The contours of my downfall were so spectacular that they permitted the luxurious pleasures of scapegoating. There was something in my story for everyone: the kids who felt marginalized because they were not white, or wealthy, or academically excelling; the kids who felt the heat of their own indiscretions, whether discovered or not; the kids who felt ignored by boys or by girls; the kids who needed reinforcement that they alone belonged at St. Paul’s School, and all the rest of us were impostors. You could laugh at me, rage at me, gape in disbelief at what I had done or allowed to be done. I could do nothing about it except hoist up my book bag and walk away, sporting my freckles and a hankering for the Ivy League.
I worked through the variables like they were homework. Hate-sex on a single occasion with Budge was not acceptable, but sex from the age of thirteen with numerous boyfriends was fine. You could put a bra in a boy’s mailbox, okay, but you could not get taken advantage of by two sixth formers you’d never speak to again. Was it the combination of Rick and Taz, followed by Budge? Was it as simple as not having a boyfriend—in which case my problem was not what I had allowed to be done to my body, but that it had been done by the wrong men?
Or was it something else about me—something everyone but me could see?
If you go to their room, you get attacked. If you permit yourself to get attacked, you get sick. If you do something that would break your parents’ hearts, your grandparents will toss your baby blanket. Lose farther, lose faster. It was like chalking the names of the dead on the blackboard wall. I’d fucked Budge the way firefighters torch the remaining grasses so the inferno has nowhere to go. But this thing kept getting bigger.
I listened to those girls’ mad-hatter laughter ringing off the pavement. They were giddy with hate. I had thought, I will be less and less and less. I had thought I was basically nothing now. But I inspired such fierce emotion, and these reactions were in inverse proportion to my own sensate awareness of myself. I couldn’t eat much, or sing much. I walked everywhere alone. I changed for hockey in a corner of the locker room, not wanting my teammates—who included Budge’s girlfriend, Candace—to see my body. On the ice I was largely benched, too sick and too uncoordinated to win a spot on the lines, though I traveled everywhere with the varsity team. I appeared in my assigned seats for Seated Meal and for Chapel, and always in class, but nowhere else. I made myself as silent and as slender as I could. But I was a wick, held fast and burning. I could not seem to put it out.
A week or so later, I was walking from my room to class when something detonated at my feet. I stopped. There was nothing there. But yes, there was: water, or something dark, spreading across the sunlit walk. Then another crash hit behind me. I turned. Now I saw the shreds of latex scattered around. They curled ugly and gray as toenails in the grass. A third crash—close enough to sting—and I looked up.
I was walking behind Simpson House, the girls’ dorm opposite mine in the quad. Budge’s Candace lived there, and I spotted her and a friend in a second-story window. They ducked down and then reappeared, and Candace hurled another condom water balloon my way.
“Cunt!” they screamed.
“Disgusting slut!”
“Whore!”
I waited until they had to reload, then kept walking.
There is a contemporary inquiry into shame that suggests that shame is not as deeply rooted in guilt as in power. Considering the work of evolutionary biologists, psychologists studying the physical manifestations of shame noted that they closely resemble the behaviors of mammals trying to demonstrate subordination to a more powerful individual. Unshackling the notion of shame from ideas of right and wrong strikes me as helpful, at least where sex is involved. In my experience, shame is not the wholehearted burn that follows a realization of guilt, which we consider to be shame’s obvious antecedent, but rather a surplus of displeasure that adheres to one party—and always the less powerful one. Shame is messy and pervasive. It does not attend to the course of misbehavior. Often enough, in fact, I think we have the order on this reversed: shame goes around seeking its object. I found Budge. There was nothing of pleasure in that for me.
I thought about the condom balloons in my fourth- and fifth-period classes, French Lit and History of the Second World War, and while I walked back to my dorm (via an alternate route) to eat some crackers out of a drawer for lunch. I was lucky it wasn’t colder, and that I hadn’t taken
