In the evenings, after Seated Meal, we were allowed to wear denim. I had cutoff shorts like all the girls did, with long white strings fraying from the hems. By late May it was warm enough for these. Scotty and I took heartbreaking chestfuls of the spring night before surrendering to the library. We set up on a red couch and pretended to study. I’d review a bit, and he’d ask me questions and run his fingers along my arm. He’d just asked me to come visit him that summer—maybe in Philly, maybe at his family’s house in upstate New York—when he drew his finger along the C scar on my thigh and said, “Whoa. What’s this?”
I told him about the bike. He hadn’t been there that day, but he’d heard about it. His shaggy head went up and down, and he laughed, his mouth hanging open. I told it lightly, feeling embarrassed by all the misfortune I’d encountered, as though it spoke to some secret desire or need of my own.
“Lots of bad shit happens to you, huh?” said Scotty.
“Not really.” How could I say it did, lofted high in the Robert A. M. Stern–designed library, studying my little notebooks, overlooking the grounds of my elite boarding school?
Scotty twined the threads of my cutoffs. His fingers were blunt and always a little grimy, but I admired this as a mark of his ease in the world. I was grateful to him for not abandoning me when I had told him what little I did about Rick and Taz. I ascribed his steadiness to a sense of safety he would have acquired between the gabled estate on the Philly Main Line and the lake house in the Thousand Islands. He didn’t talk about money, and he certainly didn’t look much like a boy with money, but in his ease was a confidence I was learning belonged to a certain kind of heir.
“I don’t think more bad things happen to me than to anyone else.”
“Oh, well,” he said. “Seems like they do.”
He never really disagreed with anything, just set his idea up there next to yours, as if there was plenty of room on the shelf.
He traced my scar. I considered being shy about the shape of my thigh spilling out beneath my cutoffs on the red sofa, but I liked the feeling of Scotty’s fingers.
I remember the sunset over the pond out the glass wall, and the clouds reflected in the water. I permitted myself a softening. Something like a valediction. You made it. Scotty’s stillness beside me, his hand on my skin, let it open up in me like a flame.
“Gus said it was kind of nasty,” said Scotty, nodding at my scar. He was talking about the injury that caused it, but I was thinking of something else.
“It was kind of a big deal,” I admitted. “It hurt. And it was scary.”
“That sucks.”
“Someone had to carry me to the infirmary.”
“All cut up? Wow. Who?”
And in that moment, all at once, I remembered. I hadn’t known him then, when he’d carried me, and I’d been so distracted and dizzy. But now the knowledge just appeared, like a person who had arrived to speak to me.
Scotty felt it. “What’s up?”
It was Rick Banner. He was the one who had wrapped a towel around me and lifted me up in his arms and brought me to the infirmary door. I remembered his voice, how I’d been aware of his arms and height while he carried me, how strong he was buoying me up. I saw how we’d looked. Like the fucking Pietà he’d carried me.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Cold?”
“No, no.”
“Does that tickle?” Scotty made everything easy.
“A little bit, yeah.”
“Sorry.” He rested his hand, then took it back. “Let’s go.”
We pressed out into the air, and the air pressed back—humid, turgid with spring. I wanted to grab it in my hands and hurl it away, it was so soft, and I was so mad. I would not be buried in new life. I would not be swamped by hope. Winter was as rigid in me as my spine.
“Maybe let’s take a walk,” said Scotty, steering us toward the woods.
I had not remembered. Not in math class, not when he called me, not when he lay on my face did I realize Rick was the one who had carried me up from the water. Not when I left their room, not when I ducked as he came down the hall, his head high and menacing above the carefully mussed hockey hair of the boys who surrounded him. Not when my throat was searing. Not when Johnny Devereux was fucking me. Not once had I remembered that I had been in his arms. He had helped me.
Is that why he called me? Is that why? Because I’d gotten hurt, or because he’d been there to rescue me?
He had been gentle. This above all broke me.
If a person with a heart had been kind and then cruel, had chosen me…
We
