When we arrived, I carried into the house my pillow and my Walkman, my little bag with its set of mixtapes, and the trash from our snacks. Nigh-Nigh was not there. We looked under the seats. We looked in the trunk. We emptied our duffels to the canvas. The blanket was gone.
“Do you remember having it this morning?” asked Dad. “It must still be at my parents’ house!”
We called Ginny and Big Jim. Nope, they said. Absolutely not here. Lacy must have taken it with her. We set everything by the door. She takes that thing everywhere, doesn’t she?
I didn’t remember. I couldn’t picture it with me on the way back home, but then again I’d been so absorbed in my fantasies of running off into some other life that I hadn’t noticed much of anything at all. I must have brought it with me, though, right?
“Well,” said my grandmother, “it’s not the end of the world. It was time to be done with that.”
I’d kept my blanket with my things, I knew I had—I’d been so embarrassed by my grandmother’s reaction that I hadn’t left it out anywhere. I hadn’t even slept with it that night. I did not myself remove it from my bag.
“But how could it just vanish?” asked Dad. “It’s the strangest thing.”
Mom’s eyes got huge. “It must have fallen out at the gas station!”
Dad held his face. “My gosh, Alicia, you’re right! That’s the only explanation!”
I could have cried. The rocking, roaring trucks.
The next morning at dawn, Dad popped his police-radar detector on the dashboard and sped to Grundy County. He taped MISSING BLANKET signs all over the gas station, plus those at other exchanges and in a few nearby towns. He even listed a reward for the return of Nigh-Nigh.
It never did turn up. For a long time, before I figured it out, I hoped the terrible prairie wind had blown my blanket off the pavement and into the cornfields, just as I had imagined running into them myself. That would be an okay fate, I thought, beneath the skies and the stars. Better than beneath a tire.
Around sunset, Dad came home from Grundy County dejected. “I’m so sorry, Say-see,” he said, rubbing my shoulders, as if he knew what was gone.
Christmastime at St. Paul’s was glorious. In choir rehearsal, the sopranos were working on the full King’s College descants, so that my friends sounded like the live BBC broadcasts of the Cambridge Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols that my mother played, as loud as the radios would go, throughout the house every Christmas Eve morning. We wore our holiday best to Seated Meal and poured hot chocolate into plastic mugs to carry across the starlit paths. Masters spangled their doorways with blinking fairy lights. During the day, Murph and Sarge, the surly Security guards, wore red Santa hats on patrol.
One morning Budge, the rooster-headed hockey player, strode up behind me and said, “I think it should be tonight.”
I thought, Bodacious ta-tas. I thought, Round yon virgin mother and child. I thought, Fuck you.
If I’d had Elizabeth Bishop in my arsenal by then, I would at least have had a road map for this descent. Practice losing farther, losing faster. When I finally read her “One Art,” I recognized the defiance of the devastated overachiever. Of course! Chuck it all. But I wouldn’t read Bishop until sixth form.
Instead I looked, permitted myself to really look, at Budge.
His mouth protruded in a way I found vaguely aggressive, almost like a primate’s. He swung his hips like a lion. Except for the spray of hair, I could not see the boy in him. This was exciting—the cruelty of it, his cruelty, was exciting. This was the truth. About the world, I mean. When he hissed about needing to finish what his friends had started, I didn’t have to deny anything to him, or pretend to be someone I wasn’t.
“Tonight,” he whispered, coming in close.
“I don’t think Candace would appreciate that,” I finally replied. His girlfriend had grown close to many of my friends. She was on our hockey team. I liked her, too. She had thick blond hair and a practiced brusqueness that stood out in contrast to the glamorous frigidity of so many of the prettier girls. A New Yorker, private-schooled, no one’s fool, already planning for an MBA and an island summer home. Her roommate was Nina, the angelic chorister who sang with me in Madrigals. I couldn’t guess why Candace had chosen to date Budge, but I didn’t give it much thought. One hoped for the pleasures of an idiosyncratic harmony.
“Candace will never know,” he said.
God knows she didn’t need protection from me. I couldn’t protect anyone. My friends were already acting strange. I wasn’t going to police a girl’s boyfriend. Those sorts of scruples belonged to a world that was too precious for me.
At the same time, I believed Budge when he said that no one would ever know. After all, Rick’s and Taz’s girlfriends still, two months later, did not seem to know what had happened in that room. They passed me in the hallways same as always, long-legged and indifferent. I understood from this one of the rules of war: what happened to girls like me did not matter, did not even register.
All sorts of things were possible at school. Behavior that was dignified and visible rode atop a wild landscape of unspoken thieving and mischief. I wasn’t wrong about this. Years later I learned which girl’s terrible mononucleosis, so severe it had sent her home for a term, was actually the third trimester of a pregnancy. I learned who was avoiding faculty come-ons after check-in, and who was courting them. In the moment, unable to shake Budge, I thought I grasped this about sex at St. Paul’s: some girls got to be girlfriends, and they were escorted and protected, even if they had
