“They’ll put you on the stand and ask you to testify against the boys. And maybe against the school. I don’t know yet. We’ll have to hire a lawyer.”
“Why do I need a lawyer?”
“To protect you. The district attorney told me that this has happened time and time again. That a child is assaulted on that campus, and the school covers it up.”
I did not care about other children. I didn’t know who they were and I figured they’d have to take care of themselves, just as I had.
She was steeled almost to the point of delight. “Angel, I think it’s time to blow this thing sky-high. I really think it’s time.”
Whose time, exactly? They’d sent me to St. Paul’s, and they’d made me stay, and now I’d be damned if I gave all of that up—watched the school transform into something not just challenging but antagonistic, with its sights set on my future. No, ma’am. I was going to graduate if it killed me.
“I don’t want to do anything,” I said. “I just want to go back.”
“Just think about it,” Mom pleaded. “Please just think about it?”
I told her I would.
Dad then had a difficult conversation with the rector. My father prided himself on sensibility and calm. He was not impulsive or hotheaded or easily swayed. He set up his pad of quadrille paper, clicked out a few millimeters of lead, and told Reverend Clark that we weren’t making progress. Would any notice be sent to the boys’ colleges? Would the school be talking to the parents of the boys?
Why wasn’t any of that happening?
And yes, Dad said, his daughter did wish to return for the sixth form, of course, as planned, and he and Mom were sure the school would do everything in its power to welcome me back—as a community of faith, as a community of scholars. I was an excellent student who contributed across a range of sports and activities. Every single report attested to this.
The rector didn’t have much to offer. The boys had graduated and were no longer under the school’s supervision. I was not on campus. By all accounts save mine, the encounter had been consensual. I’d waited so long to say something. If I’d been so upset, why hadn’t I alerted a teacher or adviser straightaway? Dozens of teachers on campus knew me and would have been in a position to help. I’d had literally hundreds of occasions to speak up. And I had chosen not to until now? Perhaps this was best left to the adolescents to understand. Perhaps the adults might acknowledge, with deep regret, that there really was nothing to discuss.
The rector did not admit that only one side had a legal obligation to report the assault to the police, and it wasn’t me. The school had failed this first test. The Concord Police knew nothing about it until my pediatrician called them. It just so happened that the delay meant they couldn’t interview the boys before they left the state.
The rector only said, Why didn’t Lacy tell anyone?
Dad replied, She did. That’s why we’re having this conversation.
Even he, who habitually saw the best until his face was smashed up against the worst, began to think the district attorney was on to something.
“I think we should sue the school,” said Mom. “It’s the only way to force them to admit what happened.”
My father sighed. “You might be right.”
My brother, coming up that summer on his twelfth birthday, raised his red hair from his dinner plate. Where had he been all June, all July? I have no idea. Day camps, friends’ homes, down the hall sorting baseball cards.
“What does it mean to sue?” he asked.
“It means take them to task,” said Mom.
“Your mother means to say that it’s a legal proceeding whereby we seek redress in the courts for a dispute the two parties can’t solve themselves,” corrected Dad.
“Oh.”
I said, “But then I can’t go back.”
“No,” said Mom.
“No,” said Dad.
My brother said, “Will you come home?”
I told him no.
“Well, you could,” said Dad, half-heartedly.
“But what about Princeton?”
Dad pressed his mouth into a line. His chin crinkled when he did this, like a little boy just about to cry. “We’ll just have to try to explain it in your application.”
“So I have to write about this? And have everyone there know about it?”
I imagined a future where I might be just a new kid at school, trailing no scandal. But St. Paul’s had already taken care of this. I was trapped. It had been genius to gather up my schoolmates, tell them I was sick, then send them out into the world for the summer. How quickly their words spread. My freshman year in college, late one night, a sophomore I’d never met emerged from the other side of the road, calling to my companion, “Hey, she’s got herpes.” Years after graduation, the man I was dating out in California attended a major theatrical opening in New York City directed by a close friend. The director also taught, and a few of his students were there that night—much younger, they had overlapped with me at university. My boyfriend mentioned my name. One of them replied, “Oh yes, she’s cool, but watch out: she’s got herpes.”
I would always be the one left gasping, wondering how on earth to reply. What should I say? Yes, but it wasn’t my fault? Yes, but you could never catch it from me, unless you did that?
My brother, James Ellis Crawford IV, was heading into the sixth grade. Already my family was talking about whether to send him to Groton as a second former, in the eighth grade—Groton was one of the few schools that still accepted boys so young. They were assigned little curtained cubicles like the sleeping car of a train. We’d seen these spaces on our tour years ago when I’d gone to look at boarding schools.
Groton was the only school one might, with a certain lens, consider on a
