The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [60]
Rose’s head drooped like a thirsty flower, and a fat teardrop landed on the satin. Bean reached down and yanked Rose up by the hand.
“Be serious,” Bean said. “Is this really what you want to look like?” She flicked an angry finger at a cheerfully juvenile bow on Rose’s sleeve. “This is kindergarten crap.”
“I want to look like a bride,” Rose said. “I’m supposed to look like a bride.”
“Is this seriously about the dress?” Bean asked. “Because this is a whole lot of drama over an overpriced pile of cheap fabric.” She picked up the price tag under Rose’s arm and shook her head.
“It’s not the dress,” Rose said, flopping down onto the box again. “It’s everything. Everything’s just”—she flailed her arms—“out of control.”
“You don’t have to get married,” Cordy said. Seeing Rose in that white dress had made her feel uncomfortable and sad. She didn’t know if it was the idea of the wedding, or the marriage, or the dress itself. She had not even the slightest urge to see herself up on that platform. Ever.
Rose and Bean looked at her as though she were a noxious substance we had just stepped in. This was a look best performed as a duet, and Cordy cringed, just as she had the million times we had delivered it in concert before. How was it possible, all these years and experiences later, that no one could wound us like the others?
“Well, you don’t,” Cordy said sulkily. She retreated into a shell of frayed hems and sloppy hair.
“Hi, Cordy,” Bean said. “Not helping.” She turned to Rose, took her hands, lifted her up. “Take off the damn marshmallow and let’s go see Mom. We’ll go somewhere else and find you a dress that doesn’t want to eat Manhattan.”
“If you make me look weird, I swear I’ll disown you,” Rose said. Her hands felt slippery and warm inside Bean’s cool fingers.
Bean rolled her eyes. “What a tragedy that would be.” She stripped Rose out of the gown with deft, impatient fingers, and shooed her back into the curtained dressing room.
When Rose was in second grade at the local public school, one of the professors at Barney had an idea. Why, given the amount of pedagogical talent and intellectual creativity at the college, did they all send their children to such traditional schools?
A consortium of professors bought one of the old mansions near the campus, wide wraparound porch, spreading green lawn, three floors and a basement smelling of dirt and broken jars of jam. They moved furniture into some of the rooms, but left others empty, so footsteps echoed emptily against the walls. The kitchen was filled with lab equipment, the bedrooms with groaning bookshelves, and the parlor and sitting room were pressed into service as a tiny auditorium. And with this completely haphazard preparation, the Barnwell Cooperative School was born.
For Rose, who had loved every minute she had spent at what she called her real school, Coop, as it came to be known, was a complete culture shock. She had loved everything the professors had so denigrated—the uniformity of the desks, the tidy, old-fashioned cloakroom, the inflexible, predictable schedule, the tight single-file lines on the way to the cafeteria.
Coop had no such things. We held classes, certainly, but they tended to take place on the whim of the professors who taught them; one week Monday might begin with biology, followed immediately by theater and then sculpture, and the next week Monday might have no classes at all. The idea behind the school was that the students would be captains of their own academic destiny, mastering all subjects through their pursuit of their interests, guided and informed by the great academic minds of the Barnwell faculty. Such a system wasn’t an entirely new idea, but decades passed before Coop’s philosophy was given a name: unschooling (which all of us found particularly objectionable).
Rose also blames this haphazard educational system for our flightiness, but we wouldn’t have had it any other way. When the other students at college talked about locker combinations, visits to the principal’s office, and Scantron forms, Cordy would mentally drift