She could be anyone, but this is someone you can hurt almost effortlessly.
You’re captains now. It’s your last year on campus. Why not take what you can, and kick the door down behind you when you go?
In bearing witness, we’re trying to correct a theft of power via a story. But power and stories, while deeply interconnected, are not the same things. One is rock, the other is water.
Over time, long periods of time, water always wins.
What I want to know, even now, is: how?
7October 1990, Fifth Form
I experienced the new morning not as a different girl, but in a different geography. I was the same. In fact I was even more myself, fretting about things, driving hard. The world was the same, too. But I had become aware of how it fit together in a new way. As though I’d come across a set of maps: here I’d spent all my life thinking the land contained the lakes, and just now discovered that in fact the earth is blue and we’re lucky to be afloat.
As the nights grew colder from that third week in October, the news began to spread.
“Whoo-ee, Red,” said one football player, slapping his lunch tray down on the conveyor belt next to mine.
As I walked into the reading room, late morning, during a free period: “Hey,” said another, watching me enter, his voice sleek with suggestion. “You can leave your sneakers on. Anytime.”
But when I tried to remember, my body reacted before my mind could think. My stomach hurt and there was a rushing sound in my ears, as though an elevator had begun to drop. I shut off these efforts immediately. The days were shorter, there was frost on the paths. It felt right to button up. Batten down the hatches, my father, the sailor, would say.
My plan was to keep quiet, be very good, work very hard, and slip through the net the night seemed to have cast for me. Above all, my parents must never, ever find out.
It’s a curious thing how children are wired to ask for help when hurt or frightened—Ouch! Help me!—but shame turns this inside out: I can survive this as long as nobody else ever knows. As though secrecy itself performed some cauterizing function, which, of course, when it comes to the matter of self-delusion, it does. I couldn’t talk about what had happened without having to let myself think about what had happened. The secret served me.
Plus I saw no logical reason to talk about it. Logic was the least of my modes of engagement with the event, but I was diligent. I was terrified their girlfriends would find out and hate me. I was terrified teachers would find out and have me expelled. I had no idea that what had happened in that room was against the law. I wasn’t aware of the statutory legislation—that I was underage—and I knew that the boys had complied with my request not to have sex with me. Yes, they’d held me down. Yes, it had hurt. But I went to their room, right? And did I scream or kick or bite? Finally, the boys bragged about what they did. I was not old enough to wonder whether their grandiosity was intended to mask their own shame or to normalize what they had done. I just concluded that there had been nothing wrong with their part of it, which was why they spoke of it so openly. Hence the hisses along the chapel rail as I scooted to my assigned spot in the pew. And the sixth former Budge, who, as I’ve mentioned, promised to pop my cherry.
I began traveling with Elise. Her head full of de Beauvoir (and now Sartre, whom she thought a cad), she was unlikely to notice, or to care, what a bunch of thuggish athletes said in my direction. I copied her habit of wrapping a scarf all the way up my face and then pulling it down to offer a bon mot.
“I don’t think women are actually meant to be with men,” she’d say, her breath glinting in the cold.
“You don’t?”
“I think maybe the best we can hope for is to be companionable without ever being truly reciprocal.”
While I worked on this, I observed privately that Elise didn’t seem to brush her hair much anymore, just let it tangle in her scarf, where it ratted enough to suggest the sophistication of a girl without vanity. She was skipping more and more meals, leaving me to venture out alone. Elise’s skin was naturally the color of roasted almonds, but this morning it was ashy, and the early winter light made her hair brighter than her forehead and cheeks. She pulled at her scarf to give me her sleepy grin. “Don’t you agree?”
I wanted to ask, What about Scotty? But our unspoken pact was to talk only about ideas, never people or events. I assumed this was what it meant to be mature and educated, and of course as a result we never had to so much as skirt the issue of Rick and Taz.
“When you say companion, I think of a big wolf,” I told her. “Right by my side.” I patted my leg where a heeling dog would be.
“Ooh, I like that. I think I’d like a leopard.”
“What does Simone say
