10

The Pom-Pom Girls changed their name to the Cheerleaders, and the Cheerleaders were not to be confused with the Twirlers, who marched at the front of the band. “It’s about time!” declared Cathy Benjamin, who sat next to me in figure drawing. “Can you imagine? Having to call yourself a Pom-Pom Girl? I mean, it’s 1979!”

The first time I photographed them for the yearbook, they made a body pyramid. It took an hour to use a roll of film because it was raining outside, and there wasn’t enough room in the hall to achieve “proper launch.” Ultimately they settled on a finishing pose, a bewildering conglomerate of kneeling, standing, half-kneeling, half-standing, and a little systematic reclining. The pose had to follow an actual cheer, otherwise it would not appear natural. This proved technically arduous since each time they tried it, they would land in a new place.

“Did you get it?” they would huff, cheerfully.

“I think so,” I would say. “Let’s do a few more just to be safe.”

I ended up using a wide-angle lens, which had the unfortunate effect of distorting the image and making the faces look fishy and squished, as if they’d been photographed off a doorknob. The cheerleaders didn’t complain when the book came out. In fact, they were good sports in general, always inviting me to join them at their lunch table, telling me how great my hair looked or what a nice sweater.

In the hallway they chanted through lips that were pink and glossy. With hands resting on the square of their hips, they took turns shouting a player’s name. Two, four, six, eight, who do we ap-pre-ci-ate? Kevin! Eddie! Nico! Billy! Mike!

One rule, either official or good manners, was that each girl got to shout the name of her boyfriend or someone she had a crush on, which was the same as a boyfriend according to the code of girls. If you liked someone, you called him, the way you called the front seat of the car when you were a kid. When we were little, we loved the Monkees. Kate called Davy Jones, so I got stuck with Mike Nesmith. Boys have codes also, but the punishment for breaking them is severe. If you hit on someone’s girl, you could get beaten or killed. With girls, things are never quite so straightforward.

I once asked Kate why it’s considered betrayal on the part of an innocent girl if a boy someone else is interested in approaches her instead of the girl who “called” him. “Or take a steady couple,” I said, fortifying my point. “If the boyfriend goes after another girl, why does everyone blame the new girl rather than the boyfriend?”

“Because,” Kate whined, “the new girl shouldn’t have done that.”

“Done what? The guy was the one who did it,” I said.

As each cheerleader called a name, she jumped into the air, making an X with her body while the others clapped twice for punctuation. There was something beautifully paradoxical about them. They dressed the way girls are supposed to dress, in earrings and ruffles, with blue eye shadow and permanent waves. Yet they were not so ladylike, and the things they did with their bodies were insane. They were powerful and athletic, not like the tennis players whose bodies were of perfectly middling proportions. They were confident, loyal, and optimistic. You have to be that way to fly through air believing someone will catch you. The flying part depressed me. Just how far they would go for their team. How there are no teams in the real world for women like that.

I watched them through my camera lens. Annie Jordan and Elizabeth Hill had just joined the club. Having black girls in the group gave it a visual allure that formerly it had lacked. When the cheer was over, I whistled. They turned and waved, Hey, Evie!, and I snapped a picture, which was actually very nice, how they were all standing, modest and tasteful and caught by surprise, pretty and in girlish disarray. I waved too, then walked to the auditorium.

There was a sign on the door: OCTOBER 22, 1979, 3:00–5:00 P.M. FINAL AUDITIONS—EHHS DRAMA CLUB. I pushed the door open, and a round of cheers from the girls rushed in with me. Everyone turned, as Mr. McGintee, the drama adviser who was also the senior guidance counselor, made the announcement that auditions were officially closed.

“That is, unless Miss Auerbach has decided to sacrifice art for the stage. What do you say, Eveline?” Mr. McGintee called.

I drew the door closed and slipped quickly into a seat in the top row. “Oh, no, I’m just waiting for someone.” I didn’t have to say Kate, since everyone knew. Mr. McGintee knew also.

“Do you girls have a moment?” Mr. McGintee had inquired, as Kate and I passed the guidance office on the first day back from summer. “Just for a chat.” He had high wiry hair and wiry glasses, and he looked as dry as an old cattail. Like he could use a stiff drink.

While he spoke in private to Kate, I sat in the empty waiting room, trying not to touch anything. The guidance office always made me uncomfortable, maybe because it trafficked in the fate of children, sort of like a doctor’s office deals in the fates of the sick. Nothing much happens in either place except waiting of the most agonizing variety. The secretary’s clock radio was playing “Sweet Home Alabama.” I noticed that it was tuned to WPLR, the local rock station, which must have been an after-hours thing. Usually it was kept tuned to light favorites.

The door to Mr. McGintee’s glass cube whooshed open, and he invited me to join them. Inside he perched on the edge of his desk and asked questions that were not exactly questions. “So, have you two had an opportunity to review the events of the summer?”

Kate said, “Yes. We have.”

And I said, “Yes. We review a lot.”

“Very good,” said Mr. McGintee, slapping his knee. “Ter-rif-ic.”

It’s not always a crime to lie. Sometimes it’s easier to give people the answer they expect than to explain what you really think or feel. No one likes to admit it, but conversation is never truly spontaneous. Everyone works toward a goal, and few people like to be surprised. You can prevent a lot of mutual embarrassment and tedious negotiation simply by pinpointing your partner’s aim at the outset.

Mr. McGintee had spent a lot of time and money earning his degree in educational psychology, and you couldn’t blame him for trying to get some use out of it. He didn’t want honest answers about how Kate was doing, just some key phrases that would allow him to classify her feelings as “normal” and call her case closed. It’s like asking someone, “How was your summer?” You don’t really want details.

But Kate could not speak of her suffering because words could never convey her specific feelings. I’d seen her sorrow. It came in the way she sat motionlessly in her room in our house watching the day skulk from orange to blue. It came in the way time passed twice as slow for her and also around her. We would sit for what felt like hours.

“What time is it?” I’d ask with a yawn.

She’d say, “Ten minutes past the last time you asked.”

Invariably she overdressed. And when she cooked or washed dishes, she leaned against the counter with her legs tightly wrapped, one around the other. Her grief expressed itself in trepidation. She was afraid to move, as though movement might draw her irrevocably from the sphere in which her mother had resided.

“Why did you drop French, Catherine?” Mr. McGintee asked the top of her head. Kate’s hands played with the fabric of the upholstered guidance chair, which was beady like dehydrated oatmeal.

“She’s already fluent,” I said. “How much better is she supposed to speak it?”

He shushed me. “The point is, French Five would have raised your class rank, Kate,” he said, and his eyelids fluttered. “The point is,” he counseled, “we need to consider your future.”

He nodded meaningfully to me, asking for backup on that, as if I had any kind of secure future myself, or as if I’d had any experience with the luxury of family outside of what I’d known from Kate’s. There was nothing anyone could do, really. Kate had lost an entire way of being—red wine in her water glass, pounded veal for dinner, a platter of cheese and fruit for dessert, strolls around Town Pond with Maman’s perfectly pressed skirt crinkling stiffly like tissue paper. On Saturdays there was dancing, Yves Montand or Jacques Brel, and when the song ended, Maman would spin, clapping twice by your eyes like a joyful, brazen someone—Ha! Ha!

How could he possibly help? Part of Kate passed when her parents passed. She no longer had proof of herself. She had become a nothing. Not a nothing, but a former something, which is infinitely more complicated.

In the auditorium, I sat on the upright edge of a seat, dropped my knapsack onto the floor, and squinted to find Kate. You could find her by her hair, which in mythology would have been called a golden mane. She was in the middle of the second row.

Mr. McGintee complimented the group on the turnout—in addition to the seventeen existing members of the club, there were twenty-six new students who had come to audition. He launched into a clichéd speech about how so few dramatic works can accommodate that many actors, and he ominously extracted a sheet of paper from his briefcase, telling everyone to write down their names and interests, in case they didn’t make the cast.

“It’s important to remember that the backstage volunteers, the costume designers, the lighting technicians, and the sales crew are just as important as the performers.” He shouted up the aisle, again to me. “Isn’t that right, Eveline?”

“Sure,” I said. I don’t know why he always had to rope me into things. He never seemed to listen to what I said. “I mean, I guess.” It wasn’t really right, not if you wanted to act. I happened to like doing the sets, but Kate would have died if they made her property mistress.

When Kate asked me whether she should join the Drama Club, I said no. She was pretty, and her hair was long, but that didn’t make her a stage actress. Carol Channing was a stage actress. Julie Andrews. Ethel Merman. Helen Hayes. Lynn Redgrave. Rita Moreno. I told her my opinion, just not in those words.

I just said, “I don’t think it would be good.”

Kate would have been fine on film, playing herself or a type of fairy—an equestrian fairy, one that lounged on horse foreheads and sent wandloads of sparkles into horse ears. One thing is that the plays they pick have to be vehicles for three talented kids and an incompetent mob. If I were in charge, I would have had them act out the newspaper.

“Let’s see, Fiddler on the Roof was last year,” I said as I ate a chicken leg and fell back on the couch. “And Guys and Dolls was the year before. It’ll probably be South Pacific.”

“You’re so mean!”

“Five bucks,” I said. “The Mikado. I bet you. Damn Yankees.”

Kate felt I was making fun of her hobby, which I was. She wanted to act because she was beautiful, and beautiful people always feel entitled to extra attention. It was the same thing with everyone saying Daryl Sackler should play basketball. It didn’t mean he had the necessary stamina or agility or dedication or wits, it just meant he was tall, that his figure would have made sense on the court. People like things at least to appear to make sense, even if that visual logic comes at the expense of factual excellence.

There were boys all over the auditorium, sitting against the edges of things. I was surprised to see Jack there. He was on the floor against the wall at the far right with Dan and Troy Resnick, and he was staring at me with a piercing curiosity, as though I were stuffed and encased behind glass. I’d seen him look at me that way before.

“Are the rumors true?” he’d asked.

Twigs were caught on his red plaid lumberjack coat. He’d just returned from boarding school for Thanksgiving. His duffel bag was sitting out on the front step, where he’d left it. It was November 1978, five months after we’d met.

It was an uncharacteristic sentence for him to speak. I was confused not by the words but by the tone, the swiftness of delivery. It was as if there were a piece of me he’d lost in a strong wind, and he was frantic to retrieve it. He was staring at me furiously.

“It depends,” I said, “on what the rumors say.”

“That they slept with you,” he countered fearlessly. One thing—Jack could be fearless. He did not ever hesitate to ensure that we were both speaking of the same thing. We were sitting on the couch in the living room. His knees brushed the coffee table.

I looked at the ceiling. “Well, no one really slept.”

“You know what I mean.”

“It makes a difference, the words you use.”

“Did you have sex with them?”

“I wouldn’t say that either.”

Jack took a breath. “What would you say?”

“I would say it was the other way around.”

“That they had sex with you?”

“Right,” I said. “That’s right.”

Jack looked at his shoes. He looked at his shoes for a long time. He became so still I thought maybe he’d fallen asleep. I tried to think what it would be like to be him, hearing such news for the first time, but that was hard to do when I’d known already for a while. It was possible that he might like to do something about what had happened. Unfortunately, it had happened five weeks before. Though it’s not hard to get emotional about the past, it’s hard to apply those emotions effectively.

Did the rumors happen to mention the way the guys came into the upstairs bathroom of Mary Brierly’s summer house in Napeague while I was peeing, the way they hoisted me against the wall before I could pull my pants up, the way L. B. Strickland covered my mouth with his mouth while Nico twisted the faucet on the sink very hard. Water splattered up from the basin onto my belly in icy slivers. I did not like water to splash up, not ever.

Would Jack feel better or worse knowing that because the back of my neck was pressed against the wall, I could hear but not see Nico’s zipper coming undone with one sharp shot. And unwillingly, I memorized the feel of my two wrists fitting into someone’s one hand, and the feel of drunken gasps on my neck going in time with strokes that tore me open, and the feel of a stranger’s hair against my skin.

“Rapture” by Blondie played. It seemed to play exponentially, with each next verse multiplying out. Surely no one had described that to Jack, or the part about Mary banging on the bathroom door and pushing it open onto the three of us, shrieking, “Get out of my house!” and “You tramp!” Did people include in the notes they passed a description of her nails going into my arms when she dragged me into the hallway with my pants around my ankles? How when I reached down to dress, there were streams of someone else’s fluid running down my inner thighs? How I stumbled down the stairs, how I ran out the front door, how I had hoped against hope that no one had noticed?

The night was moonless but not entirely unkind. Three bodies appeared. Rocky Santiago and his younger brother, Manny, and some underclassman whose name I could not recall. Rocky eased me into the passenger seat of his dented Chevy. My bike fit into his trunk. He drove cautiously toward East Hampton from Amagansett, and Manny followed in his friend’s car, cautiously also.

Rocky asked was I okay.

I felt bad not to answer. I could not get past this feeling, this harrowing after-feeling, a feeling beyond grasp or intelligence. Beyond any obvious comparison to having been robbed or cheated, inside I felt robbed and cheated. Inside, I felt the physics of injustice, which, as it turns out, has little or nothing to do with the language of injustice. The indisputable wrongness of someone’s having taken something that did not belong to them, filthied something that I’d kept clean, made their mark on property that was mine, and contemptibly crossed over into my intimacy in defiance of my desire, was all distant conjecture compared to the pragmatics of my situation—the pulled muscle in my neck, the cut on my mouth possibly from a watch, the stinging scratches on my arms made by Mary, the dampness in my underwear not from me, the surface abrasions and internal hairline splits that I could not mention to Rocky despite his kind interest because it is hard for people to understand the inside of a girl, the way it is shaped like a conch with filigreed avenues that are spectacular and ornamental. People tend to think it’s just a hole.

I asked him to pull over and when he did, I leaned out to vomit. Manny turned off the headlights on the second car to give me privacy.

When we arrived at my house, Rocky shifted the arm of the car into park and asked was I all right to go in on my own. I said that I was. Maybe I was in shock, but I didn’t feel embarrassed with him. I had the feeling he’d seen enough of the world to understand the random brutality of instinct and to know I was not to blame for what had happened to me. He’d come from Colombia in 1976, from Pereira. His real name was Raúl. I would have liked to know about his home, about what had made his family leave it for East Hampton of all places, but I didn’t want to make him nervous with talk. We both knew that it would have made the story of my assault far more plausible if I’d blamed him for what the others had done. It would have made me a more credible victim. It was good of him to take a chance on me.

“Thanks, Raúl,” I said, waving my hand weakly.

He ran his fingers through his hair, scratching the back of his scalp. “No problem, Evie.”

Rocky walked to the rear of the car, lifted the bike out of the trunk, and waited for me to join him. Then he stood watchfully as I moved down the driveway. The dimmed headlights of the two idling cars poured onto the ground. They were waiting headlights, fraternal and discreet. When I reached the garage door, I turned and waved again, not realizing then that the timing of Rocky’s benevolence, the gentlemanly readiness of his heart, had reversed in one elegant gesture the violence I’d experienced. In fact, it saved me. It was poetry, really—the random enmity, the random good.

Jack was saying that I should have done something. That reporting it to the police would have been cathartic. “You know,” he said, “like, helpful.”

It was a funny suggestion, the part about the police, coming from him. I was sorry for my involvement in an incident that would cause him to betray the basic tenets of his thinking.

Even if he was right, it was easy to say in retrospect what would have been the sensible thing to do. At the time, I did not feel sensible. At the time I was too busy thinking. Should I slice off the top layer of my skin? Should I scrape the lip marks from my neck? Would I use a knife for that, and with that knife could I make a pocket in my belly wide enough for a hand to reach in and remove the contaminated organs? I had the compulsive desire to scrub each fleshy gelatin piece of myself in acid. Periodically throughout the night I would tell myself to get over it, to act practically, to take a shower. Instantly after, I would drop back to the floor of my room, made sick by the thought of my own body, afraid to glimpse even the smallest portion of my undressed self. It didn’t seem possible that they’d had ink on their fingers, but somehow I was sure that underneath I looked splotchy like a zebra. Not a zebra, but one of the spotted kinds of animals. I just thought of zebras because of the sorrowful way they hang their heads.

“Have you seen those cops?” I asked Jack, trying to bolster his mood with complaints. My hands made circle motions around my eyes. “Those mirrored aviator glasses they wear?”

“Yeah,” Jack muttered. “Fucking assholes.”

Maybe the image of me talking to my own bloated reflection in gleaming Ray-Bans would make him understand how pointless it would’ve been to file a report. Still, if I could have guessed that telling the police would have profited Jack, I might have done it. He seemed to need to know that some manner of justice had occurred. It was like sticking a pin into a bruise, to hear him wish so naïvely for equity.

Jack’s body had not yet moved. He was like a jetty rock, obstinate and motionless against the savage force of the sea. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do or say so I waited, passing time by thinking of things I knew. I knew that he loved me desperately, never more so than at that moment. I knew that he was ready, aroused for once by the honorableness of his emotions, and yet the anger that moved him had no means of expression. How betrayed he must have felt by his belligerent pacifism, by the ambivalence he’d constantly displayed. He was thinking that the attack had not been arbitrary, that it had happened to me for a reason. He was thinking the reason was him.

“Don’t you see,” I said. “It’s like trying to catch a flying bird.”

Nothing could have changed what happened. No cop or court would have had the jurisdiction to do what was fair—to vacuum the grizzling glue from my insides and cram it back into the pinhole openings of their penises.

A bleak shaft of carrot-colored light grazed his left eye and a round patch beneath it, making Jack seem one-eyed and invincible like a Cyclops. I wondered if it was three o’clock. Usually things get carroty and bleak and Homeric at three.

“Say the rest,” he demanded.

He wanted to hear the part about him—that he should have been different than he was, that he should have been a falsely obedient son who would not have taken a knife to his father and would not have been shipped to boarding school, that he should have been a typical male who walked with his arm around my waist and his hand crammed in my back pocket, who bragged about fucking me to guys he despised, who played a sport and not an instrument. He wanted me to connect it to him.

I shrugged. “There is no rest.”

I accepted that things had to happen as they did when I walked back in that night after Rocky left me and I found the kitchen still smelling like food from dinner. The dishes in the drain board were not yet dry, and the radio by the stove that I had turned on earlier was still playing. The time was one-thirty in the morning, on Sunday, October 22nd, 1978. Hours before, it had been the 21st, Powell’s thirty-eighth birthday. On Saturday at six, Kate had called to say she couldn’t make it to the birthday dinner or to Mary’s party, that her mother was too sick to be left alone. They were leaving Sunday at noon for Manhattan. They would stay for two days of tests at Sloan-Kettering. At that time the cancer was just a suspicious lump.

I rested my knee on the same chair I’d used at dinner. While we were eating birthday cake, Mom had told the story of a new student who’d ordered a soda at a fast-food place but was given a cup of lye instead. He drank it and permanently lost the use of his voice, but he won four hundred thousand dollars in a lawsuit. He decided to apply the winnings in part to the expense of an education, which he would not otherwise have been able to afford.

“See that?” she’d said, slapping the tabletop lightly with two palms.

“Well now, that really is something,” Powell said, brushing down his mustache with his napkin and considering the dark peculiarities of fate.

“I think I’ll go to Mary’s party,” I’d said as I cleared the dishes.

“Need a ride?” Powell had asked.

“No, thanks. I’ll take my bike.” I hadn’t wanted to bother him on his birthday. The bike had affected my destiny; I’d arrived late and alone, and by the time I got there, everyone was very drunk. Like the guy who ordered a soda but got lye instead—had the timing of his day transpired differently, he might have gotten a Coke after all.

I scanned the kitchen hopelessly. Around me lay the gruesome evidence of a seemingly inconsequential chain of events, which, as it turned out, had not been inconsequential after all. I was feeling hysterical. I wanted to laugh, but instinct would not have it. I wanted to move, but there was no place to go.

I threw my ruined underwear into the garbage, then sat in bed and stared at the clock, watching the numbers flap. I timed my headaches.

At 4:09 A.M. it occurred to me that someone might see my underwear in the trash and pull them out, thinking I’d made a mistake. I returned to the kitchen and cut them up with scissors, then shoved them into a cereal box, a Rice Krispies box I emptied. I crammed the package down to the bottom of the can and covered it with other garbage. When I pulled my hands out, they had jiggling flecks of congealed chicken grease on them. I lifted the bag from the can, tied it, and dragged it into my room. Then I returned and put a clean liner in, wondering how people manage to conceal murder. What do they do with their consciousnesses? I could do nothing with my consciousness.

Morning hummed when it came, like a choir of light, and in the clear, I showered. I could not select clothes: I kept trying things until the contents of my dresser were emptied onto the floor. My skin was itching, and there were hives vining up around my neck like ivy. Since I couldn’t pick one outfit, I wore several. In the mirror I looked homely, like a straw corn doll with stick-out hair and no neck. I looked like the product of impoverished child artisans.

It was very cold in Powell’s car while I waited for the 6:17 train to pass. As soon as it rumbled by, I started the engine and pulled out of the driveway, stopping first at the nature trail, where I fed the leftover Rice Krispies to the ducks. From there I went to the dump, where I had the distinction of being the first customer, if in fact dump users can be considered customers. In Paris, some women are the first customers at the boulangerie, where they wait on the dim blue cobblestone rue for the doors to open so they can buy bread. I wondered would I ever be one of those women. It hardly seemed possible.

I teetered on the precipice of the sandy mound and swung my arm back to hurl the bag into the abyss. Vulture seagulls swarmed down. I wondered whether they would pick so far through the bag that they would arrive at the cereal box and my underpants, and then would they fly about with shreds of stained cotton hanging from their beaks. I unbuttoned one of the several sweaters I was wearing and listened to the repetitive caws of the gulls. I stood on the edge of the pit of sand feeling like a slave in the Roman Colosseum, with the wind whooshing like a wild opus through the seemingly endless sky above me.

Back at home, Mom and Powell were in the kitchen having breakfast. I considered telling them what had happened, but I couldn’t bear the proud way they looked at me to change. Besides, Powell would have ended up going over to everyone’s houses, and there would have been confrontations and arrests, more than likely of him.

The telephone rang, awfully. Bllwanngg!

“Whoa!” my mother shouted.

“I’ll get it,” I yelled, diving to prevent a second ring.

Nico Gerardi’s voice cracked through the wire. “Hello?”

I took the phone to the staircase, nearly to the top, where I sat, facing up. The carpet felt especially synthetic. Sometimes it hits you, the way a carpet is just weird fake stuff.

He asked was I okay.

“I guess,” I said, wondering what would he have done if I’d said no. And, who’d told him to call? His father, his brother? How many people already knew, when I’d told no one?

He kept talking and I kept listening, trying to stay in the present, to keep my mind from receding into recall.

“I think it’s gonna rain today,” he said. “Do you?”

“Do I—what?”

“Think it’s going to rain. Or not rain. You know, get sunny.”

Nico and L.B. had families who denied them nothing. Their parents bought them their favorite foods, gave them new cars and nice clothes, intended to pay in full for their college tuition, and dispensed generous allowances without demanding responsibility in return. Such parents are wrong to shelter children so completely, to condone immaturity, to exempt boys from basic social requirements of fair exchange. People can get hurt that way.

“Sun, I think,” I said. “Or rain. I’m not sure.”

In the end, Nico said nothing of the remotest relevance to me. I really wanted to know if it had had to be me, or could it have been anyone? And did his tendency to commit acts of violence have to do with genetics or environment? The only thing I learned, I learned by supposition—the event had not transformed him or L.B. They were clean. They had no bruises or torn flesh. They had no remorse. There was no larger lesson for them. To them, it was just a night, a lucky night. As for me, I’d been critically altered.

Jack examined every inch of my face as if it were unfamiliar to him and yet also very familiar. “You were wrong to keep it to yourself. You let your shame silence you. It’s exactly what they were counting on. You protected them.”

It was an interesting point, that shame can take your voice away. Maybe it was so. Maybe I thought that if I kept my humiliation to myself, it would go away faster. And if I shared it, then I would have to wait for everyone else to forget also, and them plus me could take a very long time. I tried to recall the half-life of uranium-238. Whatever it was, that seemed about right.

The living room had turned dark. A shroud seemed to cover Jack’s head; he seemed to be in mourning. His anger had been replaced by his customary self-analytical brooding, and that was, in fact, progress for the worse. I knew I had to speak to keep him from venturing to a bad place, but I could think of nothing to say. I wanted to lean on his shoulder; instead I lowered my head to my own lap.

Once I had a long conversation with a deaf woman, one of Mom’s students named Monica. Afterward I needed to sleep for a while. I knew only the ASL alphabet and very few signs—dead and hungry and uncle—which were not sufficient to convey with any specificity the content of my thoughts. Jack and I were having similar problems. I possessed all this information, but, for whatever reason—survival or shame—my vocabulary was limited. Jack was handicapped as well; he had more space inside than things to fill it. He could only reach forth with his considerable cerebral might to capture and claim my reluctant impressions.

Jack suggested we take a walk up to Georgica Beach, so we did. Though I saw him every waking hour for the remainder of Thanksgiving week, and he even sat alongside me as I slept, those were the last words he spoke to me until the Sunday night his mother took him back to boarding school in Connecticut.

We received a collect phone call that evening. The operator said, “From Jack, for anyone.”

My mother said, “Yes, of course, we’ll accept,” and she handed the receiver to me.

“Where are you?” I asked him. Car horns and a PA system were blaring in the background.

“Port Authority,” he said. “I just got off a Greyhound.”

“What? What about boarding school?” I asked.

“I’m quitting,” he said. “Fuck it.”

The next day Jack was back at East Hampton High School, where he remained until we graduated. Once he returned, life became bearable again, though I did not dare tell him. To say things were better would have been to imply that at some point they had been worse. Where would he have gone with his malice if I had confessed how much more painful the public humiliation had been than the private? How might he have treated himself upon learning that people preferred to think poorly of me rather than think of two football players as rapists? I did not tell Jack that after the rape I’d gone to Denny’s car at lunchtime every day. That I’d carried all my books all the time so I wouldn’t have to stop at my locker. That boys in the hall would cram their hands in the pockets of their jeans and laugh or sigh overloudly, blocking my way if I wanted to pass. That girls jumped on the opportunity to denigrate me, as though they’d been waiting. Not everyone was cruel. Not Denny or Marty Koch or Dan Lewis. Not the yearbook people. Only the popular ones, which is a confounding fact of social science—that is to say, the most-liked people behaving the least likeably.

The only good thing about Maman’s illness was that Kate ended up having to stay in New York for the week after the incident. When she returned, she was too despondent over the diagnosis to have been included in any gossip. Possibly I was incorrect; people can be quite heartless.

But once Jack returned to school, and we were together as a couple again, it dawned on people that I had not agreed to sex with Nico and L.B., or tried to trap them into dating me, as some girls had suggested. And that actually, I had no interest in them. Suddenly, not only did I possess the practical knowledge of their astounding sexual ineptitude, but my situation showed that they had to steal sex because no one was giving it to them voluntarily.

From then on, all the boys treated me with deference and civility. Possibly they felt bad for me. Possibly they were awed by the fact that I hadn’t told on Nico and L.B. By having the boys as allies, daily life became easier than ever. I wasn’t proud of this, but I wasn’t ashamed either. Things just happened to unfold this way, so I followed the rules of survival—snatching every minor advantage, immodestly seizing help wherever you can find it. The part that bothered me was the girls. Nothing was forgotten or forgiven with them—that is to say, them forgiving me.

Jack also never recovered. Periodically he would go on a tirade about how the sacredness of sex had been ruined. He would sink into a penetrating wretchedness marked by a prolonged and seething silence. I never asked what went on in the sulfurous corridors of his mind; I did not care to know. God knows we all have fantasies of retribution.

“You don’t understand,” he would say once he was able to speak of it again. “I just can’t clear it from my mind.”

I moved on because I had to, because pain gets heavy when you carry it far from its source, like a bucket of water hauled miles from a stream—it acquires a whole new value, which is the sum of its primary essence and your secondary investment. If I thought about it too much, I would start to forget things, important things, such as meals and homework. Once I found blood on my leg; perhaps I’d been scratching. Another time I was walking; who knows to where. I kept telling myself that it was enough to pity Nico’s and L.B.’s criminal lack of kindness, and to feel sorry for all the lies they’d been told—about women and themselves—and for the way they went very fast, like midget dogs, when they had sex. Maybe the cruelest revenge was to say nothing, to inform no one, to satisfy myself with the fact that they’d already hit the limits of their dubious potential, that for them, only stinking crisis lay ahead.

I wasn’t sure about the right way to think. I just tried to do my best with the little I had.

“Whom you all know by now,” Mr. McGintee was saying, and everyone clapped as a dark figure leaning against the lower left wall of the auditorium gave an abbreviated wave.

I squinted to find Jack, on the opposite side of the room. He was right there, squinting back at me.

Mr. McGintee shouted a few closing remarks as everyone rose. “Roles will be posted. Rehearsals start next Wednesday. Don’t forget to sign the paper going around.”

Kate lingered near the edge of the stage, and Jack idly ascended the aisle to my left. The lanky muscles of his thighs expressed themselves beneath the paper-thin denim of his jeans. He was wearing a white Oxford shirt over a faded blue Columbia University T-shirt that was the color of his eyes.

“Nice entrance,” he said, straddling the arm of the seat by mine, gnawing at his cuticle and kicking at a loose piece of carpet strip.

“What are you doing here?” I asked him.

“I’m like you,” he said. “Just waiting for someone.”

The group at the base of the auditorium began to thin, passing by us on the way out. Billy Martinson charged up after Troy, saying, “Give it to me, you little shit.”

Kate arrived right after. “Hey! You owe me five dollars, Evie.”

“Don’t tell me—Oklahoma.” I’d totally forgotten Oklahoma.

“Our Town.”

“Our Town?” I repeated. “That’s strange. I’d been figuring musicals.”

Jack grabbed my knapsack and followed Kate out. I followed also. As I moved to the door, I glanced over my shoulder. A handful of people were at the bottom. No one I knew, though I felt—I don’t know—as if I’d left something behind.

“We had a bet,” Kate explained to Jack as she held the auditorium door for us. “About the play. She wasn’t very nice.”

“She’s not a nice girl, Kate,” Jack said as we spilled into the lobby. “You ought to know that.” He tossed my knapsack to me, thrusting it like a medicine ball. “I’m going to Dan’s. See you.”

“What’s wrong with him?” Kate asked.

I wan’t sure. Lots of things probably. I just shrugged.

Kate was combing her hair when we got to her locker, so I opened it for her. I’ll never forget the combination, 10–24–8, or the way she looked as she started to collect her stuff. She was smiling to herself. I leaned onto the locker alongside hers and rubbed my eyes with the heels of my palms. I remember feeling sort of tired, sort of electric and free. Like I just didn’t care. Like there was nothing in the world that could possibly bind me. Like I belonged nowhere and everywhere.

We headed toward the side exit, our shoulders grazing as we walked. It was five o’clock. One long, low ribbon of sunlight slipped through the parted doors at the far end of the hall, creating a visible channel of dust in the air, and I could smell the rich, ripe aroma of just-cut grass. The school was uninhabited, but there was influence to its stillness. To this day, I believe I can render it, the feel of it—the shining, the glowing, the empty. I remember thinking, Something’s coming. I could feel it coming.

She breathed in. She said, “I think I’m in love.”

Then she blushed, and the hollows of her cheeks flushed with pink, like light warming rubies, coming up through them. Her eyes were pleading, as if calling on me to join her somehow. I remember turning. I remember exactly what it was to turn.

I saw a figure, a man. He was several paces behind us along the wall. His presence seemed to consume the entire width of the corridor, cleaving the air like an angry black slash. Never in my life had I seen anything so profoundly extrinsic, so exotic, so mystifying. His eyes were not on Kate, they were on me. He seemed to know me as I knew him; instantly we entered into confidence. He smiled, one swift and contemptuous smile, as if he’d caught me committing some crime that rendered me eligible for his coercion. And though I could not name what I had done, I felt the accuracy of his instinct. Nothing could conceal the perversion in me that was manifest to his eyes. I turned back. Whoever he was, he was inside—like a bullet, lodged.

The clock on Kate’s dresser said 9:05. She came over in a towel and sat next to me on the edge of her bed. The mattress rocked like a motorless boat. I grabbed a Seventeen magazine from her table and started flipping through it. She always had all these magazines.

“So, what do you think?” she asked.

I was looking at this article in which Mariel Hemingway was demonstrating her favorite exercises. You had to hang over crossed legs and lay both palms on the floor while straightening your knees.

“Think of what?”

“Of Harrison.”

Outside, the railroad crossing bells began to clank, and beyond the window the night blinked red. Within seconds, the whistle blew and the house began to shake, buoyantly, then furiously, then less and less as the train moved west. After a brief buzzing silence, the second set of chimes rang and the gates lifted.

“Is that his name? Harrison?”

“Harrison Rourke,” she replied.

Rourke, I thought, not Harrison. Rourke sounded more accurate. “I don’t know. He’s kind of old.” Old wasn’t right. Old was the only thing I could think of. That and him filling the hall behind us, a terrifying miracle of engineering, like a jet plowing through an alley.

“He’s not old,” she said.

I had the feeling I should mention the way he looked at me. If I didn’t mention it then, I never could, because Kate would want to know why I hadn’t said anything from the start. But often what feels implicitly true seems less true when you put it into words. I didn’t want to sound crazy.

“Is he a regular teacher?” I asked. “Or an outside guy coming in?”

Kate got up to put on a record. “An outside guy. The people who donated the money this year for the drama program hired him. They visited one day with Alicia Ross’s parents. They had a driver for their car.” After the spongy opening lull of the album came the crisp pops of music, and magically, a guitar. It was “Can’t Find My Way Home” by Blind Faith.

You are the reason I’ve been waiting all these years—

Somebody holds the key

Well, I’m near the end and I just ain’t got the time

And I’m wasted and I can’t find my way home

She sang along in her confectionery soprano and stood at the doors of her closet before a wall of meticulously folded garments coordinated in blocks of evolving color—cobalt to turquoise, coral to red, mocha to black. Kate could hunt for clothes with a transfixing resolve, making you think of Hollywood starlets. The bath towel slipped down the slope of her chest, scraping her nipples before dropping to the floor. I observed her talcum-coated body—I tried but could not imagine it in his arms. Had she said that she was in love or that she thought she was? Somehow it made a difference.

“Kate, can you do this?” The magazine had a picture of a model with a short haircut.

She returned to the bed. She was buttoning a big shirt with one of those Mandarin collars like the Beatles wore. She frowned. “It’s totally layered, you know.”

My eyes were closed and she was cutting. When she drew a combful of hair toward her, the rest of me went swayingly with it, which was hypnotic. It took me to the place in the mind where dreams are manufactured, which I pictured to be a hollow shaped like a tiny sea horse.

“It’s not so sudden,” Kate said, suddenly speaking of Rourke again. “It’s been weeks.”

I opened my eyes. In the bathroom mirror my eyes looked scared. Sometimes a thinking brain scared me. For the entire time I’d stopped thinking, she’d continued.

“Is that enough,” she asked, “or do you want to take off more?”

My hair came to my jaw in a short bob. “More.”

Her fingers kept capturing new sections, faster and faster. She would hold them with one hand and with the other she would snip, her head tilting affectedly. Her father had been a barber, and her aunt and uncle owned a salon in France, in a city called Grasse. I closed my eyes again. Kate said hair is dead, but I could feel the scissors cutting. Maybe I only felt the sound.

“Any shorter and you might as well shave it,” I heard her say. She tossed the scissors into the sink, and they bridged the drain catch. On the floor I saw my hair, a collection of pitiful commas. My hands moved to touch my head; no strand of hair was longer than two inches.

Kate sat on the toilet. She seemed shocked by what she had done. “I can’t believe it,” she kept saying. “I can’t believe it.”

I looked in the mirror. I liked how I looked—eyes and bones, my skin so fair. I looked as if I had survived something catastrophic. For the first time in my life, I could see myself.

She was crying. “You look like a war prisoner.”

I was probably supposed to tell her not to cry, that it was not her fault. But I felt myself shrink back. I felt mildly insensate, as though the me to whom she addressed her regret was just a façade, and the essential me, the me I was becoming, was safely out of reach, already halfway to vanishing.

There was the roll of the garage door, then two quick raps at the back door to my room. It was late. I came out from deep beneath the safety of my quilt and unlocked the lock.

“The living room lights are out,” Jack said, brushing past. “I didn’t want to wake Irene.” He threw his jacket onto the floor, then he turned and saw me. “Holy shit!” He dropped on the high end of my bed near the pillow. I dropped beside him. Jack took the spoon from a teacup on the bedside table and he whacked it in his hand. Then he began to slap it on his forehead instead. He asked me, “Did it leave a mark?”

“I think you have to do it harder for that. With the other side.”

“Fuck it.” He tossed the spoon back into the cup and looked to the floor. A long time passed, during which we mostly breathed. Finally, he said, “Your hair is pretty fucking short.”

“You said to cut it.”

“Cut, not shave.”

“You said, ‘Cut it short.’”

“Yeah, well, I wasn’t counting on short being so incredibly short.”

“Let’s not say short anymore.” It sounded weird—short—the horsey way you have to drop your jaw. I crawled behind his back, drawing up the covers. I rubbed my legs together.

“Cold?” he asked.

I said that I was.

His eyes remained averted, though he moved closer. His hands reached for the collar of my sweater and he fussed with the top button, then he fastened it, fastening every next one all the way down, jerking me forward each time.

“I—don’t—like—people—looking—at—you.”

I didn’t argue. It only made things worse to argue with Jack. Furniture would break, or glass would shatter, or he would disappear. Once, he took off for days, and when he returned he had a gash on his left forearm. When my mother asked how it had happened, he said, “fishing.”

I didn’t ask what he meant because I knew what he meant. Rourke had been in the auditorium with us that afternoon and Jack had seen what I had not—Rourke noticing me. Kate had also seen—she’d spoken of Rourke while cutting my hair. It had been a strange day. None of us had been immune to the sweep of its effects, not me, not Kate, not Jack. I felt somewhat like a pet, a little bird, blinking dumbly at the just-opened door of my cage. There was no point in reassuring them, in promising to go nowhere. Evidently they believed otherwise. They seemed to feel it would be asking a lot of me to defy my nature.

“I’m sorry,” I said, kissing him. “Sorry for making you angry.”

He raised his head, saying, “Okay, so let’s see the new face.”