Indecent: A taut psychological thriller about class and lust. Corinne Sullivan
I could be.
There was nothing wrong with the public high school in Lockport. My best friends Jaylen and Stephanie would be there, as well as everyone else I’d attended school with since kindergarten. I knew better, too, than to make my parents privy to my fantasies. I’d once idly mentioned boarding school to my dad, and he scoffed like he did whenever he caught me watching reality TV or reading People magazine. But still, after I slipped under my sheets with my catalogues, I imagined myself in a plaid skirt and a navy wool blazer with a school crest embroidered on it, walking down flagstone paths between imposing ivy-covered buildings with my fellow blazer-wearing peers.
The therapist I’d seen throughout high school for my skin-picking problem asked me once why I wanted to go away. “Why not the private Catholic school down the road?” she asked. Somewhere I could still wear a uniform but stay at home with my family. I told her there was no money for the private Catholic school, that my dad—like several other dads in Lockport—was suffering the consequences of budget cutbacks at Rural/Metro, and therapy was just about the only luxury we could afford. Then she asked if I’d ever applied for scholarships, and I told her all the scholarships were for prodigies and minorities, spoken-word poets and trombone players and first-generation Americans, that it was the extraordinary and unique that were rewarded free tuition, not the slightly-above-average.
“Then why wish for boarding school?” she still wanted to know.
Because, I explained, when you wish for something, you wish for the best thing, and nothing could be better than being away from the people you’d known your whole life—the people who’d defined and judged and limited you and would continue to do so until you escaped. Because when it came to wishing, practicality wasn’t a consideration.
But once high school began, the fantasies faded. I took up lacrosse and sat on the bench. I dressed like the other girls dressed and didn’t raise my hand in class and minded my own business. I didn’t date, and I went to school dances with paper decorations and girls who wore the same three dresses from the one dress boutique in town, and I patiently waited for my life to begin.
_ _ _
Even by my first Saturday at Vandenberg, a week after my arrival and the day of the first varsity lacrosse game, I thought my luck would change. When I walked through the forty-acre campus that first week—past Morris Chapel, the Marshall Huffman Library, all the cherry trees and stone archways and Tudor-style buildings reflecting in Silver Lake—I sometimes felt the overwhelming urge to cry; how lucky I was! How lucky we all were! I thought of the high school in Lockport, with its cracked vinyl tiles, its sloppy joes, its leaking toilets and dirty windows and slow insipid students who pushed past me in the hall without a second glance.
At Vandenberg, every last faucet and doorknob gleamed with possibility.
That Saturday, we were playing against Brunswick School in Greenwich. We rode the twenty minutes there on a bus driven by the head lacrosse coach, Larry, a balding divorcée with acne scars and a chipped front tooth who was probably teased by boys like the ones on his team when he was in high school. When I’d first been assigned to be his assistant lacrosse coach, he’d asked, “You any good?”
“I did a camp at the Buffalo Lacrosse Academy the summers after freshman and sophomore year,” I said.
“I didn’t ask that.”
“I’m going to try to be as helpful as I can.”
He grunted.
The boys, led by team captain Duggar Robinson, were taking turns punching each other in the gut to determine their “sex noise.” The stocky goalie, known only as Rollo, made an oafish “oof!” when Duggar punched him, and raucous laughter resulted. This was different than the quiet exchange in the classroom; this was flagrant, aggressive. Instead of being cool enough to understand, I’d been pegged as meek enough to disregard.
“Rollo, what do the girls think when you bust a nut in them and do that shit?” one of the guys near the front demanded.
Rollo got up on his knees and thrust his crotch a few times into the back of his seat. “I dunno, Baxter. Your mom seemed to like it just fine last night.”
The other guys bellowed their approval. Sitting alone near the front of the bus, I couldn’t help but smile, too, as sequestered as I was. Their laughter was infectious.
“Hey, Coach Imogene!” Baxter poked me across the aisle with the end of his lacrosse stick. “Hey, what’s your sex noise?”
The guys roared now. Larry narrowed his eyes at them through the rearview mirror.
“Let’s find out, shall we?” Duggar stood and swept towards me up the aisle. With his blond curls, Roman nose, and 60’s-style square-frame glasses, he was beyond reproach; Larry didn’t bat an eye.
I thought, suddenly, of Jared Hoffman from high school. Jared was black and wore diamond studs in his earlobes, and he was one of the few people at the school that excited me. We sat next to each other in AP Spanish, and sometimes he would reach across the aisle to grab my hand, caressing it with his thumb. On Valentine’s Day, he brought all the girls in class, including the teacher, a pink carnation. When he handed me my flower, he winked. It didn’t matter to me that he’d winked at every other girl, too, including the teacher—I felt sure there was something meaningful behind the wink he’d directed at me. He included a note with my flower, slipped onto my desk: Go out with me sometime, Imogene. I still wonder if he meant it. At times I thought I’d love Jared Hoffman forever, even after my body sagged and swelled and my hair turned gray. According to his profile page, Jared was at Johns Hopkins getting his medical degree. I wondered what it was like to know the world would never say no to you.
Duggar leaned against the back of my seat. His eyebrows were black, incongruous with his golden head, and nearly met in an impenitent tuft above his crooked nose. Those brows, if anything, made him even more handsome and frightening. “Stand up, Coach Imogene.”
I looked to the rearview mirror, hoping to meet Larry’s eyes, but he concentrated on the road, uninterested. I knew I had to say no. I imagined myself narrowing my eyes and snarling, “Back to your seat, Duggar,” like I imagined Chapin would. Or I could even joke with him: “Like hell I’m going to let you punch me!” Funny and authoritative. Cool and under control. But under Duggar’s cold glare, I simply stared up at him, struck stupid. Duggar had nearly a foot on me, and a rush of sweat flooded my armpits.
“You’re really going to punch a girl, Robinson?”
“Please, Rollo.” Duggar flashed his teeth, his eyes still on me. “You know me better than that.” Then he turned back to me. “I guess you don’t have to stand up for this.”
He wound back his arm. I stiffened. The fist propelled towards me and, just as it was about to make contact with my stomach, I flinched and let out a tiny yelp, like a dog that had its tail stepped on.
“See? Didn’t even have to touch her.” Duggar patted my shoulder. “You’re a good sport, Squeak.”
Larry’s eyes finally flicked up into the rearview mirror. “Siddown!” he barked, a one-word command that seemed embarrassingly directed at me as much as Duggar, even though I knew it wasn’t, even though I wasn’t even standing up. Larry didn’t seem to notice the punch. Larry didn’t seem to realize how unwise it was to leave me alone with them back there.
I slid down into my seat, mortified, defeated. It wasn’t until Rollo called from the back, “Hey, Squeak, how’s about asking Sergeant Larry to turn up the tunes?” that I realized that Squeak was my new nickname.
_ _ _
Vandenberg sent me stacks of catalogues after I accepted the job. The glossy pages provided the facts I needed to familiarize myself with—Vandenberg School for Boys is the oldest nonmilitary all-male boarding school in the United States. The school has an enrollment of 150 students. Tuition is $46,000 a year—but what I was most interested in were the pictures. Attractive wasn’t the first word that had come to my mind to describe the young men pictured