I passed Couchman, which I remembered as the grimmest, grungiest dorm, but it must have gotten a recent face-lift. The stones looked shockingly clean in the floodlights, the fire escape new and sleek. Early freshman year, I used to sit on the lip of the old rusty one to get afternoon sun and study in peace. Maybe it was odd to perch on an appendage of a boys’ dorm, but it seemed logical at the time. This was where, late that fall, Dorian Culler shouted down from his window, asked if I was there to stalk him. He thought it was so funny that it became the theme of all our interactions, the next three and a half years. In front of his friends he’d say things like “Bodie, I got your letter, but it was weird. Guys, she wrote me this ten-page letter about how she wants my man meat. Her phrase, not mine. Bodie, you need to get it together.” Needless to say, I’d never done anything to Dorian other than get involuntarily paired with him a few times in French class. Or he’d say, “Bodie, it was not cool of you to follow my family to London. I’m in my hotel bed and I hear this moaning from underneath, and everything smells like tuna fish, and I look under the bed and there’s Bodie pleasuring herself.”
It was the kind of joke that left no room for response. I could never figure out if he thought he was flirting, or if I was so far below him on the social scale that this was pure mockery. I tried to play along once—said, feebly, “Yes, I did crawl in your window; it was to ask you to Spring Dance, and I’ll die if you don’t say yes”—but he only laughed bigger and said to his friends, “See? I should report her! Jesus, Bodie, this is textbook sexual harassment.”
I was halfway across South Bridge when I slipped, found myself plunging forward, knew how hard my chin would hit the ice—but then it was my elbows and forearms that hit instead, and I lay facedown for a second, my brain jostled, my bones shaken. I felt, oddly, humiliated, even though no one had seen. Only all the specters of my youth.
It jarred me for another reason, too, a stupid one: I was supposed to have come back to Granby invulnerable. Fifteen-year-old Bodie might have fallen on the ice, might have been breakable or broken, might have drunk herself to sleep one night by the Kurt shrine and woken up half-frozen, terrified she could have killed herself, wondering if this had actually been her intention. But forty-year-old Bodie had her act together, had long been in control of her body and mind. And here was the hard, cold ground, rising up to remind me how easy it was to slip.
I was more careful after that. I had to remind my spoiled LA self to pitch my weight low and slightly forward. I turned on my phone light and watched for black ice.
I opened the guesthouse door to find the guy staying downstairs—a young man in skinny jeans—just arrived after a delayed flight from Newark. He was here to teach two weeks of web design. He offered me a beer and I got a water instead, plus one of the oranges from the thoughtful fruit basket left for us on the counter.
He’d never seen a place like this, he told me. He wanted to know if the kids were all geniuses or what.
“They’re smart,” I said, thankful he hadn’t asked if they were all wealthy orphans, “but they’re normal teenagers. You’ll get some international kids. American kids from places where the schools aren’t great. Plenty of kids whose parents went to boarding school, so it’s just the thing they do.”
The guy, whose name I’d already lost, blinked. He gripped his craft beer in front of his chest.
I used to try, home on break, to explain Granby to my old friends in Broad Run. The worst thing I could do was make it sound fancy, so I unwittingly made it sound more like a correctional facility. A good number of them believed I’d been sent away against my will.
“Think of it as a small liberal arts college, but for younger kids. Or—did your high school have honors classes? Pretend it’s an honors class.”
“But in the woods,” he said, smiling faintly. “An honors class in the woods.”
I told him we didn’t have mini-mesters in my time; we’d trudge from holiday break straight back to precalculus, verb conjugations, pH levels. These kids got winter forestry, textiles, abnormal psychology, Shakespearean soliloquies, the history of rap.
Skinny Jeans shook his head. “My high school didn’t even have a choice for foreign language. It was Spanish for everyone. Even the Puerto Rican kids.”
I laughed, said, “Gotta love an easy A.”
I might have been honest about how equivocal I felt toward Granby, how rough my time there was—but I was sobering up a little and something protective had kicked in, a familiar need to prove this wasn’t an entirely elite place and I was not, myself, an elitist to regard warily. So I said next what I usually say: “It’s an amazing school. Coming here on scholarship changed my life.” Note my careful wording, the way I worked in that of all the privileges I’ve had in life, wealth wasn’t one. The scholarship was a lie, but only technically.
“I was a fish out of water,” I said, “but it got me out of a tiny town in Indiana and into a place with students from all over. People sometimes think boarding school is all white kids named Trip, but it’s not.” I’d polished that speech to a gloss. I could even deliver it drunk.
“I mean,” he said, “they were literally from Puerto Rico. What does a Puerto Rican kid get from Spanish 2? That’s as far as we went, Level 2. Like, Yo tengo que comer manzanas. Level 2.”
5
I lay a long time in bed the next morning—hard mattress, soft pillows—trying to think where I was, what hotel. It clicked when I saw, on the wall opposite, a black-and-white photo of Old Chapel—and a moment later heard the distant bell from that same chapel chime eight. Only two hours before class, and one hour before the journalism teacher overseeing my visit would scoop me up and take me to HR to sign some last things.
I sat up and was flooded with hangover bile. Appropriate: I’d had my first hangovers at Granby. I once left physics to vomit in the hallway trash can, and Miss Vogel walked me to the infirmary, where I feigned food poisoning for a nurse who surely was onto me.
I texted Jerome and asked how the kids were, something I hadn’t managed yesterday. They were so used to my traveling that we’d long ago abandoned the Here safely! text.
I checked that I hadn’t drunkenly texted Yahav last night; I hadn’t, and he hadn’t written anything else. I wrote: Get together this week? Wednesday?
As I let the shower steam the small bathroom and brushed my teeth, my hangover started to clear; and underneath was just nerves. I was nervous not only about teaching but—it took a minute to put my finger on it. It was the feeling I still got when I walked into a suburban shopping mall, despite it being decades since groups of teenagers roved the food courts looking for people to ridicule. I was scared like a dog is scared of the spot where a walnut once fell on his head. Irrationally, viscerally, in a way tied more to memory than possibility.
I put on the newest clothes I’d brought: crisp dark jeans, a red sweater, and a gold bangle an online stylist had picked for me that fall.
The fall of senior year at Granby, I’d been thrilled to inherit a long, crinkly J.Crew skirt from one of Fran’s sisters. The J.Crew label inside was as good, in my mind, as Armani. I wore it with Birkenstocks and a white T-shirt and hemp jewelry. I had already lost some weight—I’d lose far too much that year—and my hair was newly longer, and I felt, for the first time, that I was passing as somewhat attractive. I’d even toned down the eyeliner, barely. I was crossing the quad when a sophomore, crossing the other way, said to me, her voice squeaky as if talking to a child, “Oh my God, I remember those skirts! Those are from, like, eighth grade!” The skirt was indeed probably two years old. It was one of the newest things I’d ever worn. Apparently it was safer to wear things from Sears and thrift stores—things the kids at Granby had never seen, couldn’t date to some past catalogue, some discount sale.