I’m told they use ultrasound now, along with basic blood-work and X-rays of growth plates in the hands, to resolve questions regarding the onset of puberty. I’m old enough to appreciate such progress. There is nothing to hold against the pediatrician; my grandmother, after all, was pregnant for eleven months. And my mother was stitched extra tight for my dad.
I was still growing fast on the late-December morning I went to Budge’s room to lose my virginity. I knew my hymen was already broken, so I wasn’t frightened, and I had no wishes for connection or affection, so I couldn’t be disappointed. I had never felt stronger at St. Paul’s School than I felt that morning. There was a dark lashing force inside me, and I thought this was something I could use. The sense was that Budge and I were teaming up to kill someone.
He lay back on a rotting sofa. His dorm was one of the single-story, 1970s-era, squat buildings on campus, and it glowered like a bunker at the downhill edge of the Schoolhouse lawn. On the sofa we were at ground level, looking up at the row of masters’ houses on the hill. Frost sparkled on the grass. A thin sun was rising over campus. He was not expecting me to appear in his single room then, long before Chapel, and I appreciated having the element of surprise. This was my doing, all of it.
He used a condom. It stung a bit. He looked at me as though I were something he needed to retrieve, a puzzle, a football caught in a tree: far away, mouth pursed, frowning. I looked back and hated him. We would never so much as have a conversation again, and I wanted him to hurry up.
When he was done I pulled my jeans back on and walked back to my dorm to get dressed for the day.
Then for a while nothing happened. I have no recollection of Christmas that year, except that I was very sick again. My pediatrician’s office tested me for mono. It was negative.
In January I returned to school, and one morning in that dead second week of January—flat light, rutted ice—I again left Elise in her dark and overheated room and walked alone to breakfast.
I crossed the low edge of the quad and continued onto the frozen path along the Library Pond, from which the dark trail snaked up toward Drury House and my former calculus tutees. (I was no longer asked for extra help with problem sets.) I came to the road and crossed back up the hill toward the Wing entrance of Upper House, pulling open the great wooden door and hearing it squeal and slam behind me. Cold air followed, and still more of it pressed in from the wall of windows on my right. The name panels on the left were dull. It was icebox light, blued with shadow, and even in this pretentious Gothic corridor you could feel the forest all around you.
I found that going to breakfast was a better way to start the day than not. The kitchens were warm, and the bustle of people feeding themselves helped me feel less lonely.
I turned off the hall and climbed the stairs to Center Upper to pick up my friends. The fire doors were always closed (the terror of fire was the sole constant of the buildings crew, who’d have quit and left the state if they knew how many candles and bongs were lit around campus each afternoon and night), and when I pulled open the door onto my friends’ hall, the wheeze of the self-closing hinge caused them to look up. Caroline, Sam, Brooke, Maddy, Meg, and Tabby were sitting on the floor as always, backs to the wall between their respective doors, books in their laps, preparing for the day.
“Morning,” I called out.
Whatever withdrawals on their friendship my deviance had made, these girls had sustained some affection for me until just now. I had finally reached the limit. All of my friends, every one of them, looked down as suddenly as if the floor had vanished beneath them. It was Budge, I understood. Candace was their friend, and I could not be excused. I had no idea how they’d found out. Again, I’d said nothing. I had thought what I’d done was only about destroying myself, and that no one else would discover it, or care.
I waited a moment longer. It was excruciating, standing there, but also fascinating: an entire hallway of wonderful young women, friends I had laughed with and skated with, friends whose heads had balanced on my shoulder when the winding shivers of the soccer bus put us to sleep, friends whose adventures with boyfriends and lovers I knew in minute detail—these friends were refusing to acknowledge me in any way. They were performing something for me, I knew. Indifference is easy. It takes a surprising amount of energy to shun a person.
“Fine,” I told them. I turned, and went down to breakfast alone.
The day warmed and water dripped from rooftops and tree branches. Crossing back to my dorm after classes, I passed my urban friends from fourth form walking together arm in arm, shiny and brittle with their usual conspiratorial glaze. Twin miniskirts. Fresh lip gloss.
“Hey, ladies!” I said, passing them.
They stopped on the walk and grabbed each other’s forearms, aghast, and then began to howl with laughter.
I thought, For walking? For saying hello? Their cruelty was clear, but I was agitated by what seemed an absurd irrationality: I could find no reason for their reaction. It breaks my heart to write that—I was looking for the rules, as though my situation were a chess position I needed only to study long enough. I am not sure anything speaks more clearly to my naivete than this. Because I knew—I felt, as surely as we all felt the rumbling
