Читать книгу Indecent: A taut psychological thriller about class and lust - Corinne Sullivan - Страница 8

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?”

I imagined us sitting together in the waiting room, perhaps for hours. I was already feeling regretful about offering my friendship—what else might I thoughtlessly promise him in that time? “I need to get back to campus,” I said. “I’m sorry.” Clarence looked as though he might cry. The EMT called me a cab. As I rode back to Vandenberg, I wondered how it was that, being around a bunch of high school boys, I felt younger than ever.

_ _ _

Chapin spent most of her nights out. I’d never joined her—of course, I’d never been asked to—but I desperately wanted to know where she went. Sometimes she brought guys back; I would hear her headboard beat steadily again the wall, her breathless screeching—“Oh, god! Oh, Christ!” When I’d pass by her open bedroom door the next day, she’d smile blithely from her bed, where she’d be reading a magazine or watching TV on her laptop. “Hello, Imogene,” she’d sigh, not caring, and perhaps not even wondering, if I had heard her the night before.

On one of these nights, the Sunday after the Clarence Howell fiasco, I felt a pang in my stomach, a punch to the gut, which I recognized as agonizing loneliness. All that first week, ReeAnn, Babs, and the Woods twins tried to include me: “Imogene, I baked some brownies, do you want one?” “Hey, Imogene, we’re doing facemasks and having a movie marathon tonight, you in?” It wasn’t that I didn’t want to join; it was that, from the very beginning—even though they were strangers to one another as much as I was to them—I felt left out. It was as though a secret meeting had taken place without me, one during which the other girls had compared interests and traded stories and created inside jokes, all the things that happen naturally over time but seem to happen without my notice in the course of a week. Even on the third night—when we skipped the dining hall and made pasta together and Meggy took one of the almost-cooked strands of linguine and dangled it between her legs and the other girls laughed like it was the funniest thing they’d ever seen—even then I didn’t belong. Of course, it was impossible to say whether the pasta bit was a previously established joke, or if I just didn’t find it funny like they did.

I wasn’t comfortable, like they were, hanging out in the living room braless under a T-shirt and scrubbed free of makeup. It didn’t matter that they were all doing it—that the Woods twins had perpetually hard nipples under their sheer tank tops and that Babs would even wear her retainer to watch TV at night. I wasn’t ready to expose my spotted face and pointy breasts to them—to anyone—and knew that to join them at night still made up and fully dressed would only invite more scrutiny.

With Chapin they had never bothered; girls like Chapin didn’t need an invitation and wouldn’t join in even if she had one.

Downstairs, ReeAnn and Babs and the Woods twins were watching that show they liked, the one about the mismatched couples and the puppies.

“Oh my god, did you see that?” I heard ReeAnn shriek. “The dog just peed everywhere!”

I tried to open a book and distract myself—Old School by Tobias Wolff, one of my favorites. “You felt a depth of ease in certain boys,” I read, “their innate, affable assurance that they would not have to struggle for a place in the world; that is already reserved for them.” The pang grew worse, radiating down my legs and shooting out through my fingertips until I felt I would burst out of my skin.

The door opened and closed downstairs. A voice greeted the others—a male voice. It was Raj. I heard the clink of a bottle on a table, a cheer from the girls. A cabinet creaked open in the kitchen and glasses were passed around—wine glasses, I could tell. “Let’s play a game!” one of the Woods yelped. (I couldn’t yet tell their voices apart.)

“Where’s Imogene?” Raj asked. He knew better than to inquire about Chapin’s whereabouts.

Babs gave a response I couldn’t hear. I opened up my bedroom door. Perhaps it was the novelty of Raj being around—he rarely hung out at the Hovel—or the lure of intoxication to placate the anxiety I felt in these sorts of situations, but I found myself creeping down the steps and suddenly standing before the others in the kitchen.

“Imogene!” ReeAnn cried, as though I were back from the dead. I was relieved to see that she wasn’t yet in her pajamas. She retrieved an extra glass for me, and I joined them at the table. The others smiled at me, and the smooth dry smell of Merlot wafted to my nostrils. “Did you know that ‘Merlot’ translates to ‘young blackbird’ in French?” Raj volunteered as he handed me my full glass, and I thought, maybe I was wrong. Maybe I did belong here.

Raj pulled out a deck of cards and said we would play a game he invented called “Give a Question, Take a Question.” If the player selected a black card, he or she would pose a question to the group. If the player selected a red card, anyone in the group could ask that player a question—“The dirtier the better,” said Raj. The girls giggled, and I considered Raj, trying to decide if he was cute. The idea of him having sexual experience made him unexpectedly alluring.

Twenty minutes and nine rounds later, we were all on our second glass of wine except for Babs, who drank water (“I don’t drink,” she announced piously; none of us were surprised). We’d learned that ReeAnn once gave a hand job in the back row of a movie theater, that Babs kissed two girls one summer at Bible camp (“But I’m not gay!”), and that the craziest place Raj had ever had sex was in a Starbucks bathroom. My head felt light and fizzy, a balloon barely tethered by its string. Though I’d drunk in college, I’d never been able to hold my liquor; after a strong drink or two I often found myself smiling for no reason and paying compliments to strangers, one time even dancing with my eyes closed in the corner of the party with my cup held triumphantly above my head, entranced by the music.

Sometimes it scared me how much I enjoyed drinking, how much I enjoyed feeling more myself and less myself at once. Sometimes, when I started drinking, I feared I’d never want to stop.

I looked around the table at my fellow apprentices and felt sure, in that moment, that I loved them all. Several times Raj turned and smiled right at me, and I smiled back. He was cute, I decided. I wondered what the girl he’d had sex with at Starbucks looked like.

Maggie Woods selected a black card and smiled devilishly. “Have you ever had anal sex and, if not, would you?” she asked the group.

Babs squealed in disgust. ReeAnn shrugged and said, “I haven’t, but I’d be open to it.” Meggy Woods said, “One time, but he promised it was an accident.” By the time Raj said, “I don’t know, are we talking about me giving or receiving here?,” my teeth chattered I was laughing so hard. Why had I never realized how funny they all were?

“What about you, Imogene?” Maggie asked, and everyone turned towards me. I hesitated. “I haven’t,” I said finally, “but if the guy really wanted to, I’d probably let him.”

I’d meant to make them laugh, but no one did. Maggie refilled her glass and nudged me. “Your turn, Imogene.”

I picked the card on top of the deck, hoping it was a black card so I could ask something funny and redeem myself from whatever I had said before that was wrong. It was red.

“Ooh, Imogene!” everyone howled. I knew I wasn’t the only one who was drunk.

“I have a question for you,” Raj said. The sureness of his voice made us turn to him in curiosity. “Have you ever hooked up with a guy of color?”

My face felt hot. The others eyed me expectantly. I felt certain this time that there was only one way to answer this question.

“Yes, in high school. I dated a guy named Jared Hoffman who was black. He’s at Johns Hopkins for med school now.” I brought my glass to my lips to keep from grinning. My pulse raced. I was never a good liar.

Raj’s foot grazed against mine under the table. It was bare, I could tell, but I didn’t feel disgust; I felt a bit giddy.

Raj picked a card. “Red again,” he said, slapping the card upright on the table.

If I had been someone else, or perhaps if I had drunk a few more glasses of wine, I could have asked what I wanted to: “Would you ever hook up with me?” And maybe he would smile, and take my hand, and the girls would clap and howl like a TV audience as Raj and I made our way upstairs to my bedroom, where we would lie down in my bed and he’d slip his tongue between my lips and his hand between my legs—

“Do you think you and your girlfriend are going to get married?” Babs asked this.

Raj shrugged. “Honestly, I think I just might be with the girl I’m going to spend the rest of my life with.”

The girls sighed happily, and I clutched the edge of the table. The room was spinning. He had a girlfriend. A girlfriend he was probably going to marry.

“You okay, Imogene?” ReeAnn asked.

I realized then that I was standing. “Yeah. I just realized—um, I need to call my mom, I think.”

Everyone stared at me. I wondered if I was wrong, and no one else was drunk, because it seemed to me that I was the only one who didn’t know what was going on.

“Okay,” she said, with the wariness you use when you’re humoring someone who’s drunker than you.

I grabbed my coat off the hook, opened the back door, and tumbled into the night.

_ _ _

I thought about walking around Silver Lake. It felt cinematic, romantic even—a girl walking along the edge of the water on a warm September night, hair blowing, hands in her jacket pockets, head turned to the sky above. I imagined the boys high up in dorm rooms looking out their windows into the night and seeing me, wondering, Who’s that? Where is she going?

But the lake was two and a half miles around, and I was tired and, though considerably sobered up now that I was walking, still a little drunk. In the distance, I heard the uninhibited laughter of boys who had never known failure and probably never would. I followed it. Between Slone House, a third-years’ dorm, and Perkins Hall for fourth years, a rope was strung a foot above the ground between two trees. Around it stood three boys, their shirts untucked and sleeves rolled up and impish grins on their faces.

“Dude, try it again,” said one, a gruff redhead with thick forearms that bulged through his shirtsleeves.

The boy beside him—super thin and Asian—snorted. “Pussy’s going to blow it.”

“Prepare to be amazed, gentlemen.”

I couldn’t see the source of the last voice, but it was clear and light, the voice of someone delivering a speech. I crouched in the shadow of Perkins and peeked around the corner.

He was neither tall nor short, with skinny limbs and a messy mop of inky black hair, trimmed enough to be within Vandenberg regulations, but long enough to demonstrate that he kept it so reluctantly. His face was coated in a thick layer of stubble, and he had unbuttoned the first few buttons on his shirt, revealing a shock of wiry black hair on his chest. As his friends and I looked on, he stepped up onto the rope, using the tree trunk for support. Then, ever so carefully, he released the tree, spread his slender arms, and began to make his way to the other side.

He bit his lip, eyes glued to his feet. His friends watched in reverent silence. He wobbled once, and I gasped aloud, but he regained his balance and continued on. Once he got close, he reached his arms in front of him for the opposite tree, a wobbly child reaching for his mother. Once his hands touched the tree, he wrapped one arm around it and pumped his other fist in the air. “Fuck yeah!” He pointed at the Asian guy. “In your face, Park!”

His friends applauded. I released my breath.

“Well done, dickhole.” Park reached into his pocket and pulled out a beer—my heart seized at the sight of it, the alarm in my head blaring: Alcohol! In the hands of minors!—which he tossed to his friend. The friend caught it in one hand and lifted the pull-tab with a hiss. After a long chug, the leader belched a response:

“FuckyouguysIrock.”

It was gross, but unapologetic in its grossness; the noisy release of gas—rude or embarrassing or immature in any other circumstance—was made cool, funny, because it came from him. I liked watching him, I realized; there was something about the way he held himself and the way the other boys regarded him that made me unable to look away. It was clear he was the chosen one, the leader, the one who made the rules. The one who got the girls and charmed the teachers and would never be wanting for friends. To me, there was nothing quite as attractive as being able to trick other people into believing you were.

“Shit, dude, it’s late.” The redhead held up his watch. “We still need to study for trig.”

“Alright, Skeat. Don’t get your thong in a bunch.” The leader brought his beer to his lips, downed the rest in two chugs, and tossed the empty can into the bushes. “Let’s go.”

After the three of them disappeared through the back door of Perkins, I snuck out from behind the dorm and went around scooping up the empty cans. I felt somehow that I would get in trouble if I didn’t, that this was my responsibility.

“Need help?”

I jumped. It was Raj, approaching from the direction of the Hovel.

“What are you doing here?”

He gestured to the building. “I live here.”

“Right.” I deposited the cans into the trash barrel beside Perkins. I scrambled to think of a reasonable excuse for why I was there, but he didn’t seem to need one.

“Tonight was fun.”

“Yeah, it was a lot of fun. Thanks for coming over.”

“I’m just glad you joined us.” He looked up at the sky. “A lot less stars out here than at home,” he said, speaking more to the sky than to me. “It’s due to light pollution, you know. It’s a direct cause of wasting our light sources.”

“There are a lot of stars in India?”

He looked at me, confused. “No. Indiana.”

“Oh.”

He opened the front door, stuck half his body inside. My head was still a bit foggy, and I thought for a moment that he might be inviting me to his room.

“My grandparents are from Pakistan,” he said.

“Oh,” I said again.

“Goodnight, Imogene.” He gave me a sad sort of smile and closed the door behind him.

_ _ _

By the time I returned to the Hovel, everyone was in bed. Our dirty glasses sat in the sink, and I washed them each by hand and put them away as a sort of apology, though for what I wasn’t exactly sure. Upstairs, Chapin’s door was ajar, her bed empty. I felt the sense of missing out on something better, and I realized then why I never wanted to hang out with the other girls: Chapin had rejected them, so I was, too. I couldn’t decide if I would rather be lumped with them in Chapin’s mind—one of the boring girls, the plain girls—or considered separate, yet still alone.

In my room, I opened my laptop and I looked up Raj’s profile page. We weren’t friends on the site yet, but it felt awkward to send a friend request now—the window of opportunity for sending one had already closed. His girlfriend was lanky and freckle-faced, with dirty blonde hair and a small gap between her front teeth. Besides the gap in her teeth, and the few inches of height she appeared to have on Raj judging from his photos, she actually looked a bit like me. But I’m prettier, I thought, startling myself; I’d always considered myself cute enough, but unexceptional. Never pretty. It must have been the wine.

After perusing his profile a bit more, I looked up the Vandenberg School roster. The roster was divided by dormitory, and I clicked on the link for Perkins Hall. I found Maxwell Park first. The accompanying photo showed him smirking at the camera, looking as though he knew something dirty about the photographer’s wife. Samuel Keating I spotted next, his red hair combed back in neat grooves and his mouth set in a small O-shape, the look of being caught off guard. With little to go off of, the leader was the hardest to find, but once I spotted his photo I couldn’t believe I had missed it before. He was unmistakable. His suit jacket was wrinkled, his face scruffy, and he was laughing, his mouth wide open and eyes nearly closed. Adam Kipling, the text beneath the photo read.

I thought of the rope, still suspended between the two trees. If they had left it hanging there, it meant that they planned to return.