“About him and Thalia?”
“He would stand behind you and put his hands on your stomach, like he was checking your diaphragm for how you were singing. Or he’d stand in front of you with his hands on your shoulders, to show how you shouldn’t move your shoulders when you breathe, but he’s so close his breath is in your face. This horrible coffee breath.”
I said, “Oh.” Why was a small part of me surprised? I’d expected to hear from someone you’d preyed on in Providence years later, maybe someone who looked like Thalia. Maybe I’d assumed you picked one girl every once in a while. Not that you had your hands all over everyone. It was dense of me. The fact that you never bothered me didn’t mean you were monocular in your fixations. “Did he ever do more than that?”
“You were supposed to be flattered. Sophomore year, his first year, right? He was so into that senior, you remember Erin Dominici? She was gorgeous. Then that spring he starts paying me all this attention. And it’s weird, but I’m not in the same league as her so the flattery is intoxicating. Everyone thinks he’s cute. He had—when you think back, he had a young look, which was more attractive to teenagers than if he had some big beard, you know? He wanted to meet more, one-on-one, to practice. He literally called my house that summer. It was lucky I was the one who picked up, but maybe he’d tried before and hung up when he got my dad. He said he wanted to check if I was singing. Then he’s telling me how lonely Granby is in summer.”
She was speaking, I realized, with the practiced self-awareness and the monologuing capacity of someone who’d gone through a lot of therapy.
“We get back in the fall, and Thalia’s new, and I’m the one who convinces her to try out for Follies. Right away, he’s obviously infatuated. What’s fucked up is, when it was me, I was okay with the attention, and suddenly it’s her and I find it disgusting. Which then, I think I must be jealous, right? Thalia’s so beautiful, I was dumb to think he liked me, blah blah. But it bothers me, how she’s falling for it. That’s how I think of it, that she’s falling for some scam he pulls with everyone.
“And she let it go so much further than I had. I remember once that fall we went shopping and she was looking at all this sexy underwear, these black lace things, asking if I thought he’d like them. I was like, But he’s never going to see them, right? and she goes, He likes to keep the lights on.”
I said, “Oh my God.” I watched my own face, surprised it didn’t burst into flame. I needed to call Amy March, needed to tell her to recall Beth, but first I needed to breathe.
“Did you know I fixed her up with Robbie?” she said. “I worked so hard to get them together. To get her away from Mr. Bloch, which didn’t work. And then Robbie was such a little dick to her. And I—for years, I told myself I must have just wanted the attention all to myself. But sometimes when we’re young, we’re smarter than we think. Maybe it didn’t bother me because I was jealous. Maybe it bothered me because it bothered me.”
She paused long enough that I thought I should say something. “You had good instincts,” I offered.
“We were on that opera trip, and she kept vanishing with him, even though Robbie was there. And I kept trying to get her to do stuff with me, just to keep them apart, and we had this huge fight. We didn’t talk for weeks.”
I thought I’d been so observant, and all this had gone right past me.
“I don’t want you thinking that was the reason I hated Granby. The girls were awful. The boys were awful. Freshman year we had to take some stupid anonymous sex survey in that health seminar, and fucking—I’m not even gonna say who it was, but someone found the pile of surveys and took mine, because I was the only one who said I’d had sex. So she shows it around the whole school before I even find out why everyone’s whispering about me. And then I have two choices: I can skulk around and be embarrassed, or I can own it. I tried to drop out, but my father—I don’t know. I stayed.”
Humiliatingly, I remembered. Donna Goldbeck—that’s who it was—had showed the completed survey around the dorm, along with a message Beth had once jotted down for her from the pay phone. She needed a lot of opinions, every single person’s opinion, on whether the handwriting matched.
“You know what’s ironic? I hadn’t even had sex. I’m in a new school, these kids all seem so sophisticated, and I’m thinking, I’m probably the only one who hasn’t done it. At fourteen fucking years old. So I put yes to all these things, because I’m afraid of someone looking over my shoulder and thinking I’m a prude. And it backfires just spectacularly.”
I said, “I’m so sorry that happened to you. And I want to be honest here, I’m sorry I took part in that. I talked about it. I don’t want to pretend I didn’t.” It wouldn’t have occurred to me in infinite lifetimes that I’d had a hand in bullying Beth Docherty.
“I don’t blame anyone for believing it. Even now, with my own kids, it’s confusing as hell. I tell them not to believe rumors, and then my daughter is like, But rumors are how we know if someone’s an abuser. She has that vocabulary at twelve, which blows my mind. So I’m supposed to say, Yes, believe those rumors, but not the other ones? Only believe rumors about men?”
“Well,” I said. “Believe women. It’s not perfect, but maybe it’s a start.”
Beth snapped her head to look right at me for the first time. “Sorry, but didn’t your husband get totally me-tooed?” She was back to her sharpest voice. As if the whole conversation had been a trap, just like “Nice top” had once been.
I said, “Someone had some issues with him.”
“So you’re one to talk. You don’t believe that woman, but you believe women when it suits you.”
“I don’t think that’s fair.”
Beth returned her gaze to the mirror, recalibrated her breath. We were back in yoga class.
“Anyway, I read all about it.”
“Yes,” I said, “he has a high profile. But my point was, I’m sorry that happened to you.”
“You remember I dated Dorian senior year? We broke up partway into my first semester at Penn, but it was a year of my life. He treated me—everything was a joke. He was all the worst things about Granby in one ball.”
Beth and Dorian broke up and made up so many times that we’d laugh about it, a running gag. She’d show up to class with puffy red eyes, and Fran would pass me a note: Trouble in Loverville!
“We were at Mike Stiles’s ski place in Vermont, and there was a security camera set up on their front porch. So Dorian somehow moved it into the bedroom, and then he brought me in there. He’d told everyone else to watch on the monitor, and I had no idea.”
In the mirror, my eyes widened, my mouth searched dumbly for words.
“That’s horrible.”
“They all sat there and watched what we were doing. Which wasn’t even anything I wanted to do. Dorian thought it was hilarious.”
“That’s horrible.” I was doing a mental inventory of who’d likely been there, who might have sat watching, laughing. Mike Stiles, for one. Robbie. I couldn’t imagine Thalia sitting through it. She’d have told them they were being disgusting, left the room.
“It’s so hot,” I remembered Donna Goldbeck saying to me, about Beth and Dorian. “The way they fight. It’s, like, steamy. They were screaming at each other at Stiles’s house and then, like, five minutes later they’re upstairs fucking.”
And I took her word for it: that it was hot, that it was enviable, that it was some level of relationship I could only aspire to.
“You don’t understand, though,” Beth said. “You say it’s horrible, and you have no idea. You were safe. You were never in that position.”