does that mean?” He giggled a little. “We frenched.”
“Aren’t we done here?” I reached for the door, and he grabbed my hand, put it on the front of his pants, then rubbed it there. “Did she do this to you?”
His jeans felt rough and, where I was rubbing, very full.
“Don’t,” I whispered, anxious to get away yet curious to know what exactly he wanted me to do. “Please.” But my hand went on moving as if separate from my arm, my brain. Mark crowded me against the wall. His body blocked the light, and the door.
“Don’t let go until I say so,” he told my ear, his hips grinding rhythmically into my right hand. “Or I’ll tell everyone you’re a fag.”
I felt lightheaded, as if I were disappearing from that room. The outlines of my body were dissolving, and what was left of me floated above the two of us, free and weightless as a ghost, so I could slip through a crack or pass through a wall.
Mark let out a painful moan. Oh, no, I thought, I’m screwed. I was afraid I’d hurt him somehow and he’d hit me. But then I saw the mess on the floor.
“You’re disgusting, you know that?” He jerked himself out of my reach and ordered me to clean myself off as he yanked up his pants. Then he ran back to class. My hands still throbbing with the feel of him, I followed his orders, wiping my hands on an unwashed wrinkled jersey. But his smell, a strange mix of sea salt and spoiled milk, remained on my skin.
This is not me, I wanted to scream. I didn’t ask for this. I screwed my eyes shut and tried to focus, prayed that I might like what he liked, not the healthy resistance of the hard bodies of men, but girls and their soft slippery skin and slimy insides, whose briny scent Mark had described for me in nauseating detail.
I made myself imagine fingering various girls from my grade as Mark had boasted of doing, but my fingers kept getting lost in the weeds. I tried mimicking Mark’s talk, “I felt her up. I squeezed her tits.” I recited those words like the blessings we recited each morning in services, hoping with practice they might sound firm and convincing. Thank you God for not making me a woman.
At least for the rest of that day and the next one, Mark did me the courtesy of not even looking my way, let alone talking to me. Maybe, hopefully, he was so disgusted by what he’d done, he’d never speak to me again.
But then two days later, I opened my locker, and a slip of white paper with Mark’s handwriting fell out. He wanted me to meet him once more in the storage room.
“You get my note?” he whispered when I passed his desk in class later. “Be there unless you want me to kill you after school.”
“Why are you doing this?” I said. “Why me?” And then Elise Fein, who in elementary school had taught me how to tie my shoes, looked over at us.
“You shut the fuck up,” said Mark. The debate was closed.
For the next few weeks, when the mood struck him, Mark summoned me to that cramped, stuffy storage room, leaving me a note in my locker or buzzing a command in my ear when we passed in the hall. Mark Taborsky—red, throbbing, stinking, sour—became as inevitable in my life as weather.
I got very quiet in school. Kids who’d never noticed me stopped me in the hall to ask if I was okay. Even Benji Pearlberg and his crowd of socially awkward boys who let me sit with them at lunch noticed I wasn’t grinning stupidly as they discussed movies I hadn’t seen or role-playing games in which I had no role. In art class, I was staring at my empty sketchpad when Benji came up next to me and asked, “What are you drawing?”
I shrugged.
“You mind if I sit here with you?”
I shook my head to say I didn’t mind, and he sat next to me quietly for the rest of the class and painted a green-scaled dragon. How could I burden Benji with my story? He still believed in dwarves and magic swords. I wasn’t even sure he’d hit puberty.
Every morning, as I dialed the combination on my blue padlock, I held my breath. When there was no note from Mark inside, I felt relieved, yet also weirdly disappointed, like a death row prisoner whose execution had been delayed. Mark and I shared a secret, something dangerous, shocking, and grown-up. For once, I was the insider.
RESEARCH
AT TIGHT-LACED, BUTTONED-UP DALTON, I COULD disappear into my new blue sport coat, school tie, and wool pants. I’d brush my hair in a new way and say “cool” in a low, rumbling voice when I meant yes. The Dalton Handbook mandated “soft conversation” between classes, so if I could just think of a few witty things to say in the hallways or during lunch, maybe I’d never be popular, but I could blend in with the walls.
So I did research.
I bought a copy of Sports Illustrated and skimmed the articles about Michael Jordan or Mike Tyson, then compared the taut bodies of underwear models to mine. I wanted to linger longer over those ads, but finally I forced myself to put down the magazine, feeling both turned on and engulfed by despair.
I borrowed Dad’s mini cassette player, recorded my voice, and played it back. Horrified by what I heard, I attempted to speak in lower tones, like a bullfrog.
And in karate, I squared my shoulders in front of the mirror, threw out my non-existent chest. I practiced walking as if I were a gunslinger in a Western, like Sensei Brad. Between exercises, I did modified bent-knee push-ups and dreamed of doing real ones.
I listened to hits by Paula Abdul, New Kids, Vanilla Ice, and Janet Jackson. I tried to like their songs, but the words and the musical notes were tiresome and repetitive, as if glued together by machines for the listening pleasure of other machines. The messages of the songs were always the same. I’m so cool. You’re so hot. I get laid a lot.
Mark could have breezed through my self-imposed training regimen without breaking a sweat. He knew all the right movies to see and sports to watch and songs to listen to and video games to play as well as the right things to say about them (like “Sweet!” with the “s” pronounced as an “sh,” ergo “Shweet!”). He was fluent in the language of boys. Of course, he had the advantage of being spectacularly unkind, taking relish in crude insults that on first hearing seemed startlingly original, though they always amounted to the same thing: girls were sluts, and boys were girls.
The Sunday before my Dalton debut, my father told me to grab my karate uniform and get in the car. Brad was opening the school early, just for us two, a private lesson.
Dad didn’t put his new Springsteen tape on the stereo as usual. He was strangely quiet as our car crunched down our snowy driveway onto Maggie Lane.
Most of the subdivisions in Bloomfield had streets with distinguished-sounding names like Haverford or Maplewood, with pleasant pretensions of being British. However, as a lame joke, the builders in our sub had named the streets after their all-American daughters: Jenny Drive, Stacy Court, and our own Maggie Lane.
Turning onto Jenny Drive, Dad said, “I heard from Detective Marten.”
“Oh?” I said, digging my thumbs into the seat cushion.
“They went before a judge.” My father, like me, never said Mark’s name aloud. “They talked about, you know, juvenile hall, but there was the
