I was working out the route: along the back path by the power plant, across a depression that flooded in spring. There would be one dangerous crossing of a lit road behind the rectory.
“It’s late,” I said. “I’ll get caught.”
“You won’t. You’re smart. Come on. Please just come.”
Maybe that was why: I was smart. He needed someone really capable tonight.
“I don’t know where, though.” I had no idea where his room was.
“The last window by the path. I’ll wait for you. Please.”
I was a virgin alone in a basement stairwell, at the bottom of three flights of tile steps, and my grandiosity was colliding with my fantasies, all of them unnamed. I did not think of Rick as a potential lover, not then and not ever. So not that. And not math. But he wanted something from me, something that would save him and soothe him, and the fact that he was going to this trouble to convince me meant that I must have had that something, whatever it was.
The sense of a summons was hardly out of place at St. Paul’s. Now get up and go into the city and you will be told what you must do. Our entire mythology was founded on our chosen-ness.
“Please,” he said. I heard some shuffling in the background, and then he returned with a whimper in his voice. “I’m waiting for you.”
My mom ministered to people. Why couldn’t I?
“All right,” I said, and I hung up the phone.
Elise had gone to bed. I didn’t bother to knock and fill her in. I changed into jeans, a sweatshirt, and a pullover jacket, laced up my sneakers, and crept back down the stairs. Another girl was on the pay phone. I heard her sad voice as I pushed out the door silently, letting it close by millimeters but stopping it before it latched.
I remember my sneakers on the sandy path. That feeling, the whisper sound, was familiar, and a thrill. I had zoomed along trails in the North Woods, summers at sleepaway camp in Minnesota—I had been happy there, happy enough to shout and holler as I raced with my friends down the switchbacks to archery or the riding ring. I remembered the walk down to the beach after Jed Lane grabbed me. I was a feral thing, content in the dark. Here I am again, I thought. Here I am. I ran between shadows and waited, holding my breath, before taking the next angle and the next.
Coming up out of the marshy trail, I heard my whispered name.
“Lacy!”
I followed the sound to a dark window. The sill was shoulder height—too high for me to climb. He bent down and took me under the arms and lifted me in. I was on a bed. I felt bad that my sandy sneakers were on a bed, and tried to shift to the edge.
But someone else was there.
The only light in the room came from the rise and fall of equalizer bars on a stereo system. Its light was blue and traveled. The sound had been turned down very low.
They said, “Shhhhh,” pointing to Mr. Belden’s wall.
I worked out that the other person on the bed was Taz, and yes, they were roommates—I guess I had known that. I’d never really thought about it before. I reasoned that if Rick was having a crisis, it made sense that his friend would be with him.
Taz was another sixth former. His girlfriend was on my tennis team. That’s all I knew.
But I could see Taz’s bare skin lit by the blue, a kind of chalky glow across his chest. And then Rick’s bare chest, too—and I gathered this in the moment after I learned that Mr. Belden lived right there and I could not speak without the great danger of getting caught. A Disciplinary Committee action on my transcript in the fall of fifth-form year would take Princeton off the table, immediately and forever. The two boys were on their knees. I was folded on top of my bent legs, my sneakers stuck under me, and I was still worried about the sand on the bed.
I imagined a sort of benign confusion to this setup, not unlike what I used to feel playing Sardines as a child—that hide-and-seek game where each person, upon discovering the hiding spot of the player who is “it,” piles into the same small hiding space to wait, silently. The last person out then finds everyone all together, and is next to be “it.” I recognized the feeling of fumbling with other kids like this, being shushed and pulled into linen closets in neighborhood homes or under the porch stairs. It could take a while to work out where the bodies were and how to sit. That was part of the fun.
I tried to get my feet out from under me. This is when I asked what was wrong, and was shushed again. And then both boys put their hands on me and pushed me to the mattress. I did not understand. For a fleeting bright moment I thought it might be another wrestling move, like awkward Shep might have pulled—Okay, okay! Let’s play! I’d go along. I strained to go along. But where Shep would have lifted his hands off me, they held me down. Then they (one? both? I don’t know) grabbed my breasts and kneaded them, and it hurt. I still did not understand. Someone went for the button of my jeans, wrenched a hand under the zipper and stuck a long finger inside me. I shot my hand down there and cupped myself, to force him out. Another face was on top of mine now, kissing me hard. I say kiss but that’s not right. It was a mouth pressed against mine, shoving and sucking, as if in preparation—with the same economy of
