Prozac-free, with occasional Vicodin to help me eat, I was returned to school.
I have files a few inches thick, each off-center page reproduced from the scanned originals, that record my passage from place to place, opening my mouth in the hope that someone would see.
Perhaps I was just being dramatic. This is what my father would have said, and it’s not wrong: I wanted the injury to speak for itself. I thought it was pretty damn dramatic, in fact. What happened in the boys’ room seemed to me both monolithic and so obvious as not to require revelation, like a compound fracture or a dangling eyeball, the sort of thing that makes someone wince and say, “Oh, shit, okay, don’t move, I’ll call someone right away.”
And no one saw.
That feeling was not limited to my throat. Watching myself troop up and down stairwells, changing for soccer and then changing again into a dress for Seated Meal, racing across high stone bridges before the chapel bells rang, I thought, Can’t you all see this girl is ruined? Isn’t anyone catching this?
The boys saw, of course. But everywhere else, I was waiting for it to be revealed. I had been waiting to be discovered since the moment I left their room, when I walked back as slowly as I could. Beneath how many streetlights did I linger?
In the boys’ room, I had been unwilling to get caught and give up my perfect record and all I had achieved at school. Moments later, back on the path, I’d made a new bargain: I’d leave school altogether, as long as I never had to say what had just happened to me.
My plan was to be found by a security guard out of my dorm after hours and brought, as I would be, before a Disciplinary Committee (the dreaded “D.C.”), which I would politely but firmly refuse to address. The committee was run by a chemistry teacher and lacrosse coach with a military bearing and a theatrical nickname, “The Rock.” He’d expel me, and still I’d say nothing. It was Bartleby’s defense, of Bartleby the Scrivener: I’d simply decline to participate in the world. I would prefer not to, I’d say, and they would throw up their hands and tell my parents to book a plane ticket, none of us the wiser. There were fine high schools in Chicago.
I make no claims for the logic of my intended rescue. What I find remarkable is that I set up an encounter of this shape, in which I would be apprehended by a guard, a man in power in a place where I did not belong, and be forced to give something up—in this case, an explanation for what I was doing out after hours—as a means to my own release. I intended this to happen immediately after leaving a dark room in which exactly this sort of transaction had taken place.
It did not once occur to me to seek my own remedy: to call someone or knock on a midnight door. I believed in rescue only if it was forced upon me, and only if I did not say what was true.
When the security guards did not find me, I turned to doctors and nurses, and opened my mouth wide so they would force the telling out of me.
But even fulminant viral disease failed to do the job. I thought, for years, Because I could not stop to tell, the telling kindly stopped for me. What was left, if not the bleeding throat? I would have no choice but to fall apart.
4January 1990, Fourth Form
I had returned to St. Paul’s in January of my fourth-form year on a tear. Having solved what I believed was wrong with me—my early-teen expression of clinical depression—I was a girl mightily fortified, if in placebo power alone, by the powerful new drug Prozac. In his limo on the way back from the airport, Stewart asked me how the ponies were doing in old Lake Forest. “Fantastic,” I replied. “Whinnying like champs.” As we drove up onto the frozen school grounds, Gaby emerged from her hair and said, “Hey.”
“Yeah?”
“I like to do this thing. Every time I come back, I think that the first person I see will dictate how the next stretch of school will go. So, like, if it’s someone I love, I’m going to have a great term. And if it’s someone hein, it’s going to suck. People you travel with don’t count. So, okay: Go.”
She turned intently to look out her window, and I turned to mine. It was too cold for students to be gathering on the lawns. I let my eyes move lightly along the grounds and rolled in my mind that word hein: it was campus slang, short for heinous, and a worse insult than the complete word would have been. Hein things were buzzkills, or bks, and if something was really hein, it might not only k your b but actually become a bad vid, an experience that kept going for some time. Hein was an insider’s word, a true Paulie term. Gaby had tossed it at me like something she’d borrowed and was giving back. Easy as that.
The first person I saw was a fifth former named Leighton Huhne. He was very tall, ursine, with a surprisingly childlike face and bowl-cut hair. I didn’t know him at all, but he ambled along in a friendly enough way, and he mostly hung out with the buddies, the group of boys who were still huffing the fumes of the Beats like old cigarettes their dads had left unfinished long ago. The walls of their rooms were crosshatched with wooden cases for their hundreds of bootlegged Grateful Dead cassettes—illustrated, usually when high, with colored-pencil spirals, bears, and dancing skeletons. The buddies’ speech was slowed and their hair often unwashed, and they wore
