“Oh my God,” Maddy said, “there’s Brophy.” The fifth-form hockey player she loved was everywhere, I thought, but seeing him was always a shock to her.
Beside Declan Brophy sat the famous grandson of a famous actor, self-satisfied and, if you were into cherubic looks, devastating, with blond curls at his temples. He was the Luke Skywalker to Knox Courtland’s Han Solo, and we were split over which was the hotter guy. Both played in bands—the famous grandson, who was also in choir with me, singing lead vocals and Knox, silent and brooding, on guitar.
“What about you, Lacy-o?” asked Caroline softly. “If you could have anyone.”
I looked around. It was delicious to picture these boys singing or playing the guitar to me. It was also silly, a fairy tale, and not only because I would not have risen to their attention. I did not yet know even how to imagine a relationship with a boy. I didn’t consider them individuals who had things to offer that I might share—conversation, say, or experiences we might have in common. I could think only of transactions: what it would feel like to be adored by one of them, and how that would elevate me at the school and keep me safe. Also what they would expect from me in return. The crushes I nursed were dalliances of fantasy that left untouched my real fear of intimacy, in whatever forms it would eventually take.
“I just don’t want my name to end up in here,” I told my friends, pointing at the name panels along the walls. “It’s depressing. I just really don’t want to spend eternity in Lower.”
I was spared further questions by the sight of a third former who had come in to eat alone. Amelia was known as cocky, which meant she was not sufficiently obsequious for a freshman girl. Not only was she willing to eat alone, for example, but she would do so, as a third former, in Lower. She was a knockout. She could barely close her full lips over her white smile, and she flashed that thing at everyone, boys and girls, losers and stars. We watched in silence as Amelia set her tray down, picked up an orange, peeled it with her long fingers, held it at the end of her slender arm, and then commenced to eat it like an apple. Juice ran down her arm and chin. The whole room had fallen silent.
We didn’t know it then, but she’d be Famous Grandson’s girlfriend before long.
“Pardon me while I make my banana into a dick,” said Brooke, holding up her own dessert, and then, with us red-faced and bursting, she did just that.
What I mean to suggest is a kind of hierarchy of attraction that mirrored, in its forms, the ranked dining halls, the successive libraries (old and new) and successive chapels (old and new), the striations of value both earned and unearned that made a star hockey player more important than a star wrestler and a legacy girl more desirable than a girl from town. You could have lined us up on two sides of a dance hall, boys here, girls there, and, after ten good minutes of inspection, predicted most of the couples that formed. (You might have kept some couples separate, thinking they were siblings.) Though increasingly I felt that I would be the last girl on campus ever to have a boyfriend, it was not love that troubled me. I was fascinated by hate. The forms it took at St. Paul’s seemed to offer lessons I imagined were crucial. I did not dare look away. I watched as a black girl, unassimilated and beautiful, walked through the common room to a meal. The uneven pigmentation on her face was striking, but so were her eyes, and altogether she had a calico appearance I found arresting. A white boy her year called out to her from a clutch of boys: “Hey, Sarai!” And she turned, face open to them, to hear him say, “Two-tone went out in the seventies!”
We all—boys and girls—saw that Sarai was gorgeous. If she’d been courted by a different white boy, we might be able to say that the community had its off individuals, as communities do. But of course this did not happen.
If my fear made me cynical, it also made me cold. I looked at a third former eating an orange like it was a burlesque show and made up my mind. That she might have been an artist or a goofball or a kid with this funny old habit with navel oranges, far from home, just fourteen? Never occurred to me.
The name panels on all the walls were of particular interest because I was not entirely sure what my name would say, if and when it ended up on one.
I had been christened Lacy Cahill Crawford. The first name was my great-grandfather’s, and Cahill also was from my father’s side.
But when we’d filled out my formal paperwork for my enrollment at St. Paul’s School, the summer before fourth form, Mom did a curious thing.
“Let’s give you another name,” she said.
I understood that she meant an additional name. Her pen hovered over the lines on the form, red on thick white stock.
“Um, okay.”
“What’s this?” Dad came close. He was eating from a bag of pretzels, and he stood over the table crunching. Mom was seated and held her pen in two fingers in the air, like the former smoker she was, while she thought.
Paperwork, in my family, was always a bit performative. Mom’s handwriting grew large and rounded, almost Gothic. She avoided common abbreviations, even if this meant spelling birth dates into the margins, and pressed hard enough that the pen
