As soon as it became clear that there would be no charges, the school, which had been so certain I was a criminal drug dealer, found no reason not to enroll me for the sixth form. I was welcomed back. Here was the contract, as I understood it: I would not speak of the assault, and they would not do anything to interfere with my applications to college or my progress toward graduation. My father had made it very clear to the school’s lawyer that he expected this.
That was all just fine with the school. The damage to me was done. It had reached my old friend Natalie even before it reached me.
My father tore the sheets of conversation notes off his graph pad and placed them in a red folder and put the file away.
Almost a decade later, when I was in graduate school in Chicago, I was home for the weekend. My parents had recently moved houses. Dad was clearing out files.
“I have no reason to hang on to this,” he said, holding out the red file. “Would you like it, or should I shred it?”
I opened the cover and saw the five accusations, in my dad’s line-of-ants hand. I began to shake. This surprised me—I had no idea so much force remained. It had been a long time. I closed the file. I’d never considered that this document might still exist, but of course it did—and here it was. Drug dealer. A bolder version of me, an older one, would have laughed. Maybe I’d have been a lot happier if I’d done a few drugs, she might have said. Maybe I ought to go find some right now, roll a fat one with this here graph paper.
I carried the red folder as if it burned, and I brought it with me, buried in my bag, to my next appointment with the therapist I was seeing. Margaret was a PsyD who specialized in Jungian analysis; she and her husband, also an analyst, worked on gender archetypes and roles in relationships. He had published several books on masculinity and ran workshops on manhood. Margaret was reputed to be very good with survivors of sexual violence. Both therapists practiced out of a beautiful home in Hyde Park, a few blocks from the campus of the University of Chicago, where I was in the Department of English Language and Literature. Despite my affinity for narratives, I found Margaret’s Jungian approach unsatisfying—we were constantly extrapolating from my experience to something universal, which erased details and dovetailed too nicely with my own impulses to denial. I was quite self-destructive in those years and had been for some time, though this could be hard to see. (A PhD program is an excellent place to mask self-hatred.)
I told Margaret about the file, holding it quivering between us. She had a suggestion: leave it with her. A safe, third space. If I wanted it back, it was there; if I didn’t want it back, I didn’t have to do anything at all. This suited me.
Periodically, once we’d stopped meeting, Margaret would email me to ask about the file. I was never ready for it. I moved overseas, changed my life, met my husband. Started a family.
Many years later still, investigators sought to corroborate my account of what the school’s lawyers had said to my parents, because it sounded to them like a possible obstruction of justice. They proposed that it might reveal an attempt at witness tampering. Could we retrieve the file?
Of course we could. I looked up Margaret to make sure she was still at the same address before giving her a call. Not long before I typed Margaret’s name into Google, her husband had shot her in the head. He then killed himself, too. I read her obituary instead. They’d had no children, and there was no clinical executor of her estate.
I called the Cook County Department of Justice, but they rather understandably had better things to do than help me track down my old red file. I spent an hour on the phone, being passed between departments. Oh, domestic violence, said one woman. Let me put you through to someone else. She clicked, and the line went dead.
10Fall 1991, Sixth Form
My mother flew with me back to New Hampshire to begin my sixth-form year. She did not wear what she called her dog collar, though she’d floated the idea. She was imperious in her planning, laying hard generosity on every aspect of getting me settled: new sheets and blankets, a bedside lamp, an account with a local deli so I could order soup when my throat was bad. This fierce focus was all she betrayed of her terror at bringing me back. That, and the way she’d clutch my arm, just above my elbow, whenever we passed through a doorway. I ended up stepping into new spaces half a stride ahead of her, my arm dully aching in her grip. This is how we presented ourselves on a hot afternoon to Brewster House, where again I had been assigned to live, to search the bulletin board for the number of my room:
9.
I knew it already. The smallest room in the dorm, in previous generations a storage space, fit only for an anchorite who might receive handouts of food through her half-panel window, which was adjacent to the dorm’s back door. There was a Room 9 in each of the four buildings on the quad, and by unspoken law it was always given to a third former. We all felt tender for the freshman who had drawn the short straw. It was almost a badge of honor.
“Maybe it’s a mistake,” said Mom.
My friends were all in Brewster too. Caroline and Sam had the long, bowling-alley double on the third floor, with the dormer windows. Brooke and Maddy had sunny singles on the second floor, Meg and Tabby the equally sunny singles beneath
