Testimony

by Anita Shreve

  As for Silas, I don’t believe he knew whom he was dancing with or where he was. He’d gone over the edge. You had the sense that it wouldn’t take much for Silas, laughing his head off, to lose it completely.

  I found myself moving toward the center of the room. Overhead there was a strobe, and there were candles on the tables, and it was fairly dark. I was dancing without too many inhibitions, either, and I was loving it. It was like driving very fast away from the school. We were doing this and getting away with it. It was incredible for those few minutes. And had it just been those few minutes, we’d have laughed about it the next morning, and that would have been that. I’m a terrible dancer, and God knows what I looked like that night. But I didn’t care. You get to that point, and you know you’re making a public ass of yourself, but everyone is laughing, and somehow that seems OK. More than OK. It seems like the greatest time you’ve ever had in your life.

  I do remember being kind of amazed that Mr. Coggeshall, who was chaperoning that night, didn’t break it up, or tone it down, or change the music or something, because it was becoming a little too Lord of the Flies at one point. There were now five guys dancing with one girl, and it felt tribal. Guttural and tribal. I’m sure there were other girls from time to time, but I don’t remember much about them. We were all on the basketball team, we’d spent hours and hours together, and we were letting off steam in a big way. I was expecting Mr. Coggeshall to come over and break it up, even though I knew it was all innocent fun, or some part of me thought it was innocent fun. I had a sense that maybe we were crossing a line somewhere, but since no one came over to us, the line just kept moving farther and farther away. Sometimes there were five of us dancing with her, sometimes two, sometimes one, while the rest of us caught our breath. Sienna never stopped. I don’t think she had ever been happier in her life. Seriously. I mean that.

  So when was it that we did cross the line? There on the dance floor?

  Or when we made our way across the quad to J. Dot’s room, laughing and calling out and falling all over one another? Or when we crowded into his room and started tucking into the beer and the Bacardi again? Or when J. Dot put on the music with the slow bass?

  The beat was mesmerizing.

  I remember that Sienna started moving to the beat, a beer in her hand, as if she were in a world of her own, just slowly turning this way and that, and moving her hips to the music, and little by little the raucous laughter started to die down, and we were all just watching her. She was the music, she was the beat. Her whole little body had become this pure animal thing. She might have been dancing alone in her room. She didn’t look at any of us, even as she seemed to be looking at all of us. There was no smile on her face. If it was a performance, it was an incredible one. I don’t think anyone in the room had ever seen anything like it. She was in this light-blue halter top with these tight jeans. The heels and her little jacket were gone already. And you just knew. Looking at her, you just knew.

  It grew quieter in the room, so that after a while there was only the low bass and this girl, this utterly beautiful female creature, seemingly unaware of us all, moving slowly with the music.

  I could hear the door open and close. Jamail and August left.

  I have asked myself a hundred thousand times why I didn’t leave the room with them. But I already know the answer. Nothing — nothing — could have induced me to leave that room right then. That room was where it was happening. Everything you had ever read about or dreamed about or heard about was in that room. To walk away from that was to never have it again. Ever. Your life would pick up where you’d left off, but you would never even come close to an experience like this one. The stars were aligned. Circumstances had conspired.

  J. Dot picked up a movie camera.

  It was a secondhand camera from his parents, and he used it from time to time, usually to put movies of himself on YouTube. Everyone, it seemed, was photographing themselves that year. I’m not sure why. To beef up their Facebook pages? To get their fifteen seconds of fame? To document every exploit, legal or not? I don’t know that it was J. Dot who posted the tape on the Internet, but I’m guessing that it was. He’d already learned how to do that, and he might have known how to blur the faces. I can imagine him thinking it would be a kick. He was like that. Pushing everything to the edge. Taking risks.

  I was aware that he had the camera in his hand. At the time, though, it all seemed like just one more piece of this outrageous and extraordinary experience. I wasn’t thinking about the consequences. Obviously.

  The section of tape, the one that apparently no one ever saw, and I can’t say what happened to it, was just of Sienna. Dancing. We watched as she untied her halter top at the neck. The blue cloth fell to reveal her breasts. They were beautiful and firm and rounded like her face. You knew at that moment that you were in it for good; there was no leaving the room then. We watched, all of us, in fascination as she did a striptease. No, it wasn’t a striptease, because that implies she was trying to tease us. It was actually something quite beautiful — something you might witness through an open window, the girl having no awareness of anyone around her, just moving a little bit to the music and undressing herself. It was lovely. It was very lovely. This small lithe girl who had something inside her none of us had ever seen: elegance and poise and beauty. Real beauty, not just the surface kind. I have never seen anyone more beautiful than she was in those moments. I’m not sure I ever will again.

  We were all seduced, rooted to the spot. It was group seduction of the most powerful kind. I don’t believe any one of us could have left the room. Not J. Dot, with his cynicism. Not Silas, with his girlfriend waiting. And not Irwin, to whom J. Dot had given the camera.

  I don’t know why J. Dot gave the camera to Irwin. Did he guess that Irwin, because he was black, would not participate? Did he not want Irwin to participate? Or was it because Irwin happened to be standing right beside J. Dot at the moment J. Dot decided he wanted to enter the tableau? I don’t know. I do know, however, that no one ever gave up Irwin’s name. We didn’t give up Irwin’s name because he was black, and we knew instinctively that if any one of us had said Irwin’s name, all the shit would have rained down on his head. The media would have distorted the entire event. “Black Student Forces White Girl to Dance Naked.” If we didn’t have those precise thoughts, we felt them in our bones. It’s the only thing we did right during that whole putrid scandal. We didn’t give up Irwin. Even Sienna, amazingly, given the lies she told afterward, never said his name.

  And it was right that Irwin didn’t come forward. I never begrudged him that. Why should he have? It would have ruined his life, too, and what would have been the point of that?

  J. Dot took off his clothes. Silas also took off his clothes. Later, I took off my clothes. I am guessing that you have seen the tape. I am guessing that I don’t have to describe to you what happened next.

  Afterward, for about two or three minutes, we all just lay on the floor. And then reality came screaming in. I remember that J. Dot went back over to his bed and lay down and pulled the covers up. Irwin put the camera down, opened the door, and quietly walked out. Sienna put her clothes on real quick, stood, and slipped on her shoes. I remember that as she left the room, she turned and blew us a kiss. It seemed so wrong, so hideously wrong of her to do that. This wasn’t an event that you walk away from and just blow a kiss. Walk away from and shut the door and never speak of it? OK, I understand that. But blow a kiss? As if we might meet up next Saturday and do the whole thing again?

  By then, Silas was puking into the wastebasket. Terrible heaving, choking puking. I got dressed and went over to him and put my hand on his back, and he flailed his arm around and said, “Get the fuck outta here.”

  “Silas,” I said.

  He turned around and squinted his eyes into an expression of pure hatred. It was a terrifying expression. And then he started heaving again into the bucket. J. Dot had passed out. I later thought he must have been p
retending, because he would have had to check in with his dorm parent at curfew.

  I left the room.

  It was both the stupidest and the worst thing I’ve ever done in my life. Worse than what I had just done minutes earlier. I’d left one guy on a bed who might be, for all I knew, comatose, and he might not wake up. I’d left Silas, my good friend, heaving into a bucket. For all I knew, he could pass out and choke on his vomit. And as for stupid, I’d left the camera on the bureau, where Irwin had set it down.

  I was already in my dorm, in my bed, before I realized that the camera was still on top of the bureau. I tried to call J. Dot on his cell phone. He didn’t answer. I was feeling nauseated by then, and I didn’t think I could make it across the quad back to J. Dot’s room. I figured I would call him in the morning, or he would wake up, find the camera, and destroy the tape. The room was spinning, and I was feeling sick to my stomach, and suddenly I had this tight feeling at the back of my throat, and I knew that I was going to hurl. I couldn’t make it to the bathroom in time, so I let go over the side of the bed. My roommate woke up, and he just freaked out. “What are you doing?” he cried. He made me get up and find a mop and a bucket right there and clean it up. I spent the rest of the night huddled on the floor of the bathroom with my quilt wrapped around me. I don’t think I slept a single hour that night.

  And as bad as that was, it was nothing compared to what lay ahead. The worst moment of my life was not when I discovered there was footage from that night on the Internet. It was not when Headmaster Bordwin called me in and told me he had the original tape. It was not the moment my mother walked into the conference room and I was sitting in the corner, and I had to look up at her. It was not even the knock on the motel door with the police outside, ready to arrest me. No, the worst moment of my life was the moment Mr. Taylor came to the motel and knocked on the door and had me sit down and told me that Silas had been found.

  Nothing will ever erase that moment.

  I have thought long and hard about why we did it, but I think the why was in the act itself. It was an act without a why.

  That isn’t an excuse, either. It is simply what I believe.

  Though I don’t believe there was a why, I know that it was wrong. It was immoral. It may even have been criminal. And the consequences of that one night have been catastrophic. In the beginning, when I had thoughts of Silas and his parents and Noelle, I wanted to climb that path myself and stay there until I, too, froze to death.

  My parents got divorced shortly after the scandal. I knew they did not have a good marriage, but I thought that perhaps it was getting better my last year of school. Or at least I hoped it was. When my mother visited in the fall, she had seemed happier. But maybe it was only because she was with me.

  I see the concern on her face every day. She worries about me constantly, and I hate that. I just hate it that she has to worry so much. I know that it would be better for us both if we could live separately, and shortly we will be able to do that. I spend a lot of time on the Internet looking for programs that do community service. Not fake community service, like the two-week programs kids do just to write about on their college essays or the Mickey Mouse community service I had to do for my probation: teach basketball clinics in surrounding towns. Some punishment. No, I am speaking of a longtime commitment. I have found one program in Uganda that is focused on building a medical clinic, and I have been in touch with Doctors Without Borders about a vaccination program in Thailand. I need to get away. Although this isn’t literally true, it is as though I have spent the last two years in a locked building, unable to take a walk. If it were the old days and young men did such things, I would probably ship out with the merchant marines. I have been reading a lot of Eugene O’Neill lately. The day after my probation is finished, I will talk to my mother and I will leave.

  I don’t believe I have ruined my mother’s life. If I did, I wouldn’t leave her. She wants to go, too. I can feel it.

  Though many people might assume this, I do not believe I have ruined my own life, either. I have had a great deal of time to think in the two years since I was expelled from Avery. I have read a lot as well. I think that though I will never be the same, my life is not destroyed. Perhaps it is better that I was pushed off the track or that I stepped off the track — and possibly it was a desire to do just that that prompted me to remain in that room — because I am a different person now. I cannot go along the path that everyone else in my generation will go on. I will have to find my own.

  Truthfully, I don’t think anyone’s life was ruined. Not J. Dot’s and I hope not Sienna’s. Maybe Mr. and Mrs. Quinney’s. Yes, I think their lives were ruined. But as for the rest of us, we’ll get by.

  To answer your last question, I believe that alcohol made it happen, but the “it” was inside of us.

  I hope this helps you with your research.

  Sincerely,

  Robert Leicht

  Acknowledgments

  Tremendous thanks to my editor, Asya Muchnick; my agent, Jennifer Rudolph-Walsh; my daughter, Katherine Clemans; and my husband, John Osborn.

  About the Author

  ANITA SHREVE is the critically acclaimed author of thirteen previous novels, including Body Surfing; The Pilot’s Wife, which was a selection of Oprah’s Book Club; and The Weight of Water, which was a finalist for England’s Orange Prize. She lives in Massachusetts.