“Next year there’ll be more spaces on varsity,” Shep said. “Then you can kick her ass and it’ll be okay.”
I wished he’d come back and watch.
I told Shep about the Ferguson exams. “That sounds horrendous,” he said, laughing. But I’d loved the essay questions my teachers had drawn up. I wrote about Willa Cather and Manon Lescaut. I worked precalculus problems with the galloping pleasure of new confidence. “You’re a total nerd,” Shep teased.
“Absolutely.”
Shep came up to the third floor to hang out with me until intervis hours were over. My roommate had found friends on the opposite side of campus and was home as little as possible. Shep was careful and anxious, like me. Usually when we were in my room, I sat on my bed with my back to the wall and he sat in my desk chair, alternately chatting with me and making fun of my photographs from home. But this night he sat next to me on my bed, both of us upright. No feet were on the floor, but we dangled them in parallel over the edge of my flowered comforter.
“Maybe you could come visit at Cornell,” he said.
We both knew I wouldn’t. I kissed him. Mint, the feel of his smile on my own mouth.
“Maybe you can come back and visit me here,” I said.
“You’ll have moved on to someone else.”
“And you’ll be dating some college babe.”
“I sure as hell hope so.”
I tried to throw him, using one of the moves he’d taught me. He let me wrestle him down. “Excellent,” he said, patronizing. I was on top of him now, pinning him, and I wasn’t thinking of anything except that at that moment his hand was undoing the sash at the back of my dress, and then I felt his hand on my skin, under my dress—modestly, because he kept my skirt down, reaching his arm up past my waist toward my breasts, as best he could figure out how.
“Do you know this move?” he whispered.
I shook my head no.
His arm was trapped between my skin and my drop-yoked dress, which suited both of us just fine—it was electric but it was limited, a hot wire of touch, just exactly right.
He kissed me again. And at that moment, the door to my room swung open and my adviser, Ms. Shay, was standing there.
We scrambled. Shep jumped to his feet. I gathered my skirt under me.
“I promise we weren’t,” I stuttered. “It wasn’t.” All of the lights were on. We were fully dressed. Already I was forming my defense, and in spite of myself I was beginning to cry.
Ms. Shay looked to Shep. He ducked his head. She said, “You may go.”
Without a word to me, he left.
“You can come talk to me about this when you’re ready,” she told me, and closed the door.
I marched downstairs in a tumble of indignation and terror. My urban friends signed out for weekends to the Cape to have sex all night long! Shyla delivered lingerie at lunchtime mail drop! Everyone knew who was boning whom in the library, the choir stalls, the lower-school woods. And Shep hadn’t even done anything to me! He only ever taught me stupid wrestling throws!
Ms. Shay, my mother said, looked like a Botticelli. Tall and graceful, with a heart-shaped face, a cherub’s red lips, and dark curls held in a loose clip at the nape of her neck. She was married to a novelist we glimpsed only occasionally. Their marriage was foundering, and we intuited this instability from her wide eyes and soft attentions. She fixed me with a look far too forgiving to provide fuel for my self-important defense. I crumpled before her at the door to her apartment.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She was quiet.
“I promise you I have never done anything inappropriate. We have only kissed.”
She nodded.
“He likes to make me do these wrestling moves.”
Her eyebrows went up.
“It’s sort of annoying, actually.”
Now she smiled.
“Lacy,” she said, and I shivered. I hated to hear my name like this. Ms. Shay was the one Dr. Miller had written to about my Prozac. Ms. Shay was the one who monitored how often I walked across the dark road to call home and cry from the pay phone by the gym. She knew how sad and lonely I’d been, how needy I was, and I felt deeply betrayed by a world in which she was the one to catch me when I was finally not desperate, to catch me almost doing something that was nothing compared to what everyone else was up to, but that was everything to me. I felt trapped by my own reckless feelings: too much sadness on the one hand and too much happiness on the other. Either way, it seemed, I was going to have to be reined in by an adult who would look at me this way—head tipped, mouth pursed, arms crossed over her long, lovely sweater.
“It’s almost the end of the year,” she said. I understood exactly. Don’t fuck this up now. She was going to let me go.
“I know.”
“Good.” She looked
