Indecent

by Corinne Sullivan

  I knew then that the shame in having lost my virginity to Zeke Maloney wasn’t because he didn’t love me; it was because he mumbled and had blotchy skin and shaved his head so close that patches of his scalp showed through the dark stubble. I was embarrassed to be tied with him because I knew—or at least liked to believe—that I was capable of having better, of having someone charming and clever and—I hated myself for thinking this but I thought it all the same—rich. Someone like Adam Kipling. I thought again of Raj’s girlfriend.

  But I’m prettier.

  * * *

  ReeAnn, Raj, and I were summoned to Ms. McNally-Barnes’ office on Sunday afternoon. She offered us a donut from the open box on her desk, and she smiled and asked us about the field trip, but we all knew why we were there—we had let her down.

  After a few minutes of the kind of agonizing idle conversation that’s used to delay the ugliness of truth, Ms. McNally-Barnes laced her fingers on her desk and leaned forward, a pose I interpreted as “getting down to business.”

  “Ms. Moore told me what happened,” she said.

  Raj paused mid-chew, powdered sugar on his lips, his expression that of a dog who just peed on the carpet. ReeAnn looked as though she might cry.

  “I told you all when you took on this job that it would come with accountability,” she continued. She, too, had powdered sugar on her lips, and I concentrated instead on the space beside her right ear. “You’re not just responsible for teaching the students here. If a student gets left behind, that’s your responsibility as well.”

  I nodded, attempting to appear contrite. I wanted to say, but it wasn’t my fault.

  “They may be little shits, but that’s why it’s your job to keep them from screwing up as often as possible.”

  “And I guess we can’t really do that if we screw up first,” Raj said with a grin.

  Ms. McNally-Barnes frowned. He had misinterpreted her candor for exoneration. “No, you cannot. Don’t let it happen again.”

  I felt nauseous. I tried to meet her eye, but she refused to meet mine. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be; I was the good influence, the good guest, the good student, the good daughter, the good apprentice. I tried to recall a time I’d ever been chastised like this in my life, and all I could think of was a sleepover at Jaylen’s house in seventh grade, when we’d snuck out to meet up with some boys who lived down the street, and Jaylen’s mother caught us coming back in and called my and Stephanie’s mothers to come pick us up. I hadn’t even wanted to go meet up with those boys; I’d wanted to play gin rummy and eat tortilla chips with melted cheese.

  “Okay?” Ms. McNally-Barnes gave us a stern look, but her voice was softer; we would be forgiven, just not yet.

  “Okay,” we echoed, a trio of obedient school children.

  On the walk back to the Hovel—ReeAnn and Raj had gone to the dining hall to get some lunch, but I said I wasn’t hungry—the relief I’d expected to feel last night finally washed over me. Watching out for Kip, thinking about Kip, texting with Kip—none of it was acceptable. Extracting myself from the situation was the best thing I could have done to assure I remained as I always had been, and how I always wished to be: good.

  What I didn’t expect was for Kip to be sitting on the back stoop of the Hovel when I arrived. I froze when I spotted him. He stood and waved. “Hi.”

  “Adam,” I said dumbly, more confirmation than greeting.

  “You said not to text you.”

  I remained frozen. “Yes.”

  “So.” He shrugged. “Here I am.”

  SEVEN

  My surprise at seeing Kip outside the Hovel was too great to formulate a reaction. When my parents threw me a surprise party for my fourteenth birthday, gathering my Aunt Carol and Uncle Fred and cousin Anastasia and Noni and Joni in the living room with balloons and streamers and a vanilla sheet cake from the local A&P, I’d been similarly dumbstruck. I’d walked in from lacrosse practice to find them all waiting, eager and grinning, and I’d stared at them, waiting for a cue. What was my line? What was my motivation? Who was my character?

  With Kip, I struggled only a few moments before deciding on, “They can’t see you.”

  “Who are they?”

  Who was I? A teacher. A figure of authority. “Anyone,” I said.

  “Then perhaps we should go inside.”

  No. No, no, no. “No,” I said.

  “I just want some water. Then I’ll go.”

  “I can bring you a glass,” I said. “Out here.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Really?”

  “Really what?”

  “Really, you won’t let me come inside for one minute?” He stepped closer to me. “What do you think I’m going to do? Ransack your drawers?”

  Ransack. I’d never heard anyone use the word in earnest, and a childish giggle threatened to spew from my lips. His face was so close to mine I felt cross-eyed from looking at him. He knew I wouldn’t put into words what I was actually afraid he might do, and I knew to protest any more would only make me look absurd. “Just for a minute.”

  He nodded solemnly. “Just for a minute.”

  I unlocked the door and led him inside. The kitchen was empty; everyone else was at lunch. He sat at the kitchen table and watched as I took a glass from the cabinet and filled it at the sink. I handed him the glass, and he gulped it down in two chugs.

  “Ah.” Kip swiped the back of his hand across his mouth for emphasis. “Thanks.”

  I stood above him. I had a small blemish on my forehead, almost healed, and I untucked the hair behind my ear so it fell into my face in a way that I hoped appeared casual. “Why are you here?”

  “This is nice.” He held his empty glass up to the light. “Do they give you all these or did you have to bring your own?” He refused to meet my eye.

  “They gave them to us.”

  “That’s nice. What about the table and couches?” He tapped the lip of the glass lightly on the table, and I heard the clink of glass falling to the floor. “Oops. Chipped it a little.” He set it back on the table, unconcerned.

  My hands were shaking. I clasped them together above my navel like I had a stomachache, which I feared I might have soon. “Adam?” It sounded too much like a question.

  “It’s been a while since I was last here, but it looks pretty much the same. Except for that.” He pointed to the cross Babs had hung above the sink. “That’s new.”

  I tried again. “Adam.”

  He finally turned to look at me.

  My hands released each other, and I forced them down by my sides. “You can’t be here.”

  “Why not?” His eyes did not have their usual mischievous glimmer. He seemed legitimately puzzled as to why his presence there could possibly be unwanted.

  “Because,” I said. My voice, which I wished to make authoritative, sounded instead teasing, flirtatious.

  “Do you want me to leave then?”

  I didn’t, but I couldn’t say so. I shrugged.

  “So maybe I can stay then, just for a little bit.”

  I didn’t protest. “Do you want more water?” I asked.

  He shook his head no. His eyes were on my face, looking for an answer even though I didn’t know the question.

  “Do you want to go to your room?” he asked finally.

  So that was the question. I picked up his chipped glass and placed it in the sink, avoiding his eyes. When I turned around, he had his hand extended towards me, and I thought, for a strange moment, that he was going to shake my hand goodbye. But his hand was palm up, an offer.

  “C’mon,” he said. It wasn’t playful, or pleading, or even exasperated; it was the matter-of-fact command of someone who knew what was going to happen next. It was the confidence from the night he took my hand, walked me home. It infuriated me.

  “No,” I said. He lowered his hand, and I repeated, more certain of myself, “No.”

  His mouth tightened—he looked defeated, maybe even angry—but then
just as quickly neutralized. “If you say so,” he said, just as he had the night we met, when I first reminded him that I was a teacher and he was a student. He gently pushed in his chair—I thought ridiculously for a moment that he might throw it against the wall, make some sort of scene—and then smiled at me, a perfect gentleman. “Thank you for the refreshment.”

  He let himself out. I plucked his glass from the sink and wrapped it in several layers of paper towels and shoved it all to the bottom of the trash bin until you couldn’t even see it.

  * * *

  The summer before starting at Vandenberg, I took a beginner’s rock-climbing class with my sister, Joni. Having already secured employment at Vandenberg back in May, after finishing college, the summer at home in Lockport lazed before me, strange and unstructured. I scrambled eggs in the morning (I never slept past eight-thirty) and ate them on the back porch, watching my dad watching the birds. After, I settled in the hammock with a book. I dozed and woke up sweating and disoriented, the angry red indentation of crisscrossing ropes welting my face and arms. At night, I watched TV with my parents, the canned sitcom laughter like gunshots. I wondered if, as you got older, life slowly became less interesting, or if you just stopped caring to do anything about it.

  My mom encouraged me to call up my friends from high school. What’s Jaylen up to these days? Or how about Stephanie? Jaylen had dropped out of SUNY Purchase after one semester and was then running a business out of her parents’ garage, making novelty knitted animal hats and selling her mother’s prescription pills to high schoolers. Stephanie had failed her nursing exam three times and was living above a convenience store with a twenty-eight-year-old beatboxer. (I’d found this all out through a combination of social media sites and Joni.) I told my mom that Jaylen and Stephanie were never really my friends.

  “You need to let people in, Imogene,” she said.

  “I try,” I promised. “I really, really do.”

  She said that if I wasn’t going to make an effort with my friends, then I should at least make an effort with my younger sister.

  Joni has lavender-tinted hair and a tiny silver nose ring that she pierced herself with a safety pin and that my dad hates. Her body is soft and shapely, her breasts full in a way mine never will be. After I left for Vandenberg, she went off to Hunter College, studying to become a writer. She told me once that I was the least interesting person she’d ever met. She never got pimples.

  The rock-climbing class was my mom’s idea. The recreation center downtown had just installed a new rock-climbing wall, and she thought it would be a nice way for us to connect—that was her word, connect. So every Monday and Thursday I drove Joni and myself there in our shared Ford Saturn, grappling for a way to make her see me as someone other than her tedious older sister.

  Our instructor’s name was B.K., and he had shaggy red hair and the whitest teeth I’d ever seen. B.K. and Joni connected without issue—she nodded appreciatively at his Dirty Projectors T-shirt, he nicknamed her Grape because of her hair. Once, belaying the rope from below, I noticed B.K.’s eyes studying the curve of Joni’s ass in her spandex shorts as she scaled the wall. B.K. had graduated from Buffalo State two years ahead of me. I didn’t have the nerve until our second-to-last lesson to point out that he had sat in front of me in the comparative literature class I’d taken my sophomore year. “That’s right,” he said, nodding vaguely. He was too kind to admit that he didn’t remember.

  He was also kind enough to wait until the end of the summer to ask Joni out. He would take the train into the city to visit her on weekends, up until November when she met her current boyfriend Alex, a silent Canadian. Joni and I never spoke about him, or us, or that summer; we both knew how shameful it was to be jealous of one’s younger sister.

  I never made it to the top of the rock wall. The farthest I’d ever made it was three-quarters of the way before I felt I might pass out and begged B.K. to please, please let me down. I was cautious, anxious—being so far off the ground was unnatural to me. By the end of the summer, I wished—as I had many times before—that I could be more like Joni. She never seemed afraid to take risks. She never seemed afraid to fall.

  * * *

  Even though I’d done nothing wrong with Kip, I still spent the next few days jumpy, nervous. When I walked into the bathroom one morning to find Meggy brushing her teeth, I screamed. “What are you on?” she asked, spitting toothpaste into the sink. Around campus, I feared running into him—Kip—but still looked for him everywhere. I told myself it was precautionary; I couldn’t admit to myself that I was dying to see him again.

  ReeAnn remarked that it seemed as though we were missing glasses. I stole one from the dining hall, where there were identical glasses, wrapping it in a dinner napkin and carrying it home in my purse to replace in secret later.

  It was the week of the college fair at Vandenberg, where the third years would attempt to charm (or, depending on the wealth and legacy of the student, be wooed by) a representative from an Ivy League or a Might-As-Well-Be-Ivy-League institution, thus ensuring themselves a spot at their choice school before applications were even rolled out the following year. It took place in the gymnasium, the bleachers pushed back and the racks of balls rolled away to make room for the many tables set up around the room. Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Dartmouth, Williams, Amherst—I ticked off the banners strung from each table in my head, like A-list celebrities on the red carpet. Babs appreciatively pointed out the stand for Rice University, her alma mater, and Chapin went over to talk to the representative from Princeton, who was a friend of her father’s. Looking around, I realized I was the only apprentice whose college wasn’t represented. Where’s the Buffalo State table? I thought of joking, but I suspected that this would elicit more pity than laughter. Self-deprecation, my standby, wasn’t as well received there as it was pre-Vandenberg.

  ReeAnn and I were instructed to stand by the main entrance to hand out flyers to students as they entered. Each of the colleges represented was listed on the page, along with its respective alumni or faculty representative—Vanderbilt University, Jonathan English, Methodist clergyman; Northwestern University, Johanna Griffin (Ph.D.), history professor and graduate school dean; Cornell University, Michael Chen (Rhodes Scholar), former U.S. Commissioner of Education.

  “Doesn’t this make you miss applying for college?” asked ReeAnn.

  I replied with a noncommittal nod.

  At ten, the boys swarmed the room in a sea of suits. Hair was slicked back, loafers were freshly shined, and every hand grasped a folder with twenty copies of updated résumés. I could only imagine the credentials these boys boasted—a summer volunteering at a Mongolian orphanage, a student internship with Ernst & Young, a prizewinning essay on the Objectivist philosophy in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. A few of the boys looked nervous—one standing near the door flipped through a stack of flash cards, which I read over his shoulder: “Speak slowly and clearly,” said one. “Make eye contact and shake with a firm grip,” said the next—but most appeared quietly confident, imperturbable. They’d been primed for this moment their whole lives. They couldn’t possibly fail.

  I was glad to be by the door, away from the action. The lights in the gym were too bright, like spotlights, and my skin felt damp and shiny under their glare. The exposure made me feel sick. I wondered idly where Kip would apply before I remembered that he was a Vandenberg senior, that his decision had probably been made months ago. I felt myself looking for him despite knowing he wasn’t there. At one point, I could have sworn I felt Chapin eyeing me from her station at the refreshment table, but when I looked towards her, she was busy pouring Dean Harvey a cup of coffee.

  I spotted Clarence Howell over by the table for Johns Hopkins. He wore a wrinkled gray suit jacket, cuffed at the wrists so it didn’t hang past his hands—his father’s, I figured. His face was tomato red as he spoke to the rep, and he seemed to be addressing the woman’s shoes. I felt culpable just watching; he felt like my responsibility
somehow. I should have prepared him better. I imagined returning to the woman later, after Clarence left, maybe telling her about his being on the lacrosse team, his art skills, how kind he was, but I knew none of that would make a difference. The injustice felt glaring; none of it mattered. Nothing he or I did mattered.

  I don’t know why I ever thought it was my responsibility to take care of Clarence Howell. We were too much alike, him and me—poor and unsure and ill-equipped to be here. I didn’t have anything of use to offer.

  ReeAnn watched the boys with a mother’s pride. “I’m excited for these boys. They all have such amazing futures ahead of them. Aren’t you excited for them?”

  “Yeah.” Christopher Jordan had entered my line of vision at the UPenn table, grinning assuredly and shaking the hand of the man standing at the table—the same hand, I couldn’t help but think, he’d probably used to beat the monkey the night before. “Yeah, I am.”

  * * *

  I left the fair early, feigning cramps, and when I saw Kip sitting once again on my doorstep, it felt like a product of my will, as though I’d been thinking of him so often that I’d drawn him to my door. His chin was in his hands and his backpack at his feet, as though a parent had forgotten to pick him up after school.

  “What are you doing here?”

  He stood. “Waiting for you.”

  “Why? How did you know I’d even come home? And what if—?” I stopped myself; he wasn’t listening, was too busy unzipping his backpack. He didn’t plan ahead, I reminded myself; he didn’t need to take precautions.

  “I stole a new glass for you, but…” He held out his open backpack, sheepish; I didn’t need to look to know it had broken. “Whoopsie.”

  Whoopsie. I tried to fight my smile. I wanted to tell him I’d wrapped my stolen glass in a stolen napkin, but I knew better than to admit this indiscretion to a student. “I came home because I’m not feeling well. Everyone else will be home soon.”