Who were these deans? Or doctors? Or lawyers? Or priests? Who were these people?
“Oh my God,” I said. My throat was hard against the threat of vomit, which would have burned terribly.
“Basically,” my father said, his voice rasping, “they’re promising to destroy you.” The rasp terrified me. My dad sounded so old.
I hadn’t, up to this point, wanted to think of St. Paul’s School as they. I’d fought the dissolution of the lawns and classes and people I knew into a faceless institution, monolithic and cruel. That had felt too easy to me, too binary—what you would say if you’d never been a student there. But I was the fool. This was not the game I’d thought it was, a civilized dance of virtue and discretion. I’d been so careful and so worried. They’d just quietly been taking aim.
Now my mother was looking at me imploringly. I tried to understand her meaning: What did she want? The fight, or not?
Dad continued. “Lacy, they’re saying that you’ve had sexual partners.”
I dragged my mind from the thought of being a Prozac dealer to the far less interesting accusation of teenage sex. That’s what bothered him most?
He said, “That the two boys were not the only ones. Is that true?”
When I did not reply, my mother burst into tears. My father turned and took her into his arms. He looked over her shoulder at me and shook his head.
I said I was sorry.
Mom sobbed. He held her.
“It’s not what we wanted for our daughter,” he told me, and they left my room.
My mother did not come downstairs for dinner that night. She cooked and left bowls on the counter for my father to serve. My brother was unusually chipper, half as a defense and half to claim his advantage. My father was polite but cold.
I replayed his words in my head. It’s not what we wanted for our daughter. It seemed to me that all I had ever done was try to give them what they wanted. This, our mutual disappointment, might have given us an opening to talk to one another. But nobody started that conversation, so we never did.
The school’s characterization of me as a drug dealer was the boldest lie I had ever encountered. Like all lies of its degree, existing wholly without truth, it felt violent. Discourse was now impossible. The conversation we’d been having with the school ceased. All speech that followed was cannily performative, every line parry or thrust. I imagine I could have convinced a court that I had never sold drugs. Any student caught doing so was immediately expelled; besides, there was a tight ecosystem of students involved in illicit substances, and not one of them would claim membership with me. The assertion that I was selling Prozac rather than, say, cocaine is laughable. But the intent of the accusation was not to posit fact. It was to threaten me.
And, of course, they’d changed the subject. Nobody was talking about the boys or what they had done. It would take all my energy to reclaim myself from the wanton, derelict, criminal blow-up doll of a girl the school had dropped over the side of their ship, and they knew this. They weren’t playing for justice; they were playing for reputation. Which means one deploys not evidence but innuendo.
What college looks mildly on the application of a student accused by her prep school of dealing drugs? My parents, meanwhile—creatures of their own time and culture—would have preferred a drug dealer to a whore. A junkie can be rehabilitated, after all.
Decades later, reading my pediatrician’s report of my account of the assault, I was surprised to realize that the story I was reading had a genre. Plain and simple, it reads like the synopsis of a porn flick. I had never seen pornography when I was in high school, so I could not have recognized it then, but now it was obvious: the summoning-the-nurse setup, the buzzing-the-secretary setup. The men the girl doesn’t know call her up and tell a laughable lie, which she falls for. When she arrives, they are all business. First one cock, then the other. She doesn’t ask any questions and they don’t offer any explanations. She needs to keep quiet because she might get caught. Once they’ve both gotten off so deep in her throat that she can’t breathe, they tell her, “It’s your turn now.” Only when I refused and climbed back out the window would the clapper have come down. In the movie they would have fucked me again, and I’d have performed multiple screaming orgasms.
As an adult still searching for some understanding, I allowed this question: Could the boys have believed that would happen? Is there any possibility they imagined that pornography might be real, that I was in on the lie from the beginning?
Did they think we were sharing something after all?
Of course, there’s nothing intimate about the sex in porn. The story the school told about my using and dealing drugs was just another version of this, squarely in keeping with the genre. An absolute, boffo lie, lewdly fictitious. We all knew it—they did and we did. My protesting (“Oh, but I’m not a drug dealer!”) would be little more than foreplay. Their lie was meant not to convince, but to compel. That’s how it works. That’s the entire point. Nobody cares about how you get there; details are a waste of time. The story has one end: no matter what, the girl is going to give it up.
My parents did not speak to me again about what happened at St. Paul’s. The conversation simply ended.
We managed logistics the way people do when planning a trip, referring to possible pitfalls like weather or delays, preparing mindfully. At some point I made the necessary formal statement over the phone that I did not wish the police to move forward with criminal charges. It would have
