Indecent

by Corinne Sullivan

  “Imogene? You okay up there?” I heard ReeAnn call.

  This was wrong. I shouldn’t be thinking about anyone his age this way—a high school student. At the school where I taught. I wasn’t even sure what I wanted him to be. A friend? A—I was embarrassed to even say this word in my own head—lover? I felt sick at the thought. I wasn’t in high school anymore; I was too old to imagine anything would happen just because I wanted it to. I was too old for him.

  I opened up my email again, reread the message from Dale. Then, I composed a message to Ms. McNally-Barnes.

  There are some issues that have come up recently. Are you available anytime tomorrow to speak with me?

  I sent the message and closed my laptop. Then I joined the other apprentices downstairs. This was what I was supposed to be doing. These were the people who were supposed to be my friends.

  * * *

  Ms. McNally-Barnes smiled at me when I entered her office the next day. Purplish lipstick stained her front tooth, and I pretended not to notice. “Dr. Duvall told me you’re doing good work,” she said, and I smiled back at her because I loved being one of the good ones. I may never have been the best, may not have been Columbia material, but I’d always been good—the good influence, the good guest, the good student, the good daughter. I never tired of hearing about my goodness; without that reassurance, I might think I wasn’t any good at all.

  I sat across from her at her desk.

  “Everything else going well? Those little shits aren’t giving you a hard time?”

  I laughed hesitantly, a laugh that wasn’t my own, because I never knew what else to do when adults cursed in front of me. “No, no, they aren’t. My students have been great.”

  “And the other apprentices? Everything going well with them?”

  “Yeah, they’re all great.”

  She raised her eyebrow questioningly.

  I shifted in my chair. “You see, I’ve been having difficulties with a student outside of my class.”

  “What sort of difficulties?”

  “He, well … His behavior towards me has been inappropriate for a student.”

  Ms. McNally-Barnes opened a notebook on her desk and clicked open a pen. “What’s his name?”

  “Duggar Robinson. He’s a fourth year on the lacrosse team. The captain, actually.”

  She nodded and scribbled down the name. I sat on my hands to keep them from shaking. A rhyme from childhood played in my head. Tattle Tale! Go to jail! Hang your britches on a nail!

  “Imogene?”

  I looked up at Ms. McNally-Barnes, realizing I had missed a question. “Sorry?”

  “I said, what sort of inappropriate behavior has he displayed?”

  “He just … He doesn’t treat me with the respect he shows Coach Larry.” It occurred to me then that Duggar didn’t exactly treat Larry with any respect either and that, perhaps, Duggar Robinson was not the kind of boy to show respect for anything.

  Ms. McNally-Barnes looked tired. “I need some specifics, Imogene.”

  “He talks back to me. And one time he punched me in the stomach.”

  “He what?”

  “Well, he didn’t exactly punch me. He pretended to.” I hesitated, my face burning. “It was a game the boys were playing. To find out their sex noises.”

  “Sex noises?” She said this the way one might say “foot fetish,” and I wished I had never walked into her office. It was as terrible as the first time I’d seen my therapist in high school, when I’d had to try to explain why I picked and prodded at my pores until my face was ruined, until I felt sick with myself but unable to stop.

  “It was just … inappropriate,” I concluded lamely. Inappropriate. Back in college I’d learned about a psychological phenomenon called semantic saturation, in which the repetition of a word causes it to temporarily lose meaning. Inappropriate.

  “Alright.” She scribbled another note. “I’ll be sure to talk to Larry about this. Thank you for bringing this to my attention, Imogene. It’s important to speak up when these sorts of things happen. You never want to find yourself too involved to get out.”

  Feeling emboldened, I said, “Actually, there’s one other thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “There’s another student who I think might have a crush on me.”

  She clicked open her pen again. “And his name?”

  “Clarence Howell. A third year on the team.”

  “Has he acted inappropriately towards you as well?”

  “Not exactly. His behavior has just seemed to suggest…” I trailed off, feeling stupid once again.

  “Imogene.” Ms. McNally-Barnes leaned over her desk towards me conspiringly. “A teenage boy will fall for anything with hair and a pair of breasts.”

  I never thought I could be made so uncomfortable by this, by the acknowledgement of my breasts by a relative stranger.

  “Hell, I’m pretty sure half the boys at this school have a crush on me!” Ms. McNally-Barnes cackled, showing that smudge of purple on her tooth again, and I thanked her for her time before quickly excusing myself from her office.

  * * *

  Before lacrosse practice began the next day, Coach Larry called us in for a huddle. Clarence had gotten the cast removed from his nose, but the bridge was still bruised a purplish-blue. He glanced at me from across the circle, and I looked away guiltily.

  “It has come to my attention that some of you boys have been acting inappropriately,” Larry began, and my stomach churned. That word again. No, this couldn’t be how he handled the situation. Not like this, not in front of everyone.

  The boys stared at him blankly, wondering where this was going.

  “Every teacher and apprentice in this school deserves to be treated with your upmost respect,” Larry continued. “They are your superiors, regardless of age, regardless of sex.” A bit of spittle sprayed between his teeth with the emphasis of this final word. I was embarrassed for him, that he didn’t even realize that the word he’d meant to say was utmost. “This includes me, and this includes Coach Imogene.”

  Clarence’s gaze probed me like a finger, but I refused to look.

  “Aw.” Duggar put a hand to his heart. “We respect you, Coach.”

  “Then act like it, you entitled little shit.”

  Duggar’s mouth fell open, and the other boys shifted uncomfortably, half laughing, half nervous that they were next.

  Larry grinned. I could see his teenage self, finally vindicated. “In fact, why don’t you run a few laps, Robinson? Show me just how much you respect me and Coach Imogene.”

  Duggar stared a moment, ready to argue, before he turned on his heel and took off around the field.

  “And if I hear of any more disrespect from you,” Larry called after him, “you better believe that captainship can be revoked!”

  That practice, I ran a defensive drill as Larry supervised. I heard myself yelling, “Let’s go, let’s go!” in a voice I didn’t know I possessed. I called Duggar by his last name, and he didn’t talk back. I ignored Clarence, though I could feel his eyes from where he sat on the bench behind me. When I blew my whistle—I’d never utilized my whistle before—a couple of the boys even jumped.

  Something had shifted, too imperceptible to name, but taking Kip’s hand and crossing the rope no longer felt irredeemable. I wanted Ms. McNally-Barnes to like me. I wanted Larry to like me. I wanted to prove to everyone—to the boys, to myself—that I was worthy of a position at Vandenberg. That I was worthy of a position of authority.

  That afternoon on the lacrosse field, for the first time since I had arrived at Vandenberg School for Boys, I felt in control.

  FIVE

  Darby Li had been randomly assigned my roommate the summer before our freshman year at Buffalo State, and when I looked up her profile page, I was terrified. She was beautiful, the kind of beautiful you couldn’t fake with professional photographs and manufactured confidence. With her gray eyes and thick dark hair and caramel-colored s
kin (the product of a Chinese father and a Jamaican mother), she was the poster child for palatable exoticism—the kind of exoticism I secretly longed for. She was from Soho, I discovered, daughter of a curator and visual artist. She’d attended an elite all-girls private school where they wore plaid kilts and knee-high socks with loafers.

  I didn’t think I belonged at Buffalo State, but I knew that Darby didn’t; it was a mistake, a mix-up, and I almost wished Buffalo had paired me with a plump homebody from Upstate, someone unobtrusive and safe. Darby and I would never be friends, I decided, not because I was plain and white—plenty of her friends were white, it appeared, though none could be described as plain—but because my life was without distinction. During freshman orientation, when we were asked to say a “Fun Fact” about ourselves, I volunteered that I played the flute until tenth grade, a fact that elicited blank stares and a sympathetic pat on the wrist from the girl on my right.

  But strangely, miraculously, Darby Li and I became friends. Darby had just broken up with her boyfriend of three years—heir to an enormous mattress fortune and possessor of a tiny prick, as Darby informed me—and she was looking to go wild. I had never done anything wild in my life, and the feverish energy in Darby’s eyes excited me. Within the first month of college, Darby had taught me about everything from handles and pregames to hookups and blackouts. Darby was the one who orchestrated my first real kiss: with a junior named Paul at a party in her brother’s apartment. Darby was the one who urged me to dance with Jonah Davis from my Communicating Nonverbal Messages lecture at the freshman Halloween bash, which later led to my first real hookup. “What would you do without me?” Darby often asked me. “I’m not sure,” I would answer quite truthfully.

  I even trusted Darby enough to let her see me without my makeup, to see the naked, spotted face that I disguised everyday. “You can’t even see it,” she’d assured me as I fussed over a raised blemish on my chin or my forehead, something that left a beige-colored protuberance under my makeup that became the only thing I saw when I looked in the mirror. Assurance was the kindest thing she could have offered me.

  I knew why I liked Darby—her beauty, her frantic energy, her ability to repel culpability and embarrassment and shame and all the burdens of those who did not possess her unique beauty—but I could never be sure why she liked me. Perhaps she found me funny, or loyal, or kind. Perhaps she enjoyed my company on all those nights we hiked barefoot back to campus, our heels in our hands and our heads floating somewhere up above our bodies.

  But more than likely, even if she did grow to like me for me, our friendship began as a project. Corrupting me gave Darby a thrill, and I was so grateful for her attention that I willingly allowed her to do it.

  * * *

  I didn’t mean to think about Adam Kipling. But it seemed anytime I entered the dining hall, or walked around campus, or performed dorm rounds in Perkins Hall—pausing by each door, wondering if I might catch his voice or get a hint as to what door he slept behind—I was on the lookout. I wasn’t even sure what I would do if I saw him. I was more curious to see what he would do if he saw me.

  Tuesday night in the dining hall, I thought I spotted him across the room by the salad bar, thought I saw him look at me and even raise his hand in greeting. But I was so sure I imagined it that I didn’t look back at the salad bar for the rest of dinner.

  I hardly knew anything about him. His name. A cursory physical description: black moppish hair, skinny arms, eyes that got squinty when he grinned. Much of what I’d learn about him would come later, and mostly from Chapin. “Distant descendent of the Rothschilds,” she’d tell me, which didn’t mean anything to me beyond “Jewish.” His father a moneylender, his mother a former member of the Royal Ballet. They owned properties in Hingham, Kennebunk, and Naples (both Florida and Italy). Kip’s childhood best friend was the prince of Lesotho.

  But despite how little I knew, I still revisited the night between the trees again and again, the memory growing in urgency. How had he known it was okay to hold my hand so tightly? What made him sure that he could walk me back to my dorm room? As far as I could see, he hadn’t stopped to question any move he’d made that night, the way I would have at his age, the way I still did now. He was certain about everything, and his certainty kept me from retroactively questioning the night’s strangeness. He had been meant to be there, and so had I. And I wanted to see him again, if only to confirm there was a reason he continued to linger.

  I imagined scenes. I pictured us running into each other somewhere away from campus—maybe running, an early-morning reunion on the trail I traced each morning through town—and him stopping and tugging his earbuds from his ears and saying, Hey, it’s you, his face bright with sweat and recognition. He’d jog alongside me, knowing I wouldn’t mind. He’d probably even challenge me to a race; from what little I’d seen of him that first night, I felt certain that was something he would do.

  I’d come to savor the afternoons I spent supervising study period. From the sweeping bay windows of the Marshall Huffman Library’s third-floor classroom, the campus was spread out before me like a map. Sitting at my teacher’s desk in the front of the room, I felt at once more removed from and closer to Vandenberg than ever, the world below me far off yet contained within that window frame, only the sounds of scratching pencils and the assured ticking of the clock on the wall for company. I spent my hours looking out over the bent heads of the students at their desks, watching all those boys milling silently about below, looking for that familiar mess of dark hair. That Wednesday afternoon, I felt sure that if I concentrated hard enough, he would appear eventually, a dark blot on the map, an answer to a question.

  “Imogene!”

  I startled. Raj stood at my elbow, grinning down at me. I hadn’t even heard him come into the room.

  “What are you doing here?”

  He grabbed a chair from the corner of the room and brought it over to my desk. “Grading some essays. I’m bored though.”

  I’d never understand the person who sought out the company of others in boredom, who felt certain that other people could eradicate the tedium of everyday life. I was far more comfortable with tedium than I was with posturing and forcing conversation. I was at my most comfortable, it seemed, when I was alone.

  “Entertain me?” he asked, a pathetic plea, and I desperately wanted him to leave.

  I gestured to the working students, some of them peeking up at us curiously. “I don’t want to distract them,” I whispered, knowing full well they welcomed distraction.

  He took a notebook from his bag and jotted something down. Then, he passed the notebook to me along the desk.

  Then we’ll talk like this.

  Okay, I wrote.

  Raj and I had had limited contact since the weekend. I wondered if he understood what had transpired between us, if he was even aware that something had transpired. I suspected sometimes that I experienced things much differently than other people did.

  He passed back the notebook. You are in a room that is completely bricked in on all four sides, including the ceiling and floor, he had written. You have nothing but a mirror and a wooden table in the room with you. How do you get out?

  I raised my eyebrows at him. “What?” I mouthed.

  “It’s a riddle,” he mouthed back.

  I’d never understood riddles. I didn’t care if the chicken or the egg came first, or why it even mattered.

  I don’t know, I wrote.

  He scribbled his answer and passed the book back.

  You look in the mirror, and you see what you saw. You take the saw, and you cut the table in half. Two halves make a whole, and you climb out of the hole.

  How was I supposed to have gotten that?

  I thought everyone knew that one.

  Not me, I guess.

  I’m sorry for the other day.

  My heart clenched. For what? I wrote.

  It’s okay that you didn’t know I was Pakistani. I didn’t mean to
seem offended.

  I hesitated, and he snatched the notebook back from me and added another note before handing it back.

  India and Pakistan were once one nation before the partition of British India in 1947.

  I didn’t know that, I wrote back.

  That’s okay.

  Do you have any more riddles?

  He read my note and smiled, accepting my apology, and then he began to scribble furiously. Maybe we could be friends, I thought. I looked over his head at the world outside. The leaves were beginning to turn, and several boys sported peacoats and scarves over their uniforms. The flash of a long red scarf trailing in the wind caught my eye. It was attached to a spindly body with a mass of dark hair. I followed the figure until it disappeared from sight, not caring if it was Kip or not, knowing it didn’t really matter.

  * * *

  Darby and I stayed out all night one time. It was a Thursday in our freshman year, and I had stats homework to finish and a class at nine the next morning, but Darby promised we would have fun so I agreed to go. We used the fake IDs Darby had secured us (I was Sandra Lee McNatt, a bright-eyed blonde from El Paso, Texas) to get into Cubby’s in downtown Buffalo, a place where many of the seniors went on Thursday nights. I was nervous. I’d never seen so many bodies crammed into so small a space, elbows and hands and mouths everywhere, and I didn’t recognize a single face. I felt anchored by the glossy head of my roommate as she tugged me through that crowd of elbows and hands and mouths; she was the reason I was there, the reason I was anyone at all.

  And it was fun. The later it got, and the more alcohol I consumed, the more comfortable I felt, easing into that crowd of bodies like a warm bath. That night, I was Sandra Lee McNatt. Or no, maybe I was still Imogene Abney, just an Imogene Abney who felt pretty in her strappy tank top and cool talking to the cute boy with the elfin ears and crooked smile from her stats class, and later kissing him, not caring who was looking, not caring what would transpire the next Tuesday in stats, just knowing it felt good in that moment.

  We ended the night at a diner down the street. I tried not to make a habit of eating after dinner, much less at four in the morning, but it felt okay as long as Darby was doing it, too. I ordered a stack of pancakes, which I smothered in so much syrup it dripped off the edge of the plate. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt so hungry.