It was another male voice.
“Johnny Devereux.” A student who had already graduated. I hadn’t known him at all, but I knew about his family. His parents were nationally recognized humanitarians who had addressed the school in Chapel. Their son’s name was listed on award plaques for character and athletics. I was pretty sure he was in the Ivy League now.
“Yeah?”
He’d heard I was amazing in bed. He’d heard I was the sexiest thing at St. Paul’s School. He’d always wanted to try me out. He was going to drive all the way to campus and pay me a visit.
“Oh, right. Okay. Whatever.”
I ended the call. Where did this stop? I climbed back up the stairs, finished my homework, brushed my teeth and washed my face, and went to bed.
I don’t know what time it was when he came through the door. We had no locks; I don’t know who let him into the dorm. I don’t know why I didn’t realize he’d meant what he said. He came in smelling of the cold and did not switch on a light. I sat up, my heart crazy, not sure who this was or what he meant to do to me. I’d been sleeping on my stomach, as I did. He sat on my bed and took off his shoes, his hand on my back.
“Baby, it’s Johnny.” He pulled back my sheets and ran his hand along my body.
There wasn’t time to think. I had to stay quiet. You started this. Sort it out. He’d driven all the way to St. Paul’s. He was an adult. An Ivy League star. I remembered his father’s face addressing us from the lectern in Chapel. And I remembered that his father had been—might still be—a St. Paul’s School trustee.
What would this man do to me if I said no to him now?
Shame drowned me; more of it meant nothing.
I lay back down on my stomach and cried into my pillow while he fucked me from behind, and then in no time at all he was gone.
In math class, I began doodling on the edges of my worksheets. First I worked Elise’s quotations in elaborate Gothic lettering that made them look taken from tombstones. Then I sketched out landscapes behind them: a castle on a hill, a bare-branched tree. I silhouetted a big black bird in the tree. I wrote lists of words that moved me: dovecote, awakening, remedy.
Moving between the rows of desks one day, Leighton Huhne—the happy augur of a good term from the year before—caught sight of my page and said, “Dude. You are a freak.”
As expressed in the school vernacular, this was a near-total compliment. To be a freak of this sort was to be creative, independent, interesting. Leighton was a buddy, and he’d have appreciated the morbid scenery and script I was embroidering all class long because it was consistent with the buddies’ fascination with the Grateful Dead and the aesthetic that surrounded the band.
I looked up. “Yeah?”
“Totally. Dude. Check this stuff out! What’s your deal?”
This was a complicated question. I knew better than to pretend to answer it.
“No deal,” I said casually. “Just passing time here.”
He tapped two huge fingers on my page. “That’s way cool.”
“Thanks.”
“Vidster.” (Affectionate derivation of vid, which itself comes from video, as in good vid or bad vid.)
I let this wash over me. There was an opening here, and I couldn’t believe I’d lucked into it.
He continued on up the rows, shaking his shaggy head in slow appreciation.
Some of the buddies managed to exist at St. Paul’s without appearing to invest in anything. They shuffled to classes by day and got high at night. A few played squash—shockingly well, given their lack of focus—and a few were in school bands. But for the most part they existed in their own good-natured fog of odd wit and poor hygiene. The masters granted them clemency on these and other counts. One day that fall, a buddy who was Muslim (one of the very few Muslims I ever knew at St. Paul’s) had stood up in class and shouted, over the teacher’s voice, “LOOK AT THAT TREE!”
Everyone turned to find one of the thousand sugar maples right outside the window, perfectly crowned, aflame with fall.
“THIS ONE MOMENT BELONGS TO THAT TREE! THAT TREE IS INCREDIBLE! THAT TREE DESERVES TO BE LOOKED AT! STOP EVERYTHING AND LOOK AT THAT GODDAMNED TREE!”
The teacher waited until this outburst was complete, then quietly asked everyone to get back to work. Nobody said much beyond that. It was just what this guy did, just what some students did: they’d see a tree and be so moved they had to shout about it. Total freaks.
I savored the moment with Leighton Huhne for a day or two. I was so hungry for kindness that his compliment felt like a proposal. Why had he been friendly? Why was he not appalled by me?
My problem, I figured, must have been one of allegiances. I was a tri-varsity athlete, a top student, a chorister—I wanted to be admired. Of course I would become a pariah for any break from this routine. But what if I didn’t want any of those things? What if I just drew crazy moonscapes and spouted poetic epithets and pretended not to care about anything?
If I simply went crazy, would they leave me alone?
“You should come hang out sometime,” said Leighton.
The first time I visited his room, I sat on the floor in front of the big easy chair where he was slumped. Dead bootlegs played on the stereo. His wall of tapes made the room look like a bank vault. He was from Colorado and knew Linley. (The coordination of social class around St. Paul’s meant that most everyone from a certain city or even state would know everyone else from that place, and the farther you went from
