12. Tiffin Talks Ghost in the Machine
None of us have any idea who’s behind Zip Zap.
As part of her investigative reporting, Ravenna Rapsicoli tries to post on the app herself but she gets shut out. So… the new posts are coming from… where? The ether? From Ralph Waldo Emerson’s transparent eyeball out in the woods, watching us?
A third post announces that Tilly Benbow has been sexting with someone outside the school, and this somehow leads to a first-floor Classic South scandal.
Madison R.’s long-ago-missing Theragun is found by Olivia P.
in Tilly’s room, and everyone suspects that Tilly has been using the Theragun to masturbate while sexting.
Tilly confesses to the sexting but not to the Theragun theft or masturbation.
Instead of treating her like a pariah, the fifth-form girls celebrate Tilly for her sexually adventurous relationship.
Olivia H-T and Olivia P. both ask her who the guy is and Tilly turns pink beneath her Flawless Filter and says, “None of your business,” which is highly unusual because Tilly loves to overshare.
Zip Zap seems intent on unearthing all our secrets.
It reminds some of us of the hypnotist who came to campus last winter.
He chose people to go up onstage and put them under his spell.
Some of them cried, one of them clucked like a chicken, and last year’s Honor Board chair, Vanessa Kendrick, told the whole auditorium that she still wet the bed.
Vanessa ended up leaving school right after that, and we overheard Ms. Robinson telling Mrs. Spooner that the hypnotist would never be asked back.
Charley hopes she falls beneath the consideration of the Zip Zap app because she too has a secret: On Tuesday and Thursday nights, she signs out of the dorm saying she’s going to the Sink to study, but instead she sneaks down to the tunnel, where she’s helping East renovate the bomb shelter.
Tonight they move the mattresses off the bunk beds and transport them up to the cellar, where they get tossed among the extra furniture.
Then, using a power drill, East dismantles the bunk beds themselves until they’re just a pile of metal frames.
Charley is freaked out by the sound of the drill—someone is going to hear it—but East assures her the shelter is soundproof.
It’s gratifying, watching the space morph into something else—Charley has never seen a single minute of HGTV, though she now understands the appeal—but the real reason she’s there is to be with East. She won’t deny that she’s attracted to him, but she’s also not delusional.
She knows that when he looks at her, he sees only a brain, and once she learns to relax around him, he’ll see a sense of humor.
East is extremely intelligent, though you would never know it from his lackluster performance in history class.
He confides that because Tiffin is his third high school, he’s covered all the material before and sees no point in doing it again.
He doesn’t do the reading or turn in written work or participate in class, but he’ll ace the midterms and squeak by with a passing grade.
“Don’t you want to go to college?” Charley asks.
“God, no,” East says. “I know you’re going to tell me this is a college preparatory school and I’m going to tell you that the deal I have with my father is I have to graduate, then I can go to him with a business plan and he’ll back me.”
Charley could never, ever fall in love with someone who doesn’t want to go to college.
And yet, she finds herself relishing the moments of physical proximity with East—for example, when he hoists her up to the counter so she can lift the open shelves off their brackets and hand them down to him.
Once, he rubbed his thumb over the corner of her mouth and showed her a crumb—focaccia—saying, “You saving this for later?” Another time, when Charley’s hands were full, he pushed up her glasses, which gave such sweet rom-com vibes that Charley giggled, possibly for the first time in her life.
She was more embarrassed about the giggle than she was about food on her face.
Occasionally she’ll catch him looking at her—she pretends not to notice, though she turns the color of a raspberry—and one night he says, “Remember when I first brought you here and you wore your hair down? I liked it that way.”
Charley tries not to go up in flames. East noticed her hair when it was out of its braids the night of First Dance?
“I keep it back so it doesn’t get in my face,” she says.
“Would you wear it down for me?” he asks. “Maybe on Thursday?”
They’re standing side by side in the doorway as they give the area one final look for the night. The room has been stripped bare. It’s uglier than it was before, but that’s the process: It has to get worse to get better.
“I’ll wear my hair down Thursday if you raise your hand in history tomorrow,” she says.
“Oh yeah?” he says. “That would be a turn-on? To hear me bloviate about the Articles of Confederation?”
Charley nearly comments on his use of the word “bloviate,” but she tries to imagine how one of the girls on her floor would respond.
“The biggest turn-on.” She holds his gaze.
The moment is so loaded, Charley can nearly hear the air between them crackle.
Kiss me! she thinks. He takes a breath and—is she imagining it?
—leans in. Charley panics and bolts for the middle of the room, where she pulls the string that leaves them in darkness.
“Ready to go?” she asks. “I think it’s late.”
He gives a brief laugh. “Okay, Charles.”
East turns on his flashlight and leads Charley through the tunnel, up the stairs to the cellar. This is chivalrous because he exits out the other side to his own dorm. She can’t believe the way she just sabotaged her own dreams. What is wrong with her?
He says, as he always does, “Have a good night, Charles.”
Charley, desperate to pretend like none of this matters to her (“chasing” is Out), says, “Night.”
When Charley looks at her phone, she sees it’s ten past ten. She has two texts, one from the floor prefect, Madison J., and one from Miss Bergeron, asking where she is.
Nobody could find you at the Sink, Miss Bergeron says.
Shit! Charley thinks. She runs around Classic South and tries her key card on the pad but the light flashes red and the speaker burps at her. Charley tries to flag down Davi, who’s in the hallway— ugh —but Davi ignores her.
Madison J. finally comes to let Charley in.
Madison is a cool person, serious but kind: perfectly suited to her role as first-floor prefect.
Charley knows that Madison J.’s mother was the first Black female graduate of Tiffin back in the 1980s; there are pictures of her in the class composites lining the hallways of the Schoolhouse, one of the few Black faces in a sea of white.
“You have to report to Miss Clavel,” Madison says. (This is how the girls on the first floor have started referring to Simone Bergeron—it’s a Madeline reference.) “Also, where were you? You weren’t at the Sink like you said. I was there all night.”
What the actual fuck? Charley thinks. She basically moves through her day like the Invisible Woman, which is why she felt comfortable slipping down to the tunnel. Who would ever notice she was missing? The answer was nobody… if she’d gotten back on time.
“Oh,” Charley says. “I was out, you know, drinking vodka Red Bulls, having orgasms.”
She watches a smile tug on the corners of Madison’s lips. “I’d let this slide,” she says. “But it’s not up to me. You have to go check in with Bergeron.”
Miss Bergeron is alone in the common room, picking Starburst wrappers and kernels of popcorn up off the floor. “Charley!” she says. “Where were you? I was worried.”
“The Sink,” Charley says.
“Nobody saw you at the Sink.”
“I have a spot that’s tucked away,” Charley says. “Because even though it’s supposed to be a library, it gets pretty social.”
Miss Bergeron studies her. Please, Charley thinks, don’t press.
At the beginning of the year, Miss Bergeron was so fervent about Charley having a social life that Charley almost feels as though she could tell Miss Bergeron the truth— I was down in a tunnel below the dorms with Andrew Eastman —and Miss Bergeron would be happy for her.
“It’s quarter past ten,” Miss Bergeron says. “The Sink kicks everyone out at nine fifty-five. Where have you been the last twenty minutes? You know check-in is at ten sharp. Frankly, I can’t believe we’re having this conversation.”
Frankly, Charley can’t believe it either.
“I took a walk.” This is a standard Tiffin excuse when people aren’t where they’re supposed to be because they’re in the Schoolhouse joining the Harkness Society or hooking up in God’s Basement.
She considers saying It’s my dad’s birthday —but she can’t bring herself to invoke her dead father as a cover and so she says, “I had some things on my mind.”
Miss Bergeron sighs. “I have to give you an infraction. You’ll be restricted to the dorm tomorrow night. I’m sorry.”
“I’m the one who’s sorry,” Charley says. She will happily study in her room tomorrow night, as long as she can check out Thursday.
Thursday afternoon at the ’Bred Bulletin office, Ravenna says that she’s asked multiple people to try posting on Zip Zap and none of them have been successful. “This means someone has hijacked the app. Or there’s a ghost in the machine.”
Grady says, “You mean the ghost of Cinnamon Peters?”
Ravenna snaps her fingers in his face. “Hey,” she says sharply. “Respect.”
“It could be Mr. James,” Levi says. “He knows a lot of secrets.”
“Hahaha!” Ravenna says. “That dude does know a lot of secrets, but I doubt he knows how to post on the Zip Zap app.” She pats Levi on the head.
Levi looks like he’s gonna pop a boner—Ravenna is touching him!—and Charley takes that as her cue to leave early. “I have to go,” she says. “I have to study.”