room.
I couldn’t hear Christopher Jordan’s response to my knock, if there even was one, and I only opened the door a crack (no stepping foot into a student’s dormitory room), but that was enough. As though stunned by a camera shutter, I stared, immobilized by the sight of him in the small gash of light from his bedside table lamp, his brutish grunts, the sound like a plastic spoon churning a thick batter—no, a plunger unclogging a stalwart toilet—still audible above the awful metallic shriek of his music. He caught my eye before I could catch myself, before I could even realize what I was seeing. “Whoops” I heard myself say, as I would if I’d accidentally stepped on someone’s shoes from behind or tripped going up the stairs. Whoops! It’s a word I’d never will myself to say but somehow always manages to emerge from my parted lips in moments of surprised indignity.
“Mother—Jesus!” He jumped as if he’d been shocked by an electrical outlet and slapped a pillow over his lap. “Don’t you know how to fucking kn—”
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry . . .”
In the dim light, his eyes were coin slots, his mouth a jeering sliver. Authority shifted.
“Who the fuck are you anyway?”
“I—” I was six years older than him, yet not feeling nearly old enough. “If you could just turn down . . .”
Christopher Jordan smiled the smile of a boy—a man—who probably knew the words to say to get a girl to undress. “Sure thing.” He reached over to his desk and adjusted the volume on his laptop, pillow still balanced precariously on his lap. “Better?”
I couldn’t speak; I nodded instead.
“Would you mind shutting the door behind you?”
I shut the door behind me. Before I had even taken a few steps away, I could hear that he was at it again. As I continued on, I fixed my gaze on the emergency exit door at the end of the hallway, afraid of what else I might see.
Raj met me outside the building. “All good?” he asked.
I nodded. I feared that if I opened my mouth, I might’ve admitted that I had irrevocably fucked up within my first week at Vandenberg, proving to myself and everyone else that I didn’t belong there. Either that, or I’d puke.
_ _ _
Dorm rounds was just one of the daily duties I began in that first week. (That first week—how long ago it seems!) Other duties included supervising study period, monitoring the dining hall, helping to coach the varsity lacrosse team, and acting as the Honors History assistant teacher for first years—first years, that’s what freshmen were called, like it was Hogwarts.
Study period was easy. Sometimes the first years would laugh and poke each other over their open biology textbooks, but just give them a hard stare—their balls would shrivel like leaves, and they’d shut the fuck up. At least that’s what Chapin said, though it certainly hadn’t worked on Christopher Jordan.
Dining hall duty was also mostly benign. I had to make sure no one stole an extra serving of French fries or banana pudding and that the trays were cleared before they were stacked in the dish room. Rumor had it among the apprentices that a few years ago, a couple of second years had started a food fight, splattering creamed corn and broccoli casserole—Thursday’s dinner special—on the mahogany-paneled walls and twenty-foot-high Palladian windows. I hoped that wouldn’t happen when I was on duty.
My first lacrosse practice was the day before the Christopher Jordan incident. It was tradition for the older boys to attempt to pants the newcomers to the team—the “virgins”—as they ran around the field with their sticks. A slight third year named Clarence Howell got his pants ripped down by team captain Duggar Robinson as they ran an overhead shooting drill. He wore a pair of grayish briefs, which set the other boys howling and made me feel strangely sad.
The best part of that week was chapel. On that first Sunday—as they did on the first Sunday of every new semester—the boys donned suit jackets and ties and filed into Morris Chapel, first years in the front and fourth years in the back. (We’re nondenominational, the Vandenberg pamphlets all boasted. We are a spiritual campus, not a religious one.) From the sidewall bench under the stained-glass windows, I watched as the Chosen Boy from each class—selected carefully by the faculty members each August based on leadership, scholarship, and philanthropy—strode solemnly up the center aisle towards the pulpit with a lit candle in his hand. (When I asked Kip if he’d ever been a Chosen Boy, he said they’d asked him his sophomore year and he’d turned them down. He then proceeded to cackle for a solid minute; I’m still not sure whether it was a joke.) They stood in order from youngest to the oldest, from the baby-faced schoolboy in front to the muscled mammoth trailing the pack, an ages-and-stages development chart from the boys’ edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves. Not a whisper or a vibrating cell phone was to be heard. They lined up before Dean Harvey, headmaster of Vandenberg School for Boys, with their candles flickering beneath their chins.
Dean Harvey spoke, his voice a ringing bell through the rafters. His hanging jowls jiggled like a bloodhound’s, but the blue eyes behind his glasses were clear and wise. “Do you seek to integrate intellectual excellence with moral commitment, to concern yourself with mind as well as character, to value knowledge and transcendent values above all else?”
“Oh yes, oh yes we do,” the four boys chorused back obediently.
He raised his eyes to the room and spread his arms. “And how about you, pupils of Vandenberg?”
With the groaning of benches and rustling of jacket sleeves, the boys all stood and sang, in almost perfect unison, “Oh yes, oh yes we do.”
I mouthed the words with them, feeling pride and love swell inside me, feeling as though my heart might beat out of my chest.
_ _ _
On my walk alone back to the Hovelina House—Raj slept in a single room in Perkins Hall, a fourth-years’ dormitory—I mentally rehearsed the story. Yeah, so I opened the door—just so I could ask him to turn down his music, you know—and there he was, masturbating! Like he was brushing his teeth! I thought maybe if I said the story out loud it would become funny, a joke. Maybe my stomach would untwist from its knots.
“Imogene!” I heard ReeAnn cry as soon as my key turned in the lock. She sat at the kitchen table reading a book on the lifestyle and habits of Parisian women, her pudgy pink face eager as a department store makeup consultant. “How was rounds duty?” ReeAnn Finkelstein, in the few days I had known her at that point, seemed to always want to know how things were. How was my run this morning? How had I slept last night? How would I like to try her new Maximizing High Volume Lip Plumper?
“Okay,” I said, deciding in that moment that I wasn’t going to tell the story, now or ever.
“Okay!” she parroted, nodding, grinning.
I tried to smile back. My lips stuck to my teeth. “I have work to do.”
The Hovel, a renovated old horse barn tucked behind the administrative building, had been the home of all of the Vandenberg teaching apprentices for the last dozen years. ReeAnn, Chapin, and I slept upstairs, while Babs Lawrence (a vegan and a Christian whose alopecia forced her to wear a horrible thick-banged human-hair wig) and the Woods twins (who owned a collective fifty pairs of Tory Burch shoes and weighed a collective one hundred and eighty pounds) had bedrooms downstairs. I headed up the back stairwell, and on the way to my bedroom, I passed by the open door of Chapin’s room. She lay sprawled on her paisley-print comforter, texting with her phone held above her face. Soft acoustic music crooned from the laptop at the foot of her bed. I paused in the doorframe.
“Hi, Imogene.” She didn’t look away from her phone as she said this.
Around Chapin Dunn, I was struck dumb, like a boy with a crush. She wasn’t what I would consider beautiful; her nose was long and severe, her frame bony and curveless, her dark hair styleless and often unwashed in a knot on top of her head. Her brows were overgrown, her nails little