Indecent Read online

  As Dale weaved through the aisles passing out syllabi, I unzipped my rain jacket (realizing just then that I had never taken it off) and set it on the floor by his desk. I’d printed out world maps for the boys to mark with famous early hominid finds and their locations—Dale had said he would allow me ten minutes at the end of each of his lectures to do an activity with the students—but the printouts had become crinkled in my book bag. Shame tightened my throat—for my wrinkled papers, for my squeaky shoes, for my frizzy hair, for my inability to command this room and to shape the young minds of the future.

  “Hey, Dale?” I asked, hesitantly at first and then louder, “Dale?”

  He turned to face me, halfway down the third row. The boy in the polka-dot tie turned to his friend beside him and waggled his brows. “Dale?”

  “Yes, Miss Abney?” The pointedness with which he said my name made me think that perhaps “Dale” was not how he was to be addressed in front of the students. The room shifted to face me, fifteen scathing sets of eyes.

  “Can I run down to the copy room? It seems that, um…” I held up one of my crinkled worksheets like an apology.

  “Of course, of course.” His grin returned, and with it I felt a rush of relief. Everything was going to be okay.

  I collected my papers and squeaked down the hall. In the copy room, I smoothed the least-wrinkled sheet out on the photocopier screen and pressed the right buttons. The machine whirred to life. As the warm papers slid into the tray, I looked up and met my reflection in the window above the copier, checking to make sure my blemishes were still buried beneath makeup. I slid a hand over the frizz in my hair, the wrinkles in my blouse and noticed, as I did so, that my wet rain jacket had made my blouse go sheer, and that the outline of my sensible beige bra was on display for all to see, having become visible through the fabric.

  I returned to the classroom and zipped my rain jacket back over my shirt. I took Dale—Dr. Duvall—aside to ask if I could just spend the day observing, as I wasn’t feeling quite ready to lead a lesson just yet. I spent the rest of the hour—dripping, useless—on a chair in the corner, while the boys cast sidelong glances at me, all of us wondering what exactly I was doing there.

  TWO

  I used to dream of boarding school. I’m not sure what first put the idea into my head—maybe it was Villette or A Separate Peace, or all those Facts of Life reruns I watched—but at some point in the year before high school, the family computer became my portal to the best boarding schools on the East Coast. Choate Rosemary Hall, Phillips Exeter Academy, the Hotchkiss School. I spent hours poring over their websites, their names as familiar as friends. “It’s homework,” I told my parents, to justify the amount of time I spent before the screen; afterwards, I’d delete my search history. I clicked the buttons that said, Yes, I’m interested, and thick, glossy catalogues arrived at my house, which I pulled from the mailbox and hid under my bed. I turned the pages slowly at night, studying the images with the squirming guilt and pleasure that an illicit top-shelf magazine might provide, dreaming of secret societies, four-poster beds, pranks and friendships and matching cotton nightgowns. I imagined every girl in the pictures—pretty girls studying bubbling beakers in laboratories and running up and down lacrosse fields—was me. Or, rather, the me I could be.

  There was nothing wrong with the public high school in Lockport. My best friends Jaylen and Stephanie would be there, as well as everyone else I’d attended school with since kindergarten. I knew better, too, than to make my parents privy to my fantasies. I’d once idly mentioned boarding school to my dad, and he scoffed like he did whenever he caught me watching reality TV or reading People magazine. But still, after I slipped under my sheets with my catalogues, I imagined myself in a plaid skirt and a navy wool blazer with a school crest embroidered on it, walking down flagstone paths between imposing ivy-covered buildings with my fellow blazer-wearing peers.

  The therapist I’d seen throughout high school for my skin-picking problem asked me once why I wanted to go away. “Why not the private Catholic school down the road?” she asked. Somewhere I could still wear a uniform but stay at home with my family. I told her there was no money for the private Catholic school, that my dad—like several other dads in Lockport—was suffering the consequences of budget cutbacks at Rural/Metro, and therapy was just about the only luxury we could afford. Then she asked if I’d ever applied for scholarships, and I told her all the scholarships were for prodigies and minorities, spoken-word poets and trombone players and first-generation Americans, that it was the extraordinary and unique that were rewarded free tuition, not the slightly-above-average.

  “Then why wish for boarding school?” she still wanted to know.

  Because, I explained, when you wish for something, you wish for the best thing, and nothing could be better than being away from the people you’d known your whole life—the people who’d defined and judged and limited you and would continue to do so until you escaped. Because when it came to wishing, practicality wasn’t a consideration.

  But once high school began, the fantasies faded. I took up lacrosse and sat on the bench. I dressed like the other girls dressed and didn’t raise my hand in class and minded my own business. I didn’t date, and I went to school dances with paper decorations and girls who wore the same three dresses from the one dress boutique in town, and I patiently waited for my life to begin.

  * * *

  Even by my first Saturday at Vandenberg, a week after my arrival and the day of the first varsity lacrosse game, I thought my luck would change. When I walked through the forty-acre campus that first week—past Morris Chapel, the Marshall Huffman Library, all the cherry trees and stone archways and Tudor-style buildings reflecting in Silver Lake—I sometimes felt the overwhelming urge to cry; how lucky I was! How lucky we all were! I thought of the high school in Lockport, with its cracked vinyl tiles, its sloppy joes, its leaking toilets and dirty windows and slow insipid students who pushed past me in the hall without a second glance.

  At Vandenberg, every last faucet and doorknob gleamed with possibility.

  That Saturday, we were playing against Brunswick School in Greenwich. We rode the twenty minutes there on a bus driven by the head lacrosse coach, Larry, a balding divorcée with acne scars and a chipped front tooth who was probably teased by boys like the ones on his team when he was in high school. When I’d first been assigned to be his assistant lacrosse coach, he’d asked, “You any good?”

  “I did a camp at the Buffalo Lacrosse Academy the summers after freshman and sophomore year,” I said.

  “I didn’t ask that.”

  “I’m going to try to be as helpful as I can.”

  He grunted.

  The boys, led by team captain Duggar Robinson, were taking turns punching each other in the gut to determine their “sex noise.” The stocky goalie, known only as Rollo, made an oafish “oof!” when Duggar punched him, and raucous laughter resulted. This was different than the quiet exchange in the classroom; this was flagrant, aggressive. Instead of being cool enough to understand, I’d been pegged as meek enough to disregard.

  “Rollo, what do the girls think when you bust a nut in them and do that shit?” one of the guys near the front demanded.

  Rollo got up on his knees and thrust his crotch a few times into the back of his seat. “I dunno, Baxter. Your mom seemed to like it just fine last night.”

  The other guys bellowed their approval. Sitting alone near the front of the bus, I couldn’t help but smile, too, as sequestered as I was. Their laughter was infectious.

  “Hey, Coach Imogene!” Baxter poked me across the aisle with the end of his lacrosse stick. “Hey, what’s your sex noise?”

  The guys roared now. Larry narrowed his eyes at them through the rearview mirror.

  “Let’s find out, shall we?” Duggar stood and swept towards me up the aisle. With his blond curls, Roman nose, and 60’s-style square-frame glasses, he was beyond reproach; Larry didn’t bat an eye.


  I thought, suddenly, of Jared Hoffman from high school. Jared was black and wore diamond studs in his earlobes, and he was one of the few people at the school that excited me. We sat next to each other in AP Spanish, and sometimes he would reach across the aisle to grab my hand, caressing it with his thumb. On Valentine’s Day, he brought all the girls in class, including the teacher, a pink carnation. When he handed me my flower, he winked. It didn’t matter to me that he’d winked at every other girl, too, including the teacher—I felt sure there was something meaningful behind the wink he’d directed at me. He included a note with my flower, slipped onto my desk: Go out with me sometime, Imogene. I still wonder if he meant it. At times I thought I’d love Jared Hoffman forever, even after my body sagged and swelled and my hair turned gray. According to his profile page, Jared was at Johns Hopkins getting his medical degree. I wondered what it was like to know the world would never say no to you.

  Duggar leaned against the back of my seat. His eyebrows were black, incongruous with his golden head, and nearly met in an impenitent tuft above his crooked nose. Those brows, if anything, made him even more handsome and frightening. “Stand up, Coach Imogene.”

  I looked to the rearview mirror, hoping to meet Larry’s eyes, but he concentrated on the road, uninterested. I knew I had to say no. I imagined myself narrowing my eyes and snarling, “Back to your seat, Duggar,” like I imagined Chapin would. Or I could even joke with him: “Like hell I’m going to let you punch me!” Funny and authoritative. Cool and under control. But under Duggar’s cold glare, I simply stared up at him, struck stupid. Duggar had nearly a foot on me, and a rush of sweat flooded my armpits.

  “You’re really going to punch a girl, Robinson?”

  “Please, Rollo.” Duggar flashed his teeth, his eyes still on me. “You know me better than that.” Then he turned back to me. “I guess you don’t have to stand up for this.”

  He wound back his arm. I stiffened. The fist propelled towards me and, just as it was about to make contact with my stomach, I flinched and let out a tiny yelp, like a dog that had its tail stepped on.

  “See? Didn’t even have to touch her.” Duggar patted my shoulder. “You’re a good sport, Squeak.”

  Larry’s eyes finally flicked up into the rearview mirror. “Siddown!” he barked, a one-word command that seemed embarrassingly directed at me as much as Duggar, even though I knew it wasn’t, even though I wasn’t even standing up. Larry didn’t seem to notice the punch. Larry didn’t seem to realize how unwise it was to leave me alone with them back there.

  I slid down into my seat, mortified, defeated. It wasn’t until Rollo called from the back, “Hey, Squeak, how’s about asking Sergeant Larry to turn up the tunes?” that I realized that Squeak was my new nickname.

  * * *

  Vandenberg sent me stacks of catalogues after I accepted the job. The glossy pages provided the facts I needed to familiarize myself with—Vandenberg School for Boys is the oldest nonmilitary all-male boarding school in the United States. The school has an enrollment of 150 students. Tuition is $46,000 a year—but what I was most interested in were the pictures. Attractive wasn’t the first word that had come to my mind to describe the young men pictured performing on stage, reading in the quad, shaking hands with state officials; what I thought, instead, was special. It was more than pedigree, or good breeding, or any of those vague, aristocratic terms that seemed only to be understood by those who had it (and more apt, to me, for dog shows). What the Vandenberg boys had, I’d finally decided, was exemption. Freedom from liability or failure.

  Lockport didn’t have old money, or new money, or much money at all. The closest thing my high school had to aristocracy was Melanie Hoffman, who boasted a BMW and two real Gucci bags thanks to the chain of drug stores her father owned. My knowledge of galas and debutantes and high teas came from Jane Austen and the Brontës. In the first week of classes, when Chapin nodded to a student walking by and whispered to me, “Paris Hilton’s cousin,” I immediately reached for my phone to take a picture, and she slapped it out of my hand, snarling, “This isn’t Disney World, Imogene.” Vandenberg boys fascinated me, and I studied and dissected them like characters from a reality show. They were formidable and foreign. It seemed impossible that I could belong to it all, that such fine young men could be mine.

  In their suit jackets and ties, the students seemed less like boys and more like men, informed and opinioned and—more than likely—experienced. Their smiles spoke of privilege that I had never known, and it wasn’t because they attended a school with nine athletic fields, a 100-acre nature laboratory, and one of the world’s most important collections of early American art. It wasn’t even because they attended an institution that comprised the bedrock of an earlier American establishment, with alumni including Astors, Vanderbilts, Tafts, and Kennedys.

  It was because they were given a uniform that assured their place in the world: that place being The Very Top.

  * * *

  The game was going well, up until Clarence Howell—the skinny third year who had his pants pulled down during our first practice—broke his nose. We were up by two when a Brunswick attacker’s swinging stick met with poor Clarence’s face mask. The snap was audible, the blood everywhere. The referee blew his whistle, and Larry and I ran out onto the field.

  “You alright, Howell?”

  Clarence removed his helmet and looked up at Larry, blood bubbling from his nostrils. “I don’t think so, Coach.”

  “Should I call an ambulance?” I pulled my phone from my back pocket. “I mean, we should call an ambulance, right?” I looked at Clarence. His hands were clasped over his face, blood leaking through his fingers. Embarrassingly, I felt myself starting to tear.

  Larry grunted, though whether it was in agreement or because of some phlegm stuck in his throat I wasn’t sure, and then he squinted at me. “Are you crying?”

  “No.” It came out more indignant than I intended.

  Over his clasped hands, Clarence’s eyes were wide and desperate.

  “Well, go on,” Larry said.

  I dialed with shaky hands. Soon enough, Clarence Howell and I were sitting in an ambulance, on our way to Greenwich Hospital.

  We sat in silence side by side, me looking out the window, Clarence holding a thick cloth towel up to his gushing face. In this close proximity, I could smell the sweat that had dried on his skin, salty and endearing. It was my first time alone with one of the students, my first time deliberating how I was supposed to talk to them. It felt silly to ask where he was from and how he liked school with blood gushing from his face. Every once in a while he snuffled, adjusting the towel. It was not a time for small talk, I decided. We were on a mission. I used this logic to justify my disinclination to speak.

  Clarence surprised me by speaking first.

  “It’s probably for the best anyways.”

  I turned to look at him. “Sorry?”

  He lowered the towel, his mouth sticky with dried red blood. “I said, it’s probably for the best anyways. You know”—he gestured to his nose—“this.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “C’mon, Imo—er, Coach Imogene.”

  “Imogene is fine.”

  “Okay. Imogene. You can tell that the other boys don’t really like me, right?”

  It was obvious to me then the way it hadn’t been before—the way the back of his neck was always scruffy and unshaven, the way he was afraid to look anyone in the eye, his dirty shoelaces and his cheap nylon shorts and the haggard backpack he carried around with a pencil sticking through the hole in the bottom. There was a reason the other boys didn’t like him, and it wasn’t because his breath smelled like tuna fish and he sometimes got distracted during practice by a leaf floating through the air or the tweet of a bird.

  He didn’t come from their world.

  “Well, do you like playing lacrosse?”

  Clarence nodded and wiped his mouth on his sleeve.

  “Then you shouldn’t
worry about what those other guys think. You should just enjoy it.”

  He squinted at me, considering. “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  “Really?”

  “Why? How old did you think I was?”

  “I dunno…”

  “C’mon, how old? Twenty-five? Thirty?” I shoved his knee. Something about the touch felt unnatural, flirtatious even, and I quickly drew back my hand. No touching the students in any way.

  His eyes flickered, and red blossomed up his neck. “My age.”

  “But why would—”

  “You just—the way you let Duggar boss you around on the bus…” He looked down at his shoes.

  “Do you all think that?” My tone, again, was unexpectedly indignant, unrecognizable.

  “Sorry,” he told his shoes.

  “It’s okay.” I felt my anger release; it wasn’t him I was angry at, after all. “I don’t exactly fit in here either, you know. This whole world, it’s new to me.” I hesitated. “So maybe … maybe we can sort of figure it out together.” I wasn’t sure what I was offering him, only that I felt the need to offer him something. I felt strangely responsible—not because I had denied him a new backpack and a trust fund and the easy confidence that comes with money—but because, knowing he’d been denied those things, I could no longer regard him without pity. Even I, the lowly teaching apprentice, had used him unthinkingly as a scapegoat for my frustration; I couldn’t imagine how the other boys used him.

  Clarence looked up at me. “Like friends?”

  I felt a little sick suddenly, as though I’d been caught in a lie. “Yeah. Sure.”

  “You’re nice, Imogene.” He said this mechanically, without surprise, as factual as his being on scholarship. Imogene Abney: Nice.

  “You’re nice, too, Clarence.”

  He grinned widely, and then put his hand to his nose. “Ow.” But he kept looking at me.

  The ambulance stopped; we had arrived at the hospital. An EMT came around and opened the back door. Clarence stood. He turned and looked back at me with a hangdog smile. “Come with me?”