by Emily Layden
It takes Sloane only a few beats to recognize the music as a Bach suite. She has danced to it a hundred times before, routine practice music. She listens for thirty seconds, then forty-five, her eyes closed to the city around her. She feels the beat inside her ankles and wrists, her head swaying with the rhythm of choreography ingrained like a second language. Her shoes are not made for dancing: They’re heavy and clunky, a thick-soled nineties throwback. But she can make do.
She drops a dollar into the boy’s case as she stretches out her arm, steadying herself, waiting for her cue. And then she begins.
SETTLEMENT REACHED IN ATWATER SUIT
By Amanda Lucas
Updated April 16, 2016, 7:46 A.M.
FALLS VILLAGE, CT—The Atwater School has reached a settlement with the former student seeking damages for the school’s handling of a sexual assault allegation, according to a joint statement released by both parties. The settlement amount owed to Karen Mirro, 38, and the exact terms of the agreement remain undisclosed.
In the statement, representatives for the school made clear its intent to perform a “rigorous evaluation and retooling of (its) practices to ensure an environment that prioritizes respect and healthy boundaries.” Additionally, Atwater announced in January that it has retained the services of Jamison Jennings to perform an assessment of school policies and procedures surrounding misconduct and abuse. The firm’s findings are expected in June.
“Ms. Mirro’s motivation was never a financial one,” Mirro’s attorneys said in the statement. “She was motivated by future generations of Atwater alumnae and alumnae families, who deserve the full protection and compassion of the adults with whom they have bestowed an immense amount of trust.”
Connecticut’s statute of limitations for rape cases—among the most stringent in the nation—prohibited Mirro from bringing a criminal suit against her alleged rapist or the school. In the same statement, Mirro expressed hope that the suit would “bring to light the necessity that Connecticut join a growing number of states in expanding its statute of limitations for crimes involving sexual assault.”
Mirro’s case is one among a proliferation of sexual abuse cases at private schools across the nation, a trend that—victim advocates say—suggests a long-standing culture of institutional nontransparency and retaliatory behavior. Although Title IX has offered protection against sex-based discrimination since 1972, and all states have had mandatory reporting laws since 1967, private and independent schools have historically been subject to a lower level of rigor in their compliance due to lesser oversight than that faced by public schools. Furthermore, federal and state laws have struggled to address the role of power and trust in consent, guidelines that could offer additional protection to college students and high school students above the legal age of consent.
With the promises made in its statement, Atwater hopes to play a role in changing the landscape. “Since its founding, Atwater has been a leader not only in girls’ education but also in teaching and learning broadly. Ms. Mirro has started a conversation from which we will grow and innovate, and we are grateful.”
Prom
By the time the morning light creeps in, Emma has been awake for hours. In fact, she isn’t entirely sure she’s sleeping anymore, period: she spends most nights in long stretches of wide-awake, stare-at-the-ceiling fitfulness, so long and so frequent that when her alarm finally rings it comes as a relief. It occurs to her on those nights she must be sleeping some, surely she falls in and out, a person can’t go this many days without any sleep whatsoever—but her own memory says otherwise.
Next to her, Olivia shifts her weight slightly, nestling herself closer to Emma, who can feel her girlfriend’s warmth on the sheets between them. It has to be said: Olivia is incomparably beautiful. Stop-you-in-your-tracks, normal-people-don’t-look-like-this, sticks-out-even-in-L.A. beautiful. It is the kind of beautiful that flattens a person, distills them only to one thing—an irony, in Olivia’s case, because her beauty is the product of a marriage between the daughter of Korean immigrants and a Black man from South Carolina, a story that is inextricable from the complicated history of America.
But Olivia doesn’t like to talk about that, neither her multiracial heritage nor the entirely original beauty it bequeaths her. When a person tells her how striking she is, Olivia replies with a thin-lipped smile, one that widens the eyes just enough so the complimenter feels as though their opinion is appreciated. She cocks her head, sometimes reaches a hand out to touch their forearm. “Thank you,” she says, and that’s it.
Once, in that shimmering space between when they were not a couple and when they were, Emma asked Olivia, in bed, her hands near her hair but not touching it, how she had learned to take a compliment like that. Everyone Emma knew—herself included—had a way of politely rejecting praise. The first time Emma had heard Olivia merely say thank you it had struck her as rude.
At the time Olivia had smiled at Emma and moved her hands to her face. She held her gaze for a moment, so closely and unblinkingly that Emma could see the shadows of her reflection in Olivia’s irises. And then she kissed her, slowly, until the question evaporated from Emma’s lips. Only later, thinking about the smile, would Emma realize that it was identical to the one Olivia used with a stranger: Thank you.
Tonight, Olivia will be perfect. She will look effortless. She will do her hair and makeup and nails herself and it will be as if she had a professional glam squad. Collier and Addison, who will have actual glam squads come to campus, whose dresses appeared in fashion magazines with the descriptor “Price Upon Request,” will look like the thousands of dollars they’ve spent.
In bed, Emma turns away from Olivia, eyeing where her dress hangs against her closet door. It’s fine. When Olivia picked out her own dress, Emma told her to pick a few options for her, too, and she’d decide from among the narrowed selection. It’s black with a deep V and squared-off shoulders that finish in elbow-length sleeves, sharp and modern. When she told Olivia which one she’d chosen, her girlfriend said simply, “Knew it,” and Emma still isn’t sure what it said about either of them. How much can you tell about a person based on her prom dress?
She untangles herself from the sheets carefully, so as not to disturb Olivia, who could sleep until lunch if anyone ever let her, and tiptoes across her room to her desk, where her phone lies overturned. No messages. Some Snapchat alerts—she hates Snapchat, actually, but since some of the Jamison Jennings interviews were leaked on the platform, she’s worried she might miss out on something if she quits it. She scrolls through Instagram, where no one has posted anything interesting in ten hours. She is in the gentle coma of social media consumption when Olivia sighs across the room, dramatically announcing her awakening.
Emma rotates slowly back toward the bed, placing her phone on her desk behind her. “’Morning, beautiful,” she says. It’s time to start the day.
* * *
At breakfast, they grab their usual table in the corner in the lower dining room. The light is good, and the trickle of girls is slow and quiet. They share the Times, which Atwater has delivered in addition to the Courant because it’s paid for by an alum whose last name is also the name of a major publishing house. They linger over coffee, the paper divided between them like a middle-aged couple in a suburban dramedy, when Collier and Addison make their entrance, both in their college crewnecks (Pomona for Addison, Williams for Collier) and tapered joggers and Birkenstocks with marled camp socks. Olivia drops her paper slightly and gives them a head nod, which the girls perceive as an invitation.
“’Morning,” Addie chimes, maneuvering through the chairs and tables between them like a biblical figure parting the seas. They post up next to Olivia and Emma, Collier resting a hand on Emma’s chair, Addie leaning into the table next to theirs.
“Excited for tonight?” Collier asks with her usual New York indifference, not sounding excited at all. In fact, Collier is from Greenwich, but at Atwater Emma quickly learned that—al
though they are not the same thing—young people from Fairfield County operate as if they are from New York.
Addie doesn’t wait for an answer. “You’re coming to my parents’ place after, right?” The Bowlsbys’ Litchfield estate sits empty most of the year, except for Parents’ Weekend and the occasional visit—they come to a couple of Addison’s tennis matches every fall, and sometimes Addison’s mother “makes a trip out of it,” using Connecticut as a hop-step on her way to Europe. In other words, the home is basically Addison’s, and Addison is therefore the only one in the senior class with the resources (chiefly, a house within driving distance) to throw an actual after-prom party, like they do in the movies or, Emma assumes, regular suburban high schools all over the country. Like they might have at the high school she would have gone to in Cincinnati, had she stayed, had middle school been bearable.
“I think so,” Olivia says, which is news to Emma, because while they’d talked about Addie’s party she wasn’t aware they’d reached an “I think so”–worthy consensus. She flashes Olivia a look but doesn’t say anything else—it’s not worth escalating here, in front of Addie and Collier and the sparsely filled dining hall.
“You have to. You’re not worried about getting in trouble, are you?”
Olivia tilts her chin down and raises an eyebrow, like, Are you fucking kidding me? They all know that after-prom is one of those moments where the school very deliberately turns a blind eye, and that this trend will continue even this year, when the growing consensus has been that the Dean of Students is going a little bit crazy in the face of her inability to catch the person responsible for the Snapchat and the Instagram and the paintings and, most recent, the flyer placed neatly in each of their physical mailboxes that implied that Mrs. Brodie’s relationship to her husband—who is twenty years older and was her professor in graduate school—prevents her from responding to allegations like Karen Mirro’s with sensitivity and empathy.
“Good. I mean, I know you guys always do your own thing, but everybody is dying for you to come. It’s our senior prom!” She gives them each a little squeeze on the shoulder.
“Wild, right?” Olivia says, her mouth curled up in one corner, her delivery just flat enough that only her girlfriend will notice. Emma almost snorts into her coffee.
Addison smiles, unfettered. “Okay, I need caffeine. And eggs! I’ll see you ladies later!” Both she and Collier give a little wave before leaving the table.
“So—we’re going to Addie’s?”
Olivia props her feet against the edge of Emma’s chair and pushes slightly, tilting her own chair onto its back legs. It’s a fidgety behavior that on anyone else would read as immature or adolescent; because Olivia is Olivia, it’s casual, ironic. “I figure we should, right? It’s the right thing to do.”
Olivia is always saying a version of this when Emma doesn’t want to do something. We should make an appearance. We don’t want anyone to be offended. We should go—it’s the right thing to do. They had their first real fight about exactly this, last year when Emma didn’t want to go to the winter luau because, in her opinion, it was stupid and heteronormative, busing boys in from Westminster and Salisbury for a pool party—but Olivia had been firm on making an appearance.
“I’m a Peer Ed,” she’d explained, her voice even, her eyes unblinking, standing in Emma’s doorframe in a high-cut one-piece swimsuit and frayed jean shorts: “I have to go.”
No you don’t, not technically, Emma had thought.
“It’s important that I participate in school bonding activities,” Olivia said, before turning on her heels and striding out of Whitney. Emma joined her, sheepishly, an hour later, sidling up next to Olivia as she tangled her ankles in the deep end.
“I’m sorry,” she’d said. “I know this is important to you.”
“It’s not important to me,” Olivia said, her tone betraying the slightest edge of frustration. “I just have to do things like this. I have to try to be a part of the community.”
“For Proctor, I know.” Emma knew that Olivia had her eyes on being named Proctor, and although to Emma it seemed like a foregone conclusion—everybody loved Olivia—Olivia wasn’t taking any chances. But Olivia just shook her head, and neither of them said anything else about it.
A year later, Emma knows that this is less a bug of Olivia’s personality and more of a feature. Even if she does not particularly prize her friendships with Collier and Addison (for example), she does value her position at the top of all of Atwater’s various hierarchies—and has a keen sense of how to maintain her status. “We only have a month left here,” she’s saying, her coffee cradled in one hand. She has this particular way of holding it: with the base of the mug resting flat in the palm of one hand, the fingertips of the other hand dancing around the rim. It’s delicate, oddly elegant, inimitable.
“Don’t lean back like that,” Emma says, rolling her eyes. “You’ll fall and crack your head open. Didn’t your mother ever tell you that?” Dr. Anderson is a literal brain surgeon at Stanford Med. Although Olivia likes to pretend that she did not have the same kind of immensely privileged upbringing that Collier and Addison had, the truth is that she grew up in a sunlit craftsman in Atherton, with a plunge pool in the backyard and dinners served al fresco, under conical cypresses and craggy oaks and a lemon tree that even occasionally bore fruit.
Olivia lifts her feet from Emma’s chair and tips forward slightly, easing the front legs of her chair back on the ground. “She was too busy operating on strangers’ brains to worry about mine.” This is not true. Olivia’s parents, despite their very busy professional lives—Olivia’s father is also a surgeon at Stanford—are endlessly attentive to both Olivia and her older brother, Anthony.
“So what’s the plan for the rest of the day? I figure we have to start getting ready around fourish, which would give us”—here she looks over Emma’s shoulder to the clock that hovers above the dining hall’s back door—“six hours of uninterrupted Netflix.”
Emma swirls the remainder of her coffee, watches it dance up the sides of her mug. “Actually—”
“What, you got big plans today?” One of the most wonderful things about Olivia is that she could spend all day, every day with Emma. She doesn’t need alone time, has never needed “space,” has a knack for coexisting, like it’s some kind of inherited gene. Look, she’d said when Emma sent her deposit to Michigan, you can fly from Detroit to New York for less than $200 round trip. It is also terrifying, a thing that makes Emma feel the tiniest bit guilty, somewhere deep inside her, in a place she doesn’t visit very often.
“Well, I was hoping to steal a few hours today to finish my econ project…” She trails off. It’s a version of the truth, anyway.
Olivia cocks her head. “So, how about you finish your project while I watch Friends in your bed?” This runs right up against one of the few things they’ve ever fought about, and Emma feels a pang of guilt at the fresh reminder that Olivia so willingly ceded her ground. It’s Emma’s room that has become theirs; Olivia has a single, too, but because she’s a Proctor her room is in Lathrop. Emma bristled at spending the night in the underclasswomen dorm; something about the obvious curiosity of the freshmen, the way they allowed their eyes to linger as they walked past Olivia’s open door, both girls curled into one another in Olivia’s bed, made Emma feel like an animal in a zoo.
“It’s good for them to see a happy, healthy—and, yeah, not straight—relationship!” Olivia had argued, somewhat indisputably.
“But,” Emma had said, running her hands up Olivia’s inner thigh, moving her lips toward her neck, “I just have a really hard time doing this when there are a bunch of fourteen-year-olds around.”
Olivia laughed. “Oh, really?” she asked, and then every night after check-in made the walk across the bowl to Whitney, even in the rain, even in the February cold.
Now Emma just hesitates.
“I know, I know—me, your bed: it’s so distracting.” Olivia smiles.<
br />
Emma laughs, relieved, grateful for the out. “It’s true. I feel like I should put in a few hours in one of the library carrels.”
“I don’t know how you get any work done in those. It’s like solitary confinement.”
Olivia is right—it’s not the pin-drop silence of the carrels that Emma loves but rather the fact that there is hardly ever another person using them. The hardest thing to find at Atwater has always been true privacy; in the perpetual dimness of the library stacks, a person has it in troves.
“Is that okay? I can finish my project in a few hours, then join you for a few episodes of Friends before we start getting ready?”
Olivia stands, stretching her arms above her head, gazing out the bay window in front of them. When she turns back to Emma, still sitting, Emma is struck by how unbothered she is, totally at ease. She leans over, one hand on Emma’s shoulder, and touches her lips to Emma’s forehead. “Sure thing,” she says. “You know where to find me.”
* * *
The carrels are arranged in small diamond-shaped clusters, four to a set. Emma chooses the quad at the far end of the floor and sets up her work space in the cubicle that positions her back—and her computer screen—to the wall. Even in an empty room, she doesn’t like the possibility of someone reading over her shoulder. She does a quick look around before tapping into Tumblr.
She joined Tumblr in eighth grade, before she came to Atwater, when she knew she was gay but wasn’t ready to say so in the real world. (It would be two more years before she’d say it out loud to her parents, armed with a photograph of Olivia, tall and deeply tanned on the sands of a beach in Santa Cruz with her hair blowing in the ocean breeze. “This is my girlfriend,” she’d say, turning her phone screen toward her mother, who would sigh: “Well, this is the time to figure these things out, I suppose,” adding, after a beat, “She’s very pretty, though.”) In the space between her middle school swim season in the fall and when her club team picked up in January, she took the bus home, where she first met Laurie. Laurie dressed like a punk-Goth but in a way that suggested she was borrowing from an archetype: she wore band T-shirts and combat boots but never once did Emma catch her listening to the Ramones or Green Day. She liked to write poetry in the notes on her iPhone and upload it to her Tumblr in a typewriter-style font. The afternoons that December stretched long and languorous, and one day, bored and curious, Emma logged in, too.