Back at Granby, everything was still—a snow globe no one had shaken in days. No one crossed the quad, no one scuttled from Commons with an Eggo and a coffee. I was the only thing moving, because I was late; I’d texted Alder to tell the class to start without me. I left Fran’s car in the lot behind Quincy and raced up the big wooden stairs to the second floor. I took them two at a time, something I’d last done senior year.
I’d sobbed on those stairs freshman year after I failed my English midterm. I fell down them once, bruising my tailbone. And one time on the landing, Dorian Culler and the postgrad senior we called Peewee cornered me and Carlotta.
I told you before that I had a story about Peewee, and this is it.
Carlotta and I sat on the landing, on the top step of the bottom half of the stairs. I wonder if you can picture the way they double back, the curve and deep patina of the banister—but maybe you didn’t spend much time in Quincy. It was after classes; Carlotta was practicing “These Are Days” on her guitar, for one of the several occasions on which she’d perform it that year and make us cry. The song had been around awhile, but didn’t become our emphatic anthem till we found ourselves about to graduate.
The boys had a camera, not odd since we were right by the darkroom. Dorian took a picture of us, and Carlotta stopped singing, asked what he wanted.
“I’m using up my roll,” he said. And then, “Peewee, get in the picture.” Parkman Walcott bounded up the stairs to plop his huge self between us, smelling like sweat and Drakkar Noir. I wasn’t falling for Dorian’s bullshit, wasn’t about to grin for the camera, and neither was Carlotta. In the instant after the flash went off, Peewee reached around both of us and grabbed my right breast and Carlotta’s left, hard enough to leave fingertip bruises. Carlotta bucked like a horse, getting Peewee off her, off us, and—unintentionally, but conveniently—ramming her guitar head into his Adam’s apple. There was some aftermath with him swearing, her screaming that she’d get his nuts next, me not knowing what to do, Dorian doubled over laughing—but I don’t recall how we got out of there.
I hadn’t thought of it more than once or twice between 1995 and that moment. It wasn’t something I’d suppressed, just something I hadn’t revisited. But in 2018, halfway up those same stairs, I did the math. Dorian Culler had shoved his dick in my face three times, had photographed his friend grabbing my breast, had humiliated me in front of my peers for four years. Things had amplified, had gone incrementally from something he could have laughed off as a joke to now, for the first time, physical force. This was fall of senior year, because yes, what Carlotta had been practicing for was the Parents’ Weekend bonfire; I remembered now for sure, because she was cold to me for a few days after the stairwell incident, and we finally had it out the night of the bonfire. She blamed me for what happened and said she was tired of me being such a wimp. She called me a noodle. I started to say something about my childhood, my dad, my brother, and she stopped me and said she didn’t want to hear it. Then she apologized, and we cried. So this was October.
And October was when I stopped eating, my veganism a convenient cover. It was when I started smoking like cigarettes were my only oxygen. It was when I began starving my body to the point that, by spring, I couldn’t row a Girl Scout canoe, let alone compete in sprint season. From this distance, it was clear: I had been in the process of erasing my body.
It wasn’t that a boob grab was the worst that could happen to me. I had survived far worse. It was just one thing too much.
And then when Thalia died—the way her body had been mangled—the way she’d been tossed in the water—the way every girl was just a body to be used, to be discarded—the way that if you had a body, they could grab you—if you had a body, they could destroy you—
And I ended up by that tree in the woods.
And I ended up hurting myself in slower ways, too.
Loretta Young didn’t understand that Clark Gable had raped her. She considered their daughter a “walking mortal sin” until, in her eighties, she learned about date rape by watching Larry King Live and realized her inability to fend him off hadn’t been her fault.
I decided to tell the Loretta Young story to my film class that afternoon. It was something to send them off into the world with.
For now, I was at the door of Quincy 212, my podcasters waiting inside for our last meeting. I had a lot of news for them. I took my coat off, fixed my hair.
When I opened the door, the sun shone behind them and they were made of light.
60
Saturday morning, Anne drove me to the airport while Fran took the boys to tumbling class.
On NPR, they were talking about the news story—the one where the small-town mayor killed himself the day after his former secretary reported him for sexual harassment.
Or rather, the one where the chef hanged himself in his empty restaurant because the rape charges were about to be filed.
The one where the ex-husband showed up at her door and said he’d already swallowed pills, and unless she took him back he wouldn’t let her drive him to the hospital.
I’d brainstormed conversation topics ahead of time, lest the hour and a half in the car grow awkward, but it turned out Anne had an agenda. We were only turning out of the campus drive when she said, “The thing with Fran is she’s just so protective of the school.”
I had picked up a piece of purple onion skin from the passenger seat, a stowaway from some grocery trip, and now I folded it into smaller and smaller pieces, felt its fibers crack cleanly each time.
I said, “She wants me to drop it. I’m aware.”
“I know it comes out as her disagreeing with you, telling you you’re making things up. She doesn’t want to rock the boat.”
I couldn’t control the noise I made, an outraged puff of air. “Christ,” I said. “This is not about anyone’s discomfort. If Omar—”
“No, I know.”
“It’s funny,” I said, “because Fran is the person who taught me how to rock boats.”
“Well. But this is her home. You get that.”
And yes, although I fundamentally disagreed, I did understand that her instinct was to protect Granby, in the reflexive way a drone will protect a beehive. I couldn’t imagine having that level of attachment to a place. By the time we met, I was someone without a home; Fran was someone who would never leave hers.
While other freshmen were still figuring out where various classrooms were, Fran was showing me the storage closet off the wrestling room where they kept the extra Frisbees. She was showing me where they kept the liquor for reunions, although we never dared. She showed me the three small gravestones in the woods—farmers who’d died two hundred years back.
To know those secret places was to know the school, to take ownership. There were plenty more of them, places you could go to be alone, or alone with one other person.
There were the theater spaces, the ones that were mine by senior year: the lighting booth, the gel room, the prop storage, the catwalk. I never invited friends; I’d have been no fun, yelling every time someone set a soda can down.
There was the darkroom, so thoroughly Geoff’s that it became mine and Fran’s and Carlotta’s by default.
There was the athletic shed, but I rarely went there—I couldn’t get over my mouse issue.
There was a nonfunctional fireplace in Jacoby Hall with an upright piano in front of it, and a few couples were in the habit of claiming the space, pulling the piano tight against the opening, making out in there.