I crossed the quad again and went into Simpson House, where Candace lived. I turned left and climbed the stairs to the hallway where I figured her window must be. With the same undirected impulse to clarity with which I’d unbuckled the pants of that Southern graduate at a party in Chicago a lifetime before, I needed to identify what was so ferocious here. I thought if I could just know, I could stop the falling apart. It all seemed a big misunderstanding. Nothing I had done was motivated by carnal desire, and wasn’t that supposed to be the sin? Couldn’t we work this out?
Candace’s door was propped open with a shoe, and I could see that she was in her room. I stood outside for a moment. She was folding laundry, opening and closing drawers. There were no voices, so I thought she might be alone, which meant I’d chosen a felicitous moment.
I knocked.
“Hello?”
She leaned her head to peek at the door.
“Oh, my God,” she said, face darkening. “No.”
I kept my distance in the hall. “I’ll go if you want me to. I just thought there might be some things you wanted to say to me.”
“I have nothing to say to you.”
“Okay, well, you’re throwing things at me.”
“You deserve it.”
I didn’t necessarily disagree.
I said, “Can I come in?”
“I don’t even know. I guess. Whatever.”
“Thank you.” I pushed through her door, let it close gently again on the sneaker, and stood there just at the threshold. She was in front of her dresser, so that it blocked her body from mine, and I sensed that she would stay there. Across the room were three windows—she’d lucked into a bright room—including the one she’d have been sitting behind to hurl condom balloons at me. I wondered if the condoms were otherwise kept in the top drawer of the dresser she was now reorganizing. I’d never bought condoms. Where did she go to buy them? Were they for Budge? Of course they were.
“Candace,” I said, “I’m sorry. I had no intention of hurting you.”
She folded furiously: turtlenecks, long-sleeve tees, short-sleeve tees. She did not look at me once. “You are a slut. Do you understand that? And you have no friends. None. All of our friends hate you now. You are disgusting. Do you understand?”
I did not reply.
“And then you go and fuck my boyfriend. Are you kidding me? Did you think you could get away with it? Did you think he was going to break up with me for you?”
I said, quietly, “I have no desire to be with Budge.”
“Hunh.” She snorted. “Then why did you screw him?”
Well, the truth, even if I’d had it, was not going to come out here. Not to someone who would bag it up and hurl it back in my face. I thought for a moment, watching her ball socks, and said, “I can’t explain that. But it wasn’t just me, Candace. I wasn’t alone in that room. And I’ll never talk to him again, if that helps any.”
“Yeah, well, it doesn’t. But don’t worry. He hates you too. He’d never talk to you anyway.”
It hurt to consider whether this was true.
“I don’t want anything from him.”
“Oh, yeah? Who’s next? Seriously, who are you going to fuck next?”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m going to go now. I just wanted to say I’m sorry. And I understand that you’re furious, and I don’t blame you.”
She exploded. “Don’t blame me for what?”
I got even quieter. “Nothing. It was a figure of speech.”
“You’re a fucking joke.”
“Okay. Thanks for letting me come up.” I turned and wriggled through the space between the door and the jamb. I didn’t want to touch anything, as if the whole room were electrified with her hate.
She called out, “Don’t ever talk to me again.”
“No problem.”
There was a moment.
“Lacy.”
I paused in the hall.
She was looking my way, and there were tears all around the rims of her dark eyes. “I love him. Okay? I love him.”
Now I was crying too. “Okay,” I said, through the wobble in my throat. And then I turned and left.
I do not remember any hour that winter so cold as ice-hockey practice. The dehydrated air of the rink scored my throat, and when I sprinted I tasted blood. I was sick, too, with the endless colds we passed around, often feverish. I could not cough for the pain. It felt as though I inhaled alcohol instead of air.
I had made the varsity team, but I rarely saw playing time; our team was led by Sarah Devens, the closest thing to aristocratic athlete Hobey Baker that St. Paul’s School had seen in eighty years. She was from Massachusetts, not Main Line Philadelphia, but you could picnic beneath a statue of her Devens forefather in a Boston park, and she demonstrated joyful, graceful mastery of every sport she attempted. I saw her spiral a football fifty yards into the arms of a football player who wasn’t expecting it. On an all-school trail run, she covered root-tangled forest miles in five minutes and forty seconds each. When we played other teams, their coaches arrived with strategies to contain her, and they looked up at Sarah and down at their clipboards as though there were no one else in uniform. The few other female pre-Olympians in New England knew who she was, and they met Sarah, and she them, with the dignity and mutual respect of generals on a battlefield.
This prowess would have made her enormously popular even if she hadn’t also been kind. It seemed impossible, seeing her in action, but inside those torrents of competitive energy spun a bright, steady self, held almost gyroscopically still and centered.
