Indecent

by Corinne Sullivan

  “This is okay,” I said, more to myself than to him. “This isn’t so bad. This is okay.” Each pump felt like stabbing a shovel into still-frozen ground.

  “God, you’re tight,” he grunted, and I imagined him stretching my body like pizza dough, no, like the waistband of a pair of childhood pajamas over the years, distending it wider and wider until it was barely recognizable.

  We slept together two more times, and then I saw him kissing another girl at a bar. I confronted him via text message.

  We were just kissing, he replied. And I never said you and I were exclusive.

  Sex means nothing, I decided. Sex is just as disposable as kisses, which were, apparently, just as disposable as me.

  * * *

  The third years were taking a field trip that Saturday to Hook Mountain for a hawk watch. Field trips were an integral part of the Vandenberg curriculum—a chance for the students to briefly emerge from what was commonly known as the “Vandenberg Bubble,” but also, more notably, a chance for Vandenberg to present its students to the larger Westchester community as the fruitful products of an esteemed institution. The week before, under the care of the Woods twins, Babs, and Chapin, the first years had taken a trip to the art museum in Katonah. Three boys had been placed on disciplinary probation for taking pictures of themselves with Roy Lichtenstein’s Beach Scene with Starfish, which apparently features several nude female comic book characters. For the Hook Mountain trip, ReeAnn, Raj, and I were assigned to chaperone, and I hoped all the boys would stay out of trouble, at least for that day.

  At eight o’clock that morning, the boys boarded two buses dressed in sturdy shoes and khakis rather than their usual blazers and ties. I’d assumed, perhaps immaturely, that ReeAnn and I would sit next to each other on the bus; we were the only girls on the trip, and didn’t that mean we were expected to stick together? I was running late, having forgotten my water bottle in my room, and when I finally boarded the bus, I saw that ReeAnn was already sitting next to Raj, the two of them watching a video on Raj’s phone. I was reminded of how my old best friends Stephanie and Jaylen and I used to rotate who sat next to whom on the bus, and how in the eighth grade Stephanie and Jaylen began sitting next to each other every day, forcing me to become seat partners with Mary Elizabeth, a sixth-grader who wore pilgrim dresses.

  As I passed down the aisle, I waved to ReeAnn and Raj in a way I hoped appeared indifferent and peered around for an empty seat. A few rows behind ReeAnn and Raj sat Clarence Howell, scribbling in his notebook, his ratty backpack on the seat beside him. He wore binoculars around his neck, and his hair didn’t appear to have been washed in the last week. I approached him.

  “Is this seat taken?”

  He looked up, startled, and moved his backpack to the floor. I sat. Our mutual loserdom sat between us like a stench, and I wanted desperately to dispel it. Finally, I asked, “Draw anything new lately?”

  “Not really.” He closed the notebook and slid it into his backpack. He met my eyes warily.

  “Your nose looks better.”

  He put his hand to his nose. “Thanks?” he said, the question mark tacked on like an afterthought.

  The supervising teacher, Susanne Moore, who taught third-year anatomy, boarded the bus. “We’ll be leaving in just a minute,” she announced. “Chaperones, a headcount please.”

  I stood and counted along with ReeAnn and Raj. “Thirty-nine,” they announced in almost perfect unison. “Thirty-nine,” I echoed. I’d gotten thirty-eight on my count.

  The bus pulled out from the school lot. Clarence was still watching me.

  “I’m glad you did it,” he said.

  I was startled by the lack of prelude. “Did what?”

  “That you told on Duggar.”

  I grimaced at that word, told, and he noticed.

  “Well, not told. Reported him, I guess.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. He’s been different.”

  Duggar Robinson had been different since the day after my meeting with Ms. McNally-Barnes. He was quieter, sullen, avoided my eye. So were, I’d noticed, most of the other boys on the team. It made me feel at once powerful and lonely.

  “I feel like the team doesn’t like me anymore,” I said, hating how childish I sounded.

  “That’s not true.”

  “Then why doesn’t anyone talk to me?”

  Clarence hesitated. “I guess … some of us aren’t really sure how to talk to you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re not just, like, a coach. You’re…” He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I don’t know.”

  My mind compiled a list of ways he could potentially end that sentence—twenty-two, a girl, a woman, maybe even pretty—but none felt quite right. Nothing could fill the void that gaped between Clarence Howell and me.

  Quietly, Clarence added, “We still like you though. I still like you.”

  “Good,” I said.

  The changing leaves and green expanse of Westchester rolled past the window behind Clarence. I nudged his arm. “Want to hear a riddle?”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay. So you’re in a room that’s all bricked in, like even the ceiling and floor, and you have a saw—no, a table and—what else is it? A mirror! And…” I trailed off. “I’m not telling this right.”

  Clarence smiled. “You look in the mirror, and you see what you saw. You take the saw, and you cut the table in half. Two halves make a whole, and you climb out of the hole.”

  “How did you know that?”

  He shrugged. “I thought everyone knew that one.”

  * * *

  After the first time Zeke Maloney and I had sex, I was sure everyone could see it. When I bought my breakfast the morning after, the dining hall worker who spooned a lump of scrambled eggs onto my plate pursed her lips reproachfully. When I walked through the quad back to my dorm, a group of freshmen looked over at me and laughed. When my mom came to pick me up from school the following weekend (I was going home to celebrate my sister Joni’s seventeenth birthday), and I sat in the passenger seat of our minivan and she swept my hair out of my eyes and smiled sadly and said, “You look different,” I felt so sure she knew that I nearly cried.

  What’s more, they all knew it had been with someone who didn’t love me. Someone who I waved to without saying hello when I saw him around campus. Someone who (as I discovered one time when he lost his phone under my bed and asked me to call it) had entered me into his contacts as “Imojean” because he didn’t even know how to spell my name. Perhaps Zeke told everyone. Or perhaps, made too uncomfortable by the little squeaks of pain I’d made and by the quarter-sized bloodstain I left on the bed, he told no one. Whether those few nights I’d spent with Zeke Maloney were private or not, I knew my first time hadn’t been what I wanted and felt convinced everyone could at least see that.

  * * *

  Clarence and I fell into comfortable silence after a little while, him doodling in his notebook, me looking past him out the window and thinking about Kip. After his last text, I’d saved his number as a contact in my phone: Adam Kipling. Then I deleted it. Then I deleted all of his messages. But still, I’d slipped my phone into my back pocket this morning so I could feel if it vibrated.

  I just want to know more about you.

  What could Adam Kipling possibly want to know about me? I studied my reflection in the window: limp hair, freckled nose, collarbones jutting from shoulders. Perhaps if I had a distinctive haircut, or an eyebrow piecing, or ethnic ambiguity, I’d understand. But as I was now, there was nothing to indicate that I had a story to tell. As I was now, what was there to know?

  What I wanted to know more about was him. I ran through the facts I’d already collected, stored in my memory like little trinkets or trading cards: He was from the suburbs of Boston, the South Shore. He had an older brother who went to Yale. He liked to smoke and drink and break rules. He was charismatic and strange.

  I wondered once who he’d
be if he’d gone to my high school, but it was impossible to imagine him stepping out of a flashy foreign car in the parking lot, strutting through the dirty halls in a woolen blazer and rugby-stripe tie. I didn’t need to know his family’s net worth to know Kip was wealthy, and like most of the boys I’d encountered at Vandenberg, his wealth was inextricable from his person. Kip was money, and everything that came along with it: a thick shiny watch and straight teeth and confidence that he exuded through his loose limbs, his laugh. I couldn’t be sure if I wanted to be with him or if I wanted to be him. I couldn’t even be sure that the person that had been infecting my thoughts was the boy who’d walked me home or a Tobias Wolff creation.

  The bus drove over a pothole and tossed us momentarily from our seats. I felt a vibration and pulled my phone from my back pocket. No new messages. I was imagining things.

  Soon enough we arrived at Hook Mountain. Tim Ludd, the hiking guide—a bespeckled man with a limp who didn’t look like he could make his way up a flight of stairs, much less a mountain—handed out pamphlets with pictures of the birds we’d likely spot today: red-shouldered hawks, broad-winged hawks, sharp-shinned hawks, bald eagles.

  “Aren’t bald eagles, like, extinct?” one of the boys near the back of the group called out.

  “Though it was on the brink of extirpation in the late twentieth century, the bald eagle is no longer even on the list of endangered and threatened wildlife,” Tim Ludd explained.

  “So they’re real?”

  The guide peered out warily, searching for the source of the voice. “Yes, they are very real.”

  “So we’ll see one today?”

  “Well, there is no guarantee on any given hike that—”

  “I won’t believe they’re real until I see one.”

  Tim Ludd sighed. “Well then.” When he was sixteen, being sixteen must have meant a very different thing than it did now.

  The boys were split into four groups, one led by Ms. Moore and one for each of the chaperones. My group, which included Clarence Howell and, to my horror, Christopher Jordan, was last in the pack. With Tim Ludd leading the way and keeping an impressively quick pace, we started to make our way up Breakneck Ridge.

  I wasn’t sure what I was expected to do as the guide for my group. Tim Ludd was so far off that we could barely make him out, never mind hear him, and so the boys took to talking amongst themselves, which was fine with me. The air was crisp and invigorating, and the Hudson Highlands spooled out beneath us like an autumnal movie set. I thought, suddenly, that I could be anyone, be anything; it’s strange what pretty things can make us feel.

  “Look, a bird!” one of the boys in my group called.

  We turned our heads to the sky. Clarence peered through his binoculars.

  “What is that, Miss Abney?”

  “Um.” I consulted my pamphlet. The bird was a speck in the sky, with no discernible identifying features. “A hawk.”

  None of the boys responded, but I saw Clarence smile behind his binoculars. Clarence and I could be friends, I decided. He could grow out of his crush, and I could be his big sister. Instead of stilted and strange and full of insinuation—like my relationships with the other boys seemed—my relationship with Clarence could actually be appropriate, normal.

  We stopped to eat after an hour and a half, and ReeAnn, Raj, and I helped pass out the brown-bag lunches the dining hall staff had prepared for us. “This smells like bologna,” one of the boys sneered as I handed him his bag. “I don’t eat cold cuts,” said another. Once all the bags were distributed, I sat with ReeAnn and Raj at one of the picnic tables.

  “Having fun?” ReeAnn asked me.

  “Yeah,” I said. “This is actually really cool.” The sandwich in my bag was turkey, and I hungrily took a bite.

  “This would be cooler if I wasn’t so hungover,” Raj said. ReeAnn laughed, affirmation of their shared affliction. They both had pushed their sandwiches aside, untouched; I wondered if sandwiches were now uncool, and when exactly that had happened. I threw away my own, half-eaten.

  The hike began again. Far up ahead, it sounded as though Tim Ludd was trying to lead Ms. Moore’s group in song, and a few of the boys joined him in mocking falsettos.

  “Where are all the fuck-ing birds?” a boy sang behind me to the tune of their song.

  I marched on ahead, ignoring the boys.

  There was a burst of laughter behind me.

  “Dude, try to piss on the rabbit!” someone hollered.

  I spun around. Christopher Jordan stood facing out on the edge of the mountain, feet spread apart and pants unbuttoned, the world spread out before him in the triangle between his legs.

  I could have pretended not to see it. It would have been easy, and less uncomfortable for everyone, for me to ignore it. But the word burst out of me anyway: “Hey,” and when it was ignored, again, louder. “HEY!”

  Christopher Jordan turned around to look at me, startled yet somehow unembarrassed. “Yeah?”

  “Pull them up. Right now.” My mouth was moving, but this wasn’t my voice, this wasn’t me. My hands shook violently.

  He stared at me, uncertain. “But I have to take a leak.”

  “I SAID PULL THEM UP.”

  The other boys gawked. Christopher Jordan zipped up his pants and turned around. Then, in an attempt to save face, “Not what she said last time.”

  His friends howled and the blood rushed to my face. These boys had the maturity of fourteen-year-olds—no, twelve-year-olds! They would never act like this in front of Ms. Moore, or Tim Ludd, or even ReeAnn or Raj or any of the other apprentices. (I’d asked Babs once how often she found gum under the desks in study hall and she’d replied, puzzled, “But students aren’t allowed to chew gum on campus.”) It was me, only me, who was subject to this harassment. And though I once thought it was acceptance, I now saw it for what it was: exploitation. For a moment, I hated every last one of them.

  “Look!”

  The boys ahead were scrambling to the side of the mountain and pointing up towards the sky. The discomfort of the moment before temporarily forgotten, my group rushed on to see what the commotion was about.

  “A bald eagle! They’re real!”

  The boys pulled out their phones to snap pictures. I couldn’t take my eyes away. If I went to take a picture, I might miss it.

  “Do you want to look?”

  I turned. Clarence stood at my elbow, offering up his binoculars. I took them and smiled, then peered through the eyeholes. I watched the eagle circle up ahead, beautiful, unreal, until it finally circled out of sight.

  * * *

  We did another headcount before we boarded the bus, and this time, ReeAnn, Raj, and I all got thirty-eight. After a flustered search of the attendance list and a call to the student services office, Ms. Moore discovered that Freddie Finnerty had never boarded the bus that morning; he’d slept through his alarm and missed the whole trip. There had been forty-eight students on Bus One all along.

  The brief panic seemed to sap whatever energy remained, and the bus ride home was unnervingly quiet. The smell of dried sweat hung in the air, and some of the boys were slumped against the windows, mouths open in sleep. Their vulnerability made me want to forgive them, but I couldn’t, not yet. I was angry with the boys, angry at Raj and ReeAnn for being wrong on the first head count, angry with myself for being so quick to give in when I knew I was right.

  I’d spent most of my life feeling too young, but right then, for the first time, I felt startlingly, achingly old. I wondered, How old was the Adam Kipling in my mind? Certainly he wasn’t just a year older than the boys who dozed around me, twitching and snoring like restless puppies. Next to me, Clarence worked on a drawing of his spandex-clad character, shading in her enormous breasts with complete absorption. He chewed on the thumbnail of his free hand and, for a moment, he appeared to be sucking his thumb. I looked out the window past him and thought of Kip as I dozed off.

  I couldn’t tell you what I dreamed
of as I slept, but I know it was of him. Him and his mouth, open and laughing.

  Next thing I knew, Clarence was nudging me. “We’re back.”

  “Oh,” I said, jerking from sleep. I stifled a yawn and pulled out my phone to check the time. I had one new text message, a number with a 781 area code. It felt at once obvious and fortuitous, inevitable and preternatural.

  * * *

  I didn’t want to look at the text message until I’d returned to my room. What a thrilling affliction a secret was. Throughout dinner, the phone sat in my back pocket, a wrapped present, a time bomb. As ReeAnn and Raj recounted the day and the bald eagle sighting to the rest of the apprentices, I concentrated on my macaroni and cheese. I wasn’t sure what my face might reveal, but I imagined it carried something resembling guilt. I told myself that I was excited by the novelty, not the person. I told myself that as long as I didn’t read the message, I wasn’t complicit. I told myself that I hadn’t asked for this to happen.

  Back in my room, I finally opened the text.

  Hey there, Imogene, it said.

  My first thought: He knows how to spell my name.

  My next thought: This is wrong.

  With shaking hands, I composed my reply. You can’t text me anymore, Adam.

  His reply took a while to come. Okay, it said.

  Okay. It was over. Okay. I set my phone on my nightstand and took a few deep breaths. But it wasn’t relief I felt—I couldn’t put a word to the twisting feeling in my stomach, but it wasn’t relief.

  It didn’t come to me until the middle of the night, when I crept down the hall to pee. Perched on the toilet seat, the stream of my urination the only sound shattering the stillness of the Hovel, what I felt was disappointment.