Chapter 6: Being the Grown Up

When Connie got to school, a note was waiting for her asking her to see Miss Perkins. She wondered what she had done. “I’m sorry, Connie,” said Miss Perkins, “There doesn’t seem to be any way you can take typing this year along with your other courses. It isn’t one of our popular minor courses, and you’ll be one of only three seniors taking third-year Latin.”

“That’s all right, ma’am. My father thought I would need it for college, but he’s clear that there are other ways of learning it.”

“It’s a useful skill. Maybe we should give it more emphasis.”

Connie hid her shock. To even teach typing at all was an unusual acknowledgement of the twentieth century for St. Wigbert’s.

She and her special friends were seniors, but they had the same room as the year before and took the same beds as the year before. Seniors didn’t have all that many extra privileges at St. Wigbert’s. Connie buckled down to her new classes. She’d sworn before she’d left that spring to get up to speed on Latin, but it had been a busy summer. She had only studied second-year Latin on her own and a year before; her classmates had taken it in class the previous winter -- except the two other seniors taking it, and they had taken third-year Latin the previous winter. Connie wasn’t worried about catching up to them, but catching up to the rest of the class looked like a job. Still, that was the only major subject that looked challenging this time, and Connie was good at languages.

Having survived algebra, she didn’t need Joan’s help anymore. Joan still seemed to need her help in French, and she agreed to supply it. Joan was a friend, after all, a better friend than Connie had ever had before the previous year. Everybody was taking general science. (St. Wigbert’s was a private school, but it still had to obey some of the Regents’ Rules.) Everybody in the room wanted Joan as a lab partner, but she chose Connie.

Connie even felt she had enough time to keep up her daily rhyme. Somehow, limericks were too close to the nasty poems she’d promised Miss Perkins to abandon. Having done iambic pentameter to death, she decided to switch over to tetrameter. She noticed that the shorter lines seemed to change how her rhymes felt.

The girls in the room took a little time reestablishing their relationship. When Liz and Michelle thanked Connie for the poems she’d sent, their thanks felt like the letters kids write to aunts who have remembered them at Christmas. Then they started admiring each others’ new clothes. Finally, on a walk after dinner, they fell back into their old relationship.

“How was your summer?” asked Joan.

“Great,” said Deb. “Mom finally realized I’m out of diapers. She let me have Jerry over when she was at work.”

“You never had before?” asked Michelle.

“Not with permission.”

“I broke up with Billy,” Pat said suddenly.

“Oh, how horrible,” said one girl. “Did you get another boy?” asked another. There were other comments of sympathy.

“How could I get another?” asked Pat. “It was right at the end of summer. Well, it was most of the summer, but it wasn’t final until the middle of August. He wanted to go all the way. After the break-up, mom wanted me to play the field. I said, ‘It’s the twentieth century, mom, wake up.’ Anyway, I was coming back here. What field?”

“They all seem to want to go all the way,” said Michelle.

“Tom certainly did,” said Joan.

“So what do you say? What did you say to Tom, Joan?”

“Yes.”

“Joan!”

“Well, it was the end of the summer, and he’s going off to UCLA. It wasn’t like Pat. He didn’t say ‘or else.’ And I wanted to. We’d done everything else, and everything else had felt grand.”

“Did it feel grand?” asked Deb. “Did the earth move?”

“No. Don’t ever tell Tom.”

“Well,” said Deb, “my sister says it gets better. She’s married.”

“And you, Connie,” asked Michelle, “did you get a tan all over this time?”

“You haven’t looked in the shower,” Connie said. She was still a little miffed that Michelle had the year before. “I wore a swimming suit, a modest swimming suit.”

“Too bad.”

“Not really. I wore it at a pool. Couldn’t go topless at a public pool.”

“Your folks didn’t let you go up to your cabin by yourself?”

“I didn’t want to go up, even with them. There were boys at the pool.”

“So, how come the modest swimsuit?” asked Liz.

“You forget,” she was ashamed to admit it out loud, but it was no secret from these girls “the tanning wasn’t the only way I went topless.”

“You’ll grow out,” Michelle said. Kind Michelle. Connie wasn’t so sure; she’d be sixteen in four months.

“Anyway, ‘It’s better to keep your mouth shut and be suspected of being a fool than speak out and prove it.’ And it’s better to wear some concealment and have people suspect you’re flat than wear a bikini and have them be sure. A girl at the youth group of the local church complained of having to wear concealing blouses. I prefer it.”

They all caught up with how the other girls had spent their summer.

Connie called home on Helen’s weekend at the cabin. “Bad news, Andre. They can’t fit me into typing.”

“I can hear the despair in your voice. Well, there are other ways. By the way, speaking of college, are you applying?”

“Starting to.”

“Well, you need to go to the school which will give you the education you want. And this is free advice and worth every penny. But. But your father thinks you should consider some schools outside the northeast.”

“Why?”

“Several reasons. In the first place, I think you could get into any school where you apply...”

“As if! MIT is probably salivating in anticipation of getting Connie Steffano.”

“Nor the Naval Academy, nor the University of Berlin. There are plenty of schools which don’t want you, but mostly you don’t want them, either. You could probably go almost anywhere you want to go. Some schools, Harvard and Yale, are looking for a reason to reject their applicants. Even after they’ve found all the good reasons, they essentially flip a coin. But coming from the northeast means that the colleges in the northeast are looking at you with a more jaundiced eye. Even your high school...”

“St. Wigbert’s isn’t that big. I don’t think anybody has too many St. Wigbert’s graduates.”

“No, but somebody on the West Coast won’t have ever seen any. It would be one more point in your favor. Anyway, the second and more important point in your case is that you need diversity. I was born and raised in New York and moved no further than Hartford. It looked like a change then; it doesn’t now. And I regret it.” That was more than Connie had heard about his past in nearly sixteen years, and she was tempted to ask for more details. But they were talking about her.

“I’ll think about it.”

“Do that, Connie.” Using her real name meant that Andre must really want to convince her. “I don’t think you want a party school, and that’s my impression of the southwest, although it may not be accurate. The west coast or the Midwest. The mountain states have great scenery. I’d go crazy, but you seem to like nature, all that time at the cabin, for example.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“And it’s your decision. Tell me the names of the schools you’re applying to and the amounts, and I’ll send you the checks. Just give me a little lead time.”

“Are things tight again?” She could imagine his running out of money when it was time to actually write the checks.

“No. Tuition might be a problem, but application fees won’t be. I just want time to write a couple of checks and mail them to you. Margin for the post office’s errors, not for mine.”

Connie got several letters from Ted in September; she got one from Kent in October. “I thought he was named Ted,” Joan said.

“Ted’s the other one, the church one. Kent’s the swimming- pool one.”

“And which one did you go out with?”

“Both.”

“Both? At the same time?”

“Separate days.”

“I told you,” Michelle said, “Connie’s ahead of us all, and not only in class.”

“I’m not ahead of Joan,” said Connie.

“Did they know about each other?” asked Joan.

“I hope not. They might not have known each other at all. They went to different high schools.”

“I don’t know, Connie. I never did that.” Well, Connie had never gone all the way, had never come close.

Connie had concentrated on her Latin until she was among the better students in class. Now she put extra effort into one subject at a time, each subject in turn. She ended up with an A in each of five majors for the first quarter. A C in gym spoiled that record. Then Miss Frazier noticed that Connie, in going from freshman to junior, had missed the second year of sex education. So she was put back in sophomore gym for the second quarter. These girls were her own age, although two years behind her in classes.

She had to decide what College Boards to take. The general English and math ones, of course, and English composition. But she could take only two of history, French, and Latin. She opted for French and history.

Connie’s dating experience didn’t help in sex education; she soon became dubious that she had as much experience as most of the sophomores. But, a year before she’d gone to St. Wigbert’s, Andre had given her books, books with technical vocabulary, to read. Besides, learning from a book was Connie’s strength. She started getting ‘A’ grades in gym. Anyway, the classes were all inside and you didn’t have to dress in something else or shower afterwards.

With the miserable weather, they stopped taking walks after dinner. They went back to discussions in French with code words for things they didn’t want any teachers to hear, but this didn’t feel very safe -- many of the teachers at St. Wigbert’s had taken French. Besides, thinking how to say something in French cut down on the spontaneity of the chatter.

Connie enjoyed the visits more this year. Her roommates seemed to be taking more care, and they -- even Liz -- had never grabbed. Connie was less sure that the girls were providing substitutes for the pleasure that boys would provide in abundance; maybe they were providing pleasure in abundance that the boys would only approximate.

Connie stayed over for the Christmas break. She was a lot happier about it than she expressed in her letter to Ted. She also wrote a letter to Kent with the same information, even though he had never answered her first letter.

Connie had given up on her boobs’ ever growing. If she kept lying face down and pulling on her nipples, it was for pleasure, not for growth. She realized, though, that her boobs were now filling her A cups, especially during her period. It wasn’t much, but it was progress.

Something was different about Michelle when she came back, but Connie couldn’t tell what, and Michelle wasn’t saying. Joan’s change was not so mysterious. She’d been finding her bras uncomfortable, and her mom took her to a department store to find out why. “When the saleslady said, ‘D cup,’” Joan reported, “mom was so shaken that she bought me three. She only wears a C cup herself.” Somehow, Connie didn’t think this was the time to mention that her A cups now fit.

Connie stayed with the sophomore gym class for the rest of the quarter. When they took up basketball, her height was an even greater advantage. She might finish the quarter with an ‘A’ in gym. In the class work in science, she wasn’t the star Joan was, but she kept up. In lab work, she was the star Joan was, two partners turning in one report.

One night, the wind was dead calm. It was still bitterly cold, but when Michelle said “let’s walk” after dinner, they all did. When she could see that nobody could overhear, Michelle asked, “Doit-un avaler?” They looked at her in bewilderment. “Do you have to swallow?” she asked. “It tastes gross!”