After supper I found my library sofa, occupied it as regally as a duchess until time ran short, and just before eight returned to my room to drop off my books and change clothes. I chose jeans and a turtleneck beneath a wool fisherman’s sweater, blue with a white patterned band across the chest. Over that I zipped my parka to my chin and added a scarf for my ears. I stepped into my trusty duck boots and tucked my gloved hands into my pockets. Shep’s dorm was a seven-minute walk via a shortcut up a lamp-lit, leaf-covered path. The leaves were soft and smelled of earth. I looked like I was going to set lobster traps in the North Atlantic.
“Warm enough?” asked Shep’s hallmate, eyeing me on the stairs.
The boys had their doors propped open with cinder blocks to try to cool their rooms. The campus of St. Paul’s School was heated by an enormous boiler system, housed in what we called “the power plant,” which was forever churning in a dense pocket of trees at one edge of campus. The heat was never turned on before October 1, no matter how chilly the September nights, but from that day, each room’s radiator sounded a whole kitchen’s worth of pots and pans. They hissed and shrieked. We fiddled with knobs and got scalded, or ended up with a dud and had to sleep in a parka. No matter where you were on the school grounds, flung as it was across ponds and fields, the pressure of those boiler pipes ran beneath and around you. It kept us alive in the winter; it was also, in its strange animation, vaguely sinister. After a freeze you could make out where the pipes were buried because green strips of grass persisted, lush as July, shrugging off snow.
Someone on Shep’s hall had raised the window at the far end of their corridor as high as it would go. There was no screen. This was the third floor of a building atop a hill. If I started from a run, I could have launched myself halfway across campus. The open window did not seem legal. Condensation dripped onto the sill.
“I’m fine,” I said.
Shep, appearing in his doorway, laughed. “Come in.”
Other friends were in his room: one boy was on the sofa, and one sat astride a desk chair. I recognized the student named Juan, a baseball player. I did not know the other boy at all. Shep said, “Have a seat.”
It was either the bed or the sofa, next to the boy I didn’t know. Hands still in pockets, parka still zipped, I perched on the open end of the couch. Shep leaned against his desk, his legs crossed at the ankles in front of him. He had a habit of bending together paper clips and twining them with his fingers, and he did this while we talked.
What did we talk about? I have no idea. I was working too hard to understand the shape of this setup: three boys, one girl; three seniors, one fourth former. I had been to boys’ rooms before, but only those of classmates (for study projects or in a group to see guys who dated my friends), and in each case I’d known my role: either be smart and useful or unobtrusive and friendly. I’d let my eyes drift over the boys’ spaces. I studied their foul nests of school-issue sheeting, the absurdly sophisticated components of their competitive stereo systems stacked like the instrument panels of commercial airliners, their posters of Neil Young and Cindy Crawford. I’d tell my little story about the Crawford family reunion in downstate Illinois somewhere, which my dad had been excited about for a while, and how Cindy hadn’t shown up but had been on the list, which meant that she was my cousin, kind of.
Maybe I told this story again to the seniors. I would have wanted to offer them something, and I was anxious not knowing what I was expected to produce. Was I auditioning? Had Shep changed his mind and asked me up so they could make fun of me? But to be alone with Shep would have caused me a different sort of fear.
On this evening, it was simple goodwill that surprised me. These boys, with their open faces and curious grins, their teams and classes and work and college plans, proved to be normal, friendly, bright young men who seemed to occupy the school more honestly than I did, as though I had climbed a flight of stairs and come upon the real students, the ones who knew a St. Paul’s I had not found.
After an hour or so Shep accompanied me back down the hall. We’d left plenty of time for me to walk alone back to my dorm before check-in. The open window sucked cold from the night like a flue. At the bottom of the stairs, he leaned down and kissed me. I felt the hair at my temples dancing, which was from my smiling, or from a breeze. This was no more or less strange than anything else. Benediction could appear out of nowhere at school. It was less common than cruelty, I thought, but every bit as mysterious, and all the sweeter for this.
The only person I told at first was my friend Caroline.
We were all a little bit in love with Caroline, the whole school was. Not just for the heavily lashed blue eyes, tall thin body, and high cheekbones—there was a lot of that at St. Paul’s. Caroline was unassuming and quick to smile, an artist and a Joni Mitchell lover, fond of candles and horoscopes and swishy, colorful, handmade clothes. Then she’d put on black heels for Seated Meal and senior boys would groan when she passed. She wrote her friends casual notes illustrated with cartoons of our latest
