“But nobody saw that!” said Brooke, pointing. “Nobody ever saw that!”
“Christ,” said Kent. He squinted at the water. “That thing’s probably thirty years old.”
I got up and started limping toward the shore. The dock was short but splintery and uneven. I was starting to feel faint but knew I was fine. I would be fine. It was just startling, and it stung.
I was aware of people pounding up around me, and others coming down to meet us at the shore. Someone very tall wrapped a towel around my shoulders and then scooped me up like I was a child.
“Got her,” he said.
“Take her to the infirmary.”
“Take her quick.”
I didn’t need to be carried, but it wasn’t a bad idea. I closed my eyes. My leg really was burning. Behind me I heard the boys strategizing how they would hoist the bike from the bottom.
“The thing was rusty,” someone said.
“It’s not safe.”
“Go get Security.”
“Go get her adviser.”
“Does she need an ambulance?”
The infirmary happened to be just up the hill from the shore where we’d been swimming. The student carrying me was huffing hard as he carried me over the grass and onto the short stretch of road to the infirmary door. Someone else had gone ahead, so a nurse met us there.
“Thank you,” she said. I was set down, and she guided my arm across her shoulders. “Come on in now. Thank you, all of you. Thank you.”
My towel was soaked with blood. She gathered up new towels for me to sit on, and pressed another on my leg. In a few moments the bleeding slowed.
“You could take a stitch or two here,” she said, pointing to the top of my thigh, “but it’s not necessary. How do you feel about just waiting?”
I didn’t want someone stitching me in the place where she pointed. I shivered. My suit was puckering, and I smelled the froggy musk of the pond on my skin and in my hair. “I’d just like to get clean and dressed.”
The nurse had me lie back with gauze pressed to my thigh, and she covered me with a blanket. I watched the ceiling: white, tacky. I considered how it was only ever observed by sick people, and wondered if surfaces absorbed the aches of those who studied them. This ceiling deserved some sun. I deserved some sun.
A doctor came in and lifted the blanket, dabbing gauze along the length of the cut.
“Found something special, did you?”
I didn’t answer this.
He’d checked my health file. My tetanus shot was up to date. The bleeding was slowing. “I think you’re going to be just fine.”
I thanked him.
I wondered where Shep was, whether he would have helped me up to the infirmary and then back to my room. I was in a swimsuit, after all. How would that feel? What would he think?
But he was with his fellow sixth formers somewhere, and my friends appeared in a cluster at the door—wet-haired and eager—asking after me, peering around the room.
It was a fearsome bandage I sported for the last week or so of fourth-form year. Everyone heard about the bicycle. I was congratulated for hitting the jackpot, mocked for aiming for underwater hardware. I was secretly proud. A visible wound counted for something.
I raised twin singeing currents down the tops of my thighs by replaying in my head the swan dive, the graceful arc, the slice. I remembered how I’d stood, in my bathing suit, alone on the end of the dock like it was a ship, with all of those students behind me and the pond and the forests in front of me, and gone off those boards with summer on my shoulders and pride in my chest.
I did nothing I hadn’t seen or known a zillion other students to do. As I had with Shep, when Ms. Shay came through the door. I was straining to burst into this place, into life at St. Paul’s. Look at how sophisticated and bright and beautiful they all were, we all were. How lucky. How fated. How good! I felt I measured each leap and made it fairly.
Not you, replied the school. Not you.
I did not win the Ferguson Scholarship. After Ms. Shay caught us, Shep never kissed me again. I watched him walk with his class down the chapel lawn to graduate. In the hugging, tearful scrum that followed, he embraced me, and I held very still so I could hear and feel the extra attention I hoped he’d pay me. But he released me and moved on. I haven’t seen him since.
Why would I? We had not belonged to each other, we’d belonged to the school. There was majesty in the chapel soaring over us, in the valediction of the departing class. Majesty on the green June lawns. Majesty in rising up to the next year. This was both the glory and the slap of the place: take it or leave it—the school, like time, did not care. It continued on. Yours to decide what to love, or if, or how.
5Summer 1990
My father insisted that I learn to drive on a manual transmission automobile. That’s how he said it, and not stick shift. He said it was important for safety reasons, because what if someone needed to be taken to a hospital, and the only car around was a manual?
Mom said, “Yes, or if her date is too drunk to take her home.”
“Right.” Dad turned to me. “Then you just take the wheel.”
When they spoke like this, I tried to imagine the shared history that informed their dire scenarios. Who’d been drunk? Who needed a hospital? They’d met when they were seventeen and twenty-one and married at nineteen and twenty-three. Their wedding portrait, silver-framed on the bookshelf, showed an impossibly young Mom,
