Free Blythewood by Carol Goodman Page B

me.
“Excellent, Miss Hall. We think you will do very nicely at
Blythewood. We’ll expect you on campus the day after tomorrow at noon sharp.”

6
    I WALKED OUT with Miss Sharp, whose calm demeanor
suggested she had experienced nothing unusual in the library.
Her open, cheerful countenance belied any suspicion of a subterfuge. Had I imagined the giant crow attacking her? Was I
hallucinating as I had at Bellevue? The thought made me feel
sick. I’d hoped those visions had been a result of the shock of
the fire, the blow to my head from the fall, or the drugs Dr.
Pritchard had given me. But if I were still hallucinating . . .
    “Congratulations, Miss Hall,” Miss Sharp said as we came
down the stairs. “I’m sure you’ll do very well at Blythewood.
You have an admirable command of classics and mythology.
Your mother taught you well. She would be very proud of you.”
    “It seems she was preparing me for that exam all along.”
“Perhaps.” Miss Sharp paused at the bottom of the stairs
and turned to me, a troubled look on her smooth elegant features. Had she seen the crow attack after all? I wondered. “Or
perhaps she was only sharing with you what she loved. At its
best Blythewood instills a love of learning in its girls, and a
wish to share that knowledge with others.”
“You attended Blythewood?”
She smiled—a sad smile, I thought. “Most faculty are alum
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Blythewood
    nae. I did my bachelor’s degree at Barnard College and I’ve been
teaching at Miss Spence’s school, but I’ve missed Blythewood
terribly. I can’t tell you how pleased I was to get this appointment. I’m afraid there is one flaw in Blythewood.” She touched
my arm and looked at me gravely. I wondered if she was going
to tell me that the school was mired in the old ways , but instead
she leaned closer and whispered, “It’s so perfect that no place
will ever measure up. You’ll always long to go back.”
z o Z
    Agnes was waiting for me outside. When she saw Miss Sharp
her face lit up.
“Vi!” she cried.
“Aggie!”
The two women threw their arms around each other and
twirled around on the sidewalk, nearly colliding with a stout
businessman in a bowler hat and eliciting disapproving looks
from a clutch of ladies exiting a dressmaker’s. They were oblivious, though, to anyone but each other—even to me—as they
traded particulars of their lives since graduation. When Agnes
learned that Vionetta Sharp would be teaching at Blythewood,
she turned to me. “Now I haven’t any reservations at all about
you going, with Vi there to look after you. That is if . . .”
“She got in,” Miss Sharp announced. “She did brilliantly
on her exam.”
“I knew she would,” Agnes said, pulling one of her oversized hankies from her bag and dabbing her eyes. “Evangeline
taught her well.”
Both women were sobered by mention of my mother.
“I was very sorry to hear about your mother,” Miss Sharp
said gravely. “She was a few years ahead of me at school and I
admired her greatly.” I saw a shadow pass over her face and I
wondered if she was thinking about the circumstances of her
expulsion, but instead she said, “What I said earlier about Blythewood being so perfect that no other place would measure
up—I didn’t mean that we should just accept the way things
have been done there forever. There are those of us who think
there should be changes—especially after this most recent occurrence.”
Agnes made a strangled sound and pulled Miss Sharp
abruptly away. They bent their heads together and whispered
while I stood a few feet away feeling foolish. After a few minutes they returned to me.
“I’m sorry, Ava,” Agnes said, her face pale beneath her
freckles. “Vionetta and I had a few . . . er . . . details to discuss
about what you’ll need for school.”
“Yes,” Miss Sharp concurred with a bright but brittle smile.
“The place has changed so much since we went