09 September 2008

Shibboleth

Tuesday 9 September 2008

It was drizzly this morning when Roger arrived to drive us to school. He stepped out with no umbrella and we skipped down the steps and got in. Jessy always gets in before me and then I sit in the right rear seat, which is where the gentleman is supposed to sit, where there is the switch for the divider window and the intercom phone. This used to have a regular mobile car phone in it and the cradle and connectors are still here for it. The whole car is like that, slightly 'retro' and '80s', which gives it a kind of charm. It's in perfect nick of course, everything works that's supposed to work, the TV was upgraded to a DVD system before we started using it, and the engine and all that is rebuilt and restored and redone. But it's like the alternative and antithesis to what anyone else could have got, a more recent super-stretch Lincoln with that gaudy grille and stupid appliques. It's only like our daddy anyway, and our stepmother too, to be sensible and conservative and dignified, even when the two teenaged girls have to ride in to school in a long dark-green Cadillac.

In homeroom the slightly-heavy girl in her tight jeans said hello to me. I'm not giving her name-- that description fits enough people in this school-- so I'll call her Becky. I said hello back and asked her how she made it in the storm. She said they had a window in their garage blown out and some stuff 'relocated' round their yard. Some other people listened in and contributed that they had similar hassles. I guess no one had really talked about it yesterday. I told them about the leak, saying merely that it was 'up stairs' and not 'in the tower', you know. (No one at this school knows where we live.) I also told them and Jessy and me raking up all over. I did NOT say I'd been in my underwear during most of it... but I was.

Becky is in my PE class. We got changed together. At HOH I did not mind this as much because we were all girls and there didn't have to be anything odd about it. While we are all girls in the girls' changing room here too, it feels different. Some girls dress for guys more than others do. You see this in their underwear. I prefer just plain cotton panties, modest bikini cut, comfortable and cool. I saw at least two of them in thongs today. It embarrasses me and I have to look away. It's not because I am intrigued or interested-- it's the opposite. Any lack of dignity makes me uncomfortable. I mean, unless they are going over their boyfriends' houses for a striptease and God knows what else straight away after school, what does it matter?

Then again maybe that's exactly what they're doing.

Becky and I were done at the same time and leaned beside each other in the lobby just inside the door, waiting for the bell. 'Where did you go before here?' she asked me.

I looked at her. 'We were in England,' I said.

'You don't sound English.'

I smiled. 'It's just my family heritage,' I said. 'We only lived there two years.'

Someone else heard that and turned round and looked at me. 'Is your dad in the air force?'

I smiled at that too. 'No, we just felt like moving there for a while.'

'Cool,' she said, and then turned to tell the girl ahead of her about it.

Becky shook her head. 'I knew there was something unusual about you,' she said with a smile. 'You're different... like a priss, but you're not.'

I made a face. The bell rang, the door opened, and a herd of girls poured forth into the corridor. 'I don't know,' I smiled. 'I'm pretty priss.'

Becky laughed. In the corridor she said to me, 'I don't know about that. And I'm not sure I'm not that priss either. You know....'

I smiled, nodding at what she had just told me. 'I know. But it's all good, right? I mean... it has to be.'

'Yes,' she said. 'Yes.' She was looking up at me as though she had just found a kindred spirit... because she had. Then we had to separate for our classes. 'See you, Janine,' she said.

'Bye-bye,' I said, and turned up the other corridor.

In the lunch room I waited by myself at what has become our 'usual' table. It's kind of sad how many people will walk past one person sitting alone and not say a single word to her. I am not a monster in any way and you'd expect people would not ignore any girl at all, you know. I certainly wasn't ignoring anyone myself. One boy happened to meet eyes with me as he passed and said hello, really just because he kind of had to. I said hello too, but that was all the farther that was going to go. Oh, well.

Jessy and her coterie arrived a few minutes later. Josie had brought a lunch, or half of one-- crackers and cheese, a fresh tomato, celery sticks. I have not ordered anything to eat here yet and neither has Jessy. Anna and Rita left their stuff, collected tray lunches from the queue, and returned. By that time Josie was mostly done her snack. I was mostly done my German. Jessy was mostly done telling Josie all about whatever we'd done yesterday (nothing out of the ordinary) while Josie gobbled up the news ravenously as if she were starved as much for this banal news as for food.

Rita came in, in a gorgeous green-and-white print dress, with her wild curly hair piled on top of her head and falling down the sides like a Regency goddess, and spilled the news that a guy she has known for a while wants to date her. This led to the expected discussion of what they all think of this guy, what they all think of the guys they already know, what those guys think of them, what they think of other guys, what other people think of other people and finally what uber-popular Rita should do about a guy who wants her for an actual regular, publicised girlfriend, which was the only part of this on which I ventured any opinion at all. They all stared at me, including Jessy, as I pronounced my verdict on the issue at hand.

'I mean, why does he want to go out with you?'

They all looked at me as though I'd asked them the best way to settle people on Mars. Then Josie, bless her heart, said, 'Well? She's Rita.'

They all laughed, even Rita. Fortunately this really was meant as a joke. Rita does not actually take her great beauty or notoriety very seriously at all. It's really just a reputation other girls have built round her and she is actually pretty humble about it-- like any superstar should be. 'I didn't ask him that,' Rita said seriously then.

'Who ever does?' Anna said.

Jessy was smiling straight at me. 'Janine does,' she told them. 'Janine asks everyone "why".'

'I really do,' I said, smiling back at her.

'I bet they all hate you,' Rita said with a smile then.

I shrugged. 'Anyone who's afraid of that question doesn't deserve my time,' I said. 'Or my heart.'

There was the dreaded silence after that, which I should have dreaded. These girls are not like the British girls at HOH. They are from a once-rural part of eastern Virginia, cut off from high art, high culture, high church, even most of world events, who have come to rely only on their parents' money to live in a modern mansion with vinyl siding and their laptop computers to connect with the greater world. They have not lived where I have lived, they have not seen what I have seen, they do not have the experiences I have nor the parents I have. It is wrong for me to expect them to have my values; but that does not mean I should not try to teach them about them if they really need them.

'Tell them about Henry,' Jessy said to me.

'Henry?' Rita wondered. 'His name is Henry?'

'He comes from a very old family,' I told her, and then proceeded to tell them how I happened, by chance, to have met someone from a 900-year-old family who lived in a 300-year-old country house and happened to have fallen in love with him. Till, of course, we separated. I had asked Henry 'why' and he could only say that it would never work, mainly because we were so different. I had taken offence to that, till I figured out why. My values and tastes will stand up to anyone's-- they are probably better than those of some royalty in the world today. Henry's family was no better than my own. But his family could not tolerate mine. Henry's 'advances', as my diary called them then, were because he had stopped valuing me as a respectable girl and had come to consider me as a worthless American outsider from a family in the entertainment business. All my father's conservative tastes and sensibly-invested money and all my stepmother's polite decency and local Norfolk heritage had come down to the inescapable fact that I would never be as good as Henry to Henry or his family. And I had said 'no' to him that evening with the very firm conviction that I would never say 'yes' to anything he would ever ask me, ever again.

'Wow,' cute little Josie sighed then.

I shrugged and stared off across the lunch room. The period was almost over.

'Find out WHY he wants to date you,' Jessy was telling her. 'Why he is attracted to YOU, Rita, cute popular Rita. You have a right to know from the start, and no one wants to see you get hurt when you find out too much later.'

'Yes,' Anna said.

'Yes,' Josie agreed.

Rita nodded. 'What if he just says he's only after... the one thing?'

I looked up then. Did she mean to say cute, popular Rita hasn't-- you know-- yet? Really? I hadn't thought of the possibility till that moment.

'Then you have your answer,' smart, brilliant little Jessy said to her.

'Yes,' Josie said softly.

'Yes,' Anna agreed.

I know then that none of them would have wanted the real topic of this girlish conversation to ever be overheard by anyone who hadn't heard ALL of it.

Rita looked right at me and asked me, 'Why do guys all have to be like this?'

I smiled. 'Because we let them,' I said.

The others thought about that. 'I have never let them,' Rita said quietly.

I patted her hand on the table like Mother would have done. 'Then you're a lady,' I said, 'and that's why you deserve his respect.'

People were clearing off; the bell was about to ring. 'Can I call you tonight?' Rita asked, turning from me to Jessy and back to me. 'Just to let you know what he says?'

The clock clicked over. 'Sure, sweetie,' I said-- sounding much too much like my stepmother at that moment! --and stood up with my books. The bell rang and the sudden noisy exodus began. 'We want to hear from you.'

Rita nodded, seriously, and we all kind of patted her back as we left.

In the Book of Judges the Gileadites were given a code word so that they could differentiate between those of their tribe and those who were the enemy Ephraimites, and the code word was 'Shibboleth'. The code I have discovered is not a matter of life and death, as theirs was-- at least not directly. But there is a kind of code, made up of certain words and attitudes we girls frame round certain issues that confront us, like a kind of shared secret faith, by which we recognise each other as innocents. Becky said it to me in the corridor after PE. Rita admitted it openly, and then the reactions of Josie and Anna confirmed them too. Jessy's convictions about the topic were made clear to them, and I don't think I left any doubt about me. This is a common ground more important than favourite colours or compatible signs or what schools we used to go to, more important than anything except maybe religion itself. And in confessing this kind of social faith we have made a pact to each other to never let down the others.

Many times online I have been asked pointblank whether or not I am a virgin. It is always being asked by a sex-starved coward who would never pluck up the courage to ask it to my face. And a thinking man shouldn't have to ask it. What unmarried 16-year-old of a good Christian family ought to be anything else? And though it is a question I never answer and call only impertinent and irrelevant online, I have to wonder why I don't answer it. Why have I any reason to be ashamed of being what I am? --that is, a good Christian girl with enough faith, intelligence and common sense to apply my God-given assets only to His work and not to my own temporary pleasure? I know I did God's work today-- I stood up for a principle God truly loves, since it serves His people best to do as I have done-- and to not do what I have not done. I helped Rita today, and she is not likely to ever forget what she learned about herself, me, and the rest of us over the lunch table. I should be proud of that. I have been good, and so I can be a good influence to others who worry that their own goodness has not been enough. I know I am called, even required to do that, as it says, 'If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained'. It means that if I stand by and do not help, I am as guilty as the one who makes the mistake and sins because I would not help.

From now on I will be more proactive and less afraid. What good is making new friends here if I must give in on what I believe to be best? But I found today that I do not have to give in at all. I already have friends whom I care for and who look up to me. Isn't it my job to be a good example? And so I will be.

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