I was frantic at the thought of just leaving. Would I be coming back?
I was staring at my stuff, paralyzed, when Reverend S. knocked on my door. He opened it before I’d said come in.
“Lacy?”
He slipped around the door in work boots and khakis, landing in the awkward, slender space where my footlocker sat. He picked up his boot and set it on the top, meaning to slide the trunk sideways, for room, but it hardly budged.
“God,” he said. “What’ve you got in there?”
“Could you just walk around it?”
He did. As I watched, he pressed his hands to his face and peered through his fingers. He looked at my walls, lingering on the quotations: “Be always drunken.” He looked at my dresser, covered, as all of ours were, in a cheap Indian tapestry and littered with hairbrush and lotions and little pots and pencils. He scanned my closet, which had no door: dresses, pants, skirts, parka. Boots akimbo on the floor. My bedside table with its little lamp. My books everywhere.
I figured this wasn’t a good time to ask him what he’d thought of my magnificent final paper for Religion class. He said, “Your mom’s asked me to help you get packed up.”
I didn’t hear in that what I might have—what was true—which was that my mom had called him after all, the night I’d called her, and spent two sobbing hours on the phone asking for solace and support. He said nothing of this to me either. I wouldn’t have begrudged her the need for an advocate of her own, but I’d have suggested she call lots of people before she called Reverend S. I honestly thought he had no idea what was going on. How could he, and stand there looking at my things and not at me?
“Okay,” I said.
“Have you started?” He was still staring at my walls. T. S. Eliot: “Here, now, always.” De Beauvoir: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
“Just now.”
“Okay. Well, what do you need?”
What I needed was underwear, bras, blue jeans, shorts, T-shirts, and a jacket, but I was not about to open my drawers to pull these things out with Reverend S. standing in his boots in the middle of my room. He bent to a stack of books along the wall and began half-heartedly moving them to the middle of my shoddy carpet. He stepped back out into the hall and returned with some cardboard boxes, which he wrestled into shape on top of my footlocker.
“Let’s just start loading things up,” he said absently.
“I don’t think I should be going home today,” I told him, half to get him to go away.
“Oh, I think you should.”
I had got it in my head that there was a strong chance I’d be awarded one of the subject prizes for my year, and particularly in Religion, at the awards ceremony. I felt I needed to be there to collect my prize. And I thought Reverend S. would understand this, that this is what he and I were talking about without saying it.
“Just a few more days,” I said.
“No. Today is good.”
“But I think I need to stay for the awards ceremony.”
He gaped at me. His eyes bugged, as they always did, but because he let his mouth hang in a small o he looked frankly disgusted with what he was seeing.
Then he looked away, at my bed. “You don’t need to be at the awards ceremony,” he said sharply.
I was stunned. So there would be no prize. I took in this disappointment like all the rest. Particularly bitter because it was Religion class, which I had thought I was born to. But why this cruelty? Did he not like my paper, did he not see how hard I had worked all year?
I turned to my dresser, eyes burning, and got to work pulling out clothes. I bundled my underwear tightly inside my shirts so I could pack it all without him seeing. He began moving my things into boxes, indiscriminately, without asking, without sorting, going as quickly as he could. I cringed to see his hands on my things. “Wait,” I said frequently, and pulled something from his grip to pack myself somewhere else. “Hang on.” An antagonism, tentative at first, grew between us into something hard. Ever the student, I thought I could see what he had found to hate. Mine was a dusty, small, overcrowded room, full of the sorts of decorative excesses that teenage girls preferred: a plant with a ribbon tied around it, a case of diet soda, stacks of hand-decorated mixtapes, a mirror covered with pictures of friends. It was an almost baroque combination of sentiment and appetite, longing and grooming. Yes, I should have been packing for days. I’d known I was going home. But this was my nest. He had no idea what I’d gotten through here. I wanted him out.
He checked his watch. “We need to keep moving.”
I zipped up my duffel and hauled my backpack up onto my bed. “All set,” I told him. He quit packing immediately, which gave me the impression he’d been sent for another reason—to supervise me, perhaps, rather than to get anything done. He never asked me what had happened, or how I was doing, or said a word about how he’d come to be in my little room. I didn’t know who would finish bundling my things. I didn’t know when or even whether I would see them again.
“Right, then. Let’s get you to the post office to meet your car.”
I didn’t even have a chance to look a last time out that window
