They all went back to their own rooms around one A.M., after lengthy conversations. Julie spent the night with Bill. And as Victoria settled into her new queen-size bed, she nestled under the covers and lay there smiling. Everything about this room felt good and looked just the way she wanted it to. It was her own cozy little world in the new life she was building for herself. It was just the beginning. Soon she would have a new job, new friends, new students, and one day maybe even a boyfriend. It was hard to imagine. Finding the apartment had been a first step, and now suddenly she was a New Yorker.

She missed Gracie as she fell asleep that night, and thought about calling her, but she was too sleepy, and she had talked to her that morning, while she was shopping at IKEA. Gracie had been so happy for her, and Victoria had promised to send her photographs of the apartment and her room. She drifted off to sleep thinking about her sister and when she would come to visit. And in Victoria’s dream they went shopping together, and she was suddenly much thinner, almost as though she had a new body to go with her new life. The salesgirl brought her a dress in a size fourteen, and Victoria told her she wore a size eight now, and everyone in the store applauded.

Chapter 9

Victoria had two days of meetings before the first day of school. She met the other teachers and tried to remember their departments and subjects and which age level they taught. She had a chance to study the books she’d be using, all of which had been selected by the teacher she was replacing for a year. She had even outlined the syllabus for her, which Victoria had been worried about for days. This was going to be much easier than she thought, and she chatted easily with the other teachers and introduced herself. The English department was one of the biggest, and there were eight teachers, all of them considerably older than she was, and most of them women, although three were men. She noticed that all of the male teachers who worked at Madison were either gay or married, but she hadn’t come here to find a boyfriend, she chided herself, she had come to teach.

And at night after the meetings, she studied the books and the syllabus again, and made notes to herself about homework assignments and quizzes she wanted to give the kids, but first she wanted to get to know them, and get a sense of who they were. She was going to be teaching four classes, one sophomore, one junior, and two senior, and she had been warned at Northwestern during her student teaching that seniors were always tough. They were chomping at the bit to leave school and get on with their lives in college, and by the second half of the year, when they had gotten their college acceptance letters, it was almost impossible to get their attention and make them work. It was going to be a challenging year for her, and she could hardly wait to sink her teeth into it. She hardly slept at all the night before school started.

On the first day of school, Victoria was up at six A.M. She made a healthy breakfast of eggs, toast, cereal, and orange juice, and made a pot of coffee for her roommates to drink as well. She was dressed and at the breakfast table by seven, and back in her bedroom, making some notes again by seven-thirty. And at a quarter to eight, she was out the door, and walking to school. She arrived promptly at eight A.M., and the students were due at eight-thirty.

She went straight to her classroom, and paced nervously around the room and then stood looking out the window. She was expecting twenty-four students that morning. There were desks for all of them and a few spares, and a big desk for her at the front of the room. It was a class on English composition, and she had writing assignments to give them. She knew it would be hard to get their attention after their summer vacations. And the kids she would be teaching that day were in the home stretch. They were seniors, and they’d be visiting colleges and doing their applications all through the fall. And she’d have to write recommendations for them. That made her an important element in their lives, and gave her a direct impact on their future, so they had to be serious and diligent in her class. She knew their names, and now she would see the faces that went with them. She was staring into space, looking out the window, when she heard a voice behind her.

“Ready for the onslaught?” She turned and saw a gray-haired woman. She was wearing jeans, a faded T-shirt with the name of a band on it, and sandals. She looked like she was still on vacation and it was a warm day in New York. She smiled when Victoria turned around with a startled look. Victoria had worn a short black cotton skirt, a loose white linen top, and flat shoes. The baggy top hid a multitude of sins, and the reasonably short skirt showed off her legs. But she wasn’t looking to seduce them, only teach them.

“Hi,” Victoria said with a look of surprise. She had seen the other woman at the teachers’ meetings, but hadn’t met her and couldn’t remember what department she was in, and didn’t want to ask her.

“I’m social studies. I have the classroom next to you, so if they start a gang war, I can help you. My name is Helen.” She was smiling as she came to shake Victoria’s hand. She looked to be around Victoria’s mother’s age, somewhere in her mid to late forties. Victoria’s mother had just turned fifty. “I’ve been here for twenty-two years, so if you need a cheat sheet or a guide, just ask me. They’re good people here, except the kids and their parents. Some of them anyway. Some of them are great kids, in spite of the privileged circumstances they live in.” As she said it, a shrill bell rang, and a few minutes later they could hear footsteps pounding up the stairs. It sounded like everyone was running.

“Thank you,” Victoria said, not sure what else to say. The statement she had made about the students and their parents was pretty damning, and an odd position to take for a woman who worked in a school full of rich kids.

“I love my students, but sometimes it’s hard to get them to deal with reality. How real is it when your parents have a boat, a plane, and a house in the Hamptons, and you spend every summer in the South of France? That’s the way it is for these kids. What the rest of the world deals with is pretty remote to them. It’s up to us to introduce them to the real world. And sometimes it’s not easy. Sooner or later you can get there, with most of them. But not very often with their parents. They’re past it, they don’t want to know how the other half lives. I guess they figure it’s not their problem. But the kids have a right to know and make choices.” Victoria didn’t disagree with her, and she hadn’t thought a lot about the lifestyles of these kids and how it would affect their view of the world. But Helen sounded faintly bitter about it and resentful of the kids. And Victoria wondered if she was jealous of the privileged lives they led. And as she thought it, the first student walked into the classroom, and Helen went back to her own.

The first student was a girl called Becki. She had blond hair to her waist, and was wearing a pink T-shirt, white jeans, and expensive Italian sandals. And she had the most beautiful face and body Victoria had ever seen. She took a seat in the middle of the classroom, which meant she wasn’t anxious to participate, but she wasn’t one of the shirkers in the back row either. She smiled at Victoria as she sat down. She had a casual air about her and looked as though she thought she owned the world. She had the cockiness of seniors Victoria had seen before. There were only four years separating the two young women, and Victoria felt a tremor sensing Becki’s self-confidence, but she reminded herself that she was the boss here. And they didn’t know exactly how young she was. She realized that she was going to have to earn their respect.

As she thought about it, four boys bolted through the door, almost at the same time, and sat down. They all looked at Becki, and obviously knew her, and glanced in Victoria’s direction with mild curiosity. A flock of girls entered the room then, laughing and talking. They said hi to Becki, ignored the boys, glanced at Victoria, and took seats in a block at the back of the room. That meant to Victoria that they wanted to keep talking and exchange notes, or maybe even text each other throughout the class. She would have to keep an eye on them. More girls then, more boys, a few stragglers who came in alone, and several in groups. And finally, after a full ten minutes, her first class had arrived. Victoria greeted them with a big smile and told them her name. She wrote it on the blackboard and then she turned to them.

“I’d like you all to introduce yourselves so I can put the faces with the names.” She pointed to a girl in the front row, to her extreme left as she faced them. “Let’s go all around the room.” And they did. They each said their name as she looked at the list she had on her desk for that class. “Who knows where they want to apply to college?” Less than half the hands in the room went up. “How about telling us?” She pointed to a boy in the back row who already looked bored. She didn’t know it yet, but he had been Becki’s boyfriend the year before, and they broke up before the summer. Now both of them were unattached. Becki had just gotten back from her father’s villa in the South of France. And like many of the students at Madison, her parents were divorced.

The boy Victoria had asked about the colleges he was applying to reeled off a list. Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, Duke, Dartmouth, and maybe MIT. He had every top school on that list, and she wondered if he was telling the truth or pulling her leg. She didn’t know the cast of characters yet at all. But she would.