The Inseparables Read Online Free Page A

word, or negotiating around basic algebraic functions and maintaining the ability to do things like find Iraq on a map without losing one’s train of thought. Cellular technology apparently interfered with this. Screens equaled distraction, as they put it, and distraction equaled a future of subpar earning potential and disappointing contributions to the alumni fund. Until this week, however, when everything blew up around her, the rule about the phones had gone largely unenforced. Or at least Lydia had thought.
    “The phone’s on my desk. Back at the dorm,” Lydia lied. With everything happening, she was not about to leave her phone around for her roommates to scrutinize. There had already been far too much scrutiny.
    Abernathy took a phone from his jacket pocket. “So you’re saying if I call you right now, your phone won’t ring?”
    “I swear,” Lydia said.
    “I’m just saying: none of this happens without the phone. None of it. Am I right?” He pointed up ahead to the headmistress’s office, which was where they were going. “That’s what the headmistress is going to say. Trust me.”
    Thirty minutes ago she’d been pulled from her Intro to Cinema class, right from the middle of a group discussion about Leni Riefenstahl’s influence on Star Wars and the commodification of fascist symbology. These kinds of discussions, she’d learned, were typical of a place like Hartwell, where everyone was mandated to wear the same gender-neutral uniform—blue slacks, white oxford, brown leather shoes—and where everyone had apparently digested the entire canon of Western civ prior to reaching puberty. For the first time in her life, Lydia fell to the bottom of the class. Abernathy had come to the door right at the soaring, demented crescendo of Triumph of the Will, interrupting the führer’s speech, to announce her name.
    Even before Abernathy ushered her into the school’s spartan, cold disciplinary office, she knew she was being suspended. Walking behind him in the hallway outside her classroom, she saw in his hand the telltale pink file folder that signaled a suspension. At first she met with the dean of students, an older man who sat in front of a window that overlooked the chapel. Abernathy stood at the door, like a prison guard.
    The dean began by telling her how alarmed everyone was. “I’m alarmed,” he told her. “The headmistress is alarmed. We are all very, very alarmed at this.” He paused to allow Lydia the impression that this meant he was serious. “Like I said, we’re all alarmed.”
    She was given only a moment to offer a defense, which she stumbled through.
    “This is not my fault,” she managed. “None of this is my fault.”
    The dean leaned forward across his desk. “But it is you in the picture, isn’t it?”
    When she said, reluctantly, that it was, he opened the pink folder and wrote in it for a few moments. “Abernathy will drive you to talk to the headmistress,” the dean said, looking up. “But before your parents take you home, we think it might benefit you to talk to some of our counselors on staff.” He took off his eyeglasses. He rubbed at his eyes. “We have great people on staff who have experience with these situations.”
    Lydia felt momentarily grateful to hear this, thinking it was a subtle nod to the uproar of this last week—the endless catcalling and bullying. But she was wrong. School administrators, the dean told her, were so alarmed about the existence of her picture that they’d begun to worry that something else was at work aside from what Lydia had already explained was the simple fact that Charlie Perlmutter had asked her for a photograph of her topless, and then eventually a photograph of her topless began to spread around school. Lydia understood all of this to be code for their worry that she was being abused, or had been abused, or that something equally awful or unspeakable had happened to her. “We want to make sure you are okay,” the dean