All Girls

by Emily Layden

  The first time he slides his hand from her lower back to underneath her waistband, Chloe takes one of her own hands away from where it moves across Aidan’s shoulder blade and gently adjusts his, back onto the soft curve in the middle of her back.

  “Come on,” Aidan half whispers, pulling her closer. His hips grind against hers, and under the stiffness of his jeans she feels him harden. She lets out a kind of maniacal giggle.

  “Someone will see—”

  Aidan’s mouth is on her neck now, and his hands work in opposite directions: One grips her ass while the other works its way up her shirt. She writhes against him, trying to wriggle space between their bodies without embarrassing either one of them. When his hand reaches the bottom of her bra, his fingers crawl frantically over the mound of her breast before squeezing, hard enough that she reflexively curves forward, her spine flexing convexly, creating an empty space between their torsos.

  “Sorry—you just feel so good—”

  “It’s okay—” She pauses as Aidan slides his mouth across hers, moving from one side of her neck to the other. She kisses him back, like she means it but urgently, changing her strategy from resistance to something she hopes resembles into it but not right now. She will promise him it will come later.

  She tries to pull away again, but Aidan plays it like a game, some kind of retreat-to-move-forward strategy. She feels the dried husks of corn tickling against her back and becomes aware of her surroundings—of the juxtaposition between their isolation at this dead end and the openness of it all, the dusk settling in above them, darkening their alleyway. Anybody can see them. Nobody will.

  Aidan’s hands move inside her underwear, the thong she’d picked out excitedly this morning, and as he slips a finger inside her—no one had ever done that to her before—he exhales loudly and whispers, “I want you to get wet for me.”

  When she thinks about it later, she will focus on this moment, her absurd lack of knowledge and understanding, how she thought that when he said that it was something she could or should have willfully conjured up. She’ll think about how he slid his finger in and out of her repeatedly, and how it would be years before a man would use his hands inside her the right way.

  She lets him move inside her for a little, and at some point he takes her hand and places it on top of his crotch, and something—had she seen it in a movie? Read it in a book?—tells her to sort of roughly massage the mound that she assumes to be his hardened penis.

  Each time they progress, she runs the calculus: Let him do this, get it over with. For a little while, she thinks she can still fairly call it a hookup.

  And then they’re on the ground, Aidan on top of her, and he’s sliding down his pants just enough, and Chloe says that she isn’t on birth control and Aidan says, “Don’t worry, I’ll pull out,” and then he’s pumping inside her, and she tries moving her hips too because it’s so fucking uncomfortable—it hurts—but it’s the wrong way, or not what she is supposed to do, because Aidan stops, mid-thrust, and moves an arm so that his hand can anchor her pelvis. She has absolutely no idea how long it lasts. Time protracts. When he pulls out he makes a moaning kind of exhale, like it is a struggle, and pushes himself back enough so that he can come into the inches of ground just below her, between her legs. Chloe looks away, at the gray sky above them and the way that, from this angle, the corn bends into arches.

  After he finishes, Aidan lifts himself up and off Chloe, into a standing position from a push-up, his boxers and pants tangled around his ankles. She doesn’t want to see it, but when he turns slightly to wriggle into his pants she sees his penis—really for the first time, she thinks wildly—half-erect, cast in the shadow of dusk. It seems both bigger and smaller than she thought it was, smaller than it felt inside of her but bigger—more confrontational, more assertive—than she had imagined one to be. Uglier; alien-like.

  As Aidan pieces himself together, it occurs to Chloe that she should, too, and arches her back to give herself enough room to pull her jeans up from where they strain around her knees, keeping her legs as wide as she can to avoid the place where Aidan came into the ground. As she stands Aidan turns toward her, moves a step in her direction, and Chloe freezes: The muscles that flank the vertebrae in her neck tighten, her breath catches in her chest. He brings his face so close to hers that their foreheads touch. In the shadowy half dark of the maze she can see his mouth stretch into a kind of sleepy smile, his eyelids heavy and half-closed.

  “We should get back,” he says.

  Leaving the maze is easy; Aidan either remembers exactly the route they traveled on the way in and manages to navigate the reverse, or perhaps it is just not as complicated as Chloe had previously considered it. She walks a half step behind him, and they do not speak, not as they cross the shadow that angles between the two walls of reedy corn husks at the start, back into the late-afternoon light; not as they cross the street back onto campus, the pavement dusty and strewn with dried leaves; not even as they crest the top of the hill next to Trask that looks down into the Bowl, eyeing the crowd for their original group: Carter-and-Luke and Brie. As they walk, Chloe feels a kind of thick dampness between her legs; she tries to discreetly look down at her pants, panicked that whatever it is might be visible through her jeans.

  The scene around them as they cross the Bowl doesn’t really dawn on either one of them until they reach their group, which has sort of Venn diagrammed into two: Carter-and-Luke and three other boys stand with their shoulders turned in to one another, a few feet off from Brie, who’s joined by Sloane and Blake and Kyla. Each one of them—each of the boys, each of the girls—has their phone out, but they lean toward one another, glancing from their own screen to the one clawed in the palm of the girl next to them. Looking around, Chloe realizes that this is the case across the Bowl: All around them, her classmates are gripped by their screens in a way that suggests something more than a casual and distracted scroll through Instagram. It’s something out of a horror movie, where Chloe is the hero not yet aware of the impending doom; something out of an early 2000s teen movie, where the protagonist doesn’t understand why the cafeteria’s gone quiet. Chloe’s stomach drops, and she is gripped with the certainty that what captivates her classmates is a video of her, immobile on the ground, Aidan thrusting in and out. It seems entirely plausible that someone watched, hidden in the forest of stalks.

  Brie looks up from her screen and catches Chloe’s eye, and with one hand waves her over, her palm flapping hurriedly, her eyes wide. Chloe’s heart thuds between her ears. She considers running back to her room without a word, unable to confront whatever dictates Brie’s urgent waving. But her roommate reaches across the remaining feet between them and grabs Chloe’s upper arm, pulling her across the expanse and into their circle of friends. “You have to see this,” she hisses, and angles her phone toward her friend.

  It’s an Instagram post—there’s the tidy, upright cursive at the top of the screen, the tiny circular icon to the left—but because it does not immediately seem to be a cell phone video of her on her back in the corn maze, and because she is actively working to slow her thundering pulse, Chloe has to review the content in her friend’s hand several times before it really lands.

  Centered within the two-inch square are several lines of formal-looking text, typed in a professional sans-serif font, capped on each end by quote marks.

  “I think that even a young woman needs to understand what she’s getting herself into. I don’t mean to imply that it’s her fault, of course, but I think that it is our responsibility, as educators, to help our girls learn to identify and avoid dangerous situations. For example, I never walk in a parking garage alone at night.”

  Maybe it’s the rhythm of the speech, the comma clause as educators, that gives it away. But Chloe knows who the quote belongs to before Brie speaks:

  “Can you believe her? I mean, I know it was, like, a different time, but…”

  “Do we know for sure that it’s Brodie?”
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  Brie snaps her head back, directing her focus away from the screen and onto her friend. “Did you read the caption? You never read the caption!” she groans.

  In 2005, a student at the all-girls Tipton School in western Massachusetts accused her former teacher of rape. Asked by local media to comment on the story, Atwater’s then-newly appointed Head of School Patricia Brodie implied that the student herself—who, in the course of the investigation, admitted to pursuing a relationship with her twenty-six-year-old teacher—was in part to blame for her trauma.

  Perhaps Mrs. Brodie’s views have changed. Or perhaps she’s simply learned that it’s better, with beliefs like this, to not comment at all.

  And then Chloe notices one more thing, the puzzle pieces clicking into place.

  “Wait,” she says, her voice a half whisper: “This is Atwater’s Insta?” She places an index finger on the icon above the post, pointing at the minuscule drawing of a heron in flight, navy wings spread wide against a fog-blue background. After the yard signs, Atwater had done a slapdash rebrand, wiping the tiny architectural sketch of the clock tower from its logo and replacing it with the school mascot.

  Brie nods, slowly.

  “How?”

  “I’m sure the password is something stupid obvious, like ATWATER1813 or something.” 1813, the year the school was founded: before the end of slavery, before women could vote, before two world wars. A planet ago.

  This crystallizes for Chloe what lurked just beneath the surface of her understanding. Of course the school’s social media manager didn’t post this; someone hacked into the account.

  “I wonder if it was the same person who leaked the newspaper,” Brie adds. Louisa wasn’t supposed to tell anyone that Mia hadn’t really caused the leak, but she’d told Anjali, who told the rest of the staff, including Brie, and thus the news that the Heron’s senior art director had taken the fall for a mysterious vigilante had made its way to Chloe. “Makes sense, right? It’s sort of a similar … approach. Journalistic.”

  “Do you think it’s real?” Chloe asks. “The quote, I mean. How do we know she really said this?”

  Brie shrugs. “Louisa already ran off to search for the original source. I’m not sure how many local newspapers keep digital archives from 2005, but—I mean, if it is real, whoever posted this was able to find it.” She pauses. “But you’ve gotta admit … it does sound like something she would say, doesn’t it? I know she’s supposed to be an advocate for women and girls or whatever, but…” Brie trails off; Chloe nods.

  She knows what her friend is saying. It’s not just the vague corporate-speak and the noncommittal couching: it’s the slight condescension, too, of an adult who does not understand the lives of the people she’s serving.

  Chloe pulls her own phone from her back pocket—she is briefly surprised and grateful that it stayed put when her jeans were circled around the bottoms of her thighs, just above her kneecaps, so that she couldn’t move her legs any wider or adjust her hips beneath Aidan—and thumbs into her own Instagram. She reads the post again, this time in her own feed, a question buzzing inside her brain like white noise. A young woman needs to understand what she’s getting herself into. There is Aidan’s hand on her waist, his drooping smile, his smirking insistence that the path turned to the left beyond the shadows.

  “Hey—” Brie says, suddenly, sharply, her neck straightened away from her screen, her chin pointed directly at Chloe. She lowers her voice: “So how’d it go? With Aidan?”

  Chloe looks up at her inexhaustible roommate, the way her blond curls shimmer in the afternoon glow, her one imperfection a spot of crowding on the front-right side of her mouth, her canine tooth slipped half behind an incisor.

  “You chickened out, didn’t you?” Brie asks, searching Chloe’s face.

  Without thinking, Chloe nods. It is an irrevocable answer, and so it becomes the story she will tell until college, when a new friend will ask—between shots of cheap vodka, the liquor searing across the inside of their skulls—when Chloe lost her virginity, and she’ll say: Sixteen. A regular age; the safe but true answer—her friend suspects nothing: Me too! she says. At thirty, she will try again: first to the man she loves, then to a therapist. But she will find that she has hidden the exact contours of the story deep inside a slowly shifting narrative, like a jagged rock smoothed by the tide, and it will be easier to keep the edges blunted: to let her class ring gather dust in the back of her jewelry box, to tell her classmates at Alumnae Weekends that she lost it in a move, and sure, yes, one day she’ll get around to ordering a new one.

  To: erin.palmiere@reginaventures.com

  From: erin.palmiere@reginaventures.com

  Date: Nov 27, 2015, 9:16 A.M.

  Subject: A Message from the Board

  Dear Atwater Students, Friends, Family, and Alumnae:

  I hope that this email finds you enjoying a restful Thanksgiving break, in the company of family and loved ones. To those of you with whom I have not previously corresponded, a brief introduction: My name is Erin Palmiere, and I am President of the Atwater Board of Trustees. I am also the CEO of a venture capital firm, Regina Ventures, and mom to two daughters, Elspeth and Emilia. It is not my intention in reaching out now to disrupt that valuable family time, but rather to provide you with space to process, so that we might all return to school with the clarity of a respite.

  The Board of Trustees has retained the services of the consulting firm Jamison Jennings to conduct an evaluation of Atwater’s policies and procedures regarding sexual misconduct and sexual abuse. While this evaluation is separate from the facts outlined in the Hartford Courant article dated September 26, we understand that the community will draw connections where it sees fit. If anything, the events outlined in the story have provided us with an opportunity to interrogate our school’s policies and procedures to be sure that they are both ever-evolving and consistently aligned with best practices.

  In my work as CEO of Regina Ventures, I hear dozens of pitches daily from aspiring companies. Each one promises to be the first of its kind: an innovation, something that fills a hole in the market. Pitches are designed to demonstrate what a product can do. But I always look to the future: What will you do, I ask these new inventors and innovators, to ensure that you keep innovating? Companies that succeed are those that find the intrinsic motivation to improve.

  From its inception, Atwater has been a leader in girls’ education. We have remained in this position of leadership not by resting on our laurels but rather via the constant pursuit of betterment; just as we ask our girls to grow, so we must ask the same of ourselves. The retention of Jamison Jennings is a part of this endeavor.

  In the coming weeks, representatives from Jamison Jennings will visit campus and establish a line of communication with the community. I hope you will provide them with the same degree of honesty and openness with which I have been met as President of the Board.

  Gratefully yours,

  Erin Palmiere

  Vespers

  The whiteboard above the lifeguard chair spells out their morning workout: four hundred warm-up, 1-2-4-8-4-2-1, six by fifty starting every two minutes, four hundred cool-down. It shouldn’t take more than forty minutes, Celeste Li thinks, if she’s honest with her rest. In the lane ahead of her, Josie—the only other Asian girl on the swim team—is already warming up, and so Celeste begins easing into the water. She likes the way her arms flex as she dips, the way her back arches so that the fabric of her suit stretches taut across her rib cage.

  Celeste is not good at swimming, but it’s the only sport she knows a thing about, the only lessons offered for free at the local BCYF when she was five or six. She’d wanted to play tennis—“We can’t afford it!” her father snapped when she nagged one time too many, angrily shoving his lunch into the small cooler he brought to his job as a call center representative—and still she feels the occasional pang of longing when she walks by the Atwater courts on a spring afternoon, the smack-pop rhythm o
f a good volley one she’ll never compose herself. At school she swims because it’s an Atwater requirement to participate in a type of “movement” each semester, and school-sanctioned sports are more socially acceptable than the PE classes Ms. McCredie cobbles together: Zumba, Insanity, pickleball, badminton. In the water she knows she should be thinking about the particular rotation of her shoulder, about how she isn’t bringing her arm across her body quite enough, but instead she counts how many strokes she can go without breathing. She loses track of her laps. She decides to stop when Josie stops, because their coach, Joe, considers them roughly the same speed—probably he considers them roughly the same person—and so won’t question the timing.

  In the locker room, Celeste’s teammates chatter away, their post-workout endorphin highs mingling with the anticipation of the upcoming winter break and Friday’s Vespers.

  “Hey Emma,” Brie Feldman says as she detangles her mess of curly blond hair. “Has Olivia picked out an outfit yet? I could totally see her wearing a kind of sleek cut-for-a-lady tux.”

  Emma pops her head around the bank of lockers between them, an eyebrow raised. “So because she’s a lesbian she has to dress like a man?”

  “No, because she has a body like a Victoria’s Secret model.”

  “It’s true,” Emma nods.

  “Is she worried that Banks is going to censor her jokes? Because of everything?” For a week or two in the wake of the hacking of the Atwater Instagram, they’d wondered whether Vespers would be allowed to happen at all: there was a rumor—Celeste didn’t know who started it—that the school planned to hold the holiday pageant hostage until someone confessed to the misdeed. But then the email came from Linda Paulsen as it always did (VESPERS INSTRUCTIONS: PLEASE READ) and the question of whether anyone among them would martyr themselves for the revelry of the student body ceased to be relevant.