But Sheila slapped her hand away. “Don’t touch me!” she said.

Monica will long remember:

In the Founders Room at the Glenkill Academy—enormous fieldstone fireplace, bay windows of leaded glass, walnut paneling on the walls, comfortably weathered Oriental carpets—in a place of brown leather couches, also comfortably weathered, and folding chairs, and spring flowers in clay vases spaced about the room—in the late, late afternoon of a rainy May day—one of Monica’s interminable days—a day so very long, so very convoluted and ambagious, she could not have said, in her state of dazed exhaustion, when it began, or how, or why—in this place (but why is she here?) Monica sits listening to boys between the ages of fifteen and seventeen reading their “recent work” (poetry, prose, other). The audience consists of thirty-six boys (Monica has counted them) and a scattering of faculty members (eight at first, but now two or three have slipped away) and of course the chaplain’s wife, Jill Starkie: Jill in a bright blue velour smock over blue jeans, Jill seated on the floor in front of the fireplace, hugging her knees, her head turned to one side in an attitude of intense ecstatic concentration.

A boy is reading a poem about death, and rain strikes in spirited little waves against the windows, and Monica is listening, Miss Jensen is listening, her own expression alertly attentive, her eyes glazing over with teacherly sympathy. (Most of the boys reading this afternoon are from her classes.) Absentmindedly she strokes the scar on her jaw, that secret pattern of striations in the flesh, hers, her. She concentrates on the boy and his poem but cannot hear the words because she is hearing other words, I hate you, I want to die, I loathe and despise you and I want to die, and her own voice lifting, shrill with weariness and despair, but which words had she uttered?—she could not now recall. Perhaps she said nothing, perhaps she has imagined everything.

When the reading is over she will hurry to telephone Sheila.

Unless—granted the distinct possibility of the phone simply ringing and ringing and ringing out there—it would be wisest for her simply to get in her car and drive to Edgemont.