Read Online The Twisted Thread by Charlotte Bacon - Free Book Online Page A

to the infirmary and sedated. Her parents were on their way from San Francisco. Nina Garcia-Jones in a tent-size dress and a green chiffon scarf had occupied the common room and told them that everything they were feeling was normal. She’d swayed and moved her hands in motions she apparently perceived as soothing as she said all this, looking, Madeline couldn’t help but think, like a physically unfit interpretive dancer. When she’d finished talking, Lee Hastings, a prefect, a stern girl going to Stanford next year, had said, “Ms. Garcia-Jones, I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but there is not one thing about this situation that is normal,” and then she had crossed her arms and taken turns glaring at every adult except Madeline, who had been relieved to escape her harsh judgment. There were many students who were far more intimidating than faculty, and Lee (and Claire) had ranked high among these.
    Parents, phones, sobbing, usually all three at once, and all of it threaded through with visits from the police—tall ones, short ones, thin ones, fat. Ones in plainclothes, ones in hats. When her mind started to warp horror into Dr. Seuss, Madeline knew she needed a break. But it wasn’t forthcoming. Exhausted by eleven, numb by noon, and ravenous by one, Madeline had at last retreated for ten minutes to the shower and revived herself under the stream of hot water. That was during the confiscation of the computers and laptops, and the discovery that a large percentage of the girls had cell phones, which they weren’t supposed to bring to school. This wave of police activity caused a fresh outburst of hysteria, and Madeline, feeling she had done her part for the moment quite manfully, had let Grace deal with this development.
    After her shower, she wolfed down a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and made several cups of espresso, which allowed her to survive the afternoon. The next three hours had included twitchy, low-slung German shepherds roaming the corridors followed by police officers elbow-deep in the frothy contents of the girls’ bureaus. Marie-France had tried to block access to her apartment—arms akimbo, nose high, repeating, “I refuse, I refuse”—until Porter himself had to be summoned. Madeline had wondered for a moment what Marie-France was so set on protecting in her underwear drawer, but that thought was profoundly disturbing and she immediately set it aside.
    In the midst of this, three other girls, spurred on by Sally’s admission, made frantic confessions that they’d also known Claire had had a baby. They’d gotten her formula, they’d brought her sanitary napkins. They’d even seen the baby. Madeline kept wanting to shout, Why didn’t you say anything to an adult? until finally she asked, far more delicately than she wanted to, “Why didn’t you tell anyone?” And all of them had said the same thing: “We promised not to.” Madeline thought about the four girls Claire had trusted and realized she had chosen her handmaidens well—none of them was her social equal. In some strange way, they would all have been thrilled to do her bidding. And Claire, apparently still razor clear about her status, even nine months pregnant, had known exactly how to extract vows no one else would have given. Madeline had never gone to school with anyone quite as cool and scary as Claire and had missed that particular aspect of the ways adolescents could inflict trauma on one another. But it was still surprising that kids as generally confident as they were at Armitage could submit to such thorough manipulation. Post tearful admission, the other three went off to join Sally at the infirmary, where FBI officers reinforcing the ranks of the Armitage police scurried after them.
    His dorm was alive with cops, too, Fred Naylor had said when he saw her at dinner, toying with some chicken he plainly wasn’t going to eat.