Viola in Reel Life by Adriana Trigiani

winding sidewalk. Sometimes the Prefect Academy is downright pretty. Like now. It’s twilight andall of our campus turns deep blue. The lights from the dorm flicker in the distance like stars. The air is crisp and smells like sweet vanilla.
    I’m lucky that I have most of my classes with Marisol. I think they deliberately put a Brooklyn girl with a Mexican girl for a reason. Diversity. Marisol and I have discussed it.
    Marisol misses Richmond a lot, and her grandmother who lives in Mexico. It’s hard for her as the days get colder. She’s a warm-weather person, which is why it’s so insane that out of all the boarding schools in the world, she picks this one in freezing South Bend, Indiana. I don’t mind winter and I sure don’t mind autumn at all, because it means soon it will be Christmas break, and I can see my parents and my friends and eat sesame noodles until my stomach explodes.
    We bury our hands in our pockets and make our way down the path. “Do you believe in ghosts?” I ask Marisol.
    “I don’t know. Do you?”
    “For sure. My friend Caitlin Pullapilly says there’s a whole pecking order in the spiritual world. They have pictures and everything. She’s Hindu.”
    “Cool.” Marisol shrugs.
    I haven’t thought about ghosts much since that first night when I was looking at the footage and saw the RedLady. It’s a funny thing—when something like that happens, and you can’t explain it, you put it aside in your thoughts and then, as the days go by the memory of it fades and I wonder if it ever happened. Maybe I did make it all up.
    I was so freaked out that first day—it was probably my imagination playing tricks on me. At any rate, I’ve decided I’m not a very spiritual person. I don’t really know about other worlds, times, and places—though I sort of wish that all that stuff were true. If it were, it would mean that time as I know it doesn’t exist, that my mother and father aren’t half a world away, that Tag Nachmanoff really isn’t too old for me, and that the hands on the clock are spinning so fast that I’m already back home at LaGuardia and in my old routine.
    “Can I tell you something?” Marisol pulls her hat down over her ears.
    “Sure.”
    “I hate Shakespeare.”
    “Me too,” I admit. “Why do they teach it?”
    “It’s classic literature.”
    “Who said so?”
    “Everybody. I mean, every school teaches Shakespeare.”
    “Maybe it’s just us.” I shrug.
    Marisol pushes open the door to the dining hall. We are greeted by peals of laughter and loud conversations as pretty much every girl from ninth through twelfth grade is either on the line to pick up their dinner or at the salad bar or already at their tables eating.
    A warm blast from the overhead heater by the entrance warms us as we go in. It’s tetrazzini night and I can see wedges of apple pie for dessert. Yum.
    Marisol and I usually study the forthcoming menus in the online school newsletter as though we are archaeologists on a dig unearthing something wonderful—we discuss it, ruminate, and get excited when the menu lists something we like.
    Marisol hands me an orange tray, and places her own on the ledge, filling it with utensils and a napkin.
    I wave at Suzanne and Romy, who have saved seats for us by the window at what has become our table. It’s so funny. My mother told me it would take exactly two weeks for me to like the place. It’s been almost a month (let’s face it—I’m a hard sell) and I guess boarding school is sort of growing on me. It’s little things, like dinner with my roommates when it’s cold outside, or assembly on Fridays when they have lame speakers and we drive them nuts with questions afterward, or in class, when I’m learning something I know I’ll use in life—these arethe moments when I know I kind of like it here.
    Prefect Academy has turned into a family in a strange way with many moving parts and different points of view. Yet, we crave the familiar and stake out