Of course, her story was not that simple, because the criminal justice system is set up, at least in theory, to assume innocence until guilt is proven. A defense attorney made hay of the fact that Sebold, traumatized and intimidated by her attacker, chose the wrong man in a lineup. The defense came after her for her uncertainty but largely left the issue of consent alone. She had already won that one, welts glowing, hands down.
I could not earn my innocence with injury. Nor, I believed, could I earn it with—well, innocence. Because I was not wholly pure. Though to the best of my awareness that night at the party made nothing subsequent happen—nobody formed expectations of me as a result of it—still I held that I was guilty.
And in court I would have had lots of company arguing I wasn’t pure. The reason I hate to write what happened on that card table—what I did on that card table—is because it’s a defense attorney’s dream. Aha! Desire! As though my choice on one night cost me the benefit of the doubt forever. The blanket projection of proto-consent, cast across all the days and nights of my life.
I don’t owe anyone the telling of this. I never sued or took my abusers to court. Nor is it a matter of conscience. I did not want to write it because it should not matter, but of course it does, because a girl who is attacked will so often assume the fault lies with her. There is no escaping a primal culpability. I include the events of the summer I was fifteen in open defiance of this presumed vulnerability, and to force into view what is to me the chilling logic that a girl who has explored a boy’s body, or permitted her body to be explored in any way, is thereafter suspect as a victim.
In other words: it’s open season on her.
In other words: to believe in the perfect victim is to believe in no victim at all.
6Fall 1990, Fifth Form
I returned to St. Paul’s for my fifth-form year in the first sharp nights of September, a long week before classes began. I’d been invited early to practice with the varsity soccer team and quickly made the squad. I was released from far-flung Warren House and the claustrophobic double I’d shared as a fourth former, but swapped it for a lonely perch: I’d been assigned to a single in Brewster House, on the quad, while most of the Kittredge girls were all together with a few other girls across campus, in Center. Linley from Colorado had elected not to come back at all. She did not elaborate. She just didn’t like it very much, she said, and her decision rattled me. I had considered people who came home from boarding school to have failed in some way, but Linley was fabulous. She had made a choice. It frightened me to think this choice was available to me too.
But the rogue housing lottery (which was not a lottery at all) had seen to put Elise—the sleepy artist from Kentucky—in my dorm too, in her own single three doors down the hall. She had been Linley’s roommate, so she too was now on her own. I didn’t know Elise well. None of us did. But her serious boyfriend from the year before had now graduated, and because we were the only two of our larger group of friends to be living in this part of campus, we took to each other immediately. Elise modeled a form of independence that thrilled me. She dismantled her bed, stacked the frame in our dorm’s basement, and made up a futon on the floor. The carpet around it was strewn with sweaters and long socks, and the air smelled of linseed oil and turpentine from her advanced art studio. Her hair was often unbrushed. She carried books in her arms rather than in a woven tote like the rest of us, and when you read their spines you saw she was reading things not assigned for class. At the beginning of the year she took on Simone de Beauvoir in the original. I’d stick my head in after soccer practice, before classes had properly begun, and find her lying on her stomach on her mattress, with Le Deuxième Sexe and a French-English dictionary open in front of her and an uncapped blue Bic in her hand.
“Want to walk to eat?” I’d ask.
“Nope,” she’d say kindly but without apology. “I’m dining with Simone.”
Around Elise I felt saccharine and young, sporty and painfully earnest. She’d never have worn soccer shorts. Instead of cleats, she glided around in hemp sandals. Instead of holding crushes, she returned to Brewster House in the evenings trailing boys she occasionally deigned to date. Early in the fall term, a classmate of ours, Scotty Lynch, started turning up. He was distinguishable anywhere on campus for his pouf of curly brown hair and impish grin. When he smiled, his eyes narrowed dramatically and held a twinkle of sincerity that was unexpected, given the rat’s nest and the slouchy cords. He was a true buddy, usually faintly redolent of marijuana and, like all his kind, masterly at affecting indifference to any form of authority or routine. I suppose Scotty went to class, but I never saw him in the Schoolhouse. I never heard him complete a sentence—he’d just scratch at the back of his hairy head and say, “Yeah, cool.” Elise played modern blues on
