The Daring Game Read online

  Ten minutes later none of them could get down another morsel, but there was still a lot of food piled on the towel.

  Helen thrust a drumstick at Eliza. “Have another piece of chicken.”

  “Ohhh, I can’t,” groaned Eliza, who had already had a large dinner at her aunt and uncle’s.

  “We’ll have to put it away and sneak it into our tuck boxes tomorrow,” said Pam. They gathered the food up quickly into a paper bag and stowed it in the closet. Then they staggered back to bed.

  “That was the best feast I’ve ever had,” sighed Helen. “I think you all performed our first dare very well. I am extremely proud of you, girls,” she added, imitating Miss Tavistock.

  She had barely finished her sentence when the lights flashed on, and a voice said crisply, “What is going on in here?”

  It wasn’t Miss Bixley. It was Miss Tavistock.

  “N-nothing, Miss Tavistock,” stammered Pam.

  “I can smell chicken. Do you have food in the dormitory? You know that is forbidden.”

  There was no use concealing it. No one ever dared hide anything from Miss Tavistock. Morosely, Helen pulled the paper bag out of the closet.

  The headmistress peered into its greasy depths, wrinkling her nose with distaste. “Very well. Put on your dressing-gowns and slippers and come downstairs. Bring the food with you.”

  Eliza climbed down and nervously jerked her dressing-gown sleeve over the flannelette sleeve of her pyjamas. Her knees shook with an almost pleasant kind of fear. What was going to happen to them? This was probably a greater crime than going onto the fire escape by accident, but she was more curious than frightened. And this time they were all in trouble together.

  Carrie seemed to feel the same. All the way down the stairs she squeezed Eliza’s arm. “Oooh, I’m so scared,” she breathed, but she sounded as if she were going to laugh.

  “Silence, please,” said Miss Tavistock. She led them along the dark hall into the dining room and made them sit on both sides of one of the long tables.

  “Put everything on the table, Helen,” she ordered. “Pamela, fetch some plates from the kitchen. Since you seem to be so hungry for extra food, you can finish your meal down here.”

  They looked at one another with horror. Finish it! Eliza’s stomach lurched in protest as she stared at the mess Helen was spreading out on the table. The remains of the chocolate bars were stuck to the chicken. Squashed doughnuts leaked their fillings onto broken crackers. The empty Coke bottle was smeared with chocolate icing, and the cake had disintegrated into soggy crumbs. Pam’s toothbrush, encrusted with dried peanut butter, lay ludicrously on top of it all.

  “Oh, please, Miss Tavistock, I can’t eat any more!” begged Carrie.

  “We won’t do it again, Miss Tavistock. I’ll be sick if I have another bite!” said Pam.

  “No arguing. Eat it up, every crumb. Come along, Elizabeth, have another piece of chicken. Helen, you’re the one who’s starving—have some licorice.”

  She heard us, thought Eliza, turning a minuscule piece of chicken around and around in her mouth. But she waited until we’d finished. She looked at Miss Tavistock sitting erectly at the head of the table. The headmistress always wore tailored suits. Tonight it was her plainest black one, but the white blouse underneath had just a hint of ruffle at the neck. Eliza thought for a second she was trying not to smile.

  She liked the headmistress more all the time. The old girls warned the new girls not to get on the wrong side of her. But Eliza couldn’t imagine Miss Tavistock ever being really mean or unfair, the way some of the headmistresses in her books were.

  Her awe of Miss Tavistock had lessened last week when the headmistress had shown her and Carrie her stamp collection. Eliza had received a letter from her English grandmother, and Miss Tavistock had stopped them in the hall after prayers one evening and asked if she could have the stamp.

  “I especially like British ones,” she said, smiling. “Come and see my collection.” Out of one of her desk drawers she pulled a bulging album crammed with tiny squares of colour, like hundreds of miniature paintings. Her voice grew animated as she talked about them. Carrie said afterwards she thought the explanation would never stop. Eliza found it interesting, however, and resolved to ask for a stamp album for Christmas.

  Thinking about Miss Tavistock was not making eating any easier. The only sound was the low ticking of the clock down the hall and five mouths chewing hesitantly. No one, not even Helen, could force down more than a few mouthfuls, and Jean looked pale.

  “All right, girls,” said Miss Tavistock finally. “I think you’ve learned your lesson. Throw it all away and then you can sit in the hall for fifteen minutes. I hope I will never catch you with food in the dormitory again.”

  Sitting in the hall without speaking was a common punishment. The headmistress arranged them on chairs down its length, then went into her study. Eliza was sitting under the clock. Its steady voice was reassuring in the darkness.

  Miss Bixley came out of the matrons’ sitting room, noticed her five charges and stopped in astonishment, then wagged her finger at them and continued up the stairs.

  Despite never wanting to eat again, Eliza felt peaceful for the first time since she’d come to Ashdown. This was what boarding school was supposed to be like, getting into trouble with your dorm-mates and feeling a bond of companionship with them because of it. She glanced over her shoulder cautiously and grinned at Carrie.

  When they were all back in bed, Pam risked a whisper. “I don’t like your game, Helen. I’m not going to play it ever again.”

  But Eliza burrowed contentedly into her pillow. At least we’ve proved to Helen we’re not cowards, she thought as she fell asleep.

  5

  Being Good

  H elen said no more about dares for the next month, and Eliza had enough to do without them. Her life was now divided into three distinct areas: the residence, the school and Saturdays. The school part was the most intense and overwhelmed everything else. Eliza was relieved to break from its whirl of activity each day to the quieter atmosphere of the residence, where she now felt very much at home. She was just as glad to have a rest from the dorm at her aunt and uncle’s every Saturday.

  The boarders made up only a fifth of the student population of Ashdown, but sometimes Eliza couldn’t resist thinking they were superior to the rest. One rule, as cooler weather approached, was that everyone had to wear her coat going between buildings. Everyone except the boarders, who wore capes instead—navy-blue gabardine lined in grey, with pointed hoods. Eliza flung the folds of her cape dramatically around her each morning before she crossed the strip of concrete that separated the residence from the school. Sometimes she pretended she was one of the Three Musketeers. As she filed into prayers she savoured the importance of standing out as a caped boarder.

  She had become friendly with only one of the day-girls, Thea Crawford, an inquisitive girl who pumped her for every detail of boarding. The dorm feast had enthralled her. It made a good long story.

  Many of the other day-girls, however, seemed to look down on the boarders. Even though they travelled to Ashdown from different parts of the city, they all appeared to know each other outside of school. Their confident talk of yacht clubs and horseback riding and ski chalets made Eliza feel excluded.

  Pam hung around with the day-girls as if she were still one herself. She was the only member of the Yellow Dorm in Eliza’s class, but she almost ignored Eliza in school hours. And Pam was the sole boarder admitted into the top level of the three-part hierarchy in 7A: winners, losers and in-betweeners. Eliza was used to being an in-betweener; she had been one in her last school. But she was insulted when one day-girl asked her: “Why were you sent away to school? Were you a problem at home?”

  Most of the school’s activities centred on the six houses it was divided into, all named after trees. Eliza was in Cedar. Everyone was knitting squares to join together into afghans for the Red Cross, and Cedar had the most
so far. Eliza, Carrie, Jean and Pam often sat up with the curtains open after Lights Out, knitting furiously.

  Carrie was the fastest. “You should see my grandmother,” she boasted. “She doesn’t even have to look at the needles. She used to win prizes in Norway.” Jean knit almost as rapidly as Carrie. Eliza was slower, but she worked at it so steadily that she had completed more squares than any of them.

  Pam was a beginner and hadn’t even got through one square yet. “I never learned,” she said. She watched Carrie’s nimble fingers enviously, for she was just as keen as Eliza to win points for her house.

  “Didn’t your mother teach you?” asked Eliza. She remembered the rainy Saturday four years earlier when her mother had shown her how to knit a scarf for John.

  Pam flushed. “She never had time. The housekeeper tried to once, but she gave up when I kept dropping stitches.”

  Jean took Pam’s square from her to correct a mistake. “Do you really have a housekeeper?”

  “We did before my parents moved. She’s still in our house, working for the people who rented it.”

  “We have a cook,” said Carrie. “But that’s because my mother manages our store all day.”

  Eliza was fascinated. She’d never known anyone with servants before. Pam and Carrie must be as rich as some of the day-girls. You could tell by their clothes, and all the places they had been, that their families had more money than Jean’s, Helen’s and her own.

  It occurred to her that Pam used Jean as a servant. She was always getting Jean to make sure the soap was out of her hair when she rinsed it, or to time her crawl when they went swimming at the Empire Pool. In the residence the two of them were becoming a pair, just as she and Carrie were. It surprised her that Jean would put up with Pam’s bossiness. But the timid girl seemed grateful to have such an authoritative person to hide behind.

  Helen didn’t knit. She was subdued these days, and Eliza wondered what she was plotting. Most of her free time she spent listening to her new radio.

  “How can you afford that?” Pam had asked when Helen had brought it in the week before. Pam had the only other radio in the dorm.

  “Oh, my mother sent me some money,” said Helen vaguely.

  Pam assumed her most priggish expression. “You’re supposed to put extra money in the office. I could report you, you know.”

  They knew she wouldn’t. Helen just gave her a withering look, to show what she thought of tattletales.

  ONE EVENING Eliza sat in one of the music rooms in the gym, finishing another square and trying to read the last chapter of her book at the same time. She was supposed to be practising, but there was still time to finish the square and play a piece or two before she had to go. Pushing the last stitch off the needle, she snipped the yellow wool, poked its end through the loop and drew it tight—there, one more done. It wasn’t quite a square, but she could stretch it. Reading would have to wait until later. She opened up her Grade V Royal Conservatory of Music of Toronto book to her List A piece, Little Prelude No. 2. The notes flooded into one another as she pressed the loud pedal guiltily. She knew that if Mrs. Fraser were listening she would tell her not to overdo it.

  Scales could be skipped today; they needed practice, but there were three days left until her next lesson. She went on to her hymn. This week Eliza was going to play the hymn at evening prayers for the first time. It was an easy one and she already knew it well, but she wanted to get it absolutely right.

  One of her favourite rituals at Ashdown was the singing of hymns. There were three a day, two in the morning and one at night. Eliza liked to make her voice sound exalted in lines like “Early in the mor-r-r-rning, our song shall rise to thee.” Once Helen, standing behind her in 7B, jabbed her and hissed that she sang too loudly. Eliza didn’t care. She knew her voice was only average, but she could carry a tune. When she sang alone she sounded weak, but in a group she could let her voice soar freely, as if it belonged to someone else. There had never been enough singing in public school to satisfy her. Here there was choir as well as prayers, and sometimes there were hootenannies on Sunday evenings.

  Someone was playing the piano next door, and the melody was so compelling that she stopped and listened. Three notes, over and over, changing slightly every few phrases. The bass chords chimed in softly, then a treble section picked out a hesitant melody. The melancholy strains suited the October dusk outside the window. She crept to the open door of the next room to hear better.

  It was Madeline; she should have known. Madeline Wood was the best pianist in the whole school. A grade eleven boarder, she was also Cedar’s house captain. Eliza admired her so much she could barely speak to her. She saw Madeline only on house meeting days, or at a distance in the dining room and in prayers. But she always kept an eye out for her long dark hair and the slash of green ribbon she wore across her sweater as an emblem of her office.

  Each of them in the Yellow Dorm, except Helen, had a special favourite among the older girls. Pam and Jean were part of a bevy of grade sevens who clustered around the head girl, Laura Singer, every break, trying to win her attention. Carrie liked Julie Cassidy, a prefect and fellow American who knew Carrie’s sisters in Seattle.

  But Eliza preferred Madeline. The older girl was tiny, but she had an air of quiet authority, and her eyes always looked amused. Every time Eliza handed her another square, Madeline would say, “Good for you, Eliza! What a hard worker you are!”

  Now Eliza listened to the last notes of the dreamlike melody. There was a yearning quality to the music, and it made her ache for something that seemed just out of reach. The final chord was so hushed it almost didn’t exist. Then Madeline sat perfectly still, as if in a trance.

  Eliza felt like an eavesdropper. She couldn’t just tiptoe away and not say anything. “That was wonderful,” she breathed. “What’s it called?”

  Madeline swung around on the piano stool. “Oh, it’s you, Eliza! That’s the Moonlight Sonata. I’m trying to get it ready for a recital, but I have a long way to go.”

  “Oh no—it’s perfect.”

  “Thank you!” Madeline sounded as if Eliza’s opinion really counted. She glanced at her watch. “I’ve finished for today. How about you? Did you have a good practice? I heard your Bach.”

  Eliza blushed to think how much of the half-hour she’d wasted on other activities. She felt, proud, however, that Madeline was speaking to her as a fellow pianist. “I think I use too much loud pedal,” she mumbled, “but it’s hard not to.”

  She came in and sat on the windowsill, and they discussed the use of the pedals like two professionals. It was the longest she had ever talked to Madeline, and she chose her words carefully. Madeline listened so attentively that she made Eliza want to be her best self.

  “How do you like boarding so far?” the older girl asked her. “Do you miss your parents?”

  “I don’t really have time to,” Eliza confessed.

  Madeline’s green eyes crinkled into slits. “Well, they certainly keep us busy here. You seem to be fitting in all right.”

  Miss Tavistock had said the same thing last week: “I’m very pleased with you, Elizabeth. You’re doing well in your work and really taking part in the life of the school.”

  “I like it here,” Eliza told Madeline. She meant it. It had seemed odd to be away from Ashdown for three whole days during the Thanksgiving weekend at her aunt and uncle’s. She had been impatient to get back. The perfect weather added to her satisfaction. It wasn’t like a prairie fall, where the wind whipped the branches bare of leaves as quickly as they turned yellow. Here the trees changed slowly, gradually ripening into golds and reds.

  “Do you like it?” asked Eliza. “How old were you when you came?”

  “I came in grade nine. I like it well enough, and Mrs. Fraser’s one of the best piano teachers in the province. But sometimes I get tired of it. I’m glad I only have a year to go.”

  Eliza was shocked. “Tired of it! I’ll never get tired of it!”


  “You’re certainly enthusiastic,” laughed Madeline. “And it’s great to have you in my house. Look at all the house points you’ve earned for us already!”

  The bell clanged insistently from the Old Residence. “Prep’s over,” said Madeline. “Let’s go to dinner.”

  They walked out of the gym together. The tree trunks by the driveway were black shadows against the dim sky. Eliza shivered, partly because of the crisp air, but mostly because of the pleasure of being with Madeline.

  TWO EVENINGS LATER Eliza sat at the piano at the back of the Blue Sitting Room, her knees shaking, her hands wet and her eyes fixed on Miss Tavistock standing in front of the assembled boarders.

  “Hymn 636.”

  This would be the worst part: playing one verse alone so everyone would learn the melody. Her hands slipped and trembled on the keys, and she whispered the words to herself to keep time.

  Work, for the night is coming!

  Work through the morning hours

  She pounded the keys hard and began to relax. By the time the singers all opened their mouths she was in full swing, throwing herself into the melody, playing faster and faster, driven by the force of their voices behind her notes.

  Give every flying mi-i-nute

  Something to keep in store

  “Slow down, Eliza!” someone whispered in her ear. She tried to, but the rhythm was too infectious. Drawing out the last line as Mrs. Fraser had taught her, however, she finished with a resounding “Amen.” Her hands dropped to her lap; she was panting.

  Miss Tavistock smiled. “Thank you, Elizabeth.”

  After prayers Helen cornered Eliza as the rest of the boarders milled about the room before returning to prep. “Why did you choose that hymn? Are you trying to give us a hint?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It sounds like you’re telling us to study,” grumbled Helen. Carrie had told Eliza that Mrs. Fitch, the 7B teacher, was always accusing Helen of being lazy.

  “I don’t think it means that,” said Eliza. “I didn’t mean it to, anyhow. I picked it because it’s one of the easiest in the book.”