“Guys, come on,” Lille pleads, looking nervous. “The whole stairwell stinks of smoke. Hamidou’s going to wake up.”
Lille has a fragile quality about her. She comes across as being much weirder and more damaged than the others. She has a series of peculiar grooming quirks, which she thinks improve her appearance but actually draw attention to it. She has an obsession with the width of her nose and draws black lines down the bridge of it to make it look narrow. She also cakes her face with white translucent powder and bleaches her long blond hair until it’s white and brittle, after which she teases it out. Between the crazy hair and the white face and the black lines, she’s like a mad wraith in designer clothes. Cressida calls her a sad soul.
Upstairs in the third-floor bathroom, they finally land in a tangled heap of coats and scarves and wet boots. Kersti lies flat on her back on the cold tile floor, staring up at the cracking brown ceiling. She’s happy. Happy because of Magnus’s attention earlier at the Brasserie, happy to be here now. She loves her strange new friends, loves being away from her family and their relentless in-your-face Estonian-ness, and most of all, loves her independence. And it all began right here, in this derelict bathroom on the third floor of Huber House, with its rusty toilets and damp musty smell of mothball and mold. Harzenmoser and Bueche are supposed to renovate it, but so far they haven’t found it necessary to put their francs toward modern plumbing. Most of the girls shower in the second-floor bathroom and use this one for middle-of-the-night peeing and smoking.
The first gathering of their little circle took place organically on a Saturday night in the fall. Cressida and Kersti went to sneak a smoke and discovered the other four girls already sitting cross-legged in a circle. Rafaella was drinking from a plastic bottle of Evian. She passed it to Cressida and Cressida had a swig. When she made the slightest grimace, Kersti knew it wasn’t water. Then she passed it to Kersti and Kersti drank from it and gagged. It was straight vodka, burning hot in her chest. She handed it back to Rafaella.
“Noa was just telling us about her brother,” Lille said. It was September and they were all still getting to know one another.
“He was kidnapped,” Noa told them matter-of-factly. She was from one of the wealthiest families in Holland. “That’s why my parents sent me here. They figured I’d be safer in Switzerland.”
“Is he okay now?” Kersti asked her.
“They killed him,” Noa said, expertly rolling tobacco into a thin paper. “My father paid the ransom but it didn’t matter.”
None of them said anything for a while. They passed around the vodka and watched smoke fill the room. Alison stood up to breathe with her head out the window.
“We all have our shit,” Noa said, tilting her head up and releasing a cloud of smoke into the air.
“My mother and I communicated by easel my whole life,” Rafaella offered.
“By easel?”
“She worked and traveled so much, she decided to set up one of her easels outside my bedroom with a giant pad of paper. I’d wake up in the morning and there would be a note. Have a good day at school. I’m going to Monaco for the weekend. And then at night I’d scribble back to her. I got an A on my test. I have a cold. So-and-so pulled my hair in class. Blah blah blah.”
Alison abruptly shut the window. “I masturbate every single day.”
The others fell absolutely silent.
“I’m not sure if other girls do that or what,” she went on. “Or if I’m, like, not normal. But I think about it constantly. Every minute. In class, doing sports. Except for when I’m skiing, that’s when my mind is clear.”
“Maybe it’s because you’ve never had a boyfriend,” Lille said.
“Maybe. Do you think something’s wrong with me?”
The other girls were watching her, mouths slightly agape. Kersti was hoping she would be able to look at Alison from that point on and not picture her masturbating.
“Because most of the time, if you look at me and I seem preoccupied, that’s probably what I’m thinking about.”
No one said anything for a long time. And then, like a cork popping, they all burst out laughing. Alison smiled and relaxed. Kersti was grateful for the levity.
“What about you, Lille?” Cressida said, turning her attention to the nervous little creature beside her.
“I was conceived in Lille, France, on my parents’ honeymoon,” she divulged, accepting her turn in the circle. “My dad lives in Oman and my mother splits her time between a pied-à-terre in Paris and our farmhouse in Westport. Mother doesn’t let me have friends over if the crystal chandeliers aren’t polished or if her hair hasn’t been professionally blown out.” She looked up at the others through her curtain of bleached hair and said, “And I hate the word nipple.”
Everyone laughed.
“Your turn,” Noa said to Kersti.
“She’s got a complex because she’s poor,” Rafaella answered for her.
“I’m middle class,” Kersti corrected, embarrassed.
“Same thing,” Rafaella remarked.
“It’s not the same thing,” Cressida said sharply. “And who gives a shit? You have no perspective, Rafaella. You don’t know anything about the real world.”
“You can’t be poor and go to the Lycée anyway,” Lille said.
“I’m here on the Legacy Scholarship,” Kersti admitted, her face hot with shame. “My dad has a travel agency and we live in a regular house. Not an estate, or a pied-à-terre, or a villa. Just a regular old house with shag carpets and forty-year-old wallpaper. I’ve never traveled, I don’t have my own bank account or credit card—”
And she was basically pretending to belong, but she left that part out.
“None of that shit matters,” Cressida said, speaking more to the other girls. “I love that you aren’t like the rest of us, Kersti. You’re probably the most normal, grounded one here.”
“Definitely more normal than Alison,” Noa joked.
Kersti felt the shame leaving her body. She sat up a little straighter, was able to look them all in the eye and own her place in their group. She looked at Cressida, surging with relief. Cressida had defended her to the others, stood up for her in a way no one else ever had before. And in doing that, Cressida had established how the others would treat Kersti from then on. By not judging her, she’d made it okay for everyone to accept her. Kersti would never forget that. She felt in that moment that she could finally be herself.
“What about you, Cressida?” Rafaella said. “What’s your deal?”
Everyone in the circle looked at Cressida.
“My chauffeur used to make me give him blow jobs,” she said.
The other girls looked down at the floor. Kersti was stunned. But then, with a mischievous smirk, Cressida said, “Just kidding.”