legs, eating a second cookie after dinner, the splotchy brown birthmark on my hipbone that Kip would nickname the Cheetah Spot—Chapin was unapologetic. Plus, her dad was some hedge fund honcho; being moneyed made everything she did permissible.
“Did you have a nice day, Imogene.” This came out in a yawn, less a question than an obligation.
“Yeah, it was fine.”
“Glad to hear it.” A beat of silence followed. She finally turned to face me, one thick brow raised in an anything-else-I-can-do-for-you manner.
I hesitated, then took a step into her bedroom. “I have a question.”
She reached down with her big toe, its nail painted an electric green, and changed the song on her computer. She sat up and turned to me curiously.
“Have you ever seen or heard anything . . . inappropriate, you know, being around all these boys?”
Chapin smiled, a secret smile that wasn’t for me, but rather for some unseen audience. I felt sure she was looking at the spot between my eyebrows, the spot where that morning there’d been the telltale tender bump of an impending pimple, a bump that I’d picked and poked and then coated with my little pot of beige cover up. “Imogene,” she said. “We’re twenty-two-year-old women surrounded by a bunch of fourteen-to eighteen-year-old boys. Inappropriate things are bound to happen.”
I choked up a laugh.
“You haven’t spent much time around guys.”
She wasn’t asking; Chapin knew. I shrugged, then nodded because she was right. I didn’t have any brothers, and all of my male cousins lived in Wisconsin and were already in their thirties. My dad wasn’t exactly the paradigm of young masculinity; he wore fleece house slippers and spent his mornings watching birds through a pair of binoculars on the back deck. Even in high school I never had any guy friends. Having realized I was awkward at a young age, I had retreated early on to the chorus room to be among the girls who were similarly challenged in determining what to do with their hands or faces when boys were around. In college I may have begun to kiss them and touch them (always sedated with liquor, always feeling like a made-for-TV-movie actress, always pretending their hairy chests and hard buttocks and probing appendages were part of an exhibit in a strange science museum), but they were just bodies; there was nothing, I’d come to realize, as impersonal as a body.
And yet, the only way I could handle touching someone else’s body was to pretend I wasn’t in my own.
I could see the next question forming on her lips, the question that had been asked by my parents, by my younger sister Joni, by my academic advisor at Buffalo State, by my friends, by my nosy neighbor Mrs. Harrington, by myself as I flipped through the Vandenberg catalogs and stared out my window and watched the neighborhood boys curse and shove one another and scramble after a soccer ball in the street—Why this? Why Vandenberg? Why now?
It’s a great opportunity, I would tell them.
The truth: I didn’t want to teach girls. I’d visited a few coed independent schools in Westchester and Connecticut during my application process, sitting dully in the back of the classrooms like a potted plant, and I’d watched. I stared as the female students tucked golden hair behind ears adorned with diamond studs and crossed bony ankles beneath their desks. They sat poised and pouting like grown women, though some hadn’t even developed breasts yet. Sometimes I caught the eyes of the girls in the mirrors of their compacts or the reflections of their cell phone screens—always primping, always keeping tabs on each other, on themselves—and I could tell without even speaking to them what they thought of me: Poor. Timid. Plain. I feared them, those privileged girls. I hated what I saw in their gaze, hated how small they made me feel.
But the male students on these visits: They never made me feel small. When I checked into the main office at one school, the secretary asked her student intern if he would mind leading me to the classroom, and he stood and smiled at me and said, “This beautiful woman? Not in the least bit,” and suddenly I was transported to an alternate universe, one in which I was back in high school but cool, coveted. I liked the ease in the boys’ bodies as they sauntered through the halls and settled loosely in their chairs. And I liked that when they looked at me, they didn’t see unfashionable shoes or flat hair but instead a person, a woman—maybe even an attractive one.
_ _ _
Vandenberg School for Boys, founded in Scarsdale, New York, in 1913, was steeped in honor, tradition, and many, many rules. Vandenberg boys were expected to dress in navy blue or gray dress slacks, white or powder blue dress shirts with a tie, solid black footwear, and the uniform school sweater or school blazer. Vandenberg boys were expected to be clean-shaven and neatly groomed, with nails cut in neat half moons and hair in no danger of festering into that reprehensible mop-like surfer style. For all intents and purposes, Vandenberg boys appeared as deferential as geishas, each one striding purposefully about campus with a thirst for knowledge and a golden halo hovering above his perfectly coiffed head.
And in that first week of school, I believed it. To me, each boy seemed more capable and charismatic than the last—future heads of State, surgeon generals, chief executive officers. The boys shimmered like imposing bronze statues, laughed and posed and grinned like models on the cover of a brochure. They held doors for one another, said “thank you” to the cafeteria ladies, and engaged their professors in stimulating (yet respectful) debates. Sure, there were vestiges of indiscretion—cigarette butts stubbed out behind the gymnasium, empty beer cans crushed on the running trail, giant phalluses carved into picnic tables and scrawled on the desks in the back of the classrooms—but as far as I could discern, Vandenberg boys were an exceptional breed.
“Above all, you must remember that these boys are little shits,” Janice McNally-Barnes informed us on our first day of orientation. She was the head of the apprenticeship program, making her our supervisor for the next year. “They may act civilized, sweet even, but don’t trust them. Let your guard down, and these kids will eat you alive.”
We sat in a semicircle around her in the library conference room, Meggy Woods on my left, her skinny legs crossed over themselves twice, and ReeAnn on my right, working an enormous wad of gum between her molars. Both stiffened in their chairs with this final statement. Chapin, sitting across from me, checked her watch.
Ms. McNally-Barnes was a squat, indelicate woman with a bulbous nose and even bigger mouth. She lived in White Plains with her partner where they bred dairy goats. She’d worked at Vandenberg for seventeen years now and, according to her, she would take raising a goat over one of these boys any day. I’d already known, when she called in May to accept me to the program, that she was not someone to cross.
“This program is not for everyone,” she’d said, “and I need to be assured that you won’t disappoint us, Imogene.” Weighty pause. “Are you going to disappoint us?”
“I won’t disappoint you.” I felt I was signing myself over to her in blood.
Begun in 1987, the Teacher Apprenticeship Program at Vandenberg School for Boys was a model for independent schools. The one-year program was for recent college graduates who wanted to develop the skills needed to be boarding-school teachers, combining training with residential life experience. Apprentices worked closely with seasoned mentor-teachers and Ms. McNally-Barnes to prepare and teach lessons as well as to support and manage their students’ academic, emotional, and social well-being, supplementing the experience by coaching, running an after-school club, or tutoring. After the year was up, the expectation for apprentices was to pursue a master’s degree in teaching and to become head teachers in classrooms of their own. Apprentices were also expected to serve as role models for the Vandenberg community, a fact that seemed strange to me since, with the exception of Raj, we were all girls—which was reflective of the nature of the teaching profession. Raj was only the third male in the history of the program. He saw this as a point of pride rather than considering, as I did, the reason why there were so few.
Ms. McNally-Barnes handed out a thick packet entitled VANDENBERG SCHOOL FOR BOYS: THE TEACHER APPRENTICE GUIDE. Apprentices, they called us, like we