My friend interrupted me. “Cool,” she said, nailing it. “They were cool girls.”
But they too were used, as surely as the threat of the faculty member catching me there, to lure me in and silence me afterward. The leap of self-preservation my mind made when the boys pushed me down was that no one could ever know about whatever this thing was that was going to happen, because they had girlfriends. (That was also, not incidentally, the chief reason why it never occurred to me that the boy on the phone wanted my body. He dated a beautiful senior, a girl way beyond my measure.) If it were ever known that I had scrumped with these two—the term we students used to describe what happened between boys and girls—I would be shunned. Basic social arithmetic. At the level of my thoughts, at least, I was more in thrall to those girls than I was to myself.
That my reputation vis-à-vis their girlfriends was my concern tells me that I had immediately arrived at two conclusions: first, that a physical assault, whatever form that was to take, was assured. And second, that nobody would believe it wasn’t my fault.
Another note on terms: the two males might be called boys or men, and I use the words largely interchangeably. They were both eighteen years of age, so legally they were adults. Men. But they were high school students, and in high school we were not men and women but boys and girls. They lived in boys’ dorms and they played on boys’ teams. They were members and, in several cases, between the two of them, captains of the varsity boys’ soccer, football, ice hockey, basketball, and lacrosse teams.
I can’t call them guys because there is a friendly familiarity in the word that evokes a certain forbearance of behavior, as with lads, and I won’t give them that.
Perpetrators does nothing for me. Assaulter is not a word. Attackers is useless because they were not Gauls, and so is accused, because I am not here accusing them, nor have I ever accused them. I eventually talked about what happened in that room, but so did they—long before I did, and in much more salacious terms. Nobody has ever disputed what happened between us, what body part went where. By the time I broke my silence, everybody knew, and everybody believed it was my fault. I thought that a good girl—the one they were accusing me of not being—would agree. My assumption of guilt was my defense against guilt.
Girl works for me. I was fifteen.
Two days after the assault, I was walking down the vaulted corridor that led from the dining halls, the place where all the names were carved, when a slovenly ice-hockey player behind me muttered, “I heard those freckles can fly.” I turned and looked at him: stained khaki pants, last year’s red-and-white letter jacket, a spray of blond hair in a near-mohawk, like the ghost of a rooster’s comb. Then I turned my eyes forward. I was walking alone, though students filled the hall in groups of twos and threes.
“It’s true, isn’t it?” he pressed. The shorter jock beside him guffawed. “Freckles everywhere.”
I did not turn around again. I heard their enormous sneakers scuffing the tile and I kept a measured pace as I pressed out the doors and walked down the hill toward Chapel and class, moving the way every bullied child in history has ever walked, eyes stinging, back on fire, wishing to vanish into another world.
They stopped hassling me. But I made note of the incident—I was taking the pulse of the community’s awareness, and it was quickening by the hour.
And yet the girlfriends appeared not to know. This, wondrously, given my fears, persisted. They appeared not ever to know. One of them was in my grade and on my tennis team, and we remained as friendly as we had ever been. The other was a neutral stranger in the halls, to my eyes a nearly mythical beauty, shrugging back her long, glossy hair and twining her fingers with her boyfriend’s on the way out of breakfast. It was impossible that his hand could hold hers after how it had held me down. It was impossible that these girls had not heard the news that I had cruised to their boyfriends’ room and gotten them both off.
Particularly in light of what came later, I have wondered if the girlfriends’ refusal to come after me was a deliberate act of grace. Plenty of people vilified me, but these two never did—at least not to my face.
“Maybe it happened to them too,” offered a classmate in graduate school. She was writing a dissertation on various versions of the embodiment of pain.
The queer theorist beside her said, “Then that’s bullshit, because they needed to rally behind you.”
This latter thought had never occurred to me. What a wonder. Can you imagine? We don’t expect such things of girls, from girls, for girls. I was beyond grateful to be treated to simple silence.
A few days after he’d first heckled me, again I found myself in a hall alongside the boy with rooster hair. His shuffle. His sidekick: shorter, same hair, also shorter. They had shed their other buddies this time, which is why my skin tightened when the taller one said, “Hey.” Without an audience, he must have had a different purpose in calling out to me. Something he meant to convey.
I slowed.
This hallway, which ran from the dining halls the length of the largest building on campus, was a glassed-in cloister, and the high windows streamed with morning sun. On the inside wall were affixed wooden panels carved with the names of more than a century of alumni, form by form. Individually they were fun to read, but collectively they gave a creepy impression of silent watchfulness, not unlike a cemetery. Sometimes I liked to try to guess, as I walked to and from meals, whereabouts on that hallway
