All Girls
Page 7
Jade senses Macy before she announces her arrival at their table. “Did you see this?” she says, turning her body away from the table so that the paper is in full view.
It takes Macy a moment to unscramble the words that stretch across the front page of the morning’s Hartford Courant. When they do, the first thing she feels is a profound relief. A smile squeaks between her lips, and for a wild moment she thinks she might laugh. It bubbles in her chest.
“Honestly, I can’t believe they kept it out of the news for this long,” Jade says.
RAPE ACCUSATION ROCKS
LOCAL PREP SCHOOL
Next to her, Lauren takes a drag of her coffee and shakes her head. “My mom is going to lose it.”
“Your mom reads the Courant?”
A former student at the all-girls Atwater School in Canaan is seeking legal action against the institution over its mishandling of an accusation she made while enrolled, the Courant finds. Karen Mirro, 38, was a senior at Atwater in the fall of 1995 when she says she was raped by a male faculty member in his on-campus apartment.
“Why is she suing the school and not this guy?”
“‘Because Mirro was eighteen at the time,’” Lauren reads, “‘the alleged rape falls outside Connecticut’s statute of limitations for sex crimes.’”
“But that just means he can’t be prosecuted, not that he can’t be sued,” Macy explains.
“True,” Jade says, nodding. “I mean, the school is a bigger fish, right? More money.”
But something about this doesn’t sit right with Macy. She thinks about Linda Paulsen, arms folded at the edge of the woods, her presence at Initiation a kind of tacit permission, adult supervision. “Maybe she feels like it’s partially the school’s fault,” she offers.
Lauren looks up from the paper, wrinkling her nose. “Hmm, you might be right,” she says, skimming the article quickly. “Sounds like she’s saying that they expelled her as retaliation.” She clears her throat and reads aloud: “‘Mirro contends that her expulsion was handed down in retribution for her allegation against a beloved faculty member—’”
“Does the article name the teacher?” Macy interrupts.
“Unh-uh,” Jade shakes her head. “But we’ve got a date now. Shouldn’t be that hard to figure out which of the current male teachers were also employed here in ’95.”
Macy nods.
“I’ve gotta tell Bryce,” Lauren says, sitting up abruptly. “Can I take this copy? You guys can grab another one from the stand?”
Jade lifts her elbows from where they hold down the paper and turns up her palms. “Be my guest.”
“Oh, hey, Mace—Louisa Manning is sitting in the back. You should go talk to her about the Heron,” Lauren says, by way of parting.
“Don’t you have to get ready to go?” Jade interrupts Macy’s sizing up of the dining hall.
Without looking at Jade, Macy says: “I thought it was going to be about last night.”
“What?”
“When I saw you guys reading. I thought—I thought maybe something happened last night.”
The look Jade gives Macy isn’t wholly confused. She pauses and tilts her chin in Macy’s direction. “Well, you weren’t totally wrong about some shit going down this weekend, I guess.”
Macy cringes. Shame flares in her gut. But she knows it’s meant as an olive branch, and so she forces a laugh. “Can’t say I didn’t tell you so,” she says.
“Hey,” Jade adds, lifting the paper again, “don’t forget to grab something to eat. Can’t race on an empty stomach.”
Macy grunts noncommittally. Instead of turning and heading for the hot food bar—she probably would have been overdoing it with the oatmeal, anyway—she heads for the back of the dining hall, weaving through the round tables toward the double doors that spill into Lathrop’s foyer. These are off-limits during dinner for reasons Macy hasn’t completely figured out (probably to maintain an orderly flow of traffic through the food stations), but weekend brunch is a more leisurely affair. Plus, there’s not a single faculty member in sight. As she walks, the Courant beams up at her from every occupied table.
Louisa is wearing an Atwater half-zip above heathered gray sweatpants. Her feet are tucked beneath her; her Birkenstocks are kicked off at odd angles on the floor. She is so engrossed in the newspaper that she doesn’t look up as Macy approaches.
“Louisa?”
“Mmm?” For a second, Louisa keeps her head lowered. When she lifts her chin to Macy, she taps her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “Oh, hey.”
“Hi.”
“So how was Initiation?”
Macy shrugs.
“Yeah,” Louisa says, leaning back in her chair. “Lotta fuss over nothing. So—you coming to meeting on Monday?”
“Actually, that’s why I wanted to talk to you—”
Louisa sits up, unfolding her legs. Her feet search the floor beneath the table blindly, tapping in the direction of her sandals until her toes find the cork bottoms. She wriggles beneath the leather straps. And then she taps the Courant in front of her. “You want to help us get to the bottom of this?”
“Well, I’m not a great writer,” Macy says, and then, just in case Louisa might misinterpret her honesty as fishing-for-compliments self-deprecation, she adds, “I’m much better at math and science.”
Louisa nods like she’s thinking it over. She curls her bottom lip slightly inside her top, as if she’s biting it inside her mouth. “I bet you’re a hell of a researcher, then,” she says, after a beat. “And I bet you don’t give up easy.”
Does she know about how Macy’s mind refuses to let a single thing go? Macy’s therapists were always telling her to interrogate her anxiety: to look beneath the “superficial obsession” for a root cause. Although she might be fixating, for example, on the failed joke in the group text (the one to which her friends only replied “ha”), the problem was not her sense of humor but rather a profound insecurity within those friendships themselves. But it was rarely this simple: What possible good reason was there—for instance—for the meltdown over the birthday cake she made for her dad’s fiftieth birthday, the one she tried to decorate to look like the tie-dye T-shirt he wore on Sunday mornings but that instead came out looking like muddy water, too many colors of frosting swirled too close together? It’s dirty like Dad’s shirt, too, Macy’s mother had said, trying for laughter when logic failed. But there was Macy, heaving with sobs at her disaster of a dessert until she gagged and then literally vomited.
“Don’t you think that having all the facts would make us feel a little bit better?” Louisa adds.
Maybe her behavior this week wasn’t a total mystery. Maybe she knew—somehow—that something felt unsafe about this place, and she only thought the danger was Initiation: an irrational obsession sourced from a rational worry. What do people see when they look at me, Macy always wondered. What do they know? Is it possible that in Macy Louisa perceives a worthy ally, somebody else with good instincts and an ability to trust her intuition?
Of course it’s probably not anything like that. Louisa probably just thinks of Macy as an endurance athlete, dogged and gritty. She probably just thinks of Macy as a runner.
To: Atwater Parents Association <
From: brodiep@TheAtwaterSchool.org
Date: Oct 5, 2015, 4:27 P.M.
Subject: From the Desk of Patricia Brodie
Atwater Families and esteemed Alumnae,
By now, I imagine that most of you have read the article published in the Hartford Courant on September 26. For those of you who have not—and in an effort to fully acknowledge the content of the article, and to recognize and assuage any concerns that we as a school are evading conversation on the matter—I’ve linked to the piece below my signature. I am reaching out now in an effort to provide some context for the reporting and to explain our decision-making surrounding the matter over the cour
se of the last three months.
We were first made aware of the allegations outlined in the story in July, when the Board of Trustees was contacted by attorneys representing Karen Mirro. We did not make the news public for two very simple reasons: first, it was important to us to protect the confidentiality of the involved parties; second, and most practically speaking, the legal contours of the case prohibited us from doing so. Although the Courant has entered the story into the public discourse, these two points remain true. Nevertheless, we’ve heard from many of you who feel that the school has been less than forthright in its communication; your feedback matters to us, and we intend to reexamine our policies and procedures for gaps in transparency. We welcome your suggestions, which you may send to my attention or to the Board.
Every day, we talk to our girls about the importance of collaboration and the sustaining power of community. We hope that you will join us in our efforts to learn and grow, and that together we can contribute to Atwater’s two-hundred-year-legacy of leadership in the advancement of women and girls. Should you find yourself on campus, my door is always open.
Be well,
Patricia Brodie
Head of School
http://www.courant.com/feat/atwaterrape
RAPE ACCUSATION ROCKS
LOCAL PREP SCHOOL
By Amanda Lucas
Updated September 27, 2015, 7:32 A.M.
FALLS VILLAGE, CT—A former student at the all-girls Atwater School in Canaan is seeking legal action against the institution over its mishandling of an accusation she made while enrolled, the Courant finds. Karen Mirro, 38, was a senior at Atwater in the fall of 1995 when she says she was raped by a male faculty member in his on-campus apartment. Mirro alleges that the school failed to investigate her claim, and that she later faced retaliation for her accusation.
According to documents obtained by the Courant, Mirro states that she reported the rape to school administrators, who encouraged her to take a leave of absence to tend to her mental health. She declined this course of action. One month later, Mirro was found smoking cigarettes in the woods behind campus. Possession of nicotine products on school property was then and is now a violation of a school “Fundamental Standard.” According to Atwater’s website, a Fundamental Standard is a “pillar of the school’s community expectations,” and violation of a Standard may result in dismissal from the school. Mirro was offered the opportunity to withdraw from Atwater to avoid the appearance of an expulsion on her official disciplinary record, and she left campus in November 1995.
Mirro, whose representatives declined to comment for this story, claims in her suit that although expulsion was delineated as one in a course of possible consequences for her behavior, it was uncommonly administered. She contends that her punishment was handed down in retribution for her allegation against a beloved faculty member, who, she maintains, was allowed to remain on campus.
Because Mirro was eighteen at the time, the alleged rape falls outside Connecticut’s statute of limitations for sex crimes. In seeking recourse through a civil suit against the school, Mirro seeks damages in an amount equal to the cost of her treatment needs both previously incurred and forthcoming.
Atwater is ranked among the top girls’ schools in the country, with an alumnae network that includes senators, cabinet members, Silicon Valley executives, and countless industry pioneers. School officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Vol. CCII, Issue No. I
The basement of Atwater’s main academic building is, technically, a fully functional educational space: the southern wing houses a series of low-ceilinged classrooms, filled with standard rectangular tables and chairs; the corridor that runs beneath the front of the building holds the tech help desk and the facilities hub and a copy room; a donor paid for an old computer lab to be converted into a small black box theater for drama classes. The hallways throughout are peppered with random furniture: sagging couches lugged from dorm lounges, clustered in twos and threes around faded antique rugs. Along the walls above the polished concrete floors, generations of students have pieced together fragments of murals: portraits of distinguished alumnae; the Litchfield Hills rendered in the style of Starry Night; a cluster of animals, exploding from a central source like flower petals, an elephant’s ear blossoming from the mane of a roaring lion.
It’s here where the staff of Atwater’s student newspaper meets once a week, in a room at the very end of the wing that runs below the building’s northern edge, through a door beneath a rounded alcove. At some point, someone painted a series of birds in flight in inky black above the archway, seven winged shadows curving up and away from the doorframe. Louisa Manning likes to think that it was a member of the Heron staff who did it, maybe the newspaper’s art director in the nineties, someone with the skills to tattoo the cement bricks with precision but with the writerly morality of a journalist—the tiny crows a relative of the heron but also symbolic of the First Amendment itself: freedom of speech, freedom of the press; freedom.
Last year in English class, Ms. Edwards asked Louisa’s class to write about their favorite place on campus. Louisa, a sophomore at the time, wrote three pages about the Heron room, from the birds in flight to the cracks in the cement walls to the row of old desktop computers they use for layout, one of which is missing the “K” on the keyboard. She wrote about how it smells like mold and old pizza—usually because there actually is old pizza somewhere, graying on the coffee tables pushed between the couches or stacked in boxes on top of the trash bins—and how one time they found a dead mouse in the closet that had, probably, been dead for years, half its carcass subsumed by the fraying carpet, a mass of bones and synthetic fibers knotted together over time. She wrote about how you might think the room would be dark and airless, but that because they meet in the afternoons the setting sun catches in the aboveground windows that graze the room’s ceiling, filling their work space with rays of warm evening light two-thirds of the year. In the end, what Louisa wrote in response to Ms. Edwards’s assignment was unmistakably a love letter, and she tacked it to the bulletin board in the Heron room, next to the clips they saved of particularly hilarious or otherwise egregious typos (like the time they forgot to fill in the copy of an entire article and so where they’d meant to run a story on student pressure they’d printed a feature comprised of Latin placeholder text instead) and outtakes from their headshots and random memes and several cut-ups of Peanuts strips featuring a creatively frustrated Snoopy, tapping away on his typewriter atop his doghouse.
The room is why Louisa is always the first person at Heron meetings: Because there is literally nowhere else on campus that she’d rather be. Now that she’s a coeditor, arriving early seems like the responsible thing to do—but in Louisa’s mind, that’s just icing on the cake. Normally, she uses the quiet time to get a little homework done, but today Louisa can’t focus on anything but the meeting. She runs through the to-do list in her head: Final copy edits with Anjali; layout tweaks with Mia; the finishing touches on their editors’ letter; plans for the announcement at Morning Meeting on Thursday, when their first issue will drop. She always has a slightly caffeinated adrenaline buzz during print week, but this time she feels it more acutely than ever before.
“I had an idea.” Louisa hears Mia before she sees her, their senior art director announcing her arrival in a droll pitch that matches her Doc Martens and her frayed denim.
Louisa first met Mia Tavoletti when she joined the Daily Heron’s writing staff as a freshman. Mia was a sophomore and editor of the Opinion pages, forever filing her stories late and complaining that the name The Daily Heron was stupid because (1) they weren’t a daily, and (2) the Heron/ “Herald” wordplay was the “least original thing in the entire universe.” But the truth was that—even if she showed up late, and even then only to sit at the outer edge of the group with her legs dangling from the table—Mia never missed a meeting. When Riya, a senior and art director at the time, would be stuck
in the Heron room doing layout late the night before deadline, Mia would order a pizza and sit with her.
“What are you doing here?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you’ve literally never been early to a meeting before.”
Mia flings her backpack onto the chair in front of her computer. “That’s because we’ve never done anything this interesting before.”
Louisa rolls her eyes.
“Don’t give me that look. Listen, I know you think this whole enterprise is like some noble civic duty, but I mean—come on.” Mia taps her login into the computer and clicks open InDesign.
“What’s your idea?”
“Right.” Mia spins around in her chair. “So I know that we decided that we weren’t going to include all the data from Macy and Bryce’s survey in the print issue, but I think we should make a graphic of the full results for digital.”
Louisa cocks her head to one side. Usually, the Heron’s digital version is just a PDF of the print format, accessible as a download from a link they distribute the day the issue drops. They were always talking to their faculty adviser, Ms. Doyle, about launching a proper website, but Mrs. Brodie had “reservations about a public-facing enterprise.”
“That would change how we do digital, wouldn’t it?”
Mia nods. “Well, I was thinking about that, because we only have three days.”
“Two, really.” They sent the file to their printer on Wednesday night.
“Sure. Whatever. Anyway, not enough time to build a whole new concept. But, realistically, I have enough time to design a graphic and insert two new pages into the file.”