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CORINNE SULLIVAN received her MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College in 2016. Her stories have appeared in Night Train, Knee-Jerk, and Pithead Chapel, among other publications. Indecent is her first novel.
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First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2018
Copyright © Corinne Sullivan 2018
Corinne Sullivan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © March 2018 ISBN: 9780008244798
For Mickey
Contents
THERE HAD BEEN NO MAJOR INCIDENTS—AT LEAST, NOTHING OF the sort I imagined could happen my first week at Vandenberg School for Boys (no salmonella outbreak, no still-lit cigarette imprudently disposed in a wastebasket, no menacingly quiet freshman with a handgun). Then I caught Christopher Jordan with his hand down his pants. I didn’t mean to see it. I certainly didn’t want to see it. But I saw it nevertheless: the flaxen-haired second year from Roanoke, prostrate and panting on his twin bed.
Beating the monkey—that’s what the Vandenberg boys called it. The first time I’d heard that term used there—“Dude, I beat the monkey every night to those tit pics Cassie sent me,” said one guy to his friend two spots before me in the chicken-fajita line—I was brought back to Camp Barbara Anne, to lying in my bottom bunk and spotting the Magic Marker sketch of a penis and testicles on the bedpost (two bulging eyes and a big long nose, I’d initially thought) and recognizing it distantly as something I’d heard about, something I should know about but would probably never fully grasp. As I’ve spent the majority of my life pretending to understand things I do not—Jackson Pollock, 401(k) plans, Buddhism, euthanasia—the sight of Christopher Jordan beating the monkey just reminded me once more how little I understood.
I’d asked Kip once if he did it a lot. He’d said, “Imogene. I’m a guy,” accompanied by a look that said duh.
The rock music screaming through the door of Christopher Jordan’s fourth-story single room in Slone House had made me stop to knock—it was quiet hours, after all. My co-apprentice Rajah Patel was supposed to accompany whatever girl was assigned to dorm rounds each night (the injustice of being the sole male apprentice, I suppose), but we’d decided instead to split up the building by floors—he one and two, I three and four—to get the job done quickly. I’d been too relieved to be on my own to worry about bending the rules. I never knew what to say to Raj; his gaze was too intense, as though he could see right through your clothes and maybe even your skin, too, and he seemed able to provide only unwelcome facts and opinions. On the first day I met him, he gestured to my face and said, “Did you know freckles are really just bunches of melanocytes that become darker when exposed to the sun?” I said, “Oh,” feeling then that every already-abhorred freckle now bulged from my face like pulsating skin pustules.
I had already been up and down the hall of the third floor, passing by half-ajar doors behind which I could see the golden heads of boys bent over desks composing essays or poring through textbooks. One guy—bless him!—fiddled with a chess board, playing against an invisible opponent. My heart swelled for each and every one of them, for the uniform shirts pressed and hanging on the back of their desk chairs for tomorrow, for