“Oh, Lace.”
We quieted.
She said, “I have it too.”
Her laughter had dissolved to tears, similarly loose and overwhelming, and I put my arms around her. We were lying together in each other’s arms on my bed, crying. “He said he had no idea. He swore to me.”
It didn’t matter, to us, who he was. He was every boy in our world. He was the world. We understood.
All of us in that room wept. “I’m sorry,” I told my friend. “I’m so sorry.”
Two more girls knocked on my door that fall to tell me they had herpes. I dug out my bottle of Zovirax and showed them the label so they could ask their physicians, once they worked up the courage, for a prescription of their own. We walked together to the old white pages in the common room, a paper slab with lines of mold through it like a Stilton, and searched for clinics close enough to reach by taxi without being gone so long a teacher would have to know. I stopped short of giving them my drugs, because I knew this was illegal, and I was not about to make the administration right. Not even for free, not even for this.
Then a third former, devoted to her third-form boyfriend, approached me for advice about birth control. And someone else asked me how to handle the situation with her mom’s new boyfriend. There were other questions too, more benign but no less important: How to tell my parents I won’t apply to their college? How to drop this class, quit that sport, break up with him?
Hester Prynne, Hawthorne writes in The Scarlet Letter, “did not flee.” She moved with her fatherless child to a “little, lonesome dwelling” on the outskirts of town. Of course she did. One step shy of the witch in her cave, our Hester, marginalized by an entire community.
I learned that while the fallen woman may keep her unloved door plain and her drapes drawn, her circle small and her fire low—if she’s wise, I suppose, she will—the path to her back stoop will be well-traveled. I guarantee it.
Then in October I was contemplating its having been a year, and Brooke put Alannah Myles’s “Black Velvet” on the new music player in the newly redesigned student center, where we were all bored out of our skulls—sixteen and seventeen and wild for something other than track halogens and a quarterless jukebox—and I was fed up and wanting to go back to my room to read when I passed a fifth-form jock who said, “What’s up, you freak?”
I turned to where he was sitting, propped on a ledge with a bunch of similar goons. It was astonishing how these things reconstellated themselves, the microcycles of high school life—here the seedling assholes all in a row, coming up to take the place of the guys who had graduated just the year before. Already they knew to mock me. Couldn’t even let me walk by. I narrowed my eyes on the one who had spoken to me. His name was Alexander Ault. He was hugely strong, but not tall. Handsome, but I did not care. The usual football–ice hockey–lacrosse type. The monkeys flanking him let their lips flap in cruel grins. These were boys with names like Grant and Sebastian.
“What did you call me?”
“What you are. A freak.”
“Fuck you.” These students were a year behind me. I might have recently been a pariah, but hierarchies were hierarchies.
“Oh, come on,” said Alex lightly, and he patted the ledge beside him, forcing Grant to scoot over. “I’m just giving you a hard time.”
I glared. He made honest-dog eyes.
“Please? Have a seat.”
I did not sit. I looked at this enormously well-built guy, who was smiling broadly—beautifully—at me, and wondered if there might be something there. As I’ve mentioned, “freak” was a complicated term.
I asked, “Why?” He played on the lacrosse team. He knew Scotty.
“Because you’re cute,” said Alex. “You’re really, really cute.” He patted the ledge again. “Will you sit down?”
I perched.
“Good,” said Alex. “I’ve been waiting for a chance to talk to you all year.”
I waited. When he didn’t say more, I asked again, “Why?” and held my breath, because of what he might say next.
I noticed him not noticing, or not caring, what the goons were doing, jabbing each other and slapping their thighs. “Do I have to say it again? You’re the best-looking girl here.”
Kindness was confounding. I was aware of where our hands met on the ledge.
“If you really think that, then why did you call me a freak?”
He leaned left and right to get his buddies’ attention. “Hey, will you guys fuck off?”
They grew solemn and slid off.
Alex looked back at me. “It just seems like nasty gets a lot more done in this place, you know?”
I did know.
“And besides, it worked,” he said, again with the smile.
We walked through the meadow. He didn’t try to touch me, but when it happened accidentally, just at the arm or hip, I felt like yelping. Some knot was unloosing inside me and this was terrible. Then I remembered who he lived with, showered with, ran wind sprints with. I was confused and frightened. But then I heard his voice and I wasn’t afraid. This reversal happened, quick oscillations, in sub-seconds. Ever seen the inside of a pocket watch? It was exhausting.
Alex had a warm, deep voice, and he was articulate. “Glad to find someone who appreciates that cruelty is currency,” he said. “Not easily admitted around here.”
My body was swimming beneath my brain. “No, it’s not.”
He hated St. Paul’s.
“Why do you stay?” I asked.
“My dad.” Alex’s father had grown up poor and had achieved, via football and a Rhodes Scholarship, top corporate positions. Cultural leadership would follow. Alex worshipped him. His dad had augmented his son’s early ice-hockey talent with ballet lessons to improve his balance. He’d raised a
