This was on the ski lift. He took turns riding in the quad chair with us, striving to be inclusive. Our feet dangled over evergreens. The sodden quiet of snow cover. Distant peaks.
“New Hampshire, huh? Is that like for juvie?”
“Ah, no. It’s for academics.”
“Oh, like tutoring?”
“Yeah. Sorta like that.”
“Got it. So what subjects, then? Like, math? Reading?”
I was pissy, hungry, arrogant. “Actually, I’m putting together an independent study project looking at the relationship between biochemical depression and the creative genius.”
“Oh. Sweet.”
“Yeah.” I felt lousy, listening to myself. The girl on the other side of him on our chair was applying ChapStick. “I’m just interested in why poets are always killing themselves.”
“Oh, right. Rock on. That is cool.”
“Isn’t it?”
I was following with his other students in a line down the last slope of the day when I sat back, overwhelmed with something I could not name, and fell on my hand. Blake took me to the first-aid clinic himself. He’d skied enough to know what it meant that I could not move my thumb.
Not a big deal. I might need surgery, I might not. An orthopedist could determine this later.
“Rock on, poet girl,” said Blake, once they’d read the X-ray. “I always give a prize to the kid who manages to ski hard enough to land a fracture.” He patted me on the head, then high-fived the emergency-room physician on his way out.
It wasn’t until after they casted me that I worked out there was no way to hold a pen, much less a tennis racket. No playing my best sport, no shot at the No. 1 singles spot, no joining my team. How would I write my essays, do my homework? I could type, but it would have to be one-handed, and back then the only computers were in the computer lab. I took my discharge instructions and a bottle of strong pain relievers back to the condo, where Mom helped me get out of my ski clothes and taped a Ziploc bag over my hand so I could shower.
It hurt. As my hand swelled I felt my heart in my palm, and at Mom’s suggestion I took a few painkillers. I remember how they softened the edges of my peripheral vision. I sat on a stool in the little eat-in kitchen turning my head swiftly and waiting for things to line up. When Blake rang the condo to ask how I was doing, my parents were grateful—and more than comfortable with his offer to take me out for a hot chocolate to cheer me up.
Nobody carded me, walking into a bar with Blake. My cocoa was spiked and delicious. There were shots, too. One of Blake’s friends, also an extreme skier, joined us, along with a girl from ski school named Tori. She was blond and enthusiastic, with glittery pink lips, and I both judged her for being cheap and drew courage from her cheer. I can still taste the liquor in the hot chocolate. I welcomed the nausea and the spinning. I wanted to launch off a cliff. God’s country. I remember being led through the snow and wondering if I could lie down in it and never wake up. How hard could it be to die? Truly, how hard? And what loss would that be? One less prep-school girl on spring break. One less suburban doll. One less Princeton applicant, one less aspiring fool. They’d turn down the radiator in my room and leave it dark, just like Elise’s.
At one point Blake was having sex with me while his buddy had sex with Tori just a few feet away. I saw them and I saw my cast, which was bright enough to shine in the dark of their filthy living room. That’s all I remember. I no longer cared.
Mom was wrong about the curse. My hand was a terrific blessing. I couldn’t have chosen a better tiny bone to break to release me from the usual school routine. My hand was casted at rest, fingers and thumb in loose parallel, and there was nowhere to lodge a pen. This meant I couldn’t take notes in class. Teachers threw too much material at us for me to simply try to remember it all. “You could bring a tape recorder,” said Dad, but then what? Sit in my room and replay entire classes? It would take all night. Instead I used what I could—my left hand—and, working with intense concentration, taught myself to write with my opposite paw.
It meant being slow. It meant being deliberate. I had to choose what to record or I would lose the thread. The effect was an engagement with classroom discussion I’d never forced on myself before. I stopped worrying about other people and started listening to them.
I pressed out French papers with new focus and math sets with greater clarity. In Religion, I cut out the fat of pseudo-philosophical musings and said only what I meant to say. Reverend S. remained unmoved, but to hell with him. I was finally understanding what it meant to pay attention, and he’d been gassing on about that all year.
I needed more time to do my work, and I received it. Because I could not play tennis, I was given the afternoons free to exercise as I wished. (As a fifth former with two other varsity sports, I’d have been given this opportunity anyway, but I never would have taken it otherwise.) “You could come warm up with the team,” suggested Coach Schiff, and for the first few days I did, shivering through laps around the blustery courts and stretching for no reason. “You could ride the exercise bike in the training room,” she offered, and I tried that, but Rick came in to ice down after lacrosse practice and his half-naked body in a tub made me quake. The training room was nauseating, a cesspit of overcompensation: four orthopedically designed tables on one side for administering pulse therapies and wrapping
