I Am Margaret Moore

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  FOR THE GIRLS WHO CHOOSE

  AND THE GIRLS WHO CANNOT

  PART I

  NAIAD

  THE SUMMER

  IT IS SUMMER AGAIN and we are alive.

  All year we are ordinary girls. We trudge through snowbanks under gray skies. We study trigonometry late into the night. We ride horses and play piano; we put on new dresses for the homecoming dance; we give good-night kisses on bright doorsteps while our mothers peek through the curtains.

  We exist, all apart from each other, in our own small corners of the world.

  But today it is summer again and we are a thousand times more than that.

  Today we are back at Marshall Summer Naval School. All the black-and-white winter is gone and the whole world is bold and gleaming.

  It is our very last summer. In six weeks, in August, we will fold our uniforms and pack them into suitcases. We will press our palms to the gold M at the top of the stairs one last time: for luck and for tradition. We will leave forever, like all the girls before us.

  But today it is summer again and it is ours.

  And we are alive.

  THE GIRLS

  FLOR IS THE FIRST of us to arrive.

  I see her from where I sit, cradled in a sycamore branch that bends out over the lake. I am wrapped in green shade but she stalks through sunlight, a leather suitcase in each hand. Her walk belongs to a girl who owns the world: shoulders thrown back, but the shadow of a slouch to her hips. She has come in a dark Cadillac with two men who might be uncles or guards or both. If her father had his way, they would follow her all summer. But here, for once, she is not the general’s daughter.

  Here we are only Marshall girls. We live behind glass and gray wood on green lawns. The forest hems us to the shore of Lake Nanweshmot; the forest keeps us safe away from the world. Here they push us until we break and heal and break again. We are everything and everything is ours.

  Nisreen is next. She comes in with a swarm of girls and boys on the airport bus. She holds her sister’s hand, her sister who is here for her very first summer, nine years old and a Butterfly. Nisreen crouches down and sunbeams strike through the gaps in the trees. She speaks soft and patient until her sister nods and holds herself straighter. At last she takes the path to the deck, alone.

  A girl runs out fast enough for her heels to hit the hem of her kilt. She does not slow down. They crash together, meteoric, and something deep within the earth shifts back to where it always should have been.

  Flor, swept up in the moment. Nisreen, swept up in Flor’s arms.

  They spin and spin there in the hot of the sun. Then they are walking, their steps matched and easy, with Flor carrying the heaviest of Nisreen’s bags.

  Rose is last. Her mother’s car lets her out on the sidewalk, and Rose already has her Victory Race notebook under her arm and a cap pulled down tight over her curls. She is ready for summer and for winning. Before she makes her way into the deck she stops and gazes out along the shore; at the sycamore with its low branch.

  I want with all my heart to jump down and run for her the way Flor ran for Nisreen. The way I ran, last summer, for a boy from Naval One.

  This summer I will not run for him.

  Rose disappears behind the gray wood building. I know every step she takes: up to the office to get her keys and turn in all the real-world things we aren’t allowed here; then to the end of the hall, the last room on the north side. Flor has already made one bed with perfect square corners. She will be across the hall, in the room I share with Nisreen. Rose will make up her bed and hang her uniforms and tack pictures to the crumbling corkboard: one of every Winston at Marshall, and one of our first Butterfly cabin.

  One from last June, before we turned tan and sunbleached. Flor and Nisreen, Rose and me, fingertips clutching into each other’s arms. Laughing and right.

  When they are unpacked they will come out to me, and we will be together again, and it will be our summer: this is what I hope with all my life.

  I sit in the crook of our sycamore and I wait for them.

  I need them back. We need us back.

  Everything depends on it.

  THE REFUGE

  THE MARSHALL SUMMER NAVAL School stands proud on the north shore of Lake Nanweshmot. It is brick buildings and green lawns caught between the dark of the forest and the lake’s jewel-blue; it is the toll of bells and the roar of the cannon. It smells like mud and gunpowder.

  All winter it is a boarding school for boys, and the summer-camp cabins wait patient under heavy snow. In May the snow melts and they fling the doors wide and brush out the spiders and open the windows and let the world in.

  We come back every summer—we Marshall girls. First we are Butterflies: nine and homesick, ten and eleven and home in the cabins close down by the road. Then we are Dragonflies, hewn strong and self-reliant from our endless weeks sailing on the water or riding horses deep into the woods. We can dress a wound and swim fearless across the deepest place in the lake. We know the leaves of every tree and the letters on the code-flags snapping high above the Naval Building. We say Ma’am, yes ma’am.

  After six summers we earn our place in Upper Camp, split into decks we will love more than the winter-places we would call home if we did not have our refuge here. We are third-class girls, then second, then first. Every summer there is more of Marshall in our blood, and every summer there is more of ours in Marshall.

  The lake and the trees and the pale mist rising: they are our dominion.

  Together we are the Marshall Regiment. All thousand of us, from the Butterflies to the first classmen. In the Regiment we are seven battalions, and in the Upper Girls’ Battalion we are six decks with three dozen girls in each. Three dozen girls who would die for us, and we would die for them. It is a thing like finding our fate when we learn, two months before third-class summer, which deck will be our sisterhood.

  We Deck Five girls live in Gambol Hall. It is the worst dorm: everyone says it, even the Deck Six girls who live downstairs. It is far away from everything; it faces the lake dead-on and swarms with mayflies. It is hot and stifling and made of wood instead of brick: it is not meant to last.

  They are wrong. It is perfect and forbidden.

  We share it with every girl who has ever been Deck Five. Their names carved into the heavy wood desks. Their gold M nailed at the top of the stairs. Their stories soaked into the walls.

  We call it Neverland.

  Here we thread orange scarves through our collars and pin gold nametags over our hearts. We march and march until we can stay in step even blindfolded; we stand, hair spun with evening light, and sing our Deck Five hymn. Here we run and carry cinderblocks and plan, all summer, for the very last day: for the Victory Race, when we will stand together or fall.

  This summer we are first-class girls. Our ninth summer and our last.

  We have won the Victory Race and worn it like laurels. We
have lost. We have climbed down the leaf-hidden point on the shore to trade kisses in sunset light. We summon ghosts around the campfire: the Marshall dead who linger in the dusk. We can find the place on the drill-field where the ground springs hollow. We know all the whispered stories of the secrets deep beneath.

  I don’t believe the stories. The truth is simpler, I think, and crueler.

  Last summer the secrets were mine.

  THE SECRETS

  THEY COME OUT INTO the summer.

  They take the lakeshore path that curves toward the Naval Building, a wide sweep beyond our sycamore. I climb down and follow the shore to where they sit, lined up on the brick walk that breaks off the path and leads nowhere. There was a pier there once, Rose says. It got old and broken and they tore it down. But it has been this way, dead-ending over the water, since our very first summer when we trooped along the shore and the counselor said, Nanweshmot. Who can tell me where that name comes from?, and Rose raised her hand high and said, It’s Potawatomi. It means a place to rest.

  Every summer this spot has been ours.

  They stare out toward the south shore. Sunlight shines blinding on their hair. My eyes fill up with tears at seeing them again. Rose, my best friend in all my life, chin following a scow across the lake, and she is thinking already of the Victory Race and what we will make of us this summer. Flor with her hair braided tight and her jaw set firm, looking the future in the eye. And Nisreen: dark-circled and dreaming from her flight halfway around the world, but always the deep-dropped anchor to hold us fast.

  Last summer knit us together and wrenched us apart. We left without goodbyes.

  I wait behind them until the heat dries the tears on my cheeks, so Flor won’t say Mar, already crying and it’s barely summer. My heart could burst with how much I love them.

  I breathe in and the summer fills up my lungs. We are here again. We have never left. August has stitched itself to June with nothing else between them.

  I step out onto the crumbling bricks. Then I am sitting there with them, next to Rose, and her skin is hot against mine.

  Nisreen lets her head fall onto Flor’s shoulder. A smile spreads across her face, warming us brighter than the daylight ever could.

  She says, We’re back.

  We are.

  In this moment in the sun we are us four again.

  THE LINEUP

  THERE ARE MISSING GIRLS. We see it and no one says anything. No one but Rose, standing to the side as we shuffle into place for supper roll-call.

  Rose is unit commander today, and the second classmen mumble, It isn’t fair. Rose Winston should be reg com. They whisper eager to the little third classmen, full of proud hard-earned knowing: Rose Winston can sail in no wind. She should be reg naval, at least.

  Rose is UC, and she stands with her arms folded behind her back as we fall into place. She casts a glance at Flor and mutters, “Where the hell are all our girls?”

  Flor shrugs, eyes straight ahead, but Nisreen looks back at me. She stands where a first classman should be: Katherine Abbott, from New York, who last summer ran a faster mile than any girl in camp. Katherine Abbott, who did not come back.

  Every summer there are girls who give up. Homesick third classmen who came to Upper Camp without being Butterflies and Dragonflies first. Tired second classmen who want one summer of freedom, without oh-six-hundred reveille, as though a Marshall summer isn’t the best freedom in the whole world. Those girls who choose the world outside—they were never Marshall girls. Folding square corners and marching all summer doesn’t make us Marshall. Threading orange scarves through our collars doesn’t make us Deck Five.

  But Katherine Abbott was Marshall through and through. A Deck Five girl as much as her sister, the one who was a first classman our last Dragonfly summer. And Isa Villanueva, our best third-class rower last summer and never homesick for even one second: she was Deck Five, too.

  They are gone, and a dozen others, their places filled in with more third classmen than Deck Five has ever seen. Deck Five is never half new girls, because we are the best deck at Marshall.

  Deck Five never quits.

  Deck Five never runs away, and leaves her girls, and keeps herself from them.

  Rose says, and it shimmers down our even rows: Where the hell are all our girls?

  Behind me there is a whisper, quiet enough I could think I dreamed it, but it is real. A third classman who has not won her place yet, and still she knows too much, and still she says:

  It’s because of last summer, isn’t it?

  It’s because of Margaret Moore.

  THE GUILT

  I LET THEM DOWN last summer.

  It happened in a blur I cannot quite remember.

  No: that is wrong.

  The truth is, I could, I think, if I let myself.

  I remember the storm.

  I remember Nisreen in the dark saying what I had kept secret and still she knew: Tell us, Mar—who is the boy?

  I remember how the phone rang and rang. The phone we share all summer, one for the whole deck: black plastic, hanging from the wall, and hard and shiny like a beetle’s shell. The stupid phone that barely worked except when we didn’t want it to, and then it did, ringing and ringing until a third classman grabbed it up and said, Mar, it’s for you.

  I remember the storm rolling in. Lightning, orange and blue. Thunder like heaven splitting open. And my father’s car takes the dark tree-tunneled bends of East Shore Drive, piercing a path streaked with rain. And the waves crash and the sailboats strain at their tethers, and the floor is soaked through.

  When it storms on Lake Nanweshmot it storms furious and bright: in the daytime we watch the rain come across the water, stirring up the surface, hazing the sky. At night it is the rush of wind and the raindrops diving murderous into the floor, and when we try to jam the windows shut they stick, swollen, and we slip on the wet, and by the time we get them closed the storm is over.

  I remember the storm.

  I remember running away.

  THE HALL

  AFTER SUPPER WE RUN free. Third classmen try on friends that don’t fit yet, the same as their too-big boat shorts. Boys and girls sit close beneath the trees on the Admiral’s Walk.

  We wander up the hill to the gymnasium. The left-hand door is shut: it is bad luck to open it, and tradition to leave it closed, and we are Marshall girls. We file through the other door. Then we fan out again and walk the Hall of Honor, past portraits of every Winter School since 1896 and every Summer Naval School since 1899. Without the years we would not know the difference. The Marshall M stands wide and proud, the way it has forever. The boys wear the same fresh white.

  We sink to a stop at the second-to-last portrait. “Look at us,” says Nisreen, floating closer, and we do. Deck Five jostles our place at the center. We beam bright, with suntanned faces and our hair still wet.

  “Deck Five the proud, Deck Five the bold,” says Nisreen, soft.

  We are there again, two summers ago, an hour before the portrait: Naval Band on the shore, trumpets flashing in the sun, playing the Navy fight song too fast. The whole camp singing, from the first classmen down to the Butterflies. Deck Five in the water and stinking like mud and shrieking, We won, we won.

  The sun is August-hot. The Victory Race is ours. We are girls and we are unconquerable.

  Nisreen says, four fingers against the glass, “I miss—”

  “We’ll be back,” says Rose. “Deck Five, with all the banners.”

  There is a rustling and the weight of stares from down the hall. We look back to the doors. A half-dozen Deck Four girls hover close.

  The end of last summer, whispers one of them, loud enough for us to hear. The night before the Victory Race, and there was an awful storm.

  Rose doesn’t move, but I can feel the curse under her breath.

  Deck Five—it was a mutiny, says the Deck Four girl. Margaret Moore got kicked out of camp, and she ran out into the storm when they came to find her, and
her whole deck went after her—

  Her voice slips down so it is only a brush of air. The tension strains. Nisreen’s hand moves to catch Flor’s arm.

  The Deck Four girl says, They canceled the Victory Race—

  “They canceled it,” says Flor, all at once and stepping out in front of me. “But who would’ve won if they didn’t?”

  They pause. From out on the lawn a breeze coils in and plays against their hair.

  “Blame us all you want,” says Flor. “It will never make you Deck Five.”

  She holds her ground until they blush and look away; until they mutter excuses and slip back out again.

  “It will be like this,” says Nisreen when the silence seeps in. “They’ll come for us this summer.”

  Flor says, unyielding, “Let them.”

  They look to where I stand against our photograph. It is two summers old. Last summer they sent Deck Five away before they took the portrait.

  Last summer it was my fault.

  “They’ll fight,” says Rose. “We’ll win. Come on, let’s go—let’s go down to the pier—”

  They turn for the far doors and the light through the windows paints them angelic. Rose says, like we sang from the lake with the Navy hymn sounding, Deck Five the proud, Deck Five the bold.

  They are swallowed up in heat and light. I should follow them, but I cannot leave us here—ourselves, our third-class summer, before I took the precious thing we had and broke it.

  Rose says, and Flor with her, singing loud and unbeaten: Our veins bleed orange, our hearts are gold.

  In the portrait, two rows behind us, there are the boys from Naval One with smiles that sear.

  We’re staunch and true and bright and brave, shout Flor and Rose. Bound with our sisters ’til the grave—