PENELOPE’S BOARDING SCHOOL WAS ALL GIRLS, SO THEY had to sneak out of the resident halls, down the beautiful sloping, manicured hills, under the back fence, to the river. That was where they met the boys. They ran, Penelope and the others, sometimes wearing their pajamas, sometimes barefoot, sometimes their hair wet and smelling of Prell shampoo; they ran to the river, across the rocky bank, across the mud, in the dark—no lights here, although the distant lights of the school could still be seen; they ran, long hair flying, arms open wide, breathing hard; they ran until they reached them, the boys, waiting.
This was 1972. The world was shifting. Even as Penelope’s world stayed the same—no-show dad, mother obsessed with finding the woman who birthed her and gave her away—the world around her kept tilting, changing, keeping her off balance. It used to be, before Penelope or the others arrived at St. Lucy’s, that the girls dressed for dinner, wore skirts to class, kept their hair tied back with ribbons or headbands; it used to be that the boys from Maxwell Academy were kept hidden except for once-a-month Friday-night mixers, or an occasional combined field trip to the Museum of Fine Arts or the Isabel Gardner Museum in Boston. There used to be rules. There still were rules, but no one followed them.
Everything was changing, faster than Mrs. Landon, the headmistress, could keep up with. Faster than even the girls themselves could. Mrs. Landon still wore knee-length wool skirts with pencil pleats. She still wore pearls, cashmere sweaters, nylon stockings. But the girls dressed in camouflage, ripped jeans, gypsy skirts. They snuck cigarettes, beer, Mrs. Landon was afraid to imagine what else. Boys were always discovered, jumping out of resident-hall windows, sneaking into the library basement, lurking around the perimeter of the grounds. Maxwell Academy boys still had to wear gray trousers, white or blue dress shirts, ties. They still wore the navy blazers with the school crest on the left-hand pocket. Their hair could not hang over their collars.
Julie Matthews, the house mother at Figg, made Mrs. Landon nervous. Julie wasn’t a St. Lucy’s girl; she’d graduated from Rosemary Hall. She had different ideas. Her cat eyes, green and almond-shaped, seemed mysterious, mocking, up to something. Keep an eye on your girls, Mrs. Landon told her every evening. Oh, Julie Matthews said, I do.
The girls waited until ten, lights-out, and then they went down to the river, where the boys waited. Penelope’s leg jumped and tapped until ten, a habit she had that drove her mother crazy. In movies and restaurants, her mother would grab Penelope’s knee hard, to hold it still. But it wasn’t something she did deliberately. Her leg had a mind of its own. At ten, lights-out, she jumped up, slipped out, ran down to the river. Racing along the rocky bank, the mud making thwacking noises against her feet, she would always pause when the boys came into sight. There they sat, smoking joints, waiting. Penelope paused, as if making them wait these few seconds more mattered.
Then she joined the others who had charged ahead. They gave a war cry, a whoop that St. Lucy’s girls had perfected for their field hockey games. It was a call to victory. They raised their arms over their heads, and shouted: Here we are!
The girls had rules. No falling in love with any particular boy. No asking the boys about any of the other girls. No telling secrets to the boys. When they arrived, they picked out the boy they would be with that night—never the same one three times in a row. They went and sat by him, to claim him. Then they got stoned. Penelope loved getting stoned, loved the way her body kind of lifted out of itself, her mind hummed, strange shivers of something shot through her. The boys brought the pot. The boys brought the potato chips, the Chips Ahoy!, the M&M’s. The girls just brought themselves.
And after they were good and stoned, clumsy with it, thick and cloudy, the girls and boys had sex. Sort of. The rule was: try anything but. Stoned, and lying on the riverbank, the rocks hard beneath her back or legs or knees, looking into the stupidly grinning face of a boy, was the only time Penelope was happy.