“My dad and hockey,” Alex said. “How about you?”
He hadn’t meant to, but already we’d come to it. With hockey he’d summoned the ghost of Rick. It was unavoidable. Alex wasn’t a giant, like Rick was, but his talent was commensurate—he was one of the stars in his year. They filled the same roles at the school, had the same coaches. Over ice and turf, much would have passed between them.
“I guess I haven’t left because I refuse to give up,” I said.
Alex was quiet. I needed to know right away, so I said, “Rick Banner fucked me up last year.”
But Alex said only, “I know.”
“And Taz.”
“I know.”
“I wanted to kill myself.”
“I’m glad you didn’t.”
“Maybe I should have, though,” I said, feeling swamped again.
“There’s still plenty of time.”
I laughed.
Alex said, “Stick with me.”
I could not stop my smile. “Why should I?”
“Because I, my dear, will beat the shit out of anyone.”
“Anyone?”
“Anyone. I can travel if I need to, too. Just give me time to sign out for the weekend.”
“Deal.”
“Though I’d rather we sign out together and go hang out somewhere.”
“Like where?”
“I dunno. Somewhere I won’t get busted for murdering Rick Banner in his sleep.”
“Paris?”
“Done.”
“Alex?”
“Yeah?”
“Was he always like that?”
“Who. Banner?”
“Yeah. Was he always such a dick?”
Alex stopped on the path and turned me toward him. He took my hands in his hands, and when I was still he said, “Oh, my god, Lacy. You didn’t think it was you, did you? You thought it was you?”
That spot in the meadow thereafter has, in my memory, a tiny light, a little firefly point I’m sure I could still see if I ever went back. Other places on campus lit too, that fall, one by one. The pillar at the front of the math building where one day I realized, ten seconds then thirty seconds then five minutes late to class, that I felt an actual pain in my chest when Alex and I parted. There’s a light at the step up into the dining halls, where he waited for me. There’s one where I sat in the choir stalls. One at the spot where he broke away from football practice to find me up on the soccer fields, grown men howling his name at his back. Above all a glow from the cramped single at the back of the top floor of Foster House, where in the evenings I’d lie for hours on Alex’s chest and he would stroke my hair.
He loved to discuss history and nation-states and the collapse of empires and macroeconomics, but mostly he told me about his family. One sister was brilliant, at Harvard Law School, and he intended to follow her there. His other sister was not as bookish but had a gift with people, just wait and I’d see it myself, and indeed I did. His mother was a warm Southern belle with extreme smarts. Alex was born of these women, shaped by them such that with his teammates he could be a hockey thug tumbling toward the locker room grab-assing and gassy, badgering through a half-maw of chewing tobacco, and still shower, put on a pressed button-down, and arrive at my room to walk me to Seated Meal, because that’s what a gentleman did. And while I heard him vulgar and puerile plenty of times, never once did I hear him deploy the feminine as insult. He could hit hard enough to leave girls out of it.
There lived, in Foster House that year, a critical mass of hockey players, whose stench began at the base of the grand staircase (the dorm had originally been a mansion) and boiled, once the radiators came on, into a carpet-based airbroth that made it almost intolerable to be inside those walls. During intervisitation hours, girls stood blushing at the bottom step with hanks of hair drawn across their noses, waiting for some younger jock to go fetch their friend. Had Alex not been Alex—my Alex—the place would have been a lion’s den to me. But as a sixth former I could stay out half an hour later than Alex could, so I would huddle with him there in his single room with its lone window cracked to the pine air until well past ten, when I was supposed to leave.
One of the masters in Foster was too old to climb the three flights of stairs. Another—the young and handsome English teacher—was routinely racing the clock too, parking his little blue sports car with its long-haired passenger in the treed lot beneath Alex’s window. The third was a Japanese instructor whom the hockey thugs could not resist abusing. Caught with mouths of chewing tobacco, they stared and gawked when Mr. Hayashi asked why they were talking strangely, until the question, in its reflexivity, seemed absurd. They liked to leave their windows wide open and spread peanuts across their dressers so they could run yelling down the stairs that a wild animal was in their room, come quickly, what was it, what could it be? Mr. Hayashi would get caught in the double rhotic consonant of squirrel and spend whole miserable seconds trying to deliver his verdict.
Late one night that fall Alex and I were lying in the dark, as we did, when Mr. Hayashi pushed open the door. Surgical light spilled in from the fluorescent hall. Mr. Hayashi saw us and blinked, trying to find the words.
“Mr. Hayashi,” said Alex politely, “please go away.”
The door closed.
Alex had not come to St. Paul’s a virgin. He was old for his class and his girlfriend at home had been older still. He was not,
