After the call with Bill Matthews, my parents began holding conversations related to St. Paul’s together in my dad’s office, in the den down at the end of the hall, with the phone on speaker. Dad took notes on pads of graph paper. He wrote with a mechanical pencil that had a little silver cap he removed to expose the eraser. Everything was replaceable—eraser, lead, even the tiny cap—and he kept the same utensils, one blue and one red, for years. He was a lefty, producing a tiny line of lead on the page, and the little boxes on the graph paper helped him square his script.
I was not supposed to be around for the St. Paul’s phone calls. Mom and Dad were protecting me. But because the subject matter was so floridly intimate, I felt cored every time they sequestered themselves to talk. I wedged myself into my window upstairs or paced the border on the dining room carpet. They would either come find me immediately, or they would say nothing at all. The issue never for one moment left us alone. My advisers refused to call us back, and my parents were walking around red-eyed. Mom insisted that the school was engaging in a cover-up, but I blocked her out. What was covered up? I couldn’t have felt more exposed. Her ferocity frightened me. Dad seemed to agree with me: “Let’s just see how they respond,” he counseled her. “Let’s just see what they do.”
It didn’t help that I did not yet understand how the school was handling our affairs. Nobody had filled me in on what they should have done legally, and I’d had little hope for any moral remedy in the first place.
“I’m telling you,” she’d say, Cassandra-like. “They will bury our daughter before they let this get out.”
I didn’t understand: get out where? Bury me how?
My parents figured they were sparing me by not filling me in on every detail. I thought I was sparing them by not letting them know anything about how I had survived. That the former would soon collide with the latter was inevitable and obvious. And as much as I dreaded it, I almost wished for the arrival of the reckoning I felt I deserved.
One day Mom came bashing through the dining room door and said, as though the room were waiting to hear it, “The district attorney said he’s had enough with St. Paul’s School.”
In the summer our dining room table was empty. The silver candlesticks were on the sideboard, everything else tucked away. A foxed mirror from my great-grandmother’s house reflected the backyard. Suburban green.
I stopped pacing. “What does that mean?”
“It means he wants to bring charges against those…boys, because they were of age and you were fifteen, and because things like this have been happening at the school for years and the school has been burying it. He’s been waiting ten years to go after St. Paul’s. He said that. You are the smoking gun.”
I understood language like “burying it” and “smoking gun” to belong to my mother—some fire and brimstone came naturally to her, and never more than when she felt wronged. So I discounted this news a bit, automatically, on account of rhetoric.
But Mom had new authority now. She repeated, “The district attorney, Lacy.” He was the rook behind the queen. My dad had taught me to play chess when I was tiny. You can clear the board with that combination.
My voice sounded small. I was still hung up on smoking gun. “Does that mean I can’t go back?”
“They’re going to take on the school. No, you can’t go back.”
It was the end of June. “But where will I go?”
“I don’t know. Sally Lane says Thacher is wonderful. That’s in California. She says it couldn’t be more different from St. Paul’s. We can call them this afternoon and find out if they have a place.”
“I’m going back,” I told my mom. “I am going to finish.”
She spat out air. Her hands flew up. “I don’t know that I can send you back. I don’t know that I can stand that.”
The moment she started to cry, I dried up like a stone. She kept at it, adding a wail here and there, her forehead against the dining room wall. “I don’t know how I’m going to make it through this!”
I wanted to shake her. Tough shit, I’d have said.
She turned back from the wall to try again. “Lacy.”
“What.”
“The school never told the police. Do you understand that? They never reported. They let the boys graduate. They let them go home. Do you get that?”
Of course I got that. What of this was news to her? What was so astounding? Rick had won the top athletic award. On Prize Day, he would have hoisted the silver plate high over his head right there, alongside the flagpole.
“They are going to start college in the fall just like nothing happened.”
I thought, Good riddance.
“The Concord Police would like to investigate with an eye to pressing charges. It is a statutory claim and there seems to be little dispute about what, um…went on. You know, what they did.” She gripped her throat to demonstrate.
I felt a small surge of courage. Since Dr. Kerrow had explained to me about statutory consent, I’d held the idea like a fabulous gemstone—too precious to trot out, almost vulgar to wear, but a resource that might buy me passage in war. The law, it turns out, anticipates naivete, or at least allows that when a child and an adult engage in a sexual act, power will occupy so much of the province of desire (if indeed there is any) that wanting would be inauthentic. Consent is not possible. No matter what anyone else claimed, the law said it was not my fault.
“Well, that’s fine,” I told my mom. I would be happy to tell the truth. “What
