Testimony

by Anita Shreve

  The next morning, when I woke up, she seemed to be in a panic over what to wear. She kept trying clothes on and ripping them off. I thought she looked great in everything. She was really beautiful. She had long blond hair and wide green eyes and a perfect nose. She was slender, not skinny, but slender. She looked great in a tank top.

  I would have to say that she dressed kind of sexy. Some girls did without even trying, but you could see that she was trying. I would watch her get dressed, and see how she changed her underwear or picked a shorter skirt or put a lace tank top on under her white shirt. She kept to the dress code but pushed it right to the edge. I know you shouldn’t judge a person by how she dresses, but it seems to me that she was asking to be judged by her clothes. By how she put them together. If you’re asking to be judged like that, then I think you’re trying to send a message.

  She drank a lot for a freshman girl. I think that came out in the newspapers. It was a badge of honor with her, how much liquor she could hold. She was kind of wild. She had no interest in the freshman or sophomore boys. There are girls at the school who will immediately go for the PGs, and that’s what she did. Sought them out. That’s what she was doing with J. Dot. That’s James Robles, who was involved.

  She liked to come across as a dumb blonde. She was always talking about her “blonde moments.” But, actually, I thought she was pretty smart.

  I went to Avery Academy because it was the best school I could get into. My parents are from New Hampshire, and they believe in the value of a private-school education, since both of them went to private school. I was very resistant at first, and I cried a lot that September. But then I got used to it, and when I go back home now and I look at our public school, how it’s only the one building, and I hear from my friends how big the classes are and how the teachers can’t even assign the books they want because there isn’t any money anymore, I think I am lucky to be where I am. I know that I will, like, have a better chance at college from here than I would have had from my public school, and I have had some wonderful teachers who you can see really care about the students. And I have had some terrific opportunities, too. Right away, that first September, I made the varsity soccer team. I would never in a million years have made the varsity soccer team at my public school my freshman year because my school was huge, and they already had more good players than they could use. Probably not even my junior year. So that’s an opportunity that I never would have had. I think the soccer will help me get into a better college.

  My roommate was at Avery for what is actually a common reason. Her parents were rich and they traveled, and they just couldn’t put in the time to be with her. She’d been left on her own a lot, and I think that got to be a bit of a problem. Some kids are here because their parents are getting divorced or the kids have gotten into trouble and the parents don’t know what to do. She said her parents didn’t get along very well, that they were always fighting. I met them only once, when they came for parents’ weekend. They seemed nice enough to me.

  The night the tape was made, there was a dance. A lot of freshmen went to the dances, and sophomores, too. Less juniors and seniors, who thought the dances were lame. I wish our class now had more spirit and would go to the dances, but we hardly ever do. Back then, they were kind of a big deal. I was surprised to discover how prevalent alcohol was. I guess I had just been living in a bubble, because it was all new to me. Some of the guys would have gotten ahold of it and it would be outside at the back of the gym, and you could buy a can and drink it right there. What happened was, it made you drink very fast, because you were always scared you were going to get caught. So you’d dance a bit or hang out inside, and then you might run out and have a quick one and run back inside. And you could see, as the night progressed, that kids were getting more and more hammered. I’m talking about freshmen and sophomores here. There are always initiatives about stopping the drinking. Each class, I think, tries to take that on. Or at least some kids in the class do. But it never seems to go anywhere. They keep trying to crack down, but it’s amazing how smart some kids are. How they manage to get it.

  That night, she was drinking even before the dance, while we were all getting dressed. I don’t know where she got it. She had it under the bed with the pocketbooks and the candy. She was drinking from those little bottles that you get in hotel rooms. Scotch and vodka and whatever. She once gave me champagne in one of those little bottles, and I drank it, but it was warm and gave me a headache. I can’t say how many of those bottles she had to drink before she went out, but she was definitely feeling good. I’m trying to think now of who might have drunk more than she did that year, and I can’t think of anyone.

  She didn’t own a movie camera. I’m pretty sure I would have known if she did, because she’d have been making movies of herself all the time.

  When she went out, she had her 7 jeans on, the ones that made her butt look great. She was wearing a blue halter top. She had light tanned skin, and it shone. She wasn’t very toned, but it didn’t seem to hurt her any. She had on a narrow white cotton jacket, like a blazer, and even though it was January and completely freezing, she wouldn’t put another, warmer jacket over that. She had these fabulous hippie silver earrings, really big and dangling. She had on a pair of silver stilettos. When she left, she looked kind of amazing.

  Jonathan

  Oddly, what I remember most about Rob Leicht is the paper he wrote on Faulkner. The class assignment was to pick a passage in As I Lay Dying and develop a thesis that might explicate either a character or a theme in the book. In the beginning, I recall asking Rob repeatedly for his outline, for his ideas about the book, for any hint at all as to what he was planning. He gave me very little response in return, and I had the distinct impression then that he hadn’t even read the book. But as the due date got closer, I could see that he was bearing down on the project. A number of questions he asked me in the final days struck me as remarkably perceptive. Truthfully, I’m not sure I’ve known a better reader/thinker ever to go through Avery. I’ve been here nearly fifteen years, and I can speak only about the students I’ve personally taught, but I think Rob was generally recognized by all of the faculty to be brilliant.

  The problem with Rob was that he was inconsistent. If challenged academically — and I think he would have responded to Brown as a tremendous challenge — he would rise to the occasion and produce excellent, even outstanding, work. If he thought a class was easy, however, or if he had taken a dislike to a teacher — which occasionally happened — he would tune out and produce work of a barely passable nature. He was exceptionally good in class discussions, and I think that carried him through a number of courses in which he’d done less than outstanding work. I should probably state for the record here that I was Rob’s adviser as well as his AP English teacher his junior year.

  As for the Faulkner paper, Rob had taken the most difficult passage in the book: the one time that the matriarch — Addie Bundren — speaks. The meaning of the passage is not immediately clear, and one must dig to understand this woman who is at once so unnatural and yet so central to the novel. Rob turned in a paper that I won’t soon forget. I seriously doubt most college juniors could have written a work that so well understood the concept of “death in life.” It was as if Rob knew Addie Bundren. I was flat-out blown away. I checked all the obvious sources to see if he might have plagiarized the piece, but it was pretty clear the work was his own. He was certainly capable of it; that, I didn’t doubt. There was a witty side to Rob, but also a profound — even dark — side, and I think the character of Addie Bundren spoke to that side.

  The paper won the Junior Class Writing Prize. None of the other contestants even came close.

  I wrote one of Rob’s recommendations for Brown. I was not in the least surprised when he was accepted “early decision.”

  But there was about Rob, as I say, this dark side. I’ve met his parents, who seemed perfectly ordinary to me, so I can’t say it was a result of his home lif
e. Who knows why one person is the way he is? I don’t mean dark in the sense that Rob was going to pick up a shotgun one day and spray bullets all over the library. No, I mean it in the sense that he had access to a kind of nihilism that you don’t ordinarily see in sixteen-, seventeen-year-olds. He skipped a few classes toward the end of his junior year, and that pattern was continuing in the fall of his senior year. I tried to talk to him about this, but I don’t recall getting very far. He’d been clipboarded once, but he stopped short of having to appear in front of the Disciplinary Committee.

  I enjoyed the Rob I knew a great deal. You’ve probably seen his picture. He was a tall, skinny kid with thick dark hair. Not a handsome face, but a nice face. I used to look forward to our conferences. He appreciated being addressed on an adult level, and he would even bristle a little if he thought he was being talked down to. One quickly learned not to do that with him. Some kids never reach that level of maturity.

  He was excited about Brown. He must have called me within minutes of getting the news because his voice was still breathless. I was thrilled for him. It’s one of the reasons the entire episode was so terrible to watch. You hate to see the best and the brightest self-destruct like that.

  I have very little insight as to why Rob did what he did. I don’t see him in that scenario at all. It’s hard for me to imagine that at some point he wouldn’t have said, either to himself or to the others, This is insane. I try often to recall what it felt like to be that age. I try to put myself in his position.

  I attempted to get in touch with Rob about a month after the incident became public, just to lend my support. I called him at his house. I could hear his mother trying to get him to come to the phone to speak with me, but he wouldn’t. Perhaps I had called too soon.

  Sienna

  So this is better. I love Starbucks. I’d die if they didn’t have one close by the campus. I always get a grande decaf skim latte. I could eat a sandwich. You want to split a sandwich? I like the panini things. With the ham. But let’s, like, get this over with. So what else do you want to know? They got me drunk. I don’t like to talk about this. It’s embarrassing. It’s cold in here. If I’d gone to the hospital right after, which I should have, they probably could have found one of those things in my blood that you put in a drink to make the girl pass out. Rofatol or something. I think that’s what they must have done to me, because I would never. Well, look at me. Do I look like the type that would do that? Be honest. I never drink now. Because I know the dangers. I was thinking that if the college thing doesn’t work out, I could go on the road on the lecture circuit and give talks about how girls can get taken advantage of, but I know my parents would kill me if I ever did that. They just want it all to go away. So, like, maybe we could get the sandwich now. It’s not like I’m starving or anything. It’s just that I think I should keep my blood-sugar levels up. If you order it at the counter, they’ll bring it to the table. They do that here. I would have kept my mouth shut, I really would have, except I got called into the headmaster’s office on, like, the Wednesday morning after it happened. God, it was so early, I was hardly awake, and I couldn’t really understand Mr. Bordwin’s questions. He said he had a tape, and I said, What tape? And he was, like, It’s a tape of you in a room in the boys’ dorm having “relations,” as he called it, with a number of boys. And I was, like, What the fuck are you talking about? Though I’m pretty sure I didn’t say fuck. And he said he would play the tape for me if I wanted, and I said I didn’t need to see any tape, and he said this was a serious offense, that I wasn’t in trouble yet but that the boys were, and anything I could remember about what happened would be good. Mr. Bordwin, he was just so lame. If it had been a different headmaster, I’m sure this whole thing might have been handled another way. That’s what my dad says. And I said, Well, maybe I had gone to a party on Saturday, I go to a lot of parties, and sometimes, you know, maybe someone tries to get me to drink, and maybe I had one beer, but maybe I didn’t, I didn’t remember much about Saturday night, because, like, maybe someone put something in my drink? Which was why I couldn’t remember? Mr. Bordwin, he had these deep blue eyes, and it was hard to look at him straight on, so I said I really wasn’t feeling good, I had to go, and he said I should go back to my dorm and think about what we had just talked about, especially about how what happened last Saturday night could be very serious, and when I was ready to talk about it some more, I should call him. And I was, like, out of there so fast, you can’t believe it. So I went back to my dorm, and I was, like, scared shitless, because if there was a tape, then, oh God, it would be embarrassing, right? And the night sort of started to come back to me, it took a few hours to get these, like, strange memories. And then I realized I had to call my parents. Because if I didn’t, Mr. Bordwin was probably going to, and truthfully, I was kind of amazed he hadn’t done it already. So I called. My father, he was, like, Oh my God, you have to call the police. And I’m going, I’m not gonna call the police. And my father said I had to do this, because it was rape and I was a victim and this was wrong, and no school should get away with this, and so he called the police, and when they came to my room I was so freaked out, because it was so weird and so surreal, and I knew everyone would hate me for this. But they said I had to go to the hospital, it was the law, and then I knew that my father was right, this was big, and I had to do the right thing, so I went and told them everything I knew, which wasn’t much because I was, like, completely out of it the entire time. I don’t remember anything about that night. I know they found alcohol in my blood when I went to the hospital, but my lawyer got that thrown out because it was four days later, and what difference did it make that I had an alcohol level of, like, whatever? I was self-medicating. I had to. It was very traumatic for me, being the center of attention like that. The other day I was watching Oprah, and I was thinking I could go on Oprah with some other girls my age and we could talk about this and bring it out into the open about how guys can get you drunk and get you to do stuff you would never do, and how you’re not even conscious so you’re not responsible. And here’s the thing I wonder about all the time: If I wasn’t conscious, not really, I mean, except that maybe I was, a little bit, then it’s as if it never happened, right? I think this ham is a little slimy. I’m going to eat only half of my half and bring back the other quarter for tonight. So that’s not too many calories today. The food in the dining hall here sucks, really sucks, though they have a salad bar and soup and frozen yogurt, so I can do that. It gets really hot here in the spring, you could die if you didn’t have air-conditioning, which they do. It was disgusting being examined by the doctors. It’s, like, you’re the victim twice because you have to go through this humiliation afterward, and I’ve read a lot about it, I think I could be an avocate for kids, in college or whatever. I hate this shirt. I hate purple. I think I’m going to give it away to the homeless. I told you about that community-service project we did with the homeless. That’s going to look really good on my application. But if the college thing doesn’t work out, I think, like I said, I might do the recording industry. My grades have kind of tanked as a result of all this. I had to leave school, so I missed those credits, and I’m not being completely successful in getting all this behind me, so I think it interferes with my studying. They say they understand, but then they still give me the Ds, so what’s up with that? But, you know, seriously, I could do a killer college essay on all this. I really could. My college counselor is driving me crazy. It’s all the time, read about this school and read about that one, and it’s just more homework as far as I’m concerned. And I know they help you get into college and everything, but that’s their job, right, so I don’t understand why I have to be supernice to them, like my mother says I should. She says if your college counselor doesn’t like you, you’re screwed. The one good thing is that it’s never going to be on my record that I was expelled or anything, because, first of all, I wasn’t, I resigned, and second of all, they’ll just say I needed a change of
scenery, or my allergies were acting up, or something like that to explain why I came to Houston. Because, really, my grades weren’t all that bad when I was at Avery before all this happened. That first semester, I got mostly C+s and B—2s, which is average, right? I would have brought those up, but then the whole thing happened, and, you know, it was really traumatic. I have post-traumatic stress disorder. So I think that will help, too. On my college application.

  Noelle

  I wait for Silas after basketball practice. I stand out in the white tiled hallway with the blue painted floor and watch through the chicken wire in the rectangle of glass. Most of the practices are over for the day, and I can smell the sweat on all the athletic clothes left in the Cage. I am hoping that Silas will come out soon so that I won’t miss dinner in the dining hall.

  There are younger boys on the court, and Silas is with them. He moves around the floor like an animal — something graceful and quick. The boys are freshmen or maybe sophomores, having a pickup game. Silas gives instructions and shouts out encouragement, and I can see on the boys’ faces that they like Silas. They do everything he asks of them. He makes one boy who has missed a shot take it over, and then over again, until he gets it right, until it puts a smile on his face. I can see that Silas might be a good teacher. He makes the boys better at what they are doing. I stand on the other side of the chicken-wire glass and imagine Silas years from now as the basketball coach at a high school or even at a private school. I can see how the boys will respect him, how he will shout at them when necessary, encourage them when they need it. The girl students will all fall in love with him, but I will be the only one Silas loves. I will be his wife, and he will be a wonderful father. I can see this — all of this — already.