In the days that followed, I watched the news pass from student to student, like that horror movie where the villain hops from stranger to stranger on a city street, awakening in each civil soul a demon.
I understand. School days were long and exhausting, but the claustrophobic nature of boarding school, hothouse that it is, tends toward ennui: every morning, at breakfast, These people again? The nation was at war in the Persian Gulf. The Berlin Wall was coming down. But we at school knew little of anything, since there was only one television in each dorm’s common room, and it was often broken. In any case we had little time for television. No internet. The only cell phone was a satellite phone the size of a woman’s handbag, owned by the son of a scion, and you had to go to his room during visiting hours to check it out. Nothing much was happening. And even if there had been something of interest to discuss on that night or any other at Seated Meal, how often did you have a prudish junior girl, a strawberry-blond chorister who had never had sex or much of a love life at all, just up and cruise to a senior boy’s room around midnight to suck two cocks in one go? It was good stuff. I’d have been talking about it, too.
Especially good gossip, no matter how outlandish, contains the sense of its own inevitability. How unlikely I was to have become, of a single night, a prep-school porn star! The illogic of my fall made its own case for truth. Stranger things. She just cracked. I wondered, when everyone was so quick to believe what the boys claimed, if this proved that it was my fault. There was something ugly that they had all seen in me, but I had not.
I was young for my class, having entered St. Paul’s as a high school sophomore—a fourth former—aged only fourteen. I’d started my period a few months prior and was still surprised every time it happened. I was freckled. Just barely had the braces off. I had the knees and spindle of a girl.
In my very first week at the school, I had been taken up by two classmates, also fourth formers, who trailed urban sophistication (Washington and New York) and Samsara perfume. They thought I was hilarious and sweet. I thought they were holograms. One of them wore Chanel suits and pearl-drop earrings, the left earring white and the right one black. One of these girls came with a boyfriend from Bermuda, who was blond and had sapphire eyes and a comical jaw, like the wrong prince in a Disney movie. When we walked into Seated Meal, when the great studded doors opened, he set his hand on the small of her back to guide her in, as though they were forty.
At Parents’ Weekend that first fall, over supper at the nicest restaurant in town, this girl’s mother leaned close to my mom and said something, and my mother, pale with fright, excused herself to the bathroom. Later Mom told me she’d been asked if I was on the pill. The other mom had started her own daughter on it, she offered, so her daughter could “enjoy herself.”
By Thanksgiving my fabulous fuckable friend had dumped her beach prince and taken up with a senior, and new opportunities beckoned. One plan was to steal the newb book from her boyfriend’s dorm. This was an actual stapled booklet of names, home addresses, and birthdays of the new students, typed neatly beneath thumbnail photographs. (The pejorative newb, derived from new boy, had not evolved after almost twenty years of coeducation.) It took some sneaking around to get hold of the newb book belonging to a popular sixth-form boy, but my city friends knew schedules and corridors. Giggling, we thumbed the pages. Her boyfriend and his senior chums had rated all the girls from 1 to 10, to two decimal points. I was happy to see that many of the girls I was coming to know, and whom I liked a good deal, were 7s and 8s. Some assessments struck me as harsh: a curvier girl was graded ruthlessly, and a few African American girls not at all. Other girls, shy but clear-cheeked, had pleasingly high marks. My friends were 10s, natch.
We found my name. Under my picture someone had written: “If a fart had a face.”
“It’s just not a great photograph,” said my New York friend, and turned the page.
Twenty-five years later, in California, I was having dinner with a classmate from St. Paul’s who herself had been raped while a student there, though her attacker was a much older alumnus who liked to take advantage of the fact that there were no locks on our dorm-room doors. We laughed about this, drinking red wine a quarter of a century later. Imagine that—Gothic piles full of sleeping girls, unlocked doors each to each, in the middle of the New Hampshire woods! The country roads we ran on to train for our sports seasons rose and fell along decrepit stone walls, the asphalt shattered from ice and salt. The view was in all directions forested and gave onto an occasional dimly screened clapboard house. It is pure Stephen King country, adjacent to his native Maine. My friend poured more wine and said, “Imagine the book he could write!”
I told her about my assault for the first time that night. She’d known about it but not known it, she said, and she thanked me for telling her. Her boyfriend was with us, and because he is my husband’s dear friend, I filled in some of the story: how the boys had called me on the pay phone of my dorm, and how surprising this had been. “You have to understand,” I told him, adding detail he would not have known, “that these guys
