Privilege

by Mary Adkins

  “Annie?” he said. “I’m Henry. I recognize you from the orchestra. You’re the bassoonist, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said, not recognizing him. “You’re in orchestra?” I tried to place his face.

  “This is my first semester here. I hope to join you guys in the spring.”

  Henry, I learned, was a third-year who had transferred from Georgetown to Carter. He was a bassist.

  So many transfers, I thought. Who knew so many people just picked up halfway through college and tried an entirely new school?

  But then he said he’d wanted to be closer to his family owing to personal issues on which he didn’t elaborate.

  “I heard you in there. Switching from reed to string?”

  “That’s embarrassing,” I said. “I’m bad.”

  “Can I see your hand?” he asked. I lifted my palm, faceup.

  There, on the top of my left index finger, was a bulbous round blister, a perfect purple sphere.

  “You’re doing too much too quickly,” he said, running his thumb along the pads of my fingers in a studious, clinical way. My stomach jolted in a good way. His fingers were long and bony, like him—stealing a look at his body, I noticed that his shoulders fell at sharp angles, and he had that tall, skinny guy slump. “You need to take a day off here and there, especially if you’re going to play for so many hours.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “Can I come in?”

  “Sure,” I said, as he followed me into the practice room.

  “Show me how you’re holding it,” he said. I sat and positioned myself around Abigail’s cello.

  “May I?” He bent over and adjusted the height of the pin sticking out of the base of the cello. He stood. “Much better. The end pin was too extended for you. That will lead to tension, which will affect your playing. And your back!”

  I could instantly tell a difference in my posture. “Thank you,” I said.

  “Playing music isn’t supposed to be work,” he said. “It’s supposed to be fun. That’s why we call it playing.”

  I groaned. He did, too, and took my right hand.

  “Loosen,” he said, and carefully—it wasn’t threatening, somehow—he laced his fingers through mine. He gently jostled them until they went limp, then dropped my hand onto the top of the bow. “Loose around the bow. No one wants to see any pinkies sticking up in the air.”

  He stood back. “Last thing,” he said. “When you play the bassoon, you look sure of yourself.” So he’d not only seen me, he’d watched me. I wasn’t sure whether to be creeped out or flattered. “When you play the cello, you look like a little girl who doesn’t know what she’s doing.”

  “Because I don’t,” I said.

  “Pretend. Act like you’re first cellist in the New York Philharmonic.”

  I laughed. He didn’t. He waited.

  I inched to the front of my chair, sat up straight, and fudged my way through the bars I’d spent the previous two hours learning. It was a performance rife with mistakes, but when I finished, he burst into applause.

  “So much better!” he exclaimed. “You faked it till you maked it!” He winked to let me know he’d made the error on purpose. “I’ll keep teaching you on one condition.” He stood, and my stomach flipped. “You teach me bassoon,” he said.

  “Deal,” I said, relieved.

  HENRY AND I began to meet daily. First we’d focus on my cello playing and next on his bassoon playing.

  “What’s your Myers-Briggs?” I asked the third afternoon of our lessons.

  “INFP,” he said. “You?”

  “INFJ,” I said. So we were both introverts. That made sense. I found it strange that he had no real friends yet, though I guess he could probably say the same about me. Anyway, he’d only been at Carter a couple of months and spent a fair amount of time at his parents’ home forty-five minutes away.

  I wasn’t sure if transfers ever joined fraternities or sororities, but regardless he had no interest in Greek life, which he didn’t explain derisively, just matter-of-factly. He was opinionated without coming across as dogmatic, open-minded without giving the air of a pushover, confident without seeming arrogant. I kept waiting for him to disappoint me, and he kept not.

  He also really liked me. That much he made clear—texting in the morning to ask how I’d slept and at the end of the day to say that he hoped work or rehearsal or studying had gone well. While I was definitely attracted to him and excited by how intrigued I was by him, I couldn’t shake my suspicion that he didn’t know what had happened to me. That he’d somehow missed it by being away from campus so much. If that was the case, it felt sort of as if he didn’t know me at all.

  I had not thought of myself as being defined by my rape, even after coming out about it publicly. But meeting and getting to know Henry brought into relief how much I now understood myself in terms of it. As Thanksgiving break approached, I began to feel as if I was lying to him, pretending to be someone I wasn’t.

  When I learned that the person who wrote TYLER BRAND = RAPIST!! on the Bridge was a landscaper whose photo I recognized as a friend of my bookstore friend, my rage, which had dissipated somewhat with the distraction of getting to know Henry, returned in full. Nicole had already told me that her cousin had been hooking up with Tyler and seemed sad, and she wasn’t sure what exactly had happened between them.

  Now it was clear. The only explanation for it was that Tyler had raped Nicole’s cousin, too. Her friend, in trying to expose him, had lost his job.

  “Could she bring a claim against him on campus as a nonstudent?” I asked Matty after I learned the news. “Or just go to the Cartersboro police?”

  “Not sure,” he said in his tone that meant he knew the answer but was preoccupied with something else.

  The whole story left me outraged and reliving my own experience in the weeks afterward but unable to discuss it with Henry.

  The night before Thanksgiving break, we walked back from orchestra rehearsal together—he’d begun rehearsing with us for the spring—and when we reached my room, he stepped just inside the doorway.

  “I got you this to read over the holiday,” he said, pulling out of his bag a hardcover book in a shiny sleeve: Mozart: The Music, the Man, the Myths. “I don’t know if you like biographies, but I thought this one was good.”

  I took it. “Thanks,” I said. “That was really sweet.”

  “Can I kiss you?” he asked, not timidly. We kissed for a minute, his hands on my arms, then my waist, squeezing. It unearthed an acute desire in me to invite him in, but the fear that I was somehow misleading him stopped me. Would it scare him off? Would he find me frightening? Or might he inexplicably find himself less attracted to me, my appeal abruptly receding in light of my status as a damaged person?

  I pulled away.

  “Have a great break,” I said. “I hope you enjoy the time with your mom.”

  “Thanks,” he said, then added, “I’m already looking forward to seeing you when you get back.”

  I couldn’t let it end with that, not on that line.

  “I think over break, you should look me up,” I said. “In the Chronicle online. There’s some stuff that happened earlier this fall that I think you should know about.”

  I could tell by his expression that I’d been right. He had no idea.

  23

  Bea

  FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 17

  “It didn’t feel gritty. It felt like everyone was talking, but no one was saying anything.”

  Bea was back in Dr. Friedman’s suite, meeting with him during the hour before class.

  “It’s complex, in other words?” he said, munching on a baby carrot.

  “Not just that,” she said. She’d decided she needed to talk to Dr. Friedman about her concerns. She’d found herself unable to write her paper reflecting on her “takeaways” from Tyler’s case. Everything she wrote she deleted because it sounded false on one hand or insubordinate on the other. “I mean . .
. did you hear about this man in Connecticut, that he abducted and killed this little girl?”

  Dr. Friedman shook his head

  “He didn’t get life, so he’ll be out at some point. And then my roommate was mugged by this kid who is serving time now for groping a student. He’s poor and black and will be on the sex offender registry for up to thirty years. That was just for groping. And meanwhile, like, with Tyler, I guess what I’m wondering now is . . . what if he did rape her?”

  “What if ?” Dr. Friedman asked.

  “It makes me wonder how what we’re doing is good.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because he’s here still. Around. Free to do it to someone else. Whoever that guy painted the Bridge for—I mean, was that person raped because of people like me?” She couldn’t say “us.”

  He pulled a small pouch of almonds from his pocket, tore it open, and offered her one. She shook her head. He tossed a few into his mouth.

  “Ever heard of carb cycling?” he said, chewing.

  “No,” she said. She was beginning to think he was obsessed with weight loss.

  “You’ve heard of cutting out carbs to lose weight, though, right?”

  She nodded.

  “And that works for people, right? Cutting carbs. Why?”

  “Because carbs are calories.”

  “Exactly. Carb cycling just means going back and forth. Eating carbs one day, not eating them the next. Would you believe it if I told you that it’s more efficient for weight loss than cutting carbs completely? How can that be?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe the body’s metabolism is kicked off by having carbs sometimes,” she said. “And then burns more fat? I don’t know.”

  “See! There you go, you don’t need me.” He finished the bag of almonds.

  “But wait,” she said when she realized he thought he’d sufficiently answered her question. “You’re saying it’s better that some guilty people go free?”

  He ignored her question.

  “Carb cycling isn’t only good for weight loss. It’s been shown to have far-reaching health benefits, from insulin regulation to improvements for chronic headache sufferers. Gut problems. Stress. Particularly for women.” He dipped his head toward her as he said “women.”

  “It makes no sense, and yet it does. Because the body is a complex system of checks and balances and feedback loops, of which carbs are one small part. Caloric intake may seem counterproductive in the short term, but in the long term it isn’t. You can’t assess an entire picture by looking at one small piece of it.

  “Similarly, we know that providing representation increases fairness across the system. That’s proven. So you have some guilty players. Does that mean you’re going to fault the entire enterprise? Consider stock market growth if you prefer that analogy. Sometimes the market falls. But overall, over time, it rises.”

  “Yeah. . . .”

  “And those who understand this, what’s the last thing they do when the market is low?”

  “Take their money out?”

  “Bingo.”

  Bea wasn’t as reassured as she wished she were by his analogies. She saw the parallels he was making clearly enough. But still, they felt off somehow, missing the heart of the thing that was nagging at her.

  “It just doesn’t feel like two ideas,” she said. “It feels like two hundred.”

  And then he did it, he pulled his Dr. Friedman magic.

  Unfazed, he said, “I think when you get the chance to work off a college campus you’re going to find more clarity of heart. You’ll come up against some nasty stuff, some real heavyweights on the other side—prosecutors more callous than seems possible, judges who don’t bother trying to see the humanity in your client. I think things will be clearer to you, ironically. You’ll know what you stand for. Does that make sense?”

  It made a ton of sense.

  “Like that kid, the one who you said is serving time for groping someone. How would you feel representing him? Even if he did do it, I mean.”

  She didn’t have to think about it. “I’d have no qualms.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s a kid. Because I don’t think jail is what he needs. And because I think . . .”

  “There you go,” he interrupted. “That’s what I mean. It’s different out there. It’ll feel different.”

  AS BEA MADE her way back home to shower and change for her show that night—their last before regionals—her optimism about the Justice program began to seep back in, her spirit awakening again. Perhaps he was right—she just needed to be off campus. Here, nothing felt real. People were living a pretend life and talking about it as if anything was consequential. “Academic probation” was a penalty, as if that meant anything. A panel to discuss sexual assault, as if anything would come out of that. Student government resolutions—what were those even? Did they carry any force?

  She scrolled through her email on her phone, deleting the unimportant ones that had come in since she’d last checked—an invitation to a first-year holiday party in the dining hall, a student affairs reminder that some campus offices, including student health, would be closed over Thanksgiving, and one from her adviser, Dr. Toast, asking her to schedule her meeting with him. She didn’t have time right now for Dr. Toast. Besides, she was skeptical that the socially awkward man named after bread had anything to offer her by way of actual advising. Delete.

  She boarded the bus, her mind returning to her conversation with Dr. Friedman. Once she was working, come June, she’d encounter real stakes. Real people facing real problems, not Carter bubble problems.

  Her phone shook: a blocked number.

  Could it be Lester Bertrand?

  But no, it was Barry, calling from his office.

  “Had a thought,” he said, launching instantly into the reason for his call. “It was Audrey’s idea. Hope you’re not offended. Before you take that summer fellowship with the crim law guy, we thought you just might want to talk with Dan Johnson’s son Taylor at Paul Weiss. They do a loooot of pro bono. You might be into it.”

  “Thanks, Barry,” she said. “But it’s too late. I already got the fellowship.”

  Was it even a lie at this point?

  “Aw, then, congratulations, kiddo!” he said. “Hope it’s all you want it to be.”

  “AN EMOTION COUPLED with a mode of transportation that makes you feel that way.”

  Chris stood at the front of the stage at the top of the Turtles’ last show before Thanksgiving, which Bea would spend on campus. It was in the South Campus black box theater and was standing room only. People were gathered at both entrances, holding their coats in front of them, shifting their weight, willing to forgo a seat to watch the team perform.

  Bea listened as students yelled out various combinations of feelings and vehicles.

  Sad plane! Jealous sports car! Angry subway!

  “Anxious bicycle!” Chris announced, jogging back into line.

  Here was the thing about Justice: its beauty was all theoretical for Bea. The stories Dr. Friedman told that left her hungry for more, eager to experience the daily grind and noble sacrifice for herself—these were what fed her devotion to it. Apart from her brief experience working with Tyler Brand and the bittersweet taste that had left behind, her participation was all yet to occur, future-bound. Justice offered her a vision of her one-day self. By summer, she hoped and expected, but future still. Justice Bea was inchoate. In the blueprint stage. Bea in the making.

  Improv Bea was the Bea of the here and now. In improv, there was only this moment, this breath, this sentence uttered; it was visceral and instant and bolted to the present. Improv began with a step forward and ended with a step back, existing exclusively in between. It was an invitation to react and react and react again and walk away, leaving all of her reactions behind. She didn’t have to carry anything forward with her.

  Even delivering the monologue had become an experience Bea happily threw herself into. Since tha
t first night she’d stepped out to offer one, she’d done so again a handful of times and found that she relished the warm spotlight illuminating her, the sea of curious eyes cast upward.

  Bea stepped forward and gazed out into the dark rows of faces.

  “First of all, we call them ‘bikes’ now, not ‘bicycles,’” she said. A titter rippled through the audience. “Bicycles make me think of training wheels, unicycles, and those giant-wheeled bikes white men used to ride while wearing bow ties.”

  “Penny farthings!” a voice yelled from behind her. Bart.

  “Sure,” she said. “Those.”

  “And anxious makes me think of the disparate application of justice.”

  Some chuckles preceded a cry of “Nerd!”

  “Yeah, I’m a nerd. I know.” She continued, “Because if you grope someone in the woods around here and you’re not a student, you get sentenced to three years and the university decides to install a hundred new blue phones all over the place. But if you, you know, do something similar or worse . . . ‘sexual misconduct’ or whatever they call it . . . and you are a student, you get an extra thousand points in dining dollars and a parade thrown in your honor.”

  The laughs were loud and affirming, and the show began.

  A spin class of unicycles prided itself on this unique feature until the members were informed that all spin classes are, technically, unicycle classes, being that the stationary bikes contain one wheel.

  A criminal case hinged on whether someone was a belligerent beggar or a mild-mannered mugger.

  The sex offender registry won best float in a float competition.

  As they packed up to go, Chris approached Bea.

  “Hey,” he said. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

  “Oh, sure,” Bea said, worried he was going to say something about the two of them. Since the night she’d gotten drunk at his place, she’d declined his invites to hang out again. The truth was that she’d developed a crush on Russell, the Brit.

  But he didn’t want to talk about their relationship.