known about the ear piercing in time to stop it, too. Poindexter didn't look up when I went into her office. She was a stubby gray-haired woman who wore rimless glasses on a chain and always looked as if she had a pain somewhere.
Maybe she always did, because often when she was thinking up one of her sardonically icy things to say she'd flip her glasses down onto her bumpy bosom and pinch her nose as if her sinuses hurt her.
But I always had the feeling that what she was trying to convey was that the student she was disciplining was what really gave her the pain. She could have saved herself a lot of trouble by following the school charter: "The Administration of Foster Academy shall guide the students, but the students shall govern themselves. Jorrocks, our American history teacher, would call a "loose constructionist," because she interpreted the charter differently from most people.
Poindexter said, still not looking up. Her voice sounded tired and muffled--as if her mouth were full of gravel. I sat down. It was always hard not to be depressed in Mrs. Poindexter's office, even if you were there to be congratulated for winning a scholarship or making straight A's.
Poindexter's love for Foster, which was considerable, didn't inspire her to do much redecorating. Her office was in shades of what seemed to be its original brown, without anything for contrast, not even plants, and she kept her thick brown drapes partway closed, so it was unusually dark.
Finally Mrs. Poindexter raised her head from the folder she was thumbing through, flipped her glasses onto her chest, pinched her nose, and looked at me as if she thought I had the personal moral code of a sea slug.
Words fail me," she said--but, like most people who say that, she somehow managed to continue. I cleared my throat, telling myself she couldn't possibly expect me to remember it word for word as it appeared in the little blue book called Welcome to Foster Academy.
Baxter's desk in the offace. Baxter was a chirpy little birdlike woman with dyed red hair who taught The Bible as Literature to juniors and told Bible stories to the Lower School once a week. Her other job was to be Mrs.
Poindexter's administrative assistant, which meant Mrs. Poindexter confided in her and gave her special jobs, anything from pouring tea at Mothers Club meetings to doing confidential typing and guarding the reporting box. Poindexter drank tea together every afternoon out of fancy Dresden china cups, but they never seemed quite like equals, the way real friends are. They were more like an eagle and a sparrow, or a whale and its pilot fish, because Ms. Baxter was always scurrying around running errands for Mrs.
Poin-dexter or protecting her from visitors she didn't want to see. Or herself. Three: If the student won't do that, the one who saw him or her break the rule is supposed to report them, the one breaking the rule, I mean. Poindexter nodded. Or when you saw what she was actually doing? Poindexter whirled around in her chair and opened her eyes, flashing them at me.
Piccolo's services as publicity chairman of our campaign. And yet Jennifer Piccolo had to go home early this afternoon because of the terrible pain in her earlobes. Poindexter," I said, and then tried to explain that I hadn't even noticed Sally's sign till she was already piercing Jennifer's ears. She shook her head as if she couldn't quite grasp that. Not," she added, "that the reporting rule or any other rule will make any difference at all if Foster has to close.
The idea of Foster's having to close had never occurred to me, although of course I knew about the financial troubles. But having to close? Both Chad and I had gone to Foster since kindergarten; it was almost another parent to us.
And if Mr. Piccolo, without whose publicity there can be no campaign, leaves us as a result of this--this foolish, thoughtless incident, I seriously doubt we will find anyone to replace him. If he leaves, goodness knows: whether the fund raiser who has agreed to act as consultant will stay on--it was hard enough getting both of them in the first place Poindexter closed her eyes again, and for the first time since I'd walked into her office that afternoon I realized she really was upset; she wasn't just acting that way for effect, the way she usually seemed to be.
Piccolo will feel about asking people for money now? Poindexter," I said, trying not to squirm. Poindexter sighed. We will hold a disciplinary hearing for you and for Sally Jarrell at that time.
Naturally, I cannot allow you to preside, since you are under a disciplinary cloud yourself. I will ask Angela Cariatid, as vice president, to take the gavel. Now you may go.
I was glad Chad wasn't with me and I wasn't sure, when I unlocked the door to the brownstone we live in and went up to our third-floor apartment, if I even wanted to see Mom before I'd had time to think. My mother's a very good person to talk to; most of the time she can help us sort out problems, even when we're wrong, without making us feel like worms.
But as it turned out, I didn't have to worry about whether I was going to be able to think things through before I talked to her this time, because she wasn't home. She'd left a note for us on the kitchen table: L and C--At neighborhood association meeting. New cookies in jar. Help yourselves. Love, Mom Mom always-- well, usually--baked cookies for us when she knew she wasn't going to be home. Chad says she still does; it's as if she feels guilty for not being a percent housewife, which of course no one but she herself expects her to be.
After I'd skimmed a few cookies off the top of the pile in the jar, and was sitting there at the table eating them and wishing the baseball season lasted into November so there'd be a game on to take my mind off school, I saw the second note under the first one: Liza-- Someone named Annie something--Cannon? She said would you please call her, Have another cookie. Love, Mom I didn't know why, but as soon as I saw that note, I felt my heart starting to beat faster.
I also realized I was thoroughly glad Mom wasn't home, because I didn't want anyone around when I called Annie, though again I didn't know why. My mouth felt dry, so I got a drink of water and I almost dropped the glass because my hands were suddenly sweaty. Then I went to the phone and started dialing, but I stopped in the middle because I didn't know what I was going to say.
I couldn't start dialing again till I told myself a few times that since Annie had called me thinking of what to say was up to her. Someone else answered the phone--her mother, I found out later--and I found myself feeling jealous of whoever it was for being with Annie while I was all the way down in Brooklyn Heights, not even on the same island she was.
Finally Annie came to the phone and said, "Hello? It's Liza. But after about the third very long pause she said, low and hesitant, "um--I was wondering if you'd like to go to the Cloisters with me Sattrday--Don't if you don't want to. I thought maybe you'd like it since you go to the Metropolitan so much, butoh, well, maybe you wouldn't.
I love it up there. The park, everything. We wouldn't even have to go into the museum. I like the museum just as much as the park. I think that was the first time I heard her laugh in her special way. It was full of delight--I don't mean delightful, although it was that, too.
She laughed as if what I'd just said was so clever that it had somehow made her bubble over with joy. That phone call was the best thing that had happened all day, and for a while after I'd hung up, the situation at school didn't seem nearly so bad any more. Widmer was a couple of minutes late to English on Friday, which was my last class for the day.
She gave us a quick nod, picked up the poetry book we'd been studying, and read: "Out of the night that covers me, Black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul.
Mom once said that Ms. Widmer's voice was a cross between Julie Harris's and Helen Hayes's. I've never heard either of them that I know of, so all I can say is that Ms. Widmer had the kind of voice, especially when she read poetry, that made people listen. Widmer looked up, pushing her gray bangs out of her eyes.
She wasn't old, but she was prematurely gray. Sometimes she joked about it, in the special way she had of finding humor in things most people didn't find funny. A fell clutch would be when he grabbed for the handle as he fell.
Widmer laughed good-naturedly along with the boos and groans and then called on Jody Crane, who was senior representative to student council. Widmer said. She opened the leather-bound dictionary she kept on her desk and used at least three times every class period.
She'd had it rebound, she told us once, because it contained almost the entire English language and that was well worth doing something special for. Also Late Latin. Fierce, cruel. Poetic--" She looked up and an involuntary shudder went through the class as she lowered her voice and said the single word: "deadly. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed. Widmer paused and glanced my way for a fraction of a second before she read the last line: "I am the captain of my soul.
He lost one foot to tuberculosis--TB is not always a lung disease--and nearly lost the other as well. He spent an entire year of his life in a hospital, and that led to this poem, which is called 'In Hospital,' as well as to others. For homework, please discover the meaning of the word he chose for his title, and also please find and bring to class one other poem, not by Henley, but with the same theme.
Due Monday. By that time, Ms. Widmer's love of poetry had spread to most of us as if it were some kind of benign disease. It was rumored that before graduation every year she gave each senior a poem that she thought would be personally appropriate for his or her future. For most of the rest of the period, we discussed why being in a hospital might lead to writing poems, and what kinds of poems it might lead to, and Ms.
Widmer read us some other hospital poems, some of them funny, some of them sad. When the bell rang, she'd just finished a funny one. Then she said, "Have a good weekend," and left. Widmer had really read it for me, the way it had seemed. Stevenson looked a little paler than usual, and her eyes already had the determined look they often had when she was doing her job as faculty adviser to student council.
But otherwise she acted as if she were trying to be reassuring. Stevenson chuckled. Take all the time you need before you answer questions. Stevenson said firmly. Take a deep breath. You'll be fine. Conn winked at me from behind his thick glasses as he opened the door. He was short, with a homely face covered with pimples, but he was one of the nicest kids in the school.
He had what teachers called a creative mind, and he was also very fair, maybe the fairest person on council, except of course Ms. Stevenson briskly when Sally came back from the water fountain, "I guess it's time. And then we all went in, Ms. Stevenson first, with Sally and me following slowly.
The Parlor, like Mrs. Poindexter's office, was so dark it was funereal. It used to be a real living room--a huge one--back when the school was a mansion, but now it was more of a semipublic lounge, reserved mostly for high-level occasions--Nike trustees' meetings and mothers' teas, but also for council meetings.
The Parlor had three long sofas along the walls, and big wing chairs, and a fireplace that took up most of the wall that didn't have a sofa against it. Over the mantle hung a picture of Letitia Foster, the school's founder.
I can't imagine why Letitia Foster ever founded a school: she always looked to me as if she hated kids. She looked that way that afternoon especially, as Sally and I sidled in under her frozen hostile stare like a couple of derelict crabs.
Poindexter was already enthroned in her special dark-maroon wing chair by the fireplace, thumbing through notes on a yellow pad and looking severe behind her rimless spectacles. Everyone else was sitting around a long, highly polished table. The vice president, Angela Cariatid, who was tall and usually reminded me in more than name of those graceful, self-possessed Greek statues that hold up buildings, didn't look at all that way as we walked in.
She was sitting tensely at the end of the table nearest Mrs. Poindexter's chair, clutching the gavel as if she were drowning and it was the only other thing afloat. She'd already told me she felt rotten about having to preside, which I thought was pretty nice of her.
I remember noticing how the sun came slanting through the dusty windows onto Mrs. Poindextcr's gray hair--just the top of it, because of the height of the wing chair. While I was concentrating on the incongruous halo it made, Mrs. Poindexter flipped her glasses down and nodded to Angela, who rapped so hard with the gavel that it popped out of her hand and skittered across the table. Sally giggled. Poindexter cleared her throat and Angela blushed.
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