7. The Tunnel #4
“Best friends,” East says. “But she was nothing like Davi. Cinnamon was chill. Really smart, musical, and she loved Tiffin. She was always giving tours for the admissions office.”
Charley was tempted to ask how she did it, and where—but Charley doesn’t want to be ghoulish, and also, she’s afraid of the answer. She changes the subject. “Why are you here?”
“I got kicked out of a couple schools in the city before this.”
“Don’t tell me,” Charley says. “You had a Chuck Bass thing going? Clubbing, drugs, older women…?”
“Is that how little you think of me?” he says, and then he grins. “It wasn’t quite that bad. More like vaping, skipping school, failure to properly yield to authority. My dad sent me here to West Bumblefuck so I couldn’t get in trouble.”
“Where’s your mom?” Charley asks.
“She lives in LA.”
At the bottom of the stairs is an arched opening; East breaks a cobweb and shines his phone’s flashlight into a brick, barrel-roofed tunnel. “There’s a tunnel like this on the Classic North side too, but it ends at a locked door, which I’m pretty sure is some kind of secret room. Come on.”
They walk down the tunnel until they come to a door. Surely this side will be locked as well, Charley thinks. But when East turns the knob, it opens.
And—whoa! They enter a spacious room with brick walls and a peeling linoleum floor.
The room has four bunk beds against one wall, and against the opposite wall is a makeshift kitchen: a sink, open shelving, a Formica countertop with a stovetop thingy plugged in.
East strides over to the sink and turns the faucet: Water runs out in a surprisingly powerful stream.
When he turns the knob of the stove, a red light comes on.
He shines his phone toward the ceiling: There’s a single bulb with a dangling string.
When he pulls it, the room is almost too bright.
A door against the back wall reveals a bathroom: toilet, sink, shower stall.
“Is this, like, where they used to put kids when they were bad?” Charley asks.
East cackles. “No, Charles, it’s a bomb shelter.” There’s a door opposite the one they entered that’s bolted. “Ah, see, I tried this from the other side and couldn’t get in.” East unbolts the door and opens it. “Here’s the north tunnel.” He grins at Charley.
Charley has to admit it’s cool, discovering the underpinnings of the school. “They probably built this during the Cold War.”
“Must have,” East says. He walks back toward her and takes one of her hands. East, she thinks, is holding her hand. “But we’re going to turn it into something else.”
Charley worries he can hear her heart beating. “What?”
“A speakeasy,” East says. “We’ll have a bar with real cocktails, music, couches. We’ll open it after lights-out on Saturdays. Invitation only, of course.”
“Of course,” Charley says.
“I’m serious. I’ve given this a lot of thought. I want it to be upscale, civilized… Do you know about the Algonquin Round Table?”
“You mean Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley?” Charley says. “I know about it, yes. Do you know about it?”
“I’m not a philistine,” East says.
Charley thinks he is a philistine, but she keeps her mouth shut.
“I’m doing this,” East says. “And I want you to be my partner.”
“Partner?” Charley says. She tries to imagine becoming an accomplice to a wealthy New York kid who starts a speakeasy in the basement of his boarding school. It’s so ludicrous, it’s sort of appealing.
“If we get caught, I’ll take the blame. My dad is the president of the Tiffin board. I can’t get expelled.”
“How are you planning on getting the alcohol?” Charley asks.
“I’ll find a connection.”
Charley laughs. Her night is turning out to be way more interesting than going to First Dance. “A connection ?”
“It’s going to work.” He gazes around the room. “We’ll make it really nice. Highbrow. Like Saint Tuesday in the city.”
Charley has no idea what he’s talking about. She has been to New York only once, on a school trip: Museum of Natural History, Statue of Liberty.
“Why me?” she says. “Why not Davi, or one of the Olivias?”
“Do I really have to answer that?” East says. “They’re a hive mind. I need an independent thinker to partner with me on this.” He pauses and squeezes her hand. “That’s you. You’re the only one I would ask.”
At that moment, Charley hears… footsteps? Then a faraway voice calling out, Hello? Charley?
“Shit,” East says. He ushers Charley out the north-side door. “You go this way, down the tunnel, up the stairs, out the door of Classic North, and back around to your dorm. I’ll go deal with this. I don’t want anyone to see the room. Once they know it’s here, it’s all over. Go.”
Charley goes.
Simone creeps down the stairs like the doomed heroine in a horror film.
She stops halfway to text Rhode. I’m in the basement of Classic South in case I never return and people are looking for my body, LOL.
She hits send, but the service is sluggish.
Yeah, no shit, she’s on a journey to the center of the earth.
At the bottom of the stairs is what can only be described as a tunnel, and from what Simone’s weak phone light can show her, it looks pretty cool.
There’s a cement floor, a bricked barrel ceiling.
Simone moves tentatively forward, aware that she could come face-to-face with the boogeyman at any second.
She calls out for Charley; her voice bounces off the walls, back into her face.
She feels ridiculous. There’s no way Charley is down here.
When Simone’s phone illuminates the torso of a live person, she screams.
“Miss Bergeron?” the person says. “It’s me, East.”
Oh god, oh god, oh god. Simone bends over in order not to faint. She can’t speak, she can’t breathe, and a trickle of urine runs down her leg into her sneaker. She has never, in her life, been so frightened.
“What,” she says, “the hell are you doing down here?”
East laughs and reaches out to touch Simone’s bare shoulder. “Relax,” he says. “I’m sorry I scared you.” He leaves his hand on her shoulder. Men are crossing all kinds of boundaries with her tonight, but now Simone doesn’t move.
“Wow,” he says, and he gives a low whistle. “You look really hot in that dress. Maybe I should have come to the dance after all.”
Simone knows it’s time to step away and admonish him, but when she hears his words, You look really hot, her heart revs like an engine. East is so cute with his floppy dark hair, his dark eyes, that brooding expression, that for a second, Simone feels helpless.
She revisits Rhode’s question. Do you have any students who stand out?
Simone noticed East the instant he loped into her classroom.
She thought he was in the wrong place: He seemed so much older than the other students, more mature, a man among boys and girls, which makes sense now that she knows he’s nineteen.
He didn’t lift a pen or open his laptop to take a single note, but she felt the pressure of his undivided attention; every time she checked, he was staring at her.
It was like some teacher-student fantasy.
Simone imagined unbuttoning her blouse for him.
When he left the first day, he stopped by her desk and said, “I get the feeling this is going to be my favorite class.”
Simone cleared her throat. She needed to get a grip. “Why, thank you, Andrew. I hope so.”
“East,” he said. “Everyone just calls me East.”
After a week and a half of classes, East has yet to raise his hand in discussion, and he hasn’t turned in a single response to the reading.
The one time Simone called on him, asking his thoughts on Thomas Morton’s reflections on the Native Americans, he’d given her a smoldering smile and said, “You know, I haven’t formed an opinion one way or the other on the topic.
” A hoot escaped from one of the Madisons while Charley Hicks scribbled something in her notebook.
Both reactions let Simone know that she should press the point—either expose East publicly for not doing the reading or ask him to stay after—but both choices felt sticky, so Simone let it slide.
“East,” she says now. She means her tone to be a reprimand, but it comes out sounding like an invitation. East slides his hand up to the curve of Simone’s neck. Before she knows what’s happening, he bends down and kisses her.
She will push him away, she thinks. She will tell him there’s no world where a kiss between teacher and student is okay.
But for just a second, she lets it happen.
This moment is so forbidden—and for that reason, irresistible.
She allows his lips to linger on her lips, his tongue to seek out her tongue.
Then she hears a voice. “Simone?”
Simone pushes East away. She spins around, holding her phone up. She sees a pinpoint of light moving toward her from the direction of the stairs. It’s Rhode, with his own phone, striding down the tunnel.
“Hey,” she says. She’s caught, she thinks.
Busted. Do they subject faculty to the Honor Board?
No, Simone thinks. She’ll just be fired and deported, sent back to Canada to make café au lait for the rest of her life.
She’ll never teach again. That’s the best-case scenario.
Worst case is ending up like that teacher who went to jail for sleeping with her student.
“What are you doing down here?” Rhode says.
“Oh…” Simone says. She turns around, thinking she’ll have to throw East under the bus to save herself.
She has no choice. But East has vanished.
The tunnel behind her is so impenetrably dark that Simone wonders if East was ever there or if what happened was some trick of her imagination.
She takes a breath. What, if anything, did Rhode see?
“I noticed the door to the basement was propped open,” she says.
“So I came down here looking for Charley, but she’s not here.
We should go.” She scoots past Rhode and heads for the stairs.
“She’s probably back in her room by now, and if she’s not, we’ll tell Audre.
” Simone hopes Rhode follows her instead of venturing any deeper into the tunnel. “Come on,” she prompts.
Rhode stares past her into the darkness. Does he see something?
“Rhode?” Simone says.
Reluctantly, he turns to follow her.
Every once in a while, Simone thinks, the universe does you a solid.
When Simone checks Charley’s room—Rhode stays out front, there are no men allowed in Classic South after eight p.m.—she finds Charley sitting on her bed, reading.
She’s undone her braids, and her hair runs in wavy kinks down her back.
She’s wearing a long white cotton nightgown with rickrack on the chest. The other girls in the dorm sleep in Roller Rabbit pajama sets.
If Charley’s daytime attire is from another decade, her nightgown is from another century.
“Where have you been ?” Simone says. “I’ve been looking all over for you.” It’s official, Simone thinks. She sounds like someone’s—everyone’s—mother.
Charley regards Simone with frosty eyes. “I walked over to the Paddock for coffee, but it was closed.”
“You walked there in your nightgown?” Simone says.
“Obviously not.” Her voice is filled with savage disinterest. Or maybe it’s pity.
Simone realizes then why Charley Hicks causes her so much anxiety.
She exposes Simone’s impostor syndrome. Simone isn’t a good teacher, she’s not qualified in the subject matter, she isn’t mature enough to stand up to the students, and, as the past fifteen minutes have just proven, she has grave moral failings as well.
She let Andrew Eastman kiss her! The bald fact of this is newly appalling now that she’s upstairs in the warm, well-lit dorm that houses the girls she’s supposed to be in charge of.
There’s no way Charley could know what happened in the tunnel, but she’s eyeballing Simone’s party dress (Simone bought it on sale at Forever 21 for a McGill fraternity formal a few years earlier) as though she would expect that behavior and worse.
Charley blinks. “I came home and changed. Did I break any rules?”
Simone tries to calculate the timing. If Charley left just before Simone arrived, walked to the Paddock, and walked back, she and Simone might have missed each other. Then when Charley would have returned, Simone would have been wandering the bowels of the building and kissing a student.
Did I break any rules?
Simone swallows. “No,” she says. “I’m just glad you’re safe.”
Charley returns to her book without a word.
Before Simone closes the door, she says, “Did you write that quote on my door? In red?”
Charley doesn’t look up. “What do you think?”
Simone thinks she should leave before she says or does anything else she regrets.
“Good night,” she says.