The wooden benches in front of the panels were heaped with backpacks and jackets hurled by kids on their way to dine. Periodically, entryways opened onto dark staircases that led up to the three dorms that together made up this broadside length of the building. We called these dorms North, Center, and Wing. When I was there, they were respectively for boys, girls, and boys. It was somewhere around Center when the taller boy called out to me. I am not sure if it’s a trick of memory that all the other students seemed to fade away, or if he chose a moment when no one else was there, but it was just the two of them, tall and short, walking behind me for a good span of the red tile in the morning light. We were heading to Saturday classes, only a half day, and no Chapel. There was release in the air.
I turned around and walked backward, keeping my distance.
The taller boy smiled. He had a full, smug mouth and an ordinary name that nobody used, preferring the nickname “Budge.” There was never a day he didn’t wear his hockey jacket, but I doubt he had reason to sport anything else—he was a hockey thug. These boys were fixtures. St. Paul’s considered itself the American cradle of the sport, and prospective families were shown the pond where the first sticks and pucks had been used in a little nineteenth-century game called shinny. Our hockey fable culminated in the dashing figure of Hobey Baker, Form of 1909, the Philadelphia Main Line boy who became a legend on the ice at St. Paul’s and Princeton, and later a World War I flying ace. People always said that Hobey Baker “had it all,” meaning it was rare to find supreme athletic talent in a blue-blooded body. By the time I was at St. Paul’s, the school seemed to have settled on admitting blue bloods and recruiting athletes. These dueling cultures were clear. Budge the hockey player listened to heavy-metal rock ballads and shaved the sides of his head, while the squash-playing heirs, feeling similarly restless, grew silky locks, wrote sonnets, and traded Dead bootlegs. Budge was without subtlety. I admired this, and I felt a little bit sorry for him. Also, he had a girlfriend, a girl a grade behind me who played on my soccer team. She spoke of him as though he was a wayward stray. Everything Budge said was sarcastic, everything a joke. Was he in on the fact that he was there only for what he could do on the ice? Was this the reason for the hair, the nickname, the filthy pants and semaphore jacket?
“Budge,” I said.
“What’s up?” he replied.
His sidekick was grinning.
Budge said nothing more, so after a moment I turned back around. This sort of thing happened with Budge—he liked to provoke you and then let the clock run out. It left you wondering if you were supposed to have done something differently.
“Hey,” he said again. “I’m gonna pop your cherry.”
I kept walking. Autumn light streamed in. The panels of names were honeyed with sun. Pop your cherry. That ugliness rattled around the majesty of the place, a horsefly trapped in a cathedral. The beauty was immune to the puerile, and the puerile unmoved by beauty.
“Okay, Budge,” I said, without interest. “Whatever.”
“Okay?” His voice tightened. “You mean it?” Two paces, three. His buddy chuckled and I startled. They had closed the space behind me. “You said okay.”
My back to them, I shook my head and rolled my eyes. Sure. Whatever. But I was losing my grip on the casual. Because how did he know I was a virgin? Why did he care? What about his girlfriend? If he was not worried about her, what other rules would he transgress?
“I’m serious,” called Budge. I heard heat in his voice, and his buddy fell silent. “I’m going to be your first.”
He wanted me, because he knew that for me, now, there would actually be no first. Whatever had been innocent was gone, and this was why he was trailing me down the hall on the way to math class, to loot what was left after the smashup. I hated him. If my virginity had been a ring, I’d have ripped it off and hurled it at him right there, to get it the hell off my hand. I’d have let it clatter to the floor.
“I’m gonna do it,” he said, as I pressed through the doors and out into the morning.
Around this time, in the first days and weeks after the assault, I became aware of a curious mind’s-eye perspective I had never held before. I saw myself as if from high above, moving across campus, going from dorm to Schoolhouse and back again. Whenever I crossed a quad, I saw the top of my own head, way down there, progressing right to left. When I approached the Schoolhouse or chapel, buildings with their own gravity, I watched myself as a tiny figure being pulled in, as though I were about to be swallowed up.
I was always so far away as to be featureless, almost a speck, and my vulnerability was clear. How exposed I was, walking the paths! My progress across campus seemed terribly slow; it took me forever to get back inside. Why didn’t I run? The tiny-self moved about her days, oblivious to danger, almost automated in her ignorance.
But there was also the self up here, perched aloft and fretting. And there was the rapacious threat that I sensed for my self-on-the-ground, born in my own mind, the way that all of our nightmares are entirely our own. So that when I saw myself push through the doors of Wing and head out into the morning, sugar maples burning themselves alive on either
