How carefully I had denied myself truth, companionship, a future. My devotion to shame, to the St. Paul’s depiction of me, had taken precedence over everything.
I sold the lying man’s ring and rented as many months as it afforded me in a haunted basement flat with its coal scuttle still visible on the street-side wall. I was close, then, to meeting the people who would help me begin to live, but I did not know it yet. When the dog and I walked across London to our new home, I wore a backpack containing my most precious things. I might have been fifteen. On my way to the Schoolhouse, on my way to the rink, on my way home from Rick and Taz’s room.
When the boys did what they did to me, they denied the third person on that bed. I had no humanity. The impact of this violation only sharpened with time. My careful distinctions of injury and responsibility—the difference I imagined between what they did and rape, between terrible things you should put behind you and truly hellish things no one would expect you to bear—allowed me, for many years, to restore that third person in the room in my mind. I could pretend that having been permitted to keep my jeans on while being choked by cocks was something like agency, that it meant that at least they saw and heard me, the girl beneath them. I worked—I still work—to restore the boys’ humanity as a way of restoring mine: they were symptoms of a sick system, they were tools of the patriarchy, they were fooled by porn.
But then the school went and did the same thing, denying my humanity, rewriting the character of a girl and spilling all her secrets to classmates to tempt them into shunning her. The teachers, rectors, lawyers, and priests of St. Paul’s School lied to preserve their legacy. It would take decades to learn not to hate the girl they disparaged, and to give her the words she deserved.
It was the school’s inhumanity I could not—cannot—overcome. Because now I was up against an institution that subsumes human beings and presents a slick wall of rhetoric and posture and ice where there should be thought and feeling. Thus is the world, this world, made.
I saw it everywhere.
12Investigation, 2016
By the time I turned forty, I had found safe harbor in marriage to a kind man who was unimpressed by Wasp wealth and had had a fine time attending the public high school a mile from his house in Los Angeles. His immigrant parents could not imagine what would cause a family to send its child across the country for high school: What had I done? My husband and I laughed and left it there. My family never talked about what had happened at St. Paul’s, and our new friends in new communities would never know. There’s no tidy way to tell the tale, no obvious antecedent that requires explication, and the result of any such revelation in an otherwise civil relationship is to coat everything with a sticky alien muck that might or might not linger in the form of shame or timidity. With my husband the event was dropped into the well we tend, where our courtship resides, too, and the births of our sons, along with the premature deaths of loved ones and my husband’s experience as a first responder at the World Trade Center. There are things he saw there that he will not tell me of. We hold these stories not in how we talk about them but in how we talk to each other about everything else.
I had finally outrun St. Paul’s. The alumni office had even lost track of me—I no longer received solicitations for money, or the Alumni Horae. My eldest child was almost ready to start exploring online, and on the day he’d think to pick out the letters of his mother’s name, I realized gratefully, nothing about any of this would come up.
Then in August of 2016, my oldest friend, Andrea, called.
“My God. St. Paul’s. Those motherfuckers. Can you believe it?”
In spite of steady headlines about the latest sexual-assault trial, I’d been ignoring the news out of New Hampshire. It was easy to do. Not my life, I’d decided. Not anymore.
“I’m sure I could believe it,” I told my friend, “but I don’t know what it is.”
Andrea explained that the school, facing a civil lawsuit from the assault victim’s family, had filed a motion in U.S. District Court in Concord to force the release of her name. By universal convention, the names of underage victims of sexual crimes are redacted in court filings. Her attacker had now been convicted on multiple counts. A handful of powerful alumni had fund-raised to pay his legal fees. Now the school did not feel it fair that everyone should know the name of the institution accused of failing to protect the young people legally and ethically in its care, but not the name of the girl who was assaulted there. So this Episcopalian school, with an endowment at that time worth well north of half a billion dollars, meant to force the teenager to defend herself to the world. They meant to intimidate her, perhaps to silence her.
It was such an astonishingly nasty legal action that Andrea, who is a lawyer, could not at first believe it was true. She’d gone so far as to find the motion on the court
