Copyright © 2020 by Lacy Crawford
Cover design by Lucy Kim
Cover © Pari Dukovic / Trunk Archives
Author photograph by Camille Quartz
Cover copyright © 2020 Hachette Book Group
Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group
1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104
littlebrown.com
twitter.com/littlebrown
facebook.com/littlebrownandcompany
First Edition: July 2020
Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to hachettespeakersbureau.com or call (866) 376-6591.
ISBN 978-0-316-49154-9
LCCN 2019947036
E3-20200615-DA-ORI
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Author’s Note
Notes on a Silencing
1: October 1990, Fifth Form
2: Fall 1989, Fourth Form
3: Fall 1990, Fifth Form
4: January 1990, Fourth Form
5: Summer 1990
6: Fall 1990, Fifth Form
7: October 1990, Fifth Form
8: Spring 1991, Fifth Form
9: Summer 1991
10: Fall 1991, Sixth Form
11: Alumna, SPS Form of 1992
12: Investigation, 2016
13: Summer 2018
14: September 2018
15
Discover More
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Lacy Crawford
For girls on the stairs
and for S, N, and T
Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more.
Tap here to learn more.
I told you I wanted to live in a world in which the antidote to shame is not honor, but honesty.
Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts
Author’s Note
This is, among other things, a story of slander, of how an institution slandered a teenage girl to coerce her into silence. To survive, the story of slander must resonate. An entire community is therefore implicated, and also burdened. I believe this is especially true for a school. We were young. The institution was always the greater power.
Most names and identifying details have been changed, particularly those belonging to my schoolmates.
Notes on a Silencing
1October 1990, Fifth Form
One evening around eleven o’clock, a young man called a girl on the phone. This was a few decades ago, and they were students at a boarding school, so he called the pay phone in her dorm from the pay phone in his. Someone answered and pounded up three flights of stairs to knock on the girl’s door. She was not expecting the call. He was a senior—a grade ahead, but a couple of years older—and he was upset. Crying, she thought, but it was hard to tell, because she barely knew him. He said something about his mom, swallowing his words. He wanted the girl’s help. Please.
She knew the senior because she had helped his friends in math class. He’d joked in the hall to her once that maybe she could help him sometime. It had been a surprise that he’d sent his attention her way, and this phone call was a bigger surprise. Something must have happened, she reasoned. Something very bad.
She had no roommate that year and lived across campus from her friends (an unfortunate turn of the school housing lottery). Her parents were a thousand miles west. It will tell you something about her naivete, and maybe her character, that to her the strange specificity of the senior’s request—for her help, and no one else’s—is what made his summons feel important, and true.
School rules forbade leaving the dorm at that hour, but she knew, as they all did, how to let the back door close without rattling the latch. She skirted pools of lamplight where campus paths crossed. His room was in shadow. He pulled her up through the window. She landed, in his hands, on a mattress, and she felt and then dismissed surprise—beds could sit beneath windows, of course, there was nothing wrong with that.
His roommate was on the bed too. She didn’t know the roommate at all.
Neither of them had shirts on. Neither of them, she saw, as her eyes adjusted, had pants on.
She said, “What’s wrong?”
They shushed her and gestured toward the wall. Each student dormitory incorporated at least one faculty apartment, where the head of the dorm lived, sometimes with a family. Mr. B.’s apartment was right there, they warned. Her voice through the wall would bring him in, blazing.
He would catch her (she realized) after hours in a male dorm with two undressed seniors on a bed.
Suspension. Shame. Her parents’ shame. (College!)
There was a moment while she waited for the one who had called to tell her how she could help him. He pressed her down. When his roommate did this too, she understood that she could not lift these men and would have to purchase her release a different way.
Four hands on her, she said, “Just don’t have sex with me.”
Instead they took turns laying their hips across her face. Their cocks penetrated her throat past the pharynx and poked the soft back of her esophagus, so she had to concentrate to breathe. The repeated laryngeal spasms in her throat—the gag reflex—caused her throat to narrow and grip their dicks rhythmically.
Someone unbuttoned her jeans and stuck his fingers inside her.
When they were finished, she climbed out the window and walked back to her own dorm, keeping to campus roads this time. There were two security guards who patrolled the grounds in a white Jeep. The kids called them Murph and Sarge, and they saw everything. But they did not see her.
She found the door as she’d left it, gently ajar.
After a long shower, she slept.
This happened in the fall of my junior year in high school, when I was, as we said—using the English terms—a fifth former at St. Paul’s School in Concord,
