“Scotty,” I said, “I’m not feeling well.”
“Oh. What’s going on?”
“Don’t know. I think maybe my tummy. I think I ought to go lie down.”
We veered right, around the Old Chapel settling into the dusk, and back down the road toward the quad. The grass was already damp with dew, and tiny gnats buzzed at our ankles.
“Dinner?” he asked.
“Probably.”
“Next time skip it and order pizza.”
“Yep.”
“You need anything?”
“I think I might be sick. I think I need to be alone.”
“Okay.” We crossed over the waterfall. “Now?”
“Yes, now. Sorry.” I pulled away from him and started to jog across the lawns, shaking to my fingers. The long metal door pull was cold. The air in the stairwell was cold. I went down to the basement, generously empty on an evening so close to the end of the year (even the most miserable girls could make it another few weeks), punched out my home telephone number, and waited, hoping nothing happened to disrupt this plummet because I could not start it again. Please ring. Please be home.
Once I heard my mother’s voice, my mind got very clear.
“I have to tell you something.”
She offered to go get my father on the line, but I said no. I told her some boys had done something to me. Two sixth formers. They’d called me and asked me to come over, and it had been a trick. A trap.
“Lacy,” said my mother. “Were you raped?”
I breathed when she said this, because it meant she could handle the sharpest part—she said it, not me—and because I thought I could honestly answer no.
“Only my mouth.”
Then her voice dropped low—ground-floor low, everyone-off-here low. I had never heard this tone before and I wanted to weep with gratitude for it. She said, “What are their names?”
I told her.
“Was this last night?”
“Um, no. October.”
There was a pause. Then she said, quietly, “Your throat.”
I was nodding. That was all I could do.
“Okay. You did the right thing, telling me. We are going to bring you home. Can you pack a bag? I am going to make a few calls.”
“No. Please don’t tell anyone.” I had no idea how ridiculous this request was.
“I need to talk to the chaplain.” Here her voice wobbled, and the sound panicked me. If she talked to people, told people, all the work I’d done would be undone. All the precarious stacking of hours and days, all the silence and shrugging, even the lying still while they’d done what they needed to do—all of it would come apart. And everyone would talk again, and everyone would know.
“Reverend S.? No, you don’t. Please.”
“Fine. The rector. Or Dean Matthews. We need to tell them.”
I saw that I had made a terrible mistake. “But there’s a few weeks left, we have—”
“Lacy.”
“You can’t tell anyone.”
I heard her sigh. I thought of her with almost patronizing sympathy, the poor thing, just learning what I had known all year. Whereas I was a pro. She’d get used to it. She’d see that I hardly needed to come home, for heaven’s sake.
She said, “I’m going to do what has to be done. Right now, that means calling the airlines. Go on upstairs and pack. Just what you need. You don’t need anything else.”
I needed to finish out the term, with its flourish of ceremonies and award presentations, the sixth-form graduation on the lawn, the last dwindling hours of this unholy year. I needed to say goodbye to my friends so they didn’t think anything was awry, and I wanted everything smooth with Scotty so I would still be on track to visit this summer, and as a down payment on his company for next year.
“I have five exams,” I told her. As I had suspected, this gave her pause. “I’ve worked really hard and I’m prepared and I want to get them done.”
“Oh shit,” she said. “Exams.”
She was not in thrall to the St. Paul’s School registrar, but to the same sense of discipline that lived in me, the one she’d raised me with. She knew I’d want to take my exams. I wasn’t a kid who would ever be grateful to get out of them. And the prospect of making them up somehow, or taking incompletes? Not in our lifetimes.
She said, “You’re ready for them?”
“Absolutely.”
“God, Lacy.”
“It will be fine. I’ll just finish them and come right home.”
She was wavering. Exams at St. Paul’s were administered in the gym, which was set up in endless rows of desks with small stacks of blue books and nothing else. The acoustics were terrible—God help you if your stomach growled—and the canister lights, way up in the cobwebby rafters, burned holes in the top of your skull. These small miseries brought me to new heights of focus and recall. Between my left hand and my right, I could get through my exams. I knew everything. I was going to set them on fire. This year would not beat me.
“Listen, Mom. It’ll just be another few days and then I can be finished and come home.”
“Okay. Okay. But the very next day.”
“That’s fine.”
“Are you safe?”
My eyelids prickled.
“I’m fine, Mom.”
“There’s a five p.m. out of Logan. How about that?”
“That will be fine,” I said.
“You will be fine. We are together now. Okay?”
“Okay.”
The morning after I finished my exams, I returned to my room from breakfast and dragged my blue duffel bag up onto my bed. I’d made the bed, unsure what to do with my sheets. Usually at the end of the year we took a few days to box everything up. Those of us farther than a car ride from home borrowed handcarts to haul boxes and duffels to the post office to be shipped, and underformers dragged other boxes, as many as possible, out into the hallways for Maintenance to load onto landscapers’ trucks and
