Tell Us No Secrets

Adult fiction

"She sent me a Friend request.  Usually I get stupidly excited by one of those--someone out there wants to get in touch.  At my age, anything unexpected that doesn't involve disease or death is a relief.  So unless it's from some random weird person, a Friend request is a plus.

     But when I saw her name I winced."

     The at first unnamed narrator of Siena Sterling's Tell Us No Secrets is seeing a name from her distant past, more specifically from a year in her life she desperately wants to forget, her senior year of high school as a member of the Stonybridge School for Girls class of '70.

      Although Stonybridge, located in the scenic Berkshire Mountains, is a New England prep school, it's definitely not a top tier one.  It's a safety school for the lower achieving daughters of well off families.  

     "You went there if you couldn't get into a school like Madiera or Miss Porter's, or if your mother had gone there and it was a family tradition.  It wasn't a Swiss "finishing school"; we weren't taught manners or how to walk with the right posture, but we weren't supposed to worry about our future careers either.  Careers were for men."

     [Hard as it may be to believe, schools like that were a thing back in the day.  My mother taught English at Garland Junior College, a school with two majors (home economics and art) where students dressed up for supper and parents didn't have to worry because "a ring before spring or your money back."  Seriously.  Of course the ring had to be offered by someone of equal or higher social status.  It would have been the perfect next step for Stonybridge grads.)

     Anyway what it lacks in prestige and academic rigor the school makes up for in traditions, some of them bizarre.  For instance, during Friendship Weekend random pairings of seniors are tied together for two days, able to untie their bonds only to use the toilet.  

     Seniors are allowed to create traditions and teach them to rising juniors without adult oversight.  In their newly created senior smoking lounge two seniors create a new kind of class list.  Each senior can put a star beside her name when she loses her virginity and rate the experience on a one to five scale.  

     "'That's...I mean people won't want to say.'

     'Are you kidding?  Of course they will.  What do you think they're talking about in the dorm right now?  The war?  The cost-of-living index?  Spinoza?'"

     That list will drastically alter the course of the year.  Flashback sequences are narrated from the perspectives of four seniors: Abby the athlete from a proper family, Karen who has book smarts but is clueless when it comes to peers, beautiful Cassidy who was sent to the school after her mother died, and sophisticated Zoey, the daughter of a filmmaker father who never finds enough time for her.  Their lives will be dramatically intertwined during their fateful senior year.

     And only three will live to graduate.

On a purrrsonal note, our last Red Cross blood drive for the school year (Tuesday and Wednesday) was a great success.  The nurses harvested a lot of units.  They were short staffed the first day and donors waited patiently to donate.  They enjoyed the canteen activity I provided.  I'd drawn and cut out hundreds of construction paper flowers.  People wrote things they were proud of or looking forward to in summer.  They wrote some really personal thoughts.  We made a garden on one of the walls.  The next blood drive is in September.  Over the summer I'll collect the materials for donors to make bookmarks for all their studying.  They students I surveyed love that idea.  (Jules)

Don't ask me to donate.  This cat does not like needles.  (Tobago)

A great big shout out goes out to all who participated in the blood drive.

Tobago and Jules Hathaway 

     

     

Sent from my U.S.Cellular© Smartphone