Free The Wives of Bath by Susan Swan Page A

she confessed that she was scared because Miss Ibister had asked her to replace a forward on the field-hockey team who had the flu.
    “There are the Amazons we have to play—out there!” she said, squeezing my arm. And, sure enough, through the dining-room window I could see a crowd of tall women with wide, thick torsos massing on the hockey pitch. They were the same big women wielding the curved sticks I’d noticed the first day I arrived. Tory said these big women were phys-ed teachers from the university imported by Miss Ibister to give our first field-hockey team practice for the finals. She didn’t know how she could be expected to holdher own against the likes of them, and neither did I. Not that I knew much about the sport. I’d never played it before and would be watching from the sidelines as Miss Ibister’s number-one helper. I couldn’t play sports on account of Alice, so Miss Ibister had cooked up the helper idea as a way of including me.
    I told Tory it was a real shame that enthusiasts like Miss Ibister didn’t know when it was best to leave well enough alone.

11
    Now see here, Mouse, I told myself in Sal’s sternest voice, you have to stop thinking about how you look in your weird shoes. There’s no point cringing around like an old dog who wants to crawl away into the ravine woods and die. It’s true you have a poor excuse for a body, but someday Morley will realize how much you have suffered and make it up to you. So hang in there the best you can. Never mind that it’s October in Madoc’s Landing, your favourite time in the whole world. Cut up the oranges for the players and pretend you’re interested in this dumb sport.
    In front of Miss Ibister and me, the beefy phys-ed women galloped up and down the pitch, their sticks slashing the air left and right but never raised quite high enough to get a foul. Just as Tory said, our girls looked reedy and small in comparison, even though most of our players were chunky, with big muscular thighs like Miss Ibister.
    Behind us, on the embankment, the sporty girls jumped up and down, shouting “Go B.C.! Go!” A bunch of day girls sat in an exclusive group on the grassy hill sneaking looks at Lewis. He didn’t give the silly whispering things so much as a glance as he lounged against the hockey shed, his peaked hunting cap twisted on backwards.
    Now, suddenly, our team was in the other team’s end zone, and even the day girls jumped to their feet, shrieking their heads off.I guessed they were putting on a display for Lewis, because it didn’t sound like their hearts were in it. They knew this was only a girls’ school, not a boys’ school, where sports were practice for the grownup-man’s game of war.
I Am Honestly Not Sure
    Now I need to tendril a little and point out Tory’s place in the hierarchy we lived by at Bath Ladies College. The hierarchy depended on two things: your appearance and where you lived. For instance, the chunky girls ran our clubs and our school teams and the school houses. They were usually boarders, and I am honestly not sure whether they got chunky from the starchy boarders’ diet or whether they were that way in the first place. The pretty girls were mostly day girls, and they were the followers, who did less-important jobs. They had boyfriends, and they didn’t do things to uphold the school reputation like being the first in the crowd to offer a seat on the bus. Only our school leaders and the prefects did that. They knew how to hold up the side, as they said at school.
    Nobody said it out loud—it was just understood—that Tory was a pretty girl who would never make a prefect. Not only was her tunic a mess, but she wore silver keepers in her pierced ears, and when Miss Phillips told her jewelry was against school rules, Tory argued that she had to wear them or else the holes would grow back in. And she wasn’t responsible: she left old apple cores in her underwear drawer and was always losing her brown homework