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.
SOON AFTER THE BEGINNING OF MY BOARDING SCHOOL OBSESSION and a week before my fourteenth birthday, I heard the rumor about Stephanie and the blowjob. I had only the vaguest idea of what a blowjob was; I pictured a girl inflating a guy’s penis with her mouth and then, like the balloon man who sometimes came to my youth group meetings at the rec center when I was a kid, bending and twisting it into all sorts of shapes—a dog! A snake! A flower! What I did know was that, according to Jaylen, Stephanie had given one to Jason Stern’s older brother Keith in her basement the weekend before.
Jaylen