My reckoning with the land continued. I ran every road. Out the white gates and left; up Pleasant Street, facing traffic; across the way to a far hill, at the top of which I found a house with mountain views and a Labrador retriever who let me sit with him in the grass and look around. I went past the blinking light beneath a major interstate and into the next town before I lost my nerve. I found a quarry, a cemetery, and a park. I didn’t risk running toward Concord, where my presence might be misunderstood as leaving campus without written permission. But I pounded everywhere else. I got barked at and honked at. I remember trampling mud and new nettles. I spotted lady’s slippers, which I recognized because my mother had pointed them out carpeting damp woods in Illinois. Sometimes I imagined I was circling the place as a wolf might—as my wolf might, to mark her territory—but I never did feel I possessed St. Paul’s; more often I imagined a kind of stitching, as if I was ensuring the perimeter could never pick up and expand. As if I was nailing the place down for good.
I didn’t think about the boys. Not any of them. I thought about the school, and whether my small catastrophes in so vaunted a place meant the world itself might wish me ill. (I was wrong to imagine a malevolent rather than indifferent world, but I had no idea how right I was about the school.) Perhaps growing up with the Crawford Curse had given me my propensity to understand what had happened to me as something broader and crueler than two boys in a dark room. Seen one way, my interpretation was paranoid—a child’s conflation of incident with environment. Seen another way, it was an easy instinct—which I believe all children have—to identify the power structures that animate any institution or society, and particularly one as preening and self-possessed as St. Paul’s.
I’d never had much interaction with the people who in fact wielded power at the school. The rector, Kelly Clark, was to me an oddly tanned, constantly intoning priest, one of many Episcopal clergymen I’d heard from pulpits all my life. To many of my classmates he was a benevolent paterfamilias, standing beside his smiling wife with her blue, sugar-spun hair. At our every encounter he called me “Lucy,” so I felt no particular affection, but I didn’t hold it against him—why should he know me? There were five hundred of us. Leadership of St. Paul’s was the last position of his career (as it had been for almost every rector, being a pinnacle appointment), and he seemed tired, almost addled. I didn’t expect anything more.
Around him was a ring of men: Bill Matthews and John Buxton and Cliff Gillespie. The vice rectors, who served as our deans, were not academic but sporting, their energy not pedantic but avuncular. Mr. Matthews was a legendary hockey star from St. Paul’s himself and now a championship coach. Two of his sons had played for St. Paul’s. The younger of them, who had graduated before I arrived, had a popular reputation that was burnished even in his absence, and this interested me enough to watch from beyond the boards while Matthews yelled at his hockey players. He was pug-faced and seemed angry, yapping up at them, his breath visible, the skaters towering over him on their blades. I saw his absence of gravitas as a normal, if alternative, presentation of masculine leadership—not for him the churchly bromides. He wanted pucks in nets and points on the board. I don’t remember him having much of a rapport with girls. He signed off on our requests to leave campus, and his signature often appeared on formal school communications. If you got into a tangle with the administration for complications of any reason—leaves of absence, failed courses—you’d likely be dealing with Mr. Matthews. I’d had nothing to do with him at all.
Mr. Buxton, another vice rector, coached wrestling; had I not gone to watch Shep’s meet that long-ago winter, I wouldn’t even have known his face. Mr. Gillespie was, as I’ve said, The Rock. It was his verdict I imagined immediately and with terror when I thought I might get caught in Rick and Taz’s room and sent to explain myself to the Disciplinary Committee. He coached lacrosse and taught chemistry, neither of which I pursued.
I don’t know by what process the deans decided that Mr. Gillespie would be the one to try to solve the problem of the Ferguson Scholarship exams. Mom and Dad thought something should be done to help me sit written exams with a broken hand, but the faculty considered it unfair to give me extra time. After all, every nominee was going to be challenged to the height of his or her personal ability; how could they know that my extra time would benefit only my motor skills without boosting my performance otherwise?
“This is a little bit ridiculous,” said my mom on the phone when I told her no accommodation would be made for me.
“It will be fine.”
“It’s not fine. You can’t write.”
At that time, I didn’t know the history of Henry Ferguson, eponymous patron of these scholarships: how he’d been shipwrecked at nineteen and forced to drift in a lifeboat across three thousand miles of the Pacific. Desperate, pounded by the sun, Ferguson had, of course, kept a journal of his trials (as
