(Is it strange that I knew what random classmates’ parents did? Remember: Every detail I overheard made the world more navigable.)
Beth Docherty was responsible for my greatest humiliation at Granby. That year, I’d started bleaching the dark hair on my upper lip, using a little pot of stinging cream and powder you mixed in with a stick. It just gave me yellow fuzz, but I didn’t know what else to do. I had no idea this was something most women dealt with; I assumed it was an ignominy only a few dejected girls knew.
I took care of it every few weeks, in the time after school when Thalia walked Robbie to the gym and waited with him for the ski van. I had locked the door and spackled the stuff on my face one afternoon, when someone knocked. I looked for my washcloth and realized I’d left it in the bathroom. I made the mistake of asking who was there; Beth called that Thalia needed her music folder. If I’d known where Thalia’s folder was, I would have handed it out the door, but I didn’t—and now I was looking for something to wipe my lip on, something that could get bleach on it, but all my clothes were black, my sheets dark blue.
Beth wiggled the knob, said, “Would you just please let me in?”
I grabbed a white T-shirt from Thalia’s laundry and wiped my face, opened the door. I must have been flushed, out of breath. Beth looked me up and down and said, “Why was the door locked?”
The next day, Dorian Culler came up to me at breakfast. He said, “I heard you were letting your fingers do the walking.”
I didn’t understand until Puja Sharma, who had no filter, found me in the Singer-Baird laundry room and said, “Ohhh, you know, I don’t think Thalia hates you, everyone is just worried about her.” I asked what she meant, and she said, “They’re saying, like, oh, she has to live with a masturbator.”
I wonder if you can understand, as a man, the stigma around this at the time. It was one thing to be called a slut; that was half-good, half-bad. This was entirely bad.
Mike Stiles stopped me in the hall that week. He said, sincerely, “I’m sorry they’re being shits to you.” It was a lovely gesture, but the fact that he knew made it worse. Along with everyone else, I had a crush on Mike Stiles, our eventual King Arthur; I was infatuated in the purest way. Pure because I never really talked to him, and because he seemed genuinely nice. He had a sloped, ridged brow, a broad chin, Elvis-thick hair. (“He’s like a hot Neanderthal,” Fran had said once, although I’d thought he looked old-fashioned in other ways—like a Union soldier, maybe.)
When I signed Thalia’s yearbook that May, I opened to the back and saw that Jorge Cardenas had ended his message with Enjoy your summer free from the Masturbator! On the previous page, Beth had made a list of inside jokes (Bunny??? and That’s not ping pong and Mr. WHATNOW and The Masterbator). Thalia was packing, her back to me, and I flipped to the Little Shop of Horrors page and signed my name—only my name—under the cast and crew photo that included us both.
But Thalia never mentioned it, was never unkind for a moment. She was mature—which I’m sure made her more appealing to you. If you’d been interested in someone truly mature, you wouldn’t have spent time with a teenager, but her maturity was probably a convenient excuse. Maybe you told yourself she was an old soul. I’m sure you told yourself she knew what she was doing. I bet you felt, when she brought you bagels and soda, that she was mothering you.
It was to my advantage that Thalia and I had no past together. These other girls had seen me come in freshman year trying earnestly, wearing knockoff Laura Ashley hand-me-downs from the Robesons’ daughter, my bangs teased and sprayed—still the fashion in Indiana but definitely not at Granby. They saw me join yearbook in a fit of school spirit (where I didn’t last long but took Geoff Richler’s friendship as a souvenir). They saw me try to befriend people like them, before I found my way to Fran.
From the perspective of girls like Rachel and Beth, having lost track of me around November of freshman year, my transformation over the next summer must have seemed abrupt. I cut my hair chin-length, chopped my bangs Bettie Page–style. I left my hand-me-downs in Indiana and, when I got back to campus a week early to stay with the Hoffnungs, went thrifting with Fran in Hanover, spending my Baskin-Robbins wages on dark, oversized clothes, fishnets I carefully ripped, a fake army jacket. We went through her sisters’ closets for things they hadn’t been back to claim. I cultivated a look I’d now call goth grunge, designed to hide my weight: all black, a flannel shirt either tied around my waist or flung on open like a coat. At Clover Music in Kern, I bought chokers made of hemp and Fimo, black-light nail polish. Fran gave me her old Doc Martens, duct-taped at the toes and a size too big. I plucked my eyebrows into sharp little checkmarks. Everyone was doing this, but mine were extreme. I learned to apply thick black eyeliner. I’d spent the summer shedding what I’d seen as pathetic artifice, ready to return as my true self.
Sophomore year was when Carlotta French showed up, a refugee from an all-girls’ school in Virginia, and all but announced that Fran and I were her new best friends, positions we happily accepted because Carlotta was cooler than either of us. Carlotta wore ankle bracelets and no bra. When she played guitar on a blanket under trees, boys who theoretically were interested only in preppy girls out of shampoo commercials would move their Frisbee games closer, end up lying on their stomachs to talk to her. She found them ridiculous. She sang “Rhiannon” for Follies, an ethereal version that made me want to be her. Her hair was wild, the color of sand. She was reed-thin, but I didn’t hate her for it. She seemed to have sprung from the earth that way, rather than crafting herself from the pages of a magazine.
That winter, Fran pulled out the previous year’s Dragon Tales and showed Carlotta, in the freshman section, how I used to dress, and Carlotta let out her most frog-like laugh. “Were you kidnapped into a cult? It’s like—if JCPenney was a cult!” And I was able to laugh with her, grateful she saw the girl in the picture as the fake me, the one who’d gotten something terribly wrong.
But most people that fall greeted my transformation with concern.
Karen King saw me on move-in day and said, “Oh God, does this mean you’re quitting crew?”
Poor Ms. Shields tried to suss out if I was okay. Before practice one morning, as we waited outside the gym for the Dragon Wagon, she started asking about my summer but within two minutes was listing resources: people I could talk to, appointments I could make. I stammered something nonsensical, didn’t understand till later that I was radiating damage. Of course, that’s exactly what it was—I was damaged, and must have subconsciously wanted to dress the part. But since the damage was only newly visible to everyone else, they assumed it was fresh. The whisper was I’d discovered drugs that summer, or witchcraft. If I’d gone to any public high school in 1990s America, I’d have blended in, at least with a certain crowd. But at Granby, land of Ralph Lauren and duck boots, I was seen for the wreck I actually was. It was only the fact they got the details so wrong—heroin! occult! wrist-cutting!—that allowed me to shrug off the gossip.
After Kurt Cobain died junior year, Clover Music sold copies of his suicide note. It was a Xerox of a Xerox, Kurt’s handwriting blurring at the page edges. The pages were double-sided, and I bought two copies so I could tape the whole thing above my bed, each page facing out.
I was in the dorm hall, returning from the bathroom, when I overheard Rachel reading the note aloud to Beth and Thalia in a stoner voice.
Thalia said, “I think it’s sweet. He was her hero.”
Beth said, “You say that now, but wait till you find her hanging from the ceiling.”