The Cave Dwellers, Christina McDowell [ap literature book list .TXT] 📗

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I. Colbert I. King, “The Removal of Confederate Windows at National Cathedral Was No Cause for Celebration,”Washington Post, September 8, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-removal-of-confederate-windows-at-national-cathedral-was-no-cause-for-celebration/2017/09/08/0d75b59e-9406-11e7-8754-d478688d23b4_story.html.

II. Washington National Cathedral website, https://cathedral.org/press-room/cathedral-to-explore-racial-justice-through-public-forums-arts-worship/.

CHAPTER TEN

St. Peter’s Academy is a college preparatory school planted like a Gothic dome on the highest hill in Washington. Shadows of the National Cathedral—looming towers, flying buttresses, gargoyles, and stained glass windows of dead Confederates and Jesus, Mary, and Joseph—cloak the brick plantation like a holy veil.

The faint synchronized rhythm of young aristocratic blood flows through the reverend, his eyes closed as he begins the Lord’s Prayer:

“Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.”

The reverend’s eyes open. He raises his hands. “May the Lord be with you.”

“And also with you.”

Completely unaware of the way in which they’re being groomed, institutionalized, these children—stuffed with American fairy tales, verses of scripture capturing the pathways of their brains; funneled into the superior life of ambassadors, CIA agents, financiers, Kennedys, lobbyists, congressmen, presidents, for the only choice they have is up, up, up! The children who will never grow up outside of make-believe, invisible boundaries keeping them separate and apart from the inevitable leaking whispers of failure—deaf to the screams of financial suffocation.

The students of St. Peter’s Academy scurry out of the nave in dramatic heaps of tears at the news of the deaths of Audrey Banks and her family. They are devastated. So much so that they can’t help but talk about how it’s affecting them. Particularly the popular girls, they’re leaning their heads on their crushes like perpetual twists and turns of such adversity, giving the boys total hard-ons.

Before third period begins, Bunny sits on a stone neoclassical swan garden bench in a secluded section of Bishop’s Garden, home to student recess where virginity is lost and drugs are sold just beyond the cathedral. Ivy trails up and around like a snake behind her head; green moss covers what looks to be some kind of cenotaph. She lights a cigarette. Over her uniform—green plaid skirt, navy collared shirt with the school’s crest and motto, Fidelitas et Integritas (Fidelity and Integrity), sewn on the pocket—she’s wrapped in a red hooded jacket lined in Burberry check. She hears the clip-clop of dress shoes coming down the stone steps. Stan Stopinksi, the Russian ambassador’s son, wild, gregarious, and a ladies’ man. Bunny, Billy, and their friends nicknamed him Putin 2.0 for his eerily similar look to a young Vladimir Putin: Aryan blond hair parted to the side, plump lips, round tip of the nose, deep eye sockets slanted upward, and high cheekbones. All of seventeen, he has an Eastern European swagger that none of the other boys have and a sharp wit. A polka-dotted silk handkerchief is tucked in the pocket of his navy blazer.

Stan calls Bunny Elizabeth (Lizbet) because he decided freshman year when he arrived in the States that the name Bunny was a joke played on him by his other classmates, “ridiculous” (“vidiculus”), he would say, swatting them away like flies. Today, years later, he still calls her Lizbet, though the Russian accent has waned into a more interesting transatlantic one, perhaps with more flare. Stan wanted to know who this strikingly interesting-looking girl was, with her strawberry blond hair, translucent skin, wide eyes, and fair freckles, her skinny legs and bony knees. There was an emotional curiosity at the root of her conversations, sprinkled with a sarcastic sense of humor but not annoyingly so. When Stan saw she belonged to Billy Montgomery, the musician, the academic, the gorgeous jock—the kid who could do anything right and nothing wrong—he backed off. Instead, he befriended them, and the trio inevitably became best friends because Stan was fun and different and mischievous and supplied the vodka at parties. Billy and Bunny inducted him into their circle of exclusivity almost instantaneously.

But Bunny hadn’t always been part of an exclusive circle at school. It wasn’t until Bunny started dating Billy that the popular girls, like Audrey Banks, noticed her. Though Audrey and Bunny had known each other since nursery school—some of Bunny’s happiest memories: playing with Audrey’s potbelly pig in the back garden when the Bankses once lived in Georgetown, and their matching Corolle Mon Premier Poupon Bebes when they played house together. Yet once they reached middle school and Audrey began shaving her legs, she formed a little “cashmere mafia,” the beginning of her clique of cool girls who bragged about their periods before anyone else, leaving Bunny behind in her prepuberty existence. It was the summer before junior year when Bunny’s legs grew long, her breasts filled out, her wit became charming and funny, a new kind of confidence marked the way she walked down the hallway of lockers, and Billy was the first to notice her—to fall in love with her. And all the popular girls followed, including Audrey. But Bunny would always remain skeptical of the friendship—of the way Audrey circled back to her.

Stan sits next to Bunny, who stares into a maze of headless pink roses.

“Wanna know how she died?” Bunny asks, setting the tone for gossip more than grief. “She was chopped up, then they burned—”

“No, no, no, Lizbet, I can’t…” Stan shakes his head to extinguish the gruesome thoughts; he grabs the cigarettes from Bunny’s hand, pulls one out for himself. “Who would do something like that?”

“The reverend didn’t say it in there, he didn’t say how they died. I googled it during the Lord’s Prayer.” Bunny stabs her cigarette against