Notes on a Silencing

His sister had fetched me at the airport, barefoot in a leaf-green MG. I thought I pleased his mom with my conscientious manners and the little cachepot I’d brought on the plane as a hostess gift. Scotty had been furloughed from his job over at the marina for filling the water tank of a yacht with gasoline. Or it might have been vice versa, he wasn’t sure, but anyway they got really mad. So we puttered around, the two-stroke engine giving us an excuse to fail to make conversation. The islands we skirted were discrete and tiny, some of them holding only one house, ringed by gravel and pine trees, a gentle wash of wind and wave like a halo around each one. We motored somewhere and went cliff diving. We motored somewhere else for sandwiches. Scotty pointed out Skull and Bones Island. I had already been thinking it looked spooky, but a lot of those little islands did, so I didn’t understand he was showing me the territorial home of the powerful Yale secret society. I figured someone had died there—maybe it was the site of a Native American massacre? A cholera outbreak? Scotty wasn’t interested in Yale—Thousand Islands was filthy with Elis, in their faded blue caps, but he was the tail end of old money’s ambition-quashing habit, his the generation that gives up entirely on private docks and heads out west to major in ceramics.

It’s what I liked about him. I had thought we understood this about each other. He’d settle my jumpiness about what came next, and I’d keep the tiniest bit of fiber in his routine. I’d zoom and he’d dawdle. He’d get high and I’d read novels, and we’d eventually just watch a movie instead of trying to have sex. I thought it was going to last us all year.

“Well, it’s just…” Scotty said now, his ice cream untouched, hand scratching at the back of his head, “it’s just the things people are saying, I guess. It’s too much.”

In three days? Four? Five? We’d only just returned to campus. “I don’t understand,” I said. “Did you talk to someone?”

He nodded, his arm going up and down with his head.

Nothing had happened, nothing new. I’d marked every threat. I knew them all.

“Who? What did they say?”

“Aw, come on,” said Scotty. “I don’t want to say it.”

“Say what?”

His hand landed with a thud on the table. “Lacy.”

“Okay, then who. Who was it?”

“Wyler,” he admitted. Who had graduated the year before. Though he’d dated my friend Brooke, he had avoided me until his good friend Scotty and I had started seeing each other. After that he’d said hello to me a few times. That was the most we’d ever spoken.

“I don’t talk to Wyler,” I said. “He’s not even here anymore.”

“I know.”

“All he’s got is gossip.”

“Well, okay.”

“What is it?”

“Just, you know…” Scotty was miserable, shifting around on the seat of his faded jeans. “Just you’re sick and all.”

I felt my stomach harden. The old not-eating was back again. A year lay ahead, and the place was closing around me like a trap.

“I’m sick,” I repeated.

“Well, yeah. Sorry. Coach told them about it, I guess, some sixth formers, and it just got around, talking and stuff, and Wyler called.”

Coach. Coach. I burned to know which coach this was. They were talking about my throat?

“Last year?” I asked him. “They were talking about me? Last year? Who? Where?”

“Aw, Lacy, I don’t know. I don’t know…anything. Look, I’m sorry. It’s just more than I can deal with.”

There were a hundred arguments—what it was, where it was, how it had gotten there, and why Scotty never needed to worry about it—but I could see that it was done. We were done.

“Okay,” I said.

I left the table, half expecting Scotty to come after me, shaking his shaggy head and saying it was all just a joke. Walking back through the meadow alone, I did not permit myself to cry. The wildflowers were as high as they’d be all year, clambering piles of green and gold, vibrating with insects, smelling of mildew and sage. Coach. Gillespie? Was it Coach Gillespie—he of the sodium ball? Was it Coach Matthews—he of “She’s not a good girl”? Coach Buxton? Someone else? Which players had heard? What did the coach say? And how on earth did he know?

To hell with Scotty, then. I was invincibly alone. The little light was on in the anchorite’s room. I marched up to my airy single, grabbed a jacket, told Mrs. Fenn I was in for the night, and went back out. My friends were on their way home for check-in, and I passed their curious faces. They waved but did not ask—they never asked. It was part frost and part care, I think. But I never told them, either.

For more than an hour, I walked. I watched lights coming on and wondered who had which rooms this year. I stayed out as long as I dared. They’d told the lacrosse team I was ill? Could that be true?

If so, I blamed my parents for telling the school I had contracted herpes. To do this I had to remove from consideration my old friend Natalie’s call at the beginning of the summer, and also the lawyers’ threat about my Prozac. There is no way I could have stayed at school if I had let myself see what these lawyers, teachers, and priests had done. But I don’t think I could have figured it out even if I had been willing, because as far as I knew, the school had found out about my herpes only after my doctor had tested me for it at home. And by then the previous sixth formers had graduated, and everyone else had gone; there was no one left to gather and tell.

I decided to bait the place, just to see if things were as animated, as complicated, as I sensed they were.

Outside the art building, where the streetlights were brightest, I encountered a tall master