Notes on a Silencing

by Lacy Crawford

  It’s what I liked about him. I had thought we understood this about each other. He’d settle my jumpiness about what came next, and I’d keep the tiniest bit of fiber in his routine. I’d zoom and he’d dawdle. He’d get high and I’d read novels, and we’d eventually just watch a movie instead of trying to have sex. I thought it was going to last us all year.

  “Well, it’s just…” Scotty said now, his ice cream untouched, hand scratching at the back of his head, “it’s just the things people are saying, I guess. It’s too much.”

  In three days? Four? Five? We’d only just returned to campus. “I don’t understand,” I said. “Did you talk to someone?”

  He nodded, his arm going up and down with his head.

  Nothing had happened, nothing new. I’d marked every threat. I knew them all.

  “Who? What did they say?”

  “Aw, come on,” said Scotty. “I don’t want to say it.”

  “Say what?”

  His hand landed with a thud on the table. “Lacy.”

  “Okay, then who. Who was it?”

  “Wyler,” he admitted. Who had graduated the year before. Though he’d dated my friend Brooke, he had avoided me until his good friend Scotty and I had started seeing each other. After that he’d said hello to me a few times. That was the most we’d ever spoken.

  “I don’t talk to Wyler,” I said. “He’s not even here anymore.”

  “I know.”

  “All he’s got is gossip.”

  “Well, okay.”

  “What is it?”

  “Just, you know…” Scotty was miserable, shifting around on the seat of his faded jeans. “Just you’re sick and all.”

  I felt my stomach harden. The old not-eating was back again. A year lay ahead, and the place was closing around me like a trap.

  “I’m sick,” I repeated.

  “Well, yeah. Sorry. Coach told them about it, I guess, some sixth formers, and it just got around, talking and stuff, and Wyler called.”

  Coach. Coach. I burned to know which coach this was. They were talking about my throat?

  “Last year?” I asked him. “They were talking about me? Last year? Who? Where?”

  “Aw, Lacy, I don’t know. I don’t know…anything. Look, I’m sorry. It’s just more than I can deal with.”

  There were a hundred arguments—what it was, where it was, how it had gotten there, and why Scotty never needed to worry about it—but I could see that it was done. We were done.

  “Okay,” I said.

  I left the table, half expecting Scotty to come after me, shaking his shaggy head and saying it was all just a joke. Walking back through the meadow alone, I did not permit myself to cry. The wildflowers were as high as they’d be all year, clambering piles of green and gold, vibrating with insects, smelling of mildew and sage. Coach. Gillespie? Was it Coach Gillespie—he of the sodium ball? Was it Coach Matthews—he of “She’s not a good girl”? Coach Buxton? Someone else? Which players had heard? What did the coach say? And how on earth did he know?

  To hell with Scotty, then. I was invincibly alone. The little light was on in the anchorite’s room. I marched up to my airy single, grabbed a jacket, told Mrs. Fenn I was in for the night, and went back out. My friends were on their way home for check-in, and I passed their curious faces. They waved but did not ask—they never asked. It was part frost and part care, I think. But I never told them, either.

  For more than an hour, I walked. I watched lights coming on and wondered who had which rooms this year. I stayed out as long as I dared. They’d told the lacrosse team I was ill? Could that be true?

  If so, I blamed my parents for telling the school I had contracted herpes. To do this I had to remove from consideration my old friend Natalie’s call at the beginning of the summer, and also the lawyers’ threat about my Prozac. There is no way I could have stayed at school if I had let myself see what these lawyers, teachers, and priests had done. But I don’t think I could have figured it out even if I had been willing, because as far as I knew, the school had found out about my herpes only after my doctor had tested me for it at home. And by then the previous sixth formers had graduated, and everyone else had gone; there was no one left to gather and tell.

  I decided to bait the place, just to see if things were as animated, as complicated, as I sensed they were.

  Outside the art building, where the streetlights were brightest, I encountered a tall master I’d never had in class. He was startled and asked if I needed help, and then his agitation became clear. I should not have been out of my dorm. This was cruising and it was an obvious D.C. He peered at me hard. “Is that Lacy?” he asked. “Crawford?”

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “Oh,” he said. He held his head low, wished me good night, and hurried away.

  I tested my limits a few more times before I forgot about limits altogether. One morning I went for a run before dawn. I had streetlights on the road up out of campus, but then followed long stretches of vertiginous, shoulderless black. I wanted to check on my woods. By the time I reached the return paths they were pearled and soft with dawn, nearly unrecognizable after a summer of growth. A master from a boys’ dorm, making coffee in his little kitchen, caught me returning. He leaned across his counter to push open his window and summoned me.

  “Where have you been?”

  I told him.

  “A run?”

  I gave him my whole face. I was aching for him to get mad.

  “And where did you go on this run?”

  I could dimly see his T-shirt, presumably the one he slept in. I pitied this man, living alone in an apartment attached to a dorm full of teenagers in the New Hampshire woods. “Blinking Light and Boat Docks.”

  “How far is that?” he asked.

  “I think almost five.”

  “And did you run it alone?”

  I nodded and smiled wide, to show him I hadn’t been alone, though of course I had been. There was a little flare in his face and his nostrils widened, but then he blew across the top of his coffee and let his eyes settle derisively on me.

  “Are you going to be doing this often?” he asked.

  “Dunno.” As bratty as I could be.

  It was sad, because I’d been such a good girl before—I’d been so eager to make teachers feel important. Now he would know me only as a spoiled delinquent.

  “Perhaps you should wait until you have a little more light,” he said finally. “You might trip. You might get hurt out there.”

  I turned without being dismissed.

  But I wasn’t, at heart, a rebel. I didn’t go into nearby towns and pay men at the bus stop to buy handles of booze. I didn’t have connections to the kids who brought gallon bags of weed from their houses in Bermuda and the Bahamas, much less the few moving cocaine from Manhattan. I was more inclined to put my advantage into service on behalf of my friends. When Caroline’s Dave came back from Brown to visit, I let him hide under my bed until check-in was complete and all the teachers’ doors were closed for the night. When Brooke scored a fifth of vodka for a boring weekend, I let her keep it in my footlocker.

  Our favorite way to alter consciousness was to do shots of vodka as quickly and surreptitiously as possible. The bottle was restowed after every pour, the shot glass shoved beneath a mattress or behind a stack of books after each swallow. No more than four of us gathered to “pound” so we didn’t seem suspicious to a teacher passing in the hall. After we’d had as many shots as we could tolerate, we’d eat tablespoons of peanut butter straight from the jar, thinking this masked the smell.

  But drinking was risky beyond the threat of getting caught. I got soused and I was at the mercy of internal tides that came on with shocking force. I’d sit on my bed, watching Brooke and Sam convulse with laughter, hearing Maddy tell yet another wild story about what finally happened that night she and Brophy hooked up, and inside me would be the smell of diesel and pine. I’d be rocking in a boat with Scotty at the stern, tiller lig
htly in his filthy palm, pointing out cabins and deer. I’d be feeling the way our small wake moved the gravel shores, making a sound like money, heaps of money, piling over itself. I had borrowed from him his way of holding the world so loosely, the way only the truly privileged can, detached and indemnified from his own outcomes—not that I wished to exist in the world without responsibility, but that around him I had been able to pretend not to care. This pretending went so deep it changed how much I really did think. Ideas loosened around Scotty. Words got up and drifted away. But still there we were, with everything we could ever want at our fingertips.

  Now that he’d dropped me, I was at the mercy of my own thoughts again: I was diseased, I was disgraced, I was alone. I had no idea how I would survive college. If I could even get in. Teachers refused to punish me, which was another way of saying they refused to look after me. I could do anything here, because nobody was willing to see me anymore.

  I heard the chapel bells. My friends laughed. I counted. It was late. Once papers were assigned and exams loomed, we would not be able to waste time like this. The girls were laughing so hard their faces shone. One of them—I will not say who, but it was a friend I loved—hopped onto my bed and bounced a bit to jolly me up. Someone else cracked that this was a Brophy move, that I should take shelter immediately, and someone else made another joke about another boy, about all boys…

  “And then they do this”—sticking a tongue out like a cartoon ghoul—“and then this”—squeezing her own tits—

  “And this”—ramming two fingers up, up, up in the air—

  “And this—” Maddy, pantomiming the eyes and reaching arms of the boys contemplating her rack, backing up slowly, hands out ahead of her, as though threatened with death—

  Caroline was bent over, laughing. Sam said she had just peed herself a little bit, and someone was shushing us—we were drunk, we could all get caught, and fuck college and fuck life and fuck it all—when the friend next to me, her arm heavy on my shoulders, turned to me and gave a little sob.

  “Oh, Lace.”

  We quieted.

  She said, “I have it too.”

  Her laughter had dissolved to tears, similarly loose and overwhelming, and I put my arms around her. We were lying together in each other’s arms on my bed, crying. “He said he had no idea. He swore to me.”

  It didn’t matter, to us, who he was. He was every boy in our world. He was the world. We understood.

  All of us in that room wept. “I’m sorry,” I told my friend. “I’m so sorry.”

  Two more girls knocked on my door that fall to tell me they had herpes. I dug out my bottle of Zovirax and showed them the label so they could ask their physicians, once they worked up the courage, for a prescription of their own. We walked together to the old white pages in the common room, a paper slab with lines of mold through it like a Stilton, and searched for clinics close enough to reach by taxi without being gone so long a teacher would have to know. I stopped short of giving them my drugs, because I knew this was illegal, and I was not about to make the administration right. Not even for free, not even for this.

  Then a third former, devoted to her third-form boyfriend, approached me for advice about birth control. And someone else asked me how to handle the situation with her mom’s new boyfriend. There were other questions too, more benign but no less important: How to tell my parents I won’t apply to their college? How to drop this class, quit that sport, break up with him?

  Hester Prynne, Hawthorne writes in The Scarlet Letter, “did not flee.” She moved with her fatherless child to a “little, lonesome dwelling” on the outskirts of town. Of course she did. One step shy of the witch in her cave, our Hester, marginalized by an entire community.

  I learned that while the fallen woman may keep her unloved door plain and her drapes drawn, her circle small and her fire low—if she’s wise, I suppose, she will—the path to her back stoop will be well-traveled. I guarantee it.

  Then in October I was contemplating its having been a year, and Brooke put Alannah Myles’s “Black Velvet” on the new music player in the newly redesigned student center, where we were all bored out of our skulls—sixteen and seventeen and wild for something other than track halogens and a quarterless jukebox—and I was fed up and wanting to go back to my room to read when I passed a fifth-form jock who said, “What’s up, you freak?”

  I turned to where he was sitting, propped on a ledge with a bunch of similar goons. It was astonishing how these things reconstellated themselves, the microcycles of high school life—here the seedling assholes all in a row, coming up to take the place of the guys who had graduated just the year before. Already they knew to mock me. Couldn’t even let me walk by. I narrowed my eyes on the one who had spoken to me. His name was Alexander Ault. He was hugely strong, but not tall. Handsome, but I did not care. The usual football–ice hockey–lacrosse type. The monkeys flanking him let their lips flap in cruel grins. These were boys with names like Grant and Sebastian.

  “What did you call me?”

  “What you are. A freak.”

  “Fuck you.” These students were a year behind me. I might have recently been a pariah, but hierarchies were hierarchies.

  “Oh, come on,” said Alex lightly, and he patted the ledge beside him, forcing Grant to scoot over. “I’m just giving you a hard time.”

  I glared. He made honest-dog eyes.

  “Please? Have a seat.”

  I did not sit. I looked at this enormously well-built guy, who was smiling broadly—beautifully—at me, and wondered if there might be something there. As I’ve mentioned, “freak” was a complicated term.

  I asked, “Why?” He played on the lacrosse team. He knew Scotty.

  “Because you’re cute,” said Alex. “You’re really, really cute.” He patted the ledge again. “Will you sit down?”

  I perched.

  “Good,” said Alex. “I’ve been waiting for a chance to talk to you all year.”

  I waited. When he didn’t say more, I asked again, “Why?” and held my breath, because of what he might say next.

  I noticed him not noticing, or not caring, what the goons were doing, jabbing each other and slapping their thighs. “Do I have to say it again? You’re the best-looking girl here.”

  Kindness was confounding. I was aware of where our hands met on the ledge.

  “If you really think that, then why did you call me a freak?”

  He leaned left and right to get his buddies’ attention. “Hey, will you guys fuck off?”

  They grew solemn and slid off.

  Alex looked back at me. “It just seems like nasty gets a lot more done in this place, you know?”

  I did know.

  “And besides, it worked,” he said, again with the smile.

  We walked through the meadow. He didn’t try to touch me, but when it happened accidentally, just at the arm or hip, I felt like yelping. Some knot was unloosing inside me and this was terrible. Then I remembered who he lived with, showered with, ran wind sprints with. I was confused and frightened. But then I heard his voice and I wasn’t afraid. This reversal happened, quick oscillations, in sub-seconds. Ever seen the inside of a pocket watch? It was exhausting.

  Alex had a warm, deep voice, and he was articulate. “Glad to find someone who appreciates that cruelty is currency,” he said. “Not easily admitted around here.”

  My body was swimming beneath my brain. “No, it’s not.”

  He hated St. Paul’s.

  “Why do you stay?” I asked.

  “My dad.” Alex’s father had grown up poor and had achieved, via football and a Rhodes Scholarship, top corporate positions. Cultural leadership would follow. Alex worshipped him. His dad had augmented his son’s early ice-hockey talent with ballet lessons to improve his balance. He’d raised a boy who had read the Federalist Papers by the ninth grade and kept them, along with other key works of constitutional law and history, in his room, above the moldering heap of hockey pads in
their rotten bag on the floor. Alex had been a top recruit to St. Paul’s. I saw, immediately, that this weight was burying him. The father was exceptional. The son was gifted and terrified.

  “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.