Indecent: A taut psychological thriller about class and lust. Corinne Sullivan
and Stephanie sat outside the bathroom stall to help me guide in my first tampon. When Stephanie’s hamster died, Jaylen decorated a tiny wooden box from the craft store for Chip’s coffin, and I played my recorder for Chip’s backyard funeral (a slow, sad rendition of Hot Cross Buns, the only song I could play). At almost fourteen, I hadn’t even yet kissed a boy (I’d lied when I told my friends I kissed Bobby McCoy in the teachers’ lounge), and now Stephanie supposedly had done stuff, things I couldn’t even describe or imagine or understand, with someone three years older.
“Is it true?” I asked her after school one day. I remember crying. Stephanie thought I was jealous. I didn’t have the words to explain what I really felt: a profound sense of betrayal.
She was getting books out of her locker, and she turned to look at me. “Is what true?” She’d recently started wearing eyeliner; it looked like thick black rings around her eyes.
The TV shows I’d watched growing up made me believe that best friends were bound by unspoken understanding, a telekinetic power mysterious to outsiders. “You know.”
Stephanie stared at me blankly. My therapist would later suggest that TV had made my expectations unrealistic, but then, and even after, I would believe that my friendships had failed to live up to my expectations.
“Did you really give Keith a—” I lowered my voice, “—b-l-o-w . . .”
She sighed with an impatience I’d never had directed at me by anyone besides my mom. “This is why I can’t tell you these things.”
Things? I wondered, what else was I not privy to?
“You’re immature, Imogene. You make a big deal out of everything.”
I wondered, were these two faults related?
Then—the worst part—she put her hand on my shoulder and smiled, pityingly. “Your time will come,” she said, “and when it does, you’ll understand.”
I wondered, Understand what? What is it that I need to understand?
_ _ _
Dean Harvey called assembly before classes on Monday to announce that our joint theater program with Baylor Academy, Vandenberg’s sister school, would be cancelled until further notice. Rehearsals had just begun for Oklahoma! the Thursday before, but due to “unforeseen circumstances,” we would no longer be collaborating with the girls of Baylor for our productions. We sat in the chapel, and the groans of the boys reverberated up to the ceiling.
“Good luck trying to get any fags to join theater now,” a second year sitting near me whispered to his friend. I was the only person within earshot, and I wondered if he knew I could hear him or, like the boy who grabbed his friend’s scrotum in the classroom on my first day, he thought of me as someone who could be privy to misbehavior, cool enough to get it.
“Good luck trying to get laid now,” his friend replied under his breath.
It wouldn’t be until later that night that Babs would tell me what had happened: a first year was found in the prop closet back stage with his pants around his ankles, a Baylor girl kneeling before him performing—Babs reddened here and leaned in to mouth the words too horrible to speak aloud—oral sex. I felt a mix of pride, for having more sexual experience than Babs—at least I could allude to oral sex without blushing seven shades of pink—and shame, for knowing that a fourteen-year-old girl had done what I had only attempted to do once—with Zeke Maloney in college—before embarrassment forced me to stop after just a minute.
“What’s the big deal?” Zeke had asked me. “It’s just a dick.”
It’s only a mountain, I’d thought. I wondered what this girl had thought, what my old friend Stephanie had thought, when they kneeled before that strange, insistent appendage.
My head ached dully from last night’s wine. The girls didn’t comment on my sudden departure the night before, but the feeling I’d had sitting around the table just hours before had dissipated. Their voices felt too loud, their faces too eager, their gestures fraught and uncoordinated. I could tell ReeAnn had overheard the conversation between the two boys near us as well, and she tried to smile at me conspiringly. I managed a grimace. Even Raj had lost all appeal for me overnight; as soon as he kicked off his shoes and folded his bare feet under himself on the bench, I inched away. It wasn’t that his feet smelled bad; I was repelled by their startling nakedness. (Inappropriate, I thought suddenly. Arrogant.) In doing so, I moved closer to Chapin, who sat with her back flat against the wall, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes blank. I sat back and assumed a similar pose: cool, unperturbed. Then I spotted Adam Kipling.
He sat in the back row between his redheaded friend Skeat and a tall black guy I’d seen around campus a few times before. Adam’s eyes were closed and his tie loose as he tapped a rhythm with his palms on the back of the bench in front of him. A teacher came by to tap his shoulder and shake her head at him and he assumed a look of appropriate contrition, but as soon as she walked away his drumming continued. He is unembarrassable, I realized in wonder; the embarrassment that he was supposed to have felt as the receiver of scolding seemed entirely absorbed by me, the mere bystander, instead.
After revealing that Timon of Athens would be the new winter production and tryouts would be held that night, Dean Harvey rang his bell on the pulpit, and the boys were dismissed.
I watched as Adam Kipling stood and swung his book bag over his shoulder.
“What are you looking at?” asked ReeAnn, following my line of vision.
I turned away. “Nothing.”
Her shoulders slumped almost imperceptibly. I’d disappointed her.
As I followed her and the other apprentices towards the chapel door, I chanced another look. The tall black guy was telling a story, gesticulating wildly, and Adam Kipling was laughing, his head thrown back and shoulders shaking, looking just like he did in his ID photo. I wished I were closer, so I could hear what his laugh sounded like.
_ _ _
I prepared a ten-minute bit on the history of animal domestication for the end of Dale’s lecture that day. After the disaster that was my first class, I’d been improving day by day; by Thursday of that first week my hands had stopped shaking violently every time I stood at the podium, and by Friday I’d even worked up the nerve to call a few of the boys by name, which seemed to both startle and please them.
Dale asked to meet with me fifteen minutes before class to go over my lesson, and after assembly, I headed to his classroom and knocked on the door. Through the glass panel I could see him sitting at his desk bent over papers. He raised his head and motioned for me to come in with an eagerly beckoning hand.
“Imogene! Hello, hello!”
Dale’s hair was loose around his shoulders, wispy and limp as a toddler’s. His grin was manic as ever, the grin of someone who had just downed a pot of coffee or an amphetamine. I sat in the chair facing his desk and attempted to return a smile of equal enthusiasm.
“So? How has your first week been?”
I shrugged one shoulder. “Um. Interesting.”
He threw back his head and barked a full-bodied laugh. “Interesting. What a wonderful word.”
“It’s been great, really. Just—”
“A learning experience.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “A learning experience.”
He leaned towards me over the desk, propping his chin in his hands. I reflexively backed away; I hated anyone being too close to my face. “I began teaching at Vandenberg nine years ago after I finished my doctorate. And I’m going to tell you the truth, Imogene. These boys, they scared the shit out of me. They’re shrewd, they’re exacting, and given the opportunity, they’re scarily influential. Because we’re not just talking about your average high school guys here. We’re talking about the most well-read,