“Yeah?”
“I like to do this thing. Every time I come back, I think that the first person I see will dictate how the next stretch of school will go. So, like, if it’s someone I love, I’m going to have a great term. And if it’s someone hein, it’s going to suck. People you travel with don’t count. So, okay: Go.”
She turned intently to look out her window, and I turned to mine. It was too cold for students to be gathering on the lawns. I let my eyes move lightly along the grounds and rolled in my mind that word hein: it was campus slang, short for heinous, and a worse insult than the complete word would have been. Hein things were buzzkills, or bks, and if something was really hein, it might not only k your b but actually become a bad vid, an experience that kept going for some time. Hein was an insider’s word, a true Paulie term. Gaby had tossed it at me like something she’d borrowed and was giving back. Easy as that.
The first person I saw was a fifth former named Leighton Huhne. He was very tall, ursine, with a surprisingly childlike face and bowl-cut hair. I didn’t know him at all, but he ambled along in a friendly enough way, and he mostly hung out with the buddies, the group of boys who were still huffing the fumes of the Beats like old cigarettes their dads had left unfinished long ago. The walls of their rooms were crosshatched with wooden cases for their hundreds of bootlegged Grateful Dead cassettes—illustrated, usually when high, with colored-pencil spirals, bears, and dancing skeletons. The buddies’ speech was slowed and their hair often unwashed, and they wore thin-wale Levi’s corduroys that were allowed to droop off their hips and pool atop their Birkenstocks. These were sported year-round, so that the true buddies arrived in Chapel just as the last of the bells were sounding eight o’clock, and raced, their twiggy corduroy thighs rasping like crickets, up the aisle, dropping snow from the tops of their bare toes.
Contrast these with the zees, short for buzzards, boys who listened to acid rock, played hockey, and kept wads of chewing tobacco deep in their bottom lips so that they could punctuate their episodic bursts of sardonic conversation with a comet of hot spit aimed at a sawed-off Coke can beside their chair.
Also frelks, a coed set who were just weirdos of a particularly energetic sort (a frelking incident looked like a friendly possession); and tools, who tried too hard; and exchange students, who smiled a lot; and black students, who had more sense than to engage in any of this shit. Also local kids from Concord, a few Latino and Latina students, several Chinese-American children of Hong Kong–based traders who went home once a year. Plenty of bog-standard Wasps, freckled boys and horsey girls. A few precious show-ponies, like my New York and D.C. friends, overindulged and perennially jetlagged. Among them all, there were some really nice kids. I’d met several, but for whatever reason, I hadn’t tried hard enough to talk to them and meet up with them again.
Leighton Huhne turned as our black car passed, and held up a giant paw of a hand in hello. He couldn’t have seen who was inside. It didn’t matter. I’d gotten my answer.
“Leighton Huhne!” I called out, in the slowing car.
“Cool,” said Gaby. “That’s a good one. You’re going to have a chill term.”
This was by far the nicest thing I ever heard her say.
Other Paulie slang that might prove useful: as I’ve noted, the physical exertions between two students were called scrumping. This was the general term, and it functioned exactly like, say, snacking, in that it implied no specificity beyond satisfying a moderate desire. Guys who hooked up with a girl scored, or occasionally (going all the way) railed or (with particular vigor) boned. If they succeeded in doing this, they might think to use a domer to prevent pregnancy. When the subject was a male, the verb was active and transitive: Henry boned Alexa. When the subject was a female, the verb was passive: Alexa was scored or got railed or got boned. I heard bone as an active verb in the female context only once: at the end of our fourth-form year, when my friend Brooke was given the choice between two fifth formers who wanted to date her. Her older brother, a graduating sixth former, had talked with them both. One of them, Trevor, was handsomer, but he had asked Brooke’s brother, evaluating her, “Does she bone?” We repeated this question among ourselves after Brooke reported it, jarring not least for the intransitive form of bone. As in, does that chicken lay?
Indeed, Brooke did bone, but not, she decided, with him.
If a girl had scrumped, etc., with a boy who was not held in high regard by other boys, she might well be tainted by the liaison. In that case, she was referred to as sloppy seconds, and other boys might not be interested in the sloppy seconds of certain classmates.
This taint was not known to work the other way around. No boy was some girl’s sloppy seconds. Only girls, therefore, could be socially contaminated by their partners. They were both target and vector.
Boys did not scrump with or rail or score or bone other boys. Nor girls with other girls. It just didn’t come up. If two male athletes, for example, pushed their beds together and hung out in just their boxer shorts in the dark after check-in, they must have had something else in mind.
All third and fourth formers were required to participate in three sports a year. (“This is to wear you all out so they can keep you in line,” observed my mother.) I’d played soccer in the fall, and after I recovered from my initial disappointment at failing to make the varsity squad, I’d discovered that the skills I’d learned at my father’s insistence all the years he had coached my rec team earned me a starting spot on JV defense, right where I liked to be. The wind in the grass was familiar. Shin guards and shivering were familiar. If I blocked out the hilly horizon and the varsity football crowd over on the prime field, I could pretend I was back at home in Illinois. I almost expected the train to come through. I imagined Dad on the sidelines so clearly I stopped missing home. What a gift he’d given me, with soccer. I knew this game, I knew my team, and if the ball came my way, I’d know what to do.
In the winter months, my choice was not as clear. Tennis was my strongest sport—another reason I couldn’t wait for spring—and I didn’t want to try squash because kids swore it was hell on your tennis game. I couldn’t get a basketball as high as the net nor a volleyball over one. In those years, St. Paul’s had no pool. This left ice hockey.
And ice hockey was gospel.
As I’ve said, and as they told us regularly, the first proto-hockey had been played on the Lower School Pond, at the heart of our two thousand acres, in 1856. St. Paul’s had turned out stars for a hundred years afterward—even in my time students in every year saw paths to the NHL. I wouldn’t have dared to claim my part of such self-satisfied glory, but when I was at St. Paul’s, girls’ ice hockey was still young in the world. Women did not yet have an Olympic team, though one of my classmates, Sarah Devens, was a prodigy who spent summers training with the group that would form the first Olympic squad.
I’d grown up skating, like so many other kids in my town part of a frigid pack that met up winter afternoons after school. The rink was arctic, unloved. But its high hissing lights blazed by four-thirty, erasing the dead winter sky and giving us wild shadows, and every other hour the maintenance crew shooed us off to bring out the Zamboni. It took forever; our hands froze; the machine laid down ice like pooling cream. We clung to the boards to wait for the first fresh steps.
When I was ten or so I’d asked my father for hockey skates, not caring for the fiddly picks on the front of figure skates’ blades or the million dainty little hooks required by their laces. I thought I’d seen pride in his face when I asked, pride in the way he took me to the sports shop as soon as a weekend rolled round.
Nothing at St. Paul’s came easily to me. Nothing felt like my natural due. But I’d been on hockey skates for years. I showed up for tryouts and made JV.
Because I could skate backward, I got to play defense (in theory, to block an incoming forward). I could deliver a good Iron Cross: front-stop, back-stop, side-stop, side-stop, over and over, until our sides knotted and w
e’d cut deep crosses into the ice, leaving piles of shavings all around. Our games were a circus, because so few of us knew what we were doing or where we were supposed to be (I certainly did not). It could take a good twenty-five minutes in the locker room just to figure out how all the pads were strapped on. But there was solidarity there, and there was a place for me.
The hierarchy of hockey teams went like this: boys’ varsity, boys’ junior varsity, girls’ varsity, girls’ junior varsity. We ponytailed scrubs were relegated to practice at 6 a.m. I’d troop across campus from Warren House, heading toward the first peach light in the sky, making a left at the library, and taking a shortcut through Kittredge House to where Gordon Rink was set back in the tall pines. Kittredge was ugly, with lousy light even on the brightest day. I’d still be waiting on the January dawn when I pulled open the heavy door. But several girls from my team lived in Kittredge, and they’d come pouring out of their house into the main hall, and in this way hockey delivered to me—finally, I felt—my true friends.
The hockey girls, six of them, were familiar faces. Two had played on my soccer team. Others I’d met in the halls. We met up in their dorm, exited into a wall of cold, crossed a footbridge toward unlit woods, and barreled through the door into the thrumming rink.
Our locker room was an unheated trailer. At 6 a.m. on a winter morning the wooden benches sang if clipped by a skate. We stripped to shorts and T-shirts to suit up, peered through clouds of breath to find where the Velcro of our pads snagged our tube socks, and tugged those socks up over skin goose-bumped so tightly it hurt. We dressed miserably, anxious, trying to take courage from the rancid plastic padding, our coughing and hacking, our halitosis.
One morning Brooke, a fourth former from California, could not find one of her kneepads. She’d asked a few times, but nobody replied. Finally she sat and opened her mouth and bellowed, “I NEED MY KNEEPAD,” in a monotone that went on and on until we all stopped to look at her because the sound she was making was so unsettling. When we were all quiet, she said, “Thanks. Can you help?” And we all laughed, and tossed our bags around until it was found. She’d been so rude, but everything about hockey was rude: the cold, the smell of unwashed pads, the hot morning spit in your mouth guard as you heaved after sprints. It felt delightful to be aggressive, to be a girl especially who could be crass and cranky and cold. After Brooke did this, we were easier with each other. On the ice we scrambled about like bears. And it might not have been pretty, but we were part of the hockey tradition at St. Paul’s School.
The passage through Kittredge to the rink became my normal route, and after practice I’d just head back to my friends’ dorm and stay. Brooke lived there. She had curly hair that was buzzed on the sides and earrings all up the edge of one ear, and a scratch confidence I could not chalk up entirely to the fact that her older brother was a much-admired sixth former (who would, by year’s end, be helping her select her next boyfriend). Her roommate, Maddy, was an Ohio brunette with green eyes, a dimple, and enormous, lovely breasts that the sixth-form boys had nicknamed the big guns. We all knew this—even Maddy, giggling, told us about it, her eyes wide with slight alarm—and instinctively protected her. She was exuberant and often imprecise, which endeared her to those of us who were so afraid of making mistakes. Hearing an excellent story, Maddy would mourn not having been “a spy on the wall.” Returning to a tiresome topic, she’d say, “Guys, not to kick a dead cow, but…” We all kicked dead cows thereafter, aware of the way Maddy might be caricatured at school (given those big guns) and unwilling to participate. Though we did not have words for this yet.
Next door to Brooke and Maddy were Linley, from Colorado, a pretty blonde whose dirty sense of humor lent power to her claim that St. Paul’s boys were coarse and lame, and Elise, a lanky artist from Kentucky with sultry, half-open eyes who had a serious boyfriend in the form above us. Elise’s refusal to say much about her beau seemed to me testament to her love’s maturity, and I was fascinated by the quiet steadiness of their relationship. Next door to Linley and Elise were Boston-bred Caroline, tall and elegant, with porcelain skin and a grown woman’s smile, and petite Samantha, who was the youngest of eight and hated being “cute.” She insisted on Samantha or Sam but never Sammy, but this didn’t help, because she brushed her bangs out of her face with a toddler’s open palm and wore her too-big sweaters with their sleeves tucked into her fists. On icy paths her backpack threatened to turtle her. It would take her Harvard and fifteen years to find the calling we saw for her already: helming the second-grade classroom that had been hers when she was seven.
These girls called me “Lace” and patted their beds to invite me to sit. Shivery with hope and envy, I pressed my palms into their quilts. They were new students too, and their attentions allowed me to imagine a benevolent map of the school, beginning with this dorm and the tremendous luck of the room draw that had put them on the same hall. My exclusion was awful but thrilling: these girls were here together, I figured, because of some virtue mysteriously apparent before they’d even arrived on campus. I felt I belonged with them. The school had not. I could not work out the mix of luck, legacy, and smart manipulation that allowed students to flourish or doomed them to fail through the school’s opaque administration. But I had no doubt that everything was coded. Everything offered tells, if only you knew where to look.
Take my big-city friends, New York and Washington. Was it coincidence they ended up assigned to the same room, where they could stay up all night swapping couture blazers and plotting trips to islands? I tested this theory with the Kittredge girls, who thought these two were bitchy and strange but were fascinated to learn the tips I’d received, like how to give a hand job in a yellow taxicab or which debutante balls were not worth bothering with. In quieter tones I revealed to them rare moments of vulnerability. I lowered my voice almost to a whisper when I told them about the late night back in October when the senior girls on the third floor had come into my big-city friends’ room to do facials. This was the invitation New York and D.C. had been waiting for. The seniors in Simpson House were glamorous and highly styled. They came in fully equipped and took the new girls’ faces in their hands. They steamed their cheeks with warm towels and covered their eyes with lavender-scented muslins from the most luxurious cosmetics lines. They tipped my friends’ heads back into their laps, massaged their soft skin, said it was time for the world’s most nourishing mask, and lovingly applied plaster of paris instead.
The Kittredge girls could not speak when I told them this. Cruelty was electric. Its proximity enlivened us and drove us closer together.
I remember one evening in this first winter, when the Lower School Pond had frozen over sufficiently that the crew had set up hockey boards so we could play outside. Saturday night there were lights, and long card tables propped on the frozen grass to hold tankards of hot cocoa and red paper cups. Some of the theater kids dragged out stereo equipment. I met the Kittredge girls at the edge of the pond to lace up. Skating without pads or a helmet, in jeans and a jacket and soft red gloves, made me feel like a passenger who got to shake off the jet and just soar. The ice was knotted, and in the spotlights it was impossible to work out depth of field. We skittered and zoomed. Above us towered the illuminated steeple of the chapel, whose bells marked our hours. For a while we batted around some pucks. Brooke and Maddy, who were the best of us, joined the boys for a bit. But eventually we set all that down and just skated. The pond was frozen across to the far woods, but away from the lights the ice seemed to disappear. We giggled and called to one another. Sometimes we lost sight of a friend, who’d then return, squealing, racing in from the dark distance. I remember feeling that my friendships had come to life. I remember going very fast, closing my eyes, and imagining the deep water beneath me completely still.
In the wintertime, Seated Meal dropped to two nights a week, on the theory that it was too dark and cold for us to have to dress up after sports every evening. Nights we did not have Seated, we could s
huffle up to the dining halls and choose our spot among the two rooms set aside for cafeteria dining—they were called Middle and Lower. Middle was brighter and larger than Lower, though still, on winter evenings, almost industrial in the way the black windows glowered at us. Lower, with its accordingly low ceiling, was positively denlike. Overflow panels of alumni names were pegged along two of the walls here and downlit, creating a spectacle of departed alumni. These belonged to far more recent classes, including some older brothers and even sisters of kids we knew (it took a lot of hallway before female names began to show up). By unspoken compact, Lower was a fifth- and sixth-form haunt, but my friend Brooke thought this was bunk.
“Why not?” she asked, tray in hand, loaded with fruit and whatever protein was identifiable, and she headed down the long, forbidden hall.
We followed her past the tanks of milk and the toasters, which were always running (toast was a reliable source of basic sustenance), and into the oddly lit room. The walls were bright, the center dark, and your eyes seemed never to adjust. This was probably why the older kids liked it—there was room for uncertainty, like hanging out in the shadows or at the back of the bus. As we came in, heads turned, mostly male. Caroline in particular could send a flare of attention through a group of boys. Sam drafted her, staying small. Elise cradled her tea mug: most of the time, she did not find food interesting enough to bother. I’d have been toting my third PB&J of the day and two glasses of chocolate milk.
“Oh my God,” Maddy said, “there’s Brophy.” The fifth-form hockey player she loved was everywhere, I thought, but seeing him was always a shock to her.
Beside Declan Brophy sat the famous grandson of a famous actor, self-satisfied and, if you were into cherubic looks, devastating, with blond curls at his temples. He was the Luke Skywalker to Knox Courtland’s Han Solo, and we were split over which was the hotter guy. Both played in bands—the famous grandson, who was also in choir with me, singing lead vocals and Knox, silent and brooding, on guitar.
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