The Encampment

Stephen Davenport

Description

Honored by Kirkus Reviews as one of The Best Indie Books of 2020.

"Davenport is an accomplished stylist with a keen ear for nuanced dialogue; he also has a knack for making serious political points with a light touch that makes them broadly accessible. . . A thoughtful and compelling account of the responsibilities that come with privilege."
--Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

There are only two rules at Miss Oliver's School for Girls that lead to automatic expulsion: stealing, and permitting a male who is not a family member into a dormitory. The head of school's daughter has broken both.

Trouble approaches on a warm September day when Sylvia Perrine Bickham, the head of school's daughter, gives money to a homeless man on the street. Through some prying, she and her friends learn he is a veteran of the Iraq War and probably suffering from post-traumatic stress, so they sneak food and clothing to his lean-to at odd hours of the day and agree to tell no one—not the teachers, and especially not Sylvia's mother, Rachel. But talk of things gone missing from the school is getting louder, and Rachel knows something is up. More importantly, winter is coming and Sylvia worries the man will freeze if he stays outside. Have they done all they can for him? Have they done enough? What is enough.

Vivid, riveting, and utterly engrossing, The Encampment is the third installment of the Miss Oliver's School for Girls series.

Sujets

• Univers ado
• Classiques ados
• Fiction ado
• Prep School
• Boarding School
• PTSD
• Young Adult Fiction
• Nueva Inglaterra
• Iraq War
• Posttraumatic stress disorder
• School
• Education
• New England
• Trouble de stress post-traumatique
• Connecticut

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 09 juin 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781513263083
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

THE
ENCAMPMENT
THE
ENCAMPMENT
A Novel
STEPHEN DAVENPORT
Text 2020 by Stephen Davenport
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real people or schools of any of the characters or schools in the novel is coincidental and unintended.
Cover image: Lifestyle Travel Photo/ Shutterstock.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Davenport, Stephen, author.
Title: The encampment / by Stephen Davenport.
Description: [Berkeley, CA] : West Margin Press, [2020.] Series: Miss Oliver s school for girls ; book 3 Summary: There are only two rules at Miss Oliver s School for Girls that lead to automatic expulsion: stealing, and permitting a male who is not a family member into a dormitory. The head of school s daughter breaks both when she meets a homeless man on the street. The third installment of the Miss Oliver s School for Girls series, The Encampment follows high school senior Sylvia Bickham as learns to navigate between the rules of society and the morals of the conscience -Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020004225 (print) LCCN 2020004226 (ebook) ISBN 9781513263069 (paperback) ISBN 9781513263076 (hardback) ISBN 9781513263083 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS3604.A9427 E53 2020 (print) LCC PS3604.A9427 (ebook) DDC 813/.6-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020004225
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020004226
Published by West Margin Press

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T O THE MEMORY OF MY PARENTS, S TEPHEN AND M ARIANA , AND MY BROTHER H ENRY .
Yes, we ll gather at the river ,
The beautiful, the beautiful river .
-Robert Lowry, traditional hymn
CONTENTS
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
ONE
O n a Saturday afternoon early in September, Rachel Bickham, Head of School, was in her office alone, eyes closed, sitting perfectly still, emptying her brain of details so that she could think. What had happened in the last week she needed to consider more, what left unsaid that should be said, and to whom? What part of the Big Plan should she pay attention to this coming week, what shoe was about to drop, what potential blessing should she recognize and cultivate? For all nineteen years that she had been the head of school, she had devoted an hour every weekend to this, a meditation akin to prayer she never had time for during the week because she led by walking around. She had always emerged from the hour energized and centered.
But this afternoon, her mind wandered to a dark place of dissatisfaction. She felt an emptiness, a hollowing out of herself, that had become familiar, and the whispered question: Is this all?
She opened her eyes, giving up her meditation-maybe she d try again tomorrow-and glanced out through the big French doors at the huge copper beech tree that stood just yards away, a motherly presence. For years, this ancient tree, under which Pequot Tribespeople had once sat to catch its shade, had radiated its calm to her. And there also, as always to reassure her, was the school she was in charge of that she wore around herself like a coat. This view of the tree and, beyond it, the curved row of white clapboard buildings, graceful in their Grecian proportions, mildly Puritanical in their affect, and the green lawns beyond them sweeping down to the woods and then the Connecticut River, had always said to her: You were born for this .
Relieved again, Rachel stood from her desk, opened the French doors. The scent of fresh-cut grass rushed in. Girls were walking on the paths. Someone had parked a shiny green bicycle on the top steps of the library.
Just then, her daughter, Sylvia, and Sylvia s best friend and roommate, Elizabeth Cochrane, emerged from their dormitory. They walked past the music building where a big golden retriever raised her head and thumped her tail on the grass in greeting. Amazed as always by how different the two girls were from each other, Rachel watched them continue side by side toward the driveway that led to the front gate.
It was Saturday afternoon and they were free to go-but only as far away as the village of Fieldington, a very safe place. Rachel had a sudden desire to join them, as if to experience the world with them, seeing in it what they saw, would also calm her emptiness; but of course that was her imagination being overactive, and besides, she didn t think she should intrude. Instead, she watched them until, like ships slipping over the horizon, they were out of sight.
TWO
S ylvia Perrine Bickham loved being part of the community of Miss Oliver s School for Girls in which each person was embraced. She admired the school s mission, the empowerment of young women, was even inspired by the concept once in a while, and she had felt the blessing of the school s affectionate inclusion at the core of her being for as long as she could remember. Other girls, the ones who were lucky anyway, had a mom and a dad and maybe several siblings. But Sylvia, from infancy, had had a whole community whose values, articulated over and over in print, in meetings, in classes, and on the athletic fields, included compassion, empathy, and kindness to others.
And she was keenly aware of how special it was that the campus stood on ground once occupied by a village of the Pequot People. Their artifacts, left behind in their defeat, were prominently displayed in the Peggy Plummer Library as evidence of how various the ways of humans are. For as long as she could remember, Sylvia had imbibed these ideas, and she had been free to roam over this expansive campus where everybody stopped to say hello to her.
And on top of that, her mom was the boss.
But once she became a ninth grade student and official member of the community, she had begun vaguely to sense that she didn t really belong and that, if she were not the head of school s daughter, she might not have been accepted. She, who would get into one college or another because she was a gifted athlete, sometimes actually felt sorry for friends who stayed up all night studying subjects that were not intrinsically interesting to them and whose contents were doomed to be forgotten, just so they could get into a college which, in Sylvia s not entirely inaccurate opinion, was deemed to be one of the best only because enough people declared it to be. It was not satisfying to study hard to prepare for a future life whose purpose was still unknown. She needed a purpose for her present life, the one she was living right now .
That Elizabeth Cochrane, her best friend, already did know her purpose, that she knew exactly what she would become, is one reason why Sylvia had gravitated toward her, why she had wanted to room with her, to be her sister and confidant. Elizabeth, who would apply for early admission to MIT, planned, and expected, to be first a widely read author of highly literary science fiction, and then, using her fame as a platform, to be president of the United States. That she said this with a perfectly straight face and no one ever laughed was another thing about the school that Sylvia loved.
S YLVIA AND E LIZABETH walked straight to Rose s Creamery, praised for miles around Fieldington for being the first to serve only organic fare and where you can still trace the development of the automobile just by looking at the black-and-white photos on the walls. Elizabeth ordered an ice cream cone with a double scoop of rocky road and cherries on top. Just as Rose handed it to her, Sylvia blurted, You really gonna eat all of that?
So, Rose, whaddaya think? Should I? Elizabeth said, her sarcastic tone close to an act of aggression. She crossed her feet, bulky ankles touching, and assumed a pose, like a model on a runway, slurping at her cone and somehow making herself look even bigger and rounder as she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She then turned around with little mincing steps and, with the hand not holding the cone, gave herself a pat on the rear. I might be just a wee bit too fat here, she admitted, but it s great for sitting down.
Rose looked at her blankly.
Elizabeth turned to Sylvia, miming surprise. Rose has no sense of humor at all!
Rose sniffed, glanced impatiently past the two girls at the lengthening line of waiting patrons, then turned back to Sylvia. And you? What will you have?
It ll be itty-bitty, whatever it is, Elizabeth said.
Sylvia ordered a double scoop of chocolate. She had planned to order something low calorie, but she didn t want Elizabeth to be right. She already regretted not keeping her mouth shut. Elizabeth felt far more vulnerable about her bigness than she let on. She had come to Rose s because she was hungry. Sylvia had come because she was bored.
For Elizabeth, her life at Miss Oliver s School for Girls was much too new and fresh and liberating to ever be boring. She had been plucked out of her little town in Oklahoma because of her smarts by an alert alumna on the lookout for special talent to enrich the student composition of her beloved alma mater. The alumna had intended to participate in a rally for a woman who was trying to unseat a senator who had been in office for several terms. But the alumna got the dates wrong and discovered she was actually at a rall