“Yes,” I answered.
“Oh,” he said. He held his head low, wished me good night, and hurried away.
I tested my limits a few more times before I forgot about limits altogether. One morning I went for a run before dawn. I had streetlights on the road up out of campus, but then followed long stretches of vertiginous, shoulderless black. I wanted to check on my woods. By the time I reached the return paths they were pearled and soft with dawn, nearly unrecognizable after a summer of growth. A master from a boys’ dorm, making coffee in his little kitchen, caught me returning. He leaned across his counter to push open his window and summoned me.
“Where have you been?”
I told him.
“A run?”
I gave him my whole face. I was aching for him to get mad.
“And where did you go on this run?”
I could dimly see his T-shirt, presumably the one he slept in. I pitied this man, living alone in an apartment attached to a dorm full of teenagers in the New Hampshire woods. “Blinking Light and Boat Docks.”
“How far is that?” he asked.
“I think almost five.”
“And did you run it alone?”
I nodded and smiled wide, to show him I hadn’t been alone, though of course I had been. There was a little flare in his face and his nostrils widened, but then he blew across the top of his coffee and let his eyes settle derisively on me.
“Are you going to be doing this often?” he asked.
“Dunno.” As bratty as I could be.
It was sad, because I’d been such a good girl before—I’d been so eager to make teachers feel important. Now he would know me only as a spoiled delinquent.
“Perhaps you should wait until you have a little more light,” he said finally. “You might trip. You might get hurt out there.”
I turned without being dismissed.
But I wasn’t, at heart, a rebel. I didn’t go into nearby towns and pay men at the bus stop to buy handles of booze. I didn’t have connections to the kids who brought gallon bags of weed from their houses in Bermuda and the Bahamas, much less the few moving cocaine from Manhattan. I was more inclined to put my advantage into service on behalf of my friends. When Caroline’s Dave came back from Brown to visit, I let him hide under my bed until check-in was complete and all the teachers’ doors were closed for the night. When Brooke scored a fifth of vodka for a boring weekend, I let her keep it in my footlocker.
Our favorite way to alter consciousness was to do shots of vodka as quickly and surreptitiously as possible. The bottle was restowed after every pour, the shot glass shoved beneath a mattress or behind a stack of books after each swallow. No more than four of us gathered to “pound” so we didn’t seem suspicious to a teacher passing in the hall. After we’d had as many shots as we could tolerate, we’d eat tablespoons of peanut butter straight from the jar, thinking this masked the smell.
But drinking was risky beyond the threat of getting caught. I got soused and I was at the mercy of internal tides that came on with shocking force. I’d sit on my bed, watching Brooke and Sam convulse with laughter, hearing Maddy tell yet another wild story about what finally happened that night she and Brophy hooked up, and inside me would be the smell of diesel and pine. I’d be rocking in a boat with Scotty at the stern, tiller lightly in his filthy palm, pointing out cabins and deer. I’d be feeling the way our small wake moved the gravel shores, making a sound like money, heaps of money, piling over itself. I had borrowed from him his way of holding the world so loosely, the way only the truly privileged can, detached and indemnified from his own outcomes—not that I wished to exist in the world without responsibility, but that around him I had been able to pretend not to care. This pretending went so deep it changed how much I really did think. Ideas loosened around Scotty. Words got up and drifted away. But still there we were, with everything we could ever want at our fingertips.
Now that he’d dropped me, I was at the mercy of my own thoughts again: I was diseased, I was disgraced, I was alone. I had no idea how I would survive college. If I could even get in. Teachers refused to punish me, which was another way of saying they refused to look after me. I could do anything here, because nobody was willing to see me anymore.
I heard the chapel bells. My friends laughed. I counted. It was late. Once papers were assigned and exams loomed, we would not be able to waste time like this. The girls were laughing so hard their faces shone. One of them—I will not say who, but it was a friend I loved—hopped onto my bed and bounced a bit to jolly me up. Someone else cracked that this was a Brophy move, that I should take shelter immediately, and someone else made another joke about another boy, about all boys…
“And then they do this”—sticking a tongue out like a cartoon ghoul—“and then this”—squeezing her own tits—
“And this”—ramming two fingers up, up, up in the air—
“And this—” Maddy, pantomiming the eyes and reaching arms of the boys contemplating her rack, backing up slowly, hands out ahead of her, as though threatened with death—
Caroline was bent over, laughing. Sam said she had just peed herself a little bit, and someone was shushing us—we were drunk, we could all get caught, and fuck college and fuck life
