She knows, I thought. “He doesn’t,” I said.
Her smile persisted, infuriating in its certainty. “Just be careful, that’s all.”
I crumbled the drawing into a ball and stuffed it deep into the trash.
* * *
At dinner the next night, I was distracted by the sight of Christopher Jordan and accidentally agreed to the game night ReeAnn had proposed for later on. It was a late dinner for us, nearly nine, having spent the greater part of the afternoon making lesson plans and grading papers together. We did these no-nonsense tasks together—working, grading, eating—not because we had to, but because it felt safer to stick together sometimes, us against them, apprentices against students. Even Chapin joined us for every meal without fail. We always sat at a table in the back of the dining hall, which usually afforded us privacy, but tonight Christopher Jordan the Monkey Beater and his friends had settled with their trays at the next table over—straight from sports practice, judging from the way their hair was plastered to their foreheads in wet strands. I kept my eyes on my plate, focused on cutting my meatloaf into cube-shaped bites.
“Can we play Friends Scene It?” ReeAnn asked. “My mom just sent it to me in the mail.”
Raj nodded. “I’m in.”
The Woods twins were tossing their lettuce leaves and trying to distract us from the fact that they weren’t eating. “We’re so good at that game,” said Meggy.
Maggie bobbled her too-big head on her skinny neck. “Yeah, we practically grew up watching that show.”
Babs sniffed. “My parents didn’t let me watch television.”
Chapin was busy building a tower out of her mashed potatoes and didn’t respond.
Christopher Jordan looked up as he chewed his meatloaf and caught my eye. He gave me a closed-mouth grin, his cheeks bulging, and waggled his fingers.
Chapin followed my gaze. “Is that your lover?” she hissed.
The other girls and Raj swiveled in their seats to look.
A rush of sweat flooded my armpits. “I have to go,” I decided, and I stood.
“Where are you going?” asked ReeAnn.
“I have to—”
“Call your mom again?” Babs smirked. I would never be friends with these people, I thought, not really.
“Check my mail,” I lied.
“Sure.”
“Will you be back for game night?” ReeAnn pressed.
“Yeah.” I grabbed my tray and headed towards the doors.
I knew already where I was going, had been secretly planning it all day, but I’ll never admit it.
FOUR
In high school, I decided I would go to Columbia University, and it was not just because Jared Hoffman, my high school crush, once expressed an interest in applying. To me, it was the best school, just as 115 pounds was the ideal weight (I’d read it in a book once—the main character, a “beautiful, waif-like girl” as the narrator described her, was 115 pounds) and seventeen years old was the most popular age to lose your virginity (I’d read this on a let’s-talk-about-sex forum I’d stumbled upon online, though I wouldn’t lose my own until several years after that age). Why Columbia, I’m not sure, but I cemented its name in my mind as the best school, the perfect school.
I didn’t imagine a transformation would take place. I didn’t imagine any sort of fairy-tale reinvention or the kind of incontestable change people from high school would see in pictures on social media and talk about with wonder—“Have you seen Imogene lately? My god!” Or, at least, I never could have articulated having these desires.
But I did imagine that, by going to what I imagined to be the best school, I’d become better. That confidence could be siphoned from imposing buildings and golden-haired legacies. That an acceptance could grant a new identity, that of a girl with skin that didn’t need to be covered and a body that didn’t induce shame, whom no one knew came from a blue-collar family and had never kissed a guy. A girl who wanted to be noticed.
* * *
In one of those rare moments in life that work out as they should, Adam Kipling and his friends had returned. Skeat was trying his luck this time, and he took two wobbly, lunging steps before he pitched off the side onto the ground. I resisted the urge to spring out from my hiding spot behind Perkins to help him, but his friends were laughing.
“You fat fuck,” Park cackled.
Skeat pushed himself off the ground with a groan. “Let’s see you do it then, you skinny motherfucker.”
Adam Kipling watched with his hands stuck in his pockets, amused.
He seemed like the embodiment of a buoyant male presence I lacked in my life, the sort of jokey, arrogant, entitled boy who everyone loves and hates in equal amounts. The kind of boy who, I imagined, would make even a trip to the grocery store into some grand adventure, would make every moment lighter and funnier, would make you feel lighter and funnier yourself. Squatting there in the grass by Perkins, watching Adam Kipling sling insults and take jabs, I couldn’t help but smile; I felt part of the joke, even if he didn’t know it.
Later on I’d confess my stakeout to Kip, and he would laugh, telling me what I did was weird, fucked up. I should have been relieved that Kip thought it more funny than freaky, but still his reaction disappointed me, as though what I’d done was voyeuristic rather than merely curious, somehow more wrong than I meant it to be.
Park pulled a cigarette out of his pocket. “Whatever, jerkoff.”
Without prelude, Adam began to chant. “Tug it, tease it, slug it, squeeze it—”
His friends chanted their response in unison. “Jerk, jerk, jerk it off!”
“Stroke it, pat it, beat it, bat it—”
“Jerk, jerk, jerk it off!”
The boys did not laugh afterwards or even acknowledge the interlude; they continued as though the moment had not been broken, the chant apparently as routine to them as their insults. Adam leaned back against a tree. Skeat bent to brush the dirt off his knees. I felt witness to a secret handshake or a complicated door knock, something you might miss if you blinked, and even if you did catch it, would never be able to recreate yourself. It was immature, and I felt hearing it should have made me feel disappointed in Adam, in all the boys of Vandenberg, but I didn’t. Like when I caught notes passed in class and overheard the lewd whispers in chapel, it tickled me somehow that the boys of Vandenberg weren’t nearly as prim and straight as they appeared in the pamphlets. I was witness to this secret side of the student body, this darker side, and it was as exciting as the celebrity tabloid magazines I leafed through at the grocery store—actors scooping dog shit from the sidewalk, starlets with cellulite.
Park brought his still-unlit cigarette to his lips. As he went to light it, his eyes caught mine, and he jumped.
“Whoops!” I stood, brushing off my knees. “Oh. I’m sorry. I—” My hands shook. I felt culpable, though I wasn’t quite sure of what. They stared at me, as though waiting for me to perform, and I turned to walk away.
“Hey, hold up.” I knew it was Adam Kipling who spoke. It felt strange knowing his voice when he didn’t even know my name; perhaps that’s what I felt guilty of, of knowing too much. I heard him jog up behind me.
I faced him and found myself at eye-level with his lips. “I’m sorry,” I said again.
“Why are you sorry?”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Have you ever done parkour?”
“Done what?”
“Parkour. You try to get from point A to point B in the most efficient way possible, using only your body and your surroundings for momentum.” Gone was the belching boy I’d seen last night and even the singer of the jerk-off song from moments before; he stood before me poised and sure, a parents’ dream.
“Dude, how is this parkour then?” interjected Skeat. “Like, how in the fuck is crossing a rope the most efficient way to get between two trees? Couldn’t you just, I don’t know, walk?”
“Shut up, Skeat. My brother’s in the parkour club a
t Yale, and they do this all the time.” Adam Kipling turned to face me again. “Want to try?”
“What?”
“Try it. Going across the rope.”
“I’ll fall!”
“No, you won’t.”
We stared at each other. I was making a decision greater than deciding to cross the rope, and we both knew it. To join them would be to shrug off my authority, to close the gap between rank and age and sex. To fail as a Vandenberg School for Boys Teaching Apprentice. But in crossing the rope, I would be one of them, however briefly. I hesitated a moment. Then I held out my hand.
He took it with surprising force. My heart seized. I couldn’t remember the last time someone held my hand. He led me to the rope. “Climb on.” I did. He steadied me as I shimmied up the tree trunk, and then he took my right hand in both of his. “Ready? I’m going to lead you across.”
Together, we edged from one tree to the other. He gripped my hand tightly, offering words of encouragement along the way. “You’re doing just fine. You’ve got this.” His hands were warm and soft and damp with sweat. Strangely, I didn’t fear for a moment he would let me go, that he would fail me. I didn’t even hear Skeat or Park; for all I knew they had left, and it was just the two of us. I just kept my eyes on the toes of my sneakers, putting one foot in front of the other, hovering precariously above the ground below. The rope was slack, not rigidly taut as a tightrope would be, and it stretched and swayed beneath me like a long narrow waterbed. I closed my eyes. I was walking on water—no, on air.
“Stop. Hey, stop.”
My eyes popped open. I had nearly walked into the opposite tree. I looked down at him. “You did it!” he said. He grinned wildly.
Using my free hand, I held on to the tree and stepped back onto the ground. It wasn’t the dizzying relief I usually felt descending from heights; I felt powerful. I laughed, perplexed and unsteady from the ridiculousness of the moment, and we stared at each other, wondering what was supposed to happen next.
He made the first move. “Adam Kipling,” he said, offering his hand. “But just call me Kip.”
I took his hand, resisting the impulse to say, I know. “Imogene Abney.”
“Now, Imogene,” he started, mock serious. Park and Skeat snickered behind him. I wished my name were something other than Imogene, and that my fleece zip-up didn’t have dried ketchup on the front pocket. “I can’t help but inquire as to how a female wound up on the campus of an all-male institution at this hour on a school night. Are you on the run, or are we safe?”
I could have lied. Maybe, that night, I could’ve been anyone I wanted to be. Maybe I’d never have to see him again—but I wanted to. The words spilled out before I could stop them.
“I live here, actually. I’m, well, kind of a teacher here, actually.”
Kip’s mouth opened slightly before he regained his composure. I’d caught him, the unflappable Adam Kipling, off guard.
“In that case, then,” he said, recovered, “may I walk you to your sleeping quarters?”
* * *
Even while earning mediocre test scores (I’d be too distracted by the loud wobbling of my desk when I used my eraser and the fear that I was bothering my neighbors and the certainty that everyone was looking at me, all while the clock ticked away) and failing to participate in extracurricular activities (I had no interest in Spanish Club or Environmental Club, much less making new friends), I held onto Columbia University like a secret, a candy hidden under my tongue. I was smart—I got all A’s—and I would be the first Abney to go to college; I wanted to believe that the right person would see that. When I presented my list of potential colleges to my guidance counselor, she said, “Ambitious.” It didn’t matter that we both knew what she meant was impossible; my desire was strong enough to circumvent reality.
For my college admissions essay, I wrote about my pubescent boarding school dreams. I spoke of my longing for the best resources, the best faculty, the best education. And when my rejection letter from Columbia arrived, I cried—I didn’t realize, until that moment, that I’d truly believed that I would be accepted.
Buffalo State covered three-quarters of my tuition, and so that is where I went. I wondered if they knew—as Columbia had more than likely known—that my dream of attending boarding school was never about the education.
* * *
As Kip and I walked through the dark, I thought of a dozen questions I could ask him—Where are you from? How do you like it here? Even, lamely, Aren’t you afraid of getting in trouble staying out so late?
Any banal question I could ask Kip would be a joke, a comically deliberate attempt to skirt around the issue at hand. It would be to compliment another woman’s dress at a funeral. Kip was a student, and I was a teacher. How was I supposed to address him—like a kid in my charge, or like a guy who was only really a few years younger than me? I knew I didn’t want to make polite conversation; I wanted to impress him. Right now, it didn’t matter where either of us was from.
I was glad it was dark. I always felt more comfortable in the dark.
Kip spoke first. “So. The Hovel, huh?”
I glanced at him to gauge his expression. I decided it was one of amusement. “What’s wrong with the Hovel?”
He shrugged. “It’s nice, I guess. If you don’t mind the smell of horse.”
He wasn’t my student, I decided. It would feel foolish to talk to him like he was. “Hey, it doesn’t smell like shit!”
“I didn’t say horse shit. I just said horse.”
I paused, considering. “How would you know, anyway?”
“Oh, believe me. I know.”
“You’re lying.”
“Wanna bet?”
We were passing Silver Lake now. Kip stopped, so I stopped, too. I was torn between the desire to keep moving towards the Hovel and the need to look as cool and unperturbed as Kip seemed. He cleared his throat and bent his face down towards mine, eyes wide and serious. I pressed my lips together and tried to remember the last time I brushed my teeth.
“Two years ago, I was a second year…”
So he’s a fourth year, I thought.
“… and there was this teaching apprentice—I forget her name—who loved to party. All the other apprentices were apparently really boring, so she started having these little social gatherings for a select few guys, including yours truly.”
“Naturally.” His candor was infectious, but I still felt uneasy. No allowing the students into your personal residence.
“Naturally. So we would go over on Friday nights to the Hovel after the other apprentice girls had gone to sleep, and we’d drink a little, smoke a little…”
“Oh, c’mon.” I imagined a younger Kip stretched out on the bed of an ethereal blonde creature, all lips and lashes and long skinny limbs. The sort of girl who would leave lipstick stains on the joint she passed from her puffy lips to Kip’s, a girl who would wear colorful lacy bras instead of practical beige ones like mine.
He spread his arms out in protest. “What, you don’t believe me?”
It must have been quiet hours by then; the campus around us was eerily still, and Kip’s voice echoed across the lake. Without thinking, I shushed him.
“Did you just shush me?”
“Sorry.”
“You say sorry a lot.” Kip looped his arm through mine and tugged me along. My looped arm tensed from my shoulder through my fingertips, but if he could feel my tension, he didn’t acknowledge it. “Point of the story being, I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the Hovel, and it smells like horse.”
“It does not.” The more I tried to relax, the more rigid my body became. He squeezed my arm tighter in his; it was becoming apparent to me that he sensed my discomfort, and that he enjoyed causing it.
“It does, too.”
I could see the Hovel up ahead. I cast a sidelong glance at Kip again. His lips curled faintly, his chin in the air. Something needed to be said.
“Hey, Adam—”
>
He furrowed his brow. “Kip. Just Kip.”
“Kip—”
We reached the back door. He released my arm and gave a theatrical bow. “Your sleeping quarters, my ladyship.”
I didn’t want to like him; I wanted to resent his affected gallantry, his swaggering sureness. He was a caricature of a prep school boy, a cocktail of charm and condescension. The walk back to the Hovel had felt divorced from time and suspended in space; I’d felt drunk, though under the influence of nothing but the strangeness of the night’s events. But standing on my doorstep, exposed in the light from the kitchen, I was sober, liable. I was relieved when he immediately turned to go.
“’Night, Teacher.” He waved his arm over his head as though heading out on a yearlong voyage at sea and started to walk back into the dark.
I hesitated, then called out to his retreating form. “I shouldn’t have let you walk me home.”
Kip turned, studied me. “Why’s that?”
“Students aren’t allowed here.”
He looked up at the sky, seeming to contemplate his answer, but then he just shrugged. “If you say so,” he said.
I stood by the back door, watching him walk away, until he disappeared.
* * *
Raj, ReeAnn, Babs, and the Woods twins were playing Friends Scene It when I returned. They turned to look at me.
“Imogene!” ReeAnn beckoned me into the room. “We’re just getting started.”
“Give me a minute,” I said, and I climbed up the stairs two at a time with no intention of coming back down.
I checked my email first. I had a message from Dale. Awesome lesson today, he said. You’re really doing great work. He signed his name with a smiley emoticon.
Then I pulled up the Vandenberg School roster.
I wanted to look up his profile page, but that felt like an invasion. He wasn’t Raj, a coworker, an equal; he was a student. Those pictures and messages posted on his page were not for me to see. So I stuck to the roster. I studied his wrinkled jacket, his open laughing mouth. I wished the roster gave more information than just his name.
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