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CHAPTER 1
There had been no major incidents — at least, nothing of the sort I imagined could happen my first week at Vandenberg School for Boys (no salmonella outbreak, no still-lit cigarette imprudently disposed in a wastebasket, no menacingly quiet freshman with a handgun). Then I caught Christopher Jordan with his hand down his pants. I didn't mean to see it. I certainly didn't want to see it. But I saw it nevertheless: the flaxen-haired second year from Roanoke, prostrate and panting on his twin bed.
Beating the monkey — that's what the Vandenberg boys called it. The first time I'd heard that term used there —"Dude, I beat the monkey every night to those tit pics Cassie sent me," said one guy to his friend two spots before me in the chicken-fajita line — I was brought back to Camp Barbara Anne, to lying in my bottom bunk and spotting the Magic Marker sketch of a penis and testicles on the bedpost (two bulging eyes and a big long nose, I'd initially thought) and recognizing it distantly as something I'd heard about, something I should know about but would probably never fully grasp. As I've spent the majority of my life pretending to understand things I do not — Jackson Pollock, 401(k) plans, Buddhism, euthanasia — the sight of Christopher Jordan beating the monkey just reminded me once more how little I understood.
I'd asked Kip once if he did it a lot. He'd said, "Imogene. I'm a guy," accompanied by a look that said duh.
The rock music screaming through the door of Christopher Jordan's fourth-story single room in Slone House had made me stop to knock — it was quiet hours, after all. My co-apprentice Rajah Patel was supposed to accompany whatever girl was assigned to dorm rounds each night (the injustice of being the sole male apprentice, I suppose), but we'd decided instead to split up the building by floors — he one and two, I three and four — to get the job done quickly. I'd been too relieved to be on my own to worry about bending the rules. I never knew what to say to Raj; his gaze was too intense, as though he could see right through your clothes and maybe even your skin, too, and he seemed able to provide only unwelcome facts and opinions. On the first day I met him, he gestured to my face and said, "Did you know freckles are really just bunches of melanocytes that become darker when exposed to the sun?" I said, "Oh," feeling then that every already-abhorred freckle now bulged from my face like pulsating skin pustules.
I had already been up and down the hall of the third floor, passing by half-ajar doors behind which I could see the golden heads of boys bent over desks composing essays or poring through textbooks. One guy — bless him! — fiddled with a chess board, playing against an invisible opponent. My heart swelled for each and every one of them, for the uniform shirts pressed and hanging on the back of their desk chairs for tomorrow, for the sticks of Tom's of Maine deodorant and bottles of Drakkar Noir cologne and tubes of acne cream cluttering their dressers, for the patchouli-and-sweat-and-gardenias smell of boy wafting from each room.
I couldn't hear Christopher Jordan's response to my knock, if there even was one, and I only opened the door a crack (no steppingfoot into a student's dormitory room), but that was enough. As though stunned by a camera shutter, I stared, immobilized by the sight of him in the small gash of light from his bedside table lamp, his brutish grunts, the sound like a plastic spoon churning a thick batter — no, a plunger unclogging a stalwart toilet — still audible above the awful metallic shriek of his music. He caught my eye before I could catch myself, before I could even realize what I was seeing. "Whoops" I heard myself say, as I would if I'd accidentally stepped on someone's shoes from behind or tripped going up the stairs. Whoops! It's a word I'd never will myself to say but somehow always manages to emerge from my parted lips in moments of surprised indignity.
"Mother — Jesus!" He jumped as if he'd been shocked by an electrical outlet and slapped a pillow over his lap. "Don't you know how to fucking kn —"
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry ..."
In the dim light, his eyes were coin slots, his mouth a jeering sliver. Authority shifted.
"Who the fuck are you anyway?"
"I —" I was six years older than him, yet not feeling nearly old enough. "If you could just turn down ..."
Christopher Jordan smiled the smile of a boy — a man — who probably knew the words to say to get a girl to undress. "Sure thing." He reached over to his desk and adjusted the volume on his laptop, pillow still balanced precariously on his lap. "Better?"
I couldn't speak; I nodded instead.
"Would you mind shutting the door behind you?"
I shut the door behind me. Before I had even taken a few steps away, I could hear that he was at it again. As I continued on, I fixed my gaze on the emergency exit door at the end of the hallway, afraid of what else I might see.
Raj met me outside the building. "All good?" he asked.
I nodded. I feared that if I opened my mouth, I might've admitted that I had irrevocably fucked up within my first week at Vandenberg, proving to myself and everyone else that I didn't belong there. Either that, or I'd puke.
* * *
Dorm rounds was just one of the daily duties I began in that first week. (That first week — how long ago it seems!) Other duties included supervising study period, monitoring the dining hall, helping to coach the varsity lacrosse team, and acting as the Honors History assistant teacher for first years — first years, that's what freshmen were called, like it was Hogwarts.
Study period was easy. Sometimes the first years would laugh and poke each other over their open biology textbooks, but just give them a hard stare — their balls would shrivel like leaves, and they'd shut the fuck up. At least that's what Chapin said, though it certainly hadn't worked on Christopher Jordan.
Dining hall duty was also mostly benign. I had to make sure no one stole an extra serving of French fries or banana pudding and that the trays were cleared before they were stacked in the dish room. Rumor had it among the apprentices that a few years ago, a couple of second years had started a food fight, splattering creamed corn and broccoli casserole — Thursday's dinner special — on the mahogany-paneled walls and twenty-foot-high Palladian windows. I hoped that wouldn't happen when I was on duty.
My first lacrosse practice was the day before the Christopher Jordan incident. It was tradition for the older boys to attempt to pants the newcomers to the team — the "virgins"— as they ran around the field with their sticks. A slight third year named Clarence Howell got his pants ripped down by team captain Duggar Robinson as they ran an overhead shooting drill. He wore a pair of grayish briefs, which set the other boys howling and made me feel strangely sad.
The best part of that week was chapel. On that first Sunday — as they did on the first Sunday of every new semester — the boys donned suit jackets and ties and filed into Morris Chapel, first years in the front and fourth years in the back. (We're nondenominational, the Vandenberg pamphlets all boasted. We are a spiritual campus, not a religious one.) From the sidewall bench under the stained-glass windows, I watched as the Chosen Boy from each class — selected carefully by the faculty members each August based on leadership, scholarship, and philanthropy — strode solemnly up the center aisle towards the pulpit with a lit candle in his hand. (When I asked Kip if he'd ever been a Chosen Boy, he said they'd asked him his sophomore year and he'd turned them down. He then proceeded to cackle for a solid minute; I'm still not sure whether it was a joke.) They stood in order from youngest to the oldest, from the baby-faced schoolboy in front to the muscled mammoth trailing the pack, an ages-and-stages development chart from the boys' edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves. Not a whisper or a vibrating cell phone was to be heard. They lined up before Dean Harvey, headmaster of Vandenberg School for Boys, with their candles flickering beneath their chins.
Dean Harvey spoke, his voice a ringing bell through the rafters. His hanging jowls jiggled like a bloodhound's, but the blue eyes behind his glasses were clear and wise. "Do you seek to integrate intellectual excellence with moral commitment, to concern yourself with mind as well as character, to value knowledge and transcendent values above all else?"
"Oh yes, oh yes we do," the four boys chorused back obediently.
He raised his eyes to the room and spread his arms. "And how about you, pupils of Vandenberg?"
With the groaning of benches and rustling of jacket sleeves, the boys all stood and sang, in almost perfect unison, "Oh yes, oh yes we do."
I mouthed the words with them, feeling pride and love swell inside me, feeling as though my heart might beat out of my chest.
* * *
On my walk alone back to the Hovelina House — Raj slept in a single room in Perkins Hall, a fourth-years' dormitory — I mentally rehearsed the story. Yeah, so I opened the door — just so I could ask him to turn down his music, you know — and there he was, masturbating! Like he was brushing his teeth! I thought maybe if I said the story out loud it would become funny, a joke. Maybe my stomach would untwist from its knots.
"Imogene!" I heard ReeAnn cry as soon as my key turned in the lock. She sat at the kitchen table reading a book on the lifestyle and habits of Parisian women, her pudgy pink face eager as a department store makeup consultant. "How was rounds duty?" ReeAnn Finkelstein, in the few days I had known her at that point, seemed to always want to know how things were. How was my run this morning? How had I slept last night? How would I like to try her new Maximizing High Volume Lip Plumper?
"Okay," I said, deciding in that moment that I wasn't going to tell the story, now or ever.
"Okay!" she parroted, nodding, grinning.
I tried to smile back. My lips stuck to my teeth. "I have work to do."
The Hovel, a renovated old horse barn tucked behind the administrative building, had been the home of all of the Vandenberg teaching apprentices for the last dozen years. ReeAnn, Chapin, and I slept upstairs, while Babs Lawrence (a vegan and a Christian whose alopecia forced her to wear a horrible thick-banged human-hair wig) and the Woods twins (who owned a collective fifty pairs of Tory Burch shoes and weighed a collective one hundred and eighty pounds) had bedrooms downstairs. I headed up the back stairwell, and on the way to my bedroom, I passed by the open door of Chapin's room. She lay sprawled on her paisley-print comforter, texting with her phone held above her face. Soft acoustic music crooned from the laptop at the foot of her bed. I paused in the doorframe.
"Hi, Imogene." She didn't look away from her phone as she said this.
Around Chapin Dunn, I was struck dumb, like a boy with a crush. She wasn't what I would consider beautiful; her nose was long and severe, her frame bony and curveless, her dark hair styleless and often unwashed in a knot on top of her head. Her brows were overgrown, her nails little stubs, her clothes seemingly thrift-store castoffs. But unlike me, who felt the need to apologize for everything — ingrown hairs on my legs, eating a second cookie after dinner, the splotchy brown birthmark on my hipbone that Kip would nickname the Cheetah Spot — Chapin was unapologetic. Plus, her dad was some hedge fund honcho; being moneyed made everything she did permissible.
"Did you have a nice day, Imogene." This came out in a yawn, less a question than an obligation.
"Yeah, it was fine."
"Glad to hear it." A beat of silence followed. She finally turned to face me, one thick brow raised in an anything-else-I-can-do-for-you manner.
I hesitated, then took a step into her bedroom. "I have a question."
She reached down with her big toe, its nail painted an electric green, and changed the song on her computer. She sat up and turned to me curiously.
"Have you ever seen or heard anything ... inappropriate, you know, being around all these boys?"
Chapin smiled, a secret smile that wasn't for me, but rather for some unseen audience. I felt sure she was looking at the spot between my eyebrows, the spot where that morning there'd been the telltale tender bump of an impending pimple, a bump that I'd picked and poked and then coated with my little pot of beige cover up. "Imogene," she said. "We're twenty-two-year-old women surrounded by a bunch of fourteen-to eighteen-year-old boys. Inappropriate things are bound to happen."
I choked up a laugh.
"You haven't spent much time around guys."
She wasn't asking; Chapin knew. I shrugged, then nodded because she was right. I didn't have any brothers, and all of my male cousins lived in Wisconsin and were already in their thirties. My dad wasn't exactly the paradigm of young masculinity; he wore fleece house slippers and spent his mornings watching birds through a pair of binoculars on the back deck. Even in high school I never had any guy friends. Having realized I was awkward at a young age, I had retreated early on to the chorus room to be among the girls who were similarly challenged in determining what to do with their hands or faces when boys were around. In college I may have begun to kiss them and touch them (always sedated with liquor, always feeling like a made-for-TV-movie actress, always pretending their hairy chests and hard buttocks and probing appendages were part of an exhibit in a strange science museum), but they were just bodies; there was nothing, I'd come to realize, as impersonal as a body.
And yet, the only way I could handle touching someone else's body was to pretend I wasn't in my own.
I could see the next question forming on her lips, the question that had been asked by my parents, by my younger sister Joni, by my academic advisor at Buffalo State, by my friends, by my nosy neighbor Mrs. Harrington, by myself as I flipped through the Vandenberg catalogs and stared out my window and watched the neighborhood boys curse and shove one another and scramble after a soccer ball in the street — Why this? Why Vandenberg? Why now?
It's a great opportunity, I would tell them.
The truth: I didn't want to teach girls. I'd visited a few coed independent schools in Westchester and Connecticut during my application process, sitting dully in the back of the classrooms like a potted plant, and I'd watched. I stared as the female students tucked golden hair behind ears adorned with diamond studs and crossed bony ankles beneath their desks. They sat poised and pouting like grown women, though some hadn't even developed breasts yet. Sometimes I caught the eyes of the girls in the mirrors of their compacts or the reflections of their cell phone screens — always primping, always keeping tabs on each other, on themselves — and I could tell without even speaking to them what they thought of me: Poor. Timid. Plain. I feared them, those privileged girls. I hated what I saw in their gaze, hated how small they made me feel.
But the male students on these visits: They never made me feel small. When I checked into the main office at one school, the secretary asked her student intern if he would mind leading me to the classroom, and he stood and smiled at me and said, "This beautiful woman? Not in the least bit," and suddenly I was transported to an alternate universe, one in which I was back in high school but cool, coveted. I liked the ease in the boys' bodies as they sauntered through the halls and settled loosely in their chairs. And I liked that when they looked at me, they didn't see unfashionable shoes or flat hair but instead a person, a woman — maybe even an attractive one.
* * *
Vandenberg School for Boys, founded in Scarsdale, New York, in 1913, was steeped in honor, tradition, and many, many rules. Vandenberg boys were expected to dress in navy blue or gray dress slacks, white or powder blue dress shirts with a tie, solid black footwear, and the uniform school sweater or school blazer. Vandenberg boys were expected to be clean-shaven and neatly groomed, with nails cut in neat half moons and hair in no danger of festering into that reprehensible mop-like surfer style. For all intents and purposes, Vandenberg boys appeared as deferential as geishas, each one striding purposefully about campus with a thirst for knowledge and a golden halo hovering above his perfectly coiffed head.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Indecent"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Corinne Sullivan.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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