We polished it off. When our spoons clicked in the ice cream, he dug in further and smiled up at me. There wasn’t much more to say about Elise—we’d been over that—but I understood our abandonment of her as a topic to mean something about a development between us.
Just before check-in we wandered down the path, back toward Brewster House. My belly was jumpy with ice cream and gratitude, though I didn’t understand the full mechanics of the latter. Spending time with Scotty—and more to the point, being seen spending time with Scotty—had had a rehabilitative effect on my reputation around campus. He was popular enough with other boys to command respect, and when I was with him, this extended to me. Caroline asked me what was up with Scotty, how it was going. Sam mentioned something about my new beau. I didn’t comment, not least because I didn’t actually know what was happening. Scotty and I had nothing in common, he was kind to me, and he hadn’t tried to fuck me. It might have been some sort of celestial accompaniment, as though Elise were looking out for me from afar. Whatever it was, I did not ask questions and I did not boast.
Walking through the low point of the meadow, Scotty and I came to a pocket of cooler air that had gathered there like a winter ghost.
“You know,” I heard myself say, “something really bad happened with Rick Banner.”
Scotty said, “Yeah?”
“Yeah. And Taz too.”
“Well, like what?” He put his arm around my shoulders.
“Like, they called me,” I blundered. “I mean, Rick called me. To cruise. And, like, Taz was there, which I didn’t know. And they told me to be quiet. And did stuff to me.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“You know,” I said, because I was sure he did. “Stuff.”
He was quiet. Our feet shuffled on the sandy path. It was re-gritted by the grounds crew every winter, for the ice, and melted off into tiny dunes in the spring.
“Not sex,” I said, to clarify, and because I was afraid I’d frightened him off.
“Hm.”
“Just oral stuff.”
After a while he said, “Yeah. I’m sorry about that. That sucks.”
Scotty wasn’t cruel or quick enough to intend the pun. I sensed a foggy bit of regret, some concern. Most important, he did not remove his arm from my shoulders.
“So anyway,” I said.
We climbed back up out of the meadow, into the warm evening air, and stopped by the back door to Brewster House—the door I’d snuck out, the one where, shattered, I had walked back in. The door that opened to the power plant and the meadow and the back of campus and that shared a view with my window, one flight up.
“Hey, Lacy.” He sounded eager, and I understood we were starting a new conversation now. “Wanna hang out?”
I looked at Scotty in the sulfured light of the utility bulb mounted over the stoop. He was cute. His hair was haloed. A little cloud of bugs swirled above us, like an echo of his hair.
“Sure,” I said.
He smiled at me for a long moment. “Cool.” He kissed me.
I consider now that he might have been stoned out of his mind, that he might not have known how to respond to what I’d revealed. (What I’d revealed! And the ground did not open up, and the trees did not splinter and collapse, and the moon did not slip, and I did not explode.) But somehow he knew enough to open the door for me, and then let me go in, up to my room, alone. I figured that was perfect. It irritates me now that I needed to be desired in order to be able to tell, but I understand: if my shame emerged from the sense that I was dirty, ruined for love, then a person I could talk to would be one who looked at me and thought he might love me anyway.
But is this really true? Or was it that the words were welling up in me, as the season was, and it was only a matter of the right company on the path?
In any case, nothing more happened that night. I couldn’t have worked it out myself, but if you’d done the math—how to care for the girl I was just then—you’d have come out exactly there.
Years later, after I graduated from college and moved to California, I acquired a trained security dog, a sleek and leonine Belgian shepherd whose leash I would slipknot around my waist before going out for very long runs. I swore up and down that her fearsome presence had nothing to do with my personal safety. I just liked dogs, and I particularly liked this breed. We’d run for three or four hours without stopping. At that time in my life I liked to choose a difficult route and then double it—add a mountain, say, or every set of stadium stairs in the arena. I’d put some mad money in my sock, and off dog and I would go.
I learned that there wasn’t a contest I set for myself that I could not finish unless I made one critical mistake: to look up before the end. The moment I scanned the top of the hill, my legs lost their courage. The instant I saw the chutes at the finish of the marathon, my chest tightened like an asthma attack. The trick was to never know how close you were, because relief was the killer of drive.
With about two weeks remaining in the school year, my fifth-form spring at St. Paul’s, I finished a run in the woods, dropped a panting, leaf-dragging Raspberry back at Ms. Radley’s house, showered, grabbed a bite of supper, and headed for the library to continue studying for finals. I had exhausted
