“You have exactly nine minutes to report to the gymnasium for your annual fitness examination. As you know, we take a dim view of stragglers, so be prompt and be ready for bodily assessment.”
Fitness examination? Bodily assessment? At six-thirty in the morning? Luce had already been regretting staying out so late last night … and staying up so much later lying in bed, stressing.
Right around the time she started imagining Daniel and Gabbe kissing, Luce had begun to feel queasy—that specific kind of queasiness that came from knowing she’d made a fool of herself. There was no going back to the party. There was only prying herself off the wall and slinking back to her dorm room to second-guess that strange feeling she got around Daniel, the one she’d foolishly taken as some sort of connection. She’d woken up with the bad taste of the party’s aftermath still in her mouth. The last thing she wanted to think about now was fitness.
She swung her feet off the bed and onto the cold vinyl floor. Brushing her teeth, she tried to picture what Sword & Cross might mean by “bodily assessment.” Intimidating images of her fellow students—Molly doing dozens of mean-faced chin-ups, Gabbe effortlessly ascending a thirty-foot rope toward the sky—flooded her mind. Her only shot at not making a fool of herself—again—was to try to put Daniel and Gabbe out of her mind.
She crossed the south side of campus to the gymnasium. It was a large Gothic structure with flying buttresses and fieldstone turrets that made it look more like a church than a place where one would go to break a sweat. As Luce approached the building, the layer of kudzu coating its façade rustled in the morning breeze.
“Penn,” Luce called out, spotting her tracksuit-clad friend lacing up her sneakers on a bench. Luce looked down at her regulation black clothes and black boots and suddenly panicked that she’d missed some memo about dress code. But then, some of the other students were loitering outside the building and none of them looked much different than she did.
Penn’s eyes were groggy. “So beat,” she moaned. “I karaoke’d way too hard last night. Thought I’d compensate by trying to at least look athletic.”
Luce laughed as Penn fumbled with the double knot on her shoe.
“What happened to you last night, anyway?” Penn asked. “You never came back to the party.”
“Oh,” Luce said, stalling. “I decided to—”
“Gaaahh.” Penn covered her ears. “Every sound is like a jackhammer in my brain. Tell me later?”
“Yeah,” Luce said. “Sure.” The double doors to the gym were thrust open. Randy stepped out in heavy rubber clogs, holding her ever-present clipboard. She waved the students forward, and one by one they filed past to be assigned their fitness station.
“Todd Hammond,” Randy called as the wobbly-kneed kid approached. Todd’s shoulders caved forward like parentheses, and Luce could see remnants of a serious farmer’s tan on the back of his neck.
“Weights,” Randy commanded, chucking Todd inside.
“Pennyweather Van Syckle-Lockwood,” she bellowed next, causing Penn to cower and press her palms against her ears again. “Pool,” Randy instructed, reaching into a cardboard box behind her and tossing Penn a red one-piece Speedo racer-back.
“Lucinda Price,” Randy continued, after consulting her list. Luce stepped forward and was relieved when Randy said, “Also pool.” Luce reached up to catch the one-piece bathing suit in the air. It was stretched out and thin as a piece of parchment between her fingers. At least it smelled clean. Sort of.
“Gabrielle Givens,” Randy said next, and Luce whipped around to see her new least-favorite person sashay up in short black shorts and a thin black tank top. She’d been at this school for three days … how had she already gotten Daniel?
“Hiii, Randy,” Gabbe said, drawing out the words with a twang that made Luce want to pull a Penn and cover her own ears.
Anything but pool, Luce willed. Anything but pool.
“Pool,” Randy said.
Walking next to Penn toward the girls’ locker room, Luce tried to avoid looking back at Gabbe, who twirled what seemed to be the only fashionable bathing suit in the stack around her French-manicured index finger. Instead, Luce focused on the gray stone walls and the old religious paraphernalia covering them. She walked past ornately carved wooden crosses with their bas-relief depictions of the Passion. A series of faded triptychs hung at eye level, with only the orbs of the figures’ halos still aglow. Luce leaned forward to get a better look at a large scroll written in Latin, encased in glass.
“Uplifting décor, isn’t it?” Penn asked, throwing back a couple of aspirin with a swig of water from her bag.
“What is all this stuff?” Luce asked.
“Ancient history. The only surviving relics from when this place was still the site of Sunday Mass, back in Civil War days.”
“That explains why it looks so much like a church,” Luce said, pausing in front of a marble reproduction of Michelangelo’s pietà.
“Like everything else in this hellhole, they did a totally half-assed job of updating it. I mean, who builds a pool in the middle of an old church?”
“You’re joking,” Luce said.
“I wish.” Penn rolled her eyes. “Every summer, the headmaster gets it in his little mind to try and stick me with the task of redecorating this place. He won’t admit it, but all the God stuff really freaks him out,” she said. “Problem is, even if I did feel like pitching in, I’d have no idea what to do with all this junk, or even how to clear it out without offending, like, everyone and God.”
Luce thought back to the immaculate white walls inside Dover’s gymnasium, row after row of professionally shot varsity championship pictures, each matted with the same navy card stock, each showcased in a matching golden frame. The only hallway more hallowed at Dover was its entryway, which was where all the alumni-turned-state-senators and Guggenheim fellowship winners and run-of-the-mill billionaires displayed their head shots.
“You could hang all the current alumni’s mug shots,” Gabbe offered from behind them.
Luce started to laugh—it was funny … and strange, almost like Gabbe had just read her mind—but then she remembered the girl’s voice the night before, telling Daniel she was the only one he had. Luce quickly swallowed any notion of a connection with her.
“You’re straggling!” yelled an unknown gym coach, appearing from nowhere. She—at least Luce thought she was a she—had a frizzy wad of brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, calves like ham hocks, and yellowing “invisible” braces covering her top teeth. She hustled the girls angrily into a locker room, where each was given a padlock with a key and directed toward an empty locker with a shove. “Nobody straggles on Coach Diante’s watch.”
Luce and Penn scrambled into their faded, baggy bathing suits. Luce shuddered at her reflection in the mirror, then covered as much of herself as she could with her towel.
Inside the humid natatorium, she instantly understood what Penn was talking about. The pool itself was giant, Olympic-sized, one of the few state-of-the-art features she’d encountered so far on this campus. But that wasn’t what made it remarkable, Luce realized in awe. This pool had been set down right in the middle of what used to be a massive church.