The The Name of the Star (2 page)

But then there was a hurricane warning, and everyone freaked out, and the airlines wiped the schedule. The hurricane teased everyone and rolled around the Gulf before turning into a rainstorm, but by that point our flight had been canceled and everything was a mess for a few days. Eventually, the airline managed to find one empty seat on a flight to New York, and another empty seat on a flight to London from there. Since I was scheduled to be at Wexford before my parents needed to be in Bristol, I got the seat and went by myself.

Which was fine, actually. It was a long trip—three hours to New York, two hours wandering the airport before taking a six-hour flight to London overnight—but I still liked it. I was awake all night on the flight watching English television and listening to all the English accents on the plane.

I made my way through the duty-free area right after customs, where they try to get you to buy a few last-minute gallons of perfume and crates of cigarettes. There was a man waiting for me just beyond the doors. He had completely white hair and wore a polo shirt with the name
Wexford
stitched on the breast. A shock of white chest hair popped out at the collar, and as I approached him, I caught the distinctive, spicy smell of men's cologne. Lots of cologne.

“Aurora?” he asked.

“Rory,” I corrected him. I never use the name Aurora. It was my great-grandmother's name, and it was dropped on me as kind of a family obligation. Not even my parents use it.

“I'm Mr. Franks. I'll be taking you to Wexford. Let me help you with those.”

I had two incredibly large suitcases, both of which were heavier than I was and were marked with big orange tags that said HEAVY. I needed to bring enough to live for nine months. Nine months in a place that had cold weather. So while I felt justified in bringing these extremely big and heavy bags, I didn't want someone who looked like a grandfather pulling them, but he insisted.

“You picked quite the day to arrive, you did,” he said, grunting as he dragged the suitcases along. “Big news this morning. Some nutter's gone and pulled a Jack the Ripper.”

I figured “pulled a Jack the Ripper” was one of those English expressions I'd need to learn. I'd been studying them online so I wouldn't get confused when people started talking to me about “quid” and “Jammy Dodgers” and things like that. This one had not crossed my electronic path.

“Oh,” I said. “Sure.”

He led me through the crowds of people trying to get into the elevators that took us up to the parking lot. As we left the building and walked into the lot, I felt the first blast of cool breeze. The London air smelled surprisingly clean and fresh, maybe a little metallic. The sky was an even, high gray. For August, it was ridiculously cold, but all around me I saw people in shorts and T-shirts. I was shivering in my jeans and sweatshirt, and I cursed my flip-flops—which some stupid site told me were good to wear for security reasons. No one mentioned they make your feet freeze on the plane and in England, where they mean something different when they say “summer.”

We got to the school van, and Mr. Franks loaded the bags in. I tried to help, I really did, but he just said no, no, no. I was almost certain he was going to have a heart attack, but he survived.

“In you get,” he said. “Door's open.”

I remembered to get in on the left side, which made me feel very clever for someone who hadn't slept in twenty-four hours. Mr. Franks wheezed for a minute once he got into the driver's seat. I cracked my window to release some of the cologne into the wild.

“It's all over the news.” Wheeze, wheeze. “Happened up near the Royal Hospital, right off the Whitechapel Road. Jack the Ripper, of all things. Mind you, tourists love old Jack. Going to cause lots of excitement, this. Wexford's in Jack the Ripper territory.”

He switched on the radio. The news station was on, and I listened as he drove us down the spiral exit ramp.

“. . . thirty-one-year-old Rachel Belanger, a commercial filmmaker with a studio on Whitechapel Road. Authorities say that she was killed in a manner emulating the first Jack the Ripper murder of 1888 . . .
”

Well, at least that cleared up what “pulling a Jack the Ripper” meant.

“. . . body found on Durward Street, just after four this morning. In 1888, Durward Street was called Bucks Row. Last night's victim was found in the same location and position as Mary Ann Nichols, the first Ripper victim, with very similar injuries. Chief Inspector Simon Cole of Scotland Yard gave a brief statement saying that while there were similarities between this murder and the murder of Mary Ann Nichols on August 31, 1888, it is premature to say that this is anything other than a coincidence. For more on this, we go to senior correspondent Lois Carlisle . . .
”

Mr. Franks barely missed the walls as he wove the car down the spiral.

“. . .
Jack the Ripper struck on four conventionally agreed upon dates in 1888: August 31, September 8, the ‘Double Event' of September 30—so called because there were two murders in the space of under an hour—and November 9. No one knows what became of the Ripper or why he stopped on that date . . .
”

“Nasty business,” Mr. Franks said as we reached the exit. “Wexford is right in Jack's old hunting grounds. We're just five minutes from the Whitechapel Road. The Jack the Ripper tours come past all the time. I imagine there'll be twice as many now.”

We took a highway for a while, and then we were suddenly in a populated area—long rows of houses, Indian restaurants, fish-and-chip shops. Then the roads got narrower and more crowded and we had clearly entered the city without my noticing. We wound along the south side of the Thames, then crossed it, all of London stretched around us.

I had seen a picture of Wexford a hundred times or more. I knew the history. Back in the mid-1800s, the East End of London was very poor. Dickens, pickpockets, selling children for bread, that kind of thing. Wexford was built by a charity. They bought all the land around a small square and built an entire complex. They constructed a home for women, a home for men, and a small Gothic revival church—everything necessary to provide food, shelter, and spiritual guidance. All the buildings were attractive, and they put some stone benches and a few trees in the tiny square so there was a pleasant atmosphere. Then they filled the buildings with poor men, women, and children and made them all work fifteen hours a day in the factories and workhouses that they also built around the square.

Somewhere around 1920, someone realized this was all kind of horrible, and the buildings were sold off. Someone had the bright idea that these Gothic and Georgian buildings arranged around a square kind of looked like a school, and bought them. The workhouses became classroom buildings. The church eventually became the refectory. The buildings were all made of brownstone or brick at a time when space in the East End came cheap, so they were large, with big windows and peaks and chimneys silhouetted against the sky.

“This is your building here,” Mr. Franks said as the car bumped along a narrow cobblestone path. It was Hawthorne, the girls' dorm. The word WOMEN was carved in bas-relief over the doorway. Standing right under this, as proof, was a woman. She was short, maybe just five feet tall, but broad. Her face was a deep, flushed red, and she had big hands, hands you'd imagine could make really big meatballs or squeeze the air out of tires. She had a bob haircut that was almost completely square, and was wearing a plaid dress made of hearty wool. Something about her suggested that her leisure activities included wrestling large woodland animals and banging bricks together.

As I got out of the van she called, “Au
ror
a!” in a penetrating voice that could cause a small bird to fall dead out of the sky.

“Call me Claudia,” she boomed. “I'm housemistress of Hawthorne. Welcome to Wexford.”

“Thanks,” I said, my ears still ringing. “But it's Rory.”

“Rory. Of course. Everything all right, then? Good flight?”

“Great, thank you.” I hurried to the back of the van and tried to get to the bags before Mr. Franks broke his spine in three places hauling them out. Flip-flops and cobblestones do not go well together, however, especially after a rain, when every slight indentation is filled with cold water. My feet were soaked, and I was sliding and stumbling over the stones. Mr. Franks beat me to the back of the car, and grunted as he yanked the bags out.

“Mr. Franks will bring those inside,” Claudia said. “Take them to room twenty-seven, please, Franks.”

“Righto,” he wheezed.

The rain started to patter down lightly as Claudia opened the door, and I entered my new home for the first time.

2

I
WAS IN A FOYER PANELED IN DARK WOOD WITH A mosaic floor. A large banner bearing the words WELCOME BACK TO WEXFORD hung from the inner doorway. A set of winding wooden steps led up to what I guessed were our rooms. On the wall, a large bulletin board was already full of flyers for various sports and theater tryouts.

“Call me Claudia,” Claudia said again. “Come through this way so we can have a chat.”

She led me through a door on the left, into an office. The room had been painted a deep, scholarly shade of maroon, and there was a large Oriental rug on the floor. The walls and shelves were mostly covered in hockey awards, pictures of hockey teams, mounted hockey sticks. Some of the awards had years on them and names of schools, telling me that Claudia was now in her early thirties. This amazed me, since she looked older than Granny Deveaux. Though to be fair, Granny Deveaux had permanent makeup tattooed on her eyes and bought her jeans in the juniors department at Kohl's. Whereas Claudia, it was clear, didn't mind getting out there in the elements and perpetrating a little physical violence in the name of sport. I could easily picture her running over a muddy hillside, field hockey stick raised, screaming. In fact, I was pretty sure that was what I was going to see in my dreams tonight.

“These are my rooms,” she said, indicating the office and whatever splendors lay behind the door by the window. “I live here, and I am available at all times for emergencies, and until nine every evening if you just want to chat. Now, let's go through some basics. This year, you are the only student coming from abroad. As you probably know, our system here is different from the one you have at home. Here, students take tests called GCSEs when they are about sixteen . . .”

I did know this. There was no way I could have prepared to come here without knowing this. The GCSEs are individual tests on pretty much every subject you've ever studied, ever. People take between eight and fourteen of these things, depending, I guess, on how much they like taking tests. How you do on your GCSEs determines how you're going to spend your next two years, because when you're seventeen and eighteen, you get to specialize. Wexford was a strange and rare thing: a boarding “sixth-form college”—
college
here meaning “school for seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds.” It was for people who couldn't afford five years in a fancy private school, or hated the school they were in and wanted to live in London. People only attended Wexford for two years, so instead of moving in with a bunch of people who had known each other
forever
, at Wexford, my new fellow students would have been together for a year at most.

“Here, at Wexford,” she went on, “students take four or five subjects each year. They are studying for their A-level exams, which they take at the end of their final year. You are welcome to sit for the A levels if you like, but since you do not require them, we can set up a separate system of grading to send back to America. I see you'll be taking five subjects—English literature, history, French, art history, and further maths. Here is your schedule.”

She passed me a piece of paper with a huge grid on it. The schedule itself didn't have that day-in, day-out sameness I was used to. Instead, I got this bananas spreadsheet that spanned two weeks, full of double periods and free periods.

I stared at this mess and gave up any hope of ever memorizing it.

“Now,” Claudia said, “breakfast is at seven each morning. Classes begin at eight fifteen, with a lunch break at eleven thirty. At two forty-five you change for sport—that's from three to four. Then you shower and have class again from four fifteen until five fifteen. Dinner is from six to seven. Then the evenings are for clubs, or more sport, or work. Of course, we still need to put you into your sport. May I recommend hockey? I am in charge of the girls' hockey team. I think you'd enjoy it.”

This was the part I'd been dreading. I am not a very sporty person. Where I come from, it's too hot to run, and it's generally not encouraged. The joke is, if you see someone running in Bénouville, you run in the same direction, because there's probably something really terrible right behind them. At Wexford,
daily
physical activity was required. My choices were football (a.k.a. soccer, a.k.a. a lot of running outdoors), swimming (no), hockey (by this they meant field, not ice), or netball. I hate all sports, but basketball I at least know something about—and netball was supposed to be the cousin of basketball. You know how girls play softball instead of baseball? Well, netball is the softball version of basketball, if that makes any sense. The ball is softer, and smaller, and white, and some of the rules are different . . . but basically, it's basketball.

“I was thinking netball,” I said.

“I see. Have you ever played hockey before?”

I looked around at the hockey decorations.

“I've never played it. I really only know basketball, so netball—”

“Completely different. We could start you fresh in hockey. How about we just do that now, hmmm?”