He asked, “Why would you sue St. Paul’s?”
And my mother replied, “To make them tell the truth, sweetheart.”
“About what they did to Lacy?”
“Well, yes. About what was done to Lacy.”
“By two boys.”
“Men,” said my father.
“Yes,” said Mom.
“Which was very bad,” said my brother.
“Yes,” said Dad.
“A sexual assault,” said James, the words unfamiliar in his mouth.
My parents looked at each other.
Dad said, “That’s right.”
My brother, knowing not to ask any more questions, nodded. Then he gave me his version of my father’s flat-line, wrinkly-chin sympathy sigh.
“Got it,” he said.
Mom, crying again, excused herself to go upstairs.
Up in my room, I imagined a courtroom: dark-paneled, not unlike Coit Dining Hall at school. Benches like pews. I had the pacing attorneys, for and against, borrowed from television dramas. They asked me what happened. Rick and Taz were seated across the way, shoulders rounded, heads hung in a simulacrum of humility. My mother cried somewhere beyond my line of sight. The lawyers would ask me: But you went to their room, did you not? Against school rules? And you did not run away or scream or punch them, am I correct? Yes or no, Miss Crawford. Yes or no.
And onward from there, to Budge, who would appear now a few rows back, his coxcomb hair bleached with summer, sidekick at his shoulder. Beside him, Johnny Devereux. Then dear Timothy Macalester, the wide-smiling, clear-hearted hippie. Like Scrooge’s ghosts, they’d show who I was and how I’d come this way. My parents would understand they’d raised a slut. I was almost reconciled to this discovery; I was almost certain there was no escaping it. But the telos of my agony that summer was not, ultimately, my parents’ idea of me. It was the Möbius strip of logic that would give my behavior since the assault as proof that the assault was not an assault at all. They’d say, You wanted this. Even if you didn’t think you did, even if you didn’t say so, you wanted it.
Take away anything, I thought. My school, my friends, my parents’ love. But do not dare tell me what I wanted, who I was on that night when I took your call and thought that you were sad.
That’s why the memory of Rick carrying me after the bike accident had moved me when nothing else could. I saw myself in his arms: a girl who was hurt and needed help. No one would deny it. He—even he—had seen it too. That’s why he’d picked me up and brought me up the hill.
Once I’d been reminded of her, whom I had banished all year, something low in me started to burn.
In July, a formal call came in. The school, in concert with legal counsel from the well-regarded Concord firm of Orr & Reno, wished to communicate a few things.
My father got out his graph paper. I was not invited into the library for the call, so I stayed upstairs in my room, with my door closed, and stared out the window over our driveway. It was short and opened onto the central artery through town, a two-lane country road lined with mature trees. In the summer you drove in a tunnel of green. I heard cars whooshing through and saw the shudder in the leaves above the fences a second later.
A knock at my door. My parents came in, looking pale.
I moved from my window to my twin bed and folded myself up in the middle of it. My parents stood side by side in front of me. Sitting small, I said, “What’s up?”
Dad was the only one of them to speak. “The lawyer for the school says that you are not welcome to return to campus.”
“What? Why?”
“Well, they have a list of things here that they are prepared to say about you. That is, if you agree to press charges against the boys, they will get you on the stand, and here’s what they’re going to say.”
He held up his graph pad and read.
“One, Lacy is a drug user.
“Two, Lacy is a drug dealer who has sold her Prozac and other drugs to students on campus, endangering them.
“Three, Lacy regularly abuses privileges and circumvents rules on campus.
“Four, Lacy is a promiscuous girl who has had intercourse with a number of boys on campus, including the accused.
“Five, Lacy is not welcome as a student at St. Paul’s School.”
Dad lowered the page and aimed his eyes at me, querulous and hard, with my mother beside him avoiding my face. The moment when he might have laughed at that drug-dealing bit had passed. The moment when we might have started punching out windows had passed too. They just stood there, opaque, like a Wasp update of that exhausted hardscrabble couple in American Gothic—graph paper instead of pitchfork clutched in Dad’s hand.
I could not get past Prozac. I was hung up on that word. It sounds ugly to begin with, inorganic and cheap, and I had to dig a bit to think why I was hearing it now. Nobody knew I’d taken the drug. Who told them? Why did they care? I’d never lost a pill, never given one away. The idea that I had sold that or any other drug was insane. There was not a shred of evidence of that, not the smallest whisper.
Unless, of course, you were willing to flat-out lie. Unless you were willing to access a girl’s medical records without her consent and share what you found there with the administration (and all of her schoolmates). Unless you were willing to manufacture accusations to poison the
