Atlanta, 1990
Anna did not call that weekend, and I didn’t call her, either, thinking that she needed a little time to process what had happened. But the Monday after prom, after Mom and I ate Stouffer’s French bread pizzas in front of the PBS NewsHour, I borrowed Mom’s car and drove to Anna’s house. Not that she was expecting me. Uncle Bob answered the door with a surprised grin, proclaimed that I looked just as pretty as I had on prom night, and said that Anna was upstairs studying. Once upstairs I turned right at the hall, which took me to Anna’s room. Her door was closed, and on the handle hung a small sign that read: “Un peu d’intimité, s’il vous plaît,” which had surely been picked up in Paris, where Anna and her parents had gone for spring break.
I knocked just to let her know I was coming in, and then pushed open the door. Anna was sitting on her bed, leaning against an oversized pillow covered in a floral sham. The duvet on her bed was in the same floral pattern. On the wall across from her bed was a corkboard pinned with hundreds of photos of Anna laughing with friends. I was only in a few of the pictures, which stung, even though I had been the one to drift away from her group and attach myself to Lizzie and Sake.
“Move over, bacon,” I said.
Anna did not acknowledge my reference to the old Sizzlean commercial, only wordlessly moved over a few inches as I kicked off my shoes and climbed up onto her antique wrought-iron bed, a family heirloom given to her on her sixteenth birthday, along with an opal and diamond ring that had once been her mother’s, and a new Honda Civic. It had been a while since I had last spent the night at Anna’s, but I imagined the sheets were still soft and clean and smelled subtly of lavender. And her pillows—at least the non-decorative ones—were packed tight with goose down.
I sat so close to Anna that our arms touched. Her skin was tanner than mine.
“How are you?” I asked, trying to sound concerned but not pitying.
“Busy. Trying to figure out something to say about Elizabeth Bennet.” She held a clicker pen in one hand and a notebook in the other. Pride and Prejudice lay facedown on the comforter. Like me, Anna was a top student, but she was in a different section of honors English than I was and my class had already completed its unit on Jane Austen. I had received an A on my paper, in which I argued that in Austen’s world a woman’s single moment of power was when she chose a husband. Get tripped up by lust or impulse and your life was, if not ruined, limited.
“Can we talk about what happened on Friday?”
She turned and looked at me with a blank face. “I don’t know what happened on Friday. I don’t remember anything. I’m just glad it’s no longer Friday and we can put it behind us.”
“Look, I think we should turn George in. I don’t think they’ll kick us out for drinking in light of the circumstances, and even if they did . . . well, it would suck, but we would deal with it. We could write our college application essays on choosing justice over our own self-interest, you know?”
Anna clicked the top of her pen over and over, making the tip pop out, then recede.
“I can’t believe you would even consider using this experience for your college essay. Wow. That’s just . . . that’s just rotten.”
She was crying, tears spilling down her cheeks.
“Oh my God, that’s not what I meant! I just meant if we got kicked out, we’d figure out a way to make things okay. That’s all.”
She turned to face me straight on and I turned to face her, too, so that now my knees grazed against hers. She had a bright red pimple on her cheek, rare for Anna, or at least rare for Anna to show herself without any makeup on to cover it. “Listen,” she said. “You have got to promise me, swear to me, that you won’t tell anyone about this. Not anyone at school, not Lizzie, not your mom. You have to promise.”
“And just let George get away with it?”
“Don’t you understand that he’s going to get away with it no matter what? Think about it: If we turned him in, at most he would get kicked out of Coventry for drinking. He’s not going to face any other punishment. It’s not like we have a criminal case against him. He was in the room with me with my underwear off. That’s all you saw, and anyway, he could just deny it, say that it wasn’t true.”
“You were passed out on the bed and he was bent over you.”
She didn’t respond. I tried again. “UVA might rescind their offer of admission.”
“Yeah, and all of his friends would hate me if that happened, and so would his mom, who I’ve known my whole life. The truth is, we were all drunk, and I don’t even remember any of it. The only thing I know for sure is that if we turned him in, I would be the one who got punished. I would be humiliated—again—and we would probably get kicked out. And Sarah, I know you’ve only been at Coventry since sophomore year, but I’ve been going there since I was five years old, and damn it, I am not going to get kicked out because of something George Simmons may or may not have done! You have to promise me you won’t tell anyone. You have to promise.”
She was gripping my forearms tightly, her face a mess of tears and snot. There was a box of tissues on her bedside table. I wanted to get one for her, but I didn’t want to pull away while she was holding on to me.
“Can I get you a Kleenex?” I finally asked.
“Yeah,” she said, between choking little sobs.
I reached toward the box and handed one to her. She blew her nose, folded up the tissue, and then blew into it again. “Can I have another?” she asked.
I handed her another one. She wrapped it around her index finger and used the dressed finger to dig out a huge booger. She held it up for me to see. “I picked something special just for you,” she said, alluding to a birthday card I gave her when she turned thirteen, which showed a little boy with a booger on his finger.
“Gross,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said, sniffing.
“Anna,” I said. “I promise I won’t tell anyone if you don’t want me to. But I really want you to think about this some more.”
“Do you think I’ve thought about anything else? Sarah, I hate that this happened. But I’m not going to let George ruin the rest of my time at Coventry. We’re seniors next year and there’s so much to look forward to and I just refuse to be dragged down by all of this during my final year of school. Can’t you understand that?”
I could. And I admit there was a part of me that was relieved that Anna didn’t want me to tell anyone at Coventry about what I had witnessed on prom night. Anna’s determination to keep everything under wraps kept me safe, too.
I did not see Anna at all that summer. She had enrolled, last minute, in an outdoor leadership course trekking through the Rockies, leaving for Colorado two days after school let out. She had been looking forward to summer in Atlanta because Stuart would be home from Episcopal and they could spend their days making eyes at each other while swimming laps at the Driving Club, or batting a tennis ball back and forth across the net, or playing squash, or doing whatever else they did to help them avoid the temptation of going off somewhere alone and having sex. But instead she broke up with Stuart over the phone that spring, saying that she just couldn’t handle the long distance anymore.
Anna returned from Colorado ten pounds thinner and with her blond hair cut to her chin. Dean and I had started dating over the summer, news I was nervous about sharing with Anna considering that our relationship had really gotten its start on prom night. But Anna was her usual exuberant self when I told her that we were a couple. “I’m so happy for you!” she enthused. Lizzie and Sake also liked Dean. They thought he was wry, and occasionally the four of us would all hang out together. But the truth was that more and more I found myself wanting to spend time alone with him, which was surely all right with Lizzie and Sake because it meant they could go off on their own, too.
That fall, Anna dropped the cheerleading squad and she kept dropping weight, even though she was no longer burning a million calories a day practicing cheer routines. She took to wearing dark clothes: black jeans, black T-shirts, gray sweaters, despite Aunt Eve’s urging that she liven things up a little with a colorful purse or scarf. She drifted from her popular, earnest friends and started hanging out with Redburn Connor, who was known to light up a cigarette the instant his car turned off campus. I liked Redburn; we were in AP history together and I thought he was funny, especially when he asked if the London cabbies who drove soldiers to the front lines during World War II were paid a fare. But he was Anna’s polar opposite: an avowed atheist, an LSD enthusiast, and one of two members of Coventry’s Young Socialists Club.
That Anna was hanging out with an atheist druggie was not as unusual as it might seem but, rather, matched the pattern of blurred lines that defined the social dynamics of our class in its senior year. The captain of the football team auditioned for, and was cast in, the school play. The homecoming queen—Anna was on the court but was not crowned queen—broke up with him not because of his thespian impulses, but rather so that she could date a wiry junior who was on the fencing team. The closer we got to graduation, the more the hierarchy seemed to be breaking down, and nowhere was that more apparent than at Chastain Memorial Park on a Saturday night, where the bulk of our class often wound up, parking our cars in the lot by the stone pavilion, where there was a fire pit and, beyond that, acres of woods.
I don’t know how it was that a sizable group of minors could gather in the wooded area of a large suburban park, build a bonfire, play loud music, and drink for hours without drawing the attention of the authorities, but most likely it had something to do with the sea of “Coventry” bumper stickers on the backs of our cars—protecting us even from the Atlanta police, who surely did not want to deal with entitled prep school kids any more than they wanted to deal with their powerful, entitled parents. In any event, we gathered at the park nearly every weekend of our senior year, playing the B-52s and R.E.M. from our car stereos, warming ourselves by the fire, venturing into the woods, either to kiss or to pee.
There was an older man who would sometimes show up, a rugged, athletic-looking guy with bushy silver hair and a thick beard. Dean and I called him Mountain Man because the first time we saw him he looked as if he had just come from hiking the Appalachian Trail, what with his oversized backpack, dusty boots, and flannel shirt. Initially, Mountain Man lingered on the periphery of our gatherings, but eventually he drew closer. One night Dean and I talked to him at length. He implored us to read some book called The Sociological Imagination, explaining that it had helped him jettison the corporate life in order to live in the woods with no possessions other than what he carried on his back. He claimed to have once been an executive at Coca-Cola but to have burnt out on corporate America, on its “shortsightedness, greed, and bullshit macho culture.” And then he made direct eye contact with me and said, “Speaking of bullshit macho culture, don’t let this guy pressure you into doing anything you don’t want to do.”
“Excuse me?” I asked, indignant. If anything, I was the one pressuring Dean.
“I’m just saying there’s this insidious thing that gets passed from one generation to the next—believe me, I know—where boys are taught that in order to be a real man they have to dominate a woman, whether by force or by putting her onto such a high pedestal that she can’t move. But that’s bullshit. A real man respects a woman’s choices. A real man isn’t afraid of a strong woman.”
“Um, okay,” I said. “Thanks for the tutorial on Feminism 101.”
“Do you consider yourself a feminist?” he asked, his eyes lighting up.
“Well, yeah,” I said, though I’d never claimed the title before. “Weaned on Our Bodies, Ourselves.”
This was not exactly true. Yes, Mom had a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves that she kept on the bookshelf by her bed, but she never showed it to me or encouraged me to look at it. In fact, the few times I’d flipped through it—usually to gawk at the up-close photos of women giving birth—were times she wasn’t at home. But I wanted to show up Mountain Man, to prove I wasn’t some clueless prep.
“Right on!” he cheered. “I didn’t know kids still read that!”
• • •
A few Saturdays later, we spotted Mountain Man at Chastain again, this time talking to Redburn Connor and Anna near the bonfire. I thought about going over and joining them, if for no other reason than to see if Redburn and Mountain Man were duking it out to see who hated corporate America more. But I was waiting for Dean, who’d gone in search of more beer. From where I stood, it looked like Mountain Man was doing all of the talking, which seemed par for the course. But then Anna said something, animatedly. Maybe she was responding to Mountain Man having asked her if she was a feminist. I remembered once hearing Anna say that feminists were “just bitter women with hairy armpits who couldn’t get dates,” which was probably a line she picked up from one of the talk radio shows her dad listened to. But that was a while ago. Maybe her feelings had changed because of George, her summer spent hiking in Colorado, her friendship with Redburn. It occurred to me that I didn’t really know Anna anymore.
Dean walked up holding a Busch tall boy and offered me a sip.
“I have to pee first. Will you come and keep an eye out?”
I didn’t like to venture into the woods alone. I knew too many details of grisly murders, thanks to Mom’s work with men on death row, all of whom, obviously, were not innocent.
We walked into the woods and away from the bonfire and the various clusters of people from Coventry.
“Is he for real?” I asked.
“Who?”
“Mountain Man.”
“Yes. He definitely exists.”
“I mean, do you think he was really a Coca-Cola exec who dropped out of the ‘rat race’?”
“It’s possible. Your mom quit her job at a corporate law firm.”
“Yeah, but she didn’t just quit working; she immediately took another job.”
“Maybe he made enough money not to have to work anymore.”
“But if Mountain Man really had enough money just to quit and not find other work, what’s he doing here? Why spend his time hiking around Chastain Park? Why not go to a private island somewhere, or at least go hiking in the actual mountains?”
I almost tripped over a tree root, but Dean caught me and then kept his hand on my arm. I liked the way Dean smelled, both earthy and sweet, like the smell of freshly baked sourdough bread, which the woman who was currently renting our basement apartment made each week.
“Maybe he has someone in Atlanta who keeps him here,” Dean said. “A sick mother or a kid.”
“You’re like a dog with a bone. Tenacious.”
“Nice SAT word,” said Dean.
“My mom is going out of town in two weeks,” I said, blurting out what I had been both nervous and excited to tell him all night.
“Oh, really?”
Dean held back a branch with thorns on it so I wouldn’t get stung as I walked past it.
“There’s some ACLU conference in D.C. She’s on a panel or something. Do you want to spend the night?”
He glanced at me, smiled. “Yes. I want.”
We had not yet had sex, but the night before he had come over to my house to watch a movie and afterward, once we were sure Mom had gone to bed, he had pulled down the straps of my tank top, which I wore without a bra. He put my right breast into his mouth, kissing and sucking the nipple, before moving on to the left one. It felt so good, so startling. I kept thinking, How does he know to do this?
“I think this is far enough,” I said. “Turn around.”
I pulled down my shorts and underwear and squatted. It took a minute for my pee to start because I was self-conscious about Dean being so near, but eventually it did. A little splashed on my Birkenstocks, which I chose to ignore.
I stood and pulled my underwear and shorts back on. “Okay.”
Dean turned back toward me. He smiled and I smiled back, holding his gaze. In two weeks he would sleep over at my house and we could do whatever we wanted in my mother’s queen-size bed. Mine was just a twin and not really big enough for the two of us.
I stepped up close to him, took in his familiar smell, ran my hand along his cheek, which was rough with stubble. “Hi,” I said.
And then we heard the crunching of dead leaves and turned to see Anna walking in our direction, a burly figure heading the opposite way. In the moonlight I could make out his plaid flannel shirt.
“Hey! Anna! Over here.”
Anna walked toward us, her short hair clipped back on each side with a little barrette, making her look like a young girl.
“Were you out here with Mountain Man?” I asked, not meaning to sound as judgmental as I did.
“I was with Miles, if that’s what you mean.”
“Oh, he’s Miles now?” I asked.
“That’s his name,” she said. Mountain Man had actually told me that, but I hadn’t bothered to remember. He was a caricature, someone interesting to talk to in a group, to muse about with Dean, certainly not someone to go alone with into the woods.
“Jesus, Anna, you have to be more careful. He’s super creepy.”
“Oh gee, thanks, Sarah,” she said. “It’s awesome how good you are at keeping me safe and sound.”
She stormed off, back in the direction of the bonfire.
I turned toward Dean. “Oh my God.”
“What was that about?”
“She’s losing it. I have to tell her mom.”
And then I told Dean about what George had done to her or, at least, the part of it I saw.
• • •
The next afternoon, after what seemed like hours, I finally heard the sound of the key in the lock. I ran to the front door to greet Mom, who looked sad and weary.
“Well?” I said.
“It didn’t go quite as I expected,” she said.
“Was she mad at me for not having said something sooner?”
“No, she wasn’t. Come with me to the kitchen. I’d like a glass of wine. Would you like to have a small one with me?”
Mom had never offered me wine before. I had so much homework left to do, but how could I refuse this moment? “Um, sure.”
We went to the kitchen, where Mom pulled an open bottle of white Zinfandel from the refrigerator. “Eve already knew about what happened with George,” she said, reaching for two glasses from the cabinet above the dishwasher.
“What? Then why hasn’t anything happened?”
Mom poured us each half a glass, then hesitated and filled them all the way. “Let’s not make this a habit,” she said, handing my glass to me.
“Did Anna tell her? When? After she got back from her wilderness thing?”
“Anna told her last spring, the morning after prom. Eve said that Anna was terrified of getting kicked out of Coventry over what happened, and Eve agreed that Anna shouldn’t subject herself to possible expulsion over ‘one bad night,’ that Anna would be punished more than George, and that the best thing Anna could do was to move on, to not let George’s actions ruin her senior year, especially since George would have already graduated, meaning she wouldn’t have to worry about running into him at school.”
I could hear the distaste in Mom’s voice. I took a sip of my pale pink wine and then took another.
“It was Eve who suggested Anna go to Colorado. She thought a summer spent hiking would help Anna recover, would sort of wash the slate clean.”
“Did she at least tell George’s mom about what happened? I mean, they’re friends. And neighbors! She sees her all the time.”
“I doubt it, sweetie.”
“But that’s just awful. Why would Aunt Eve let George get away with doing that to her daughter?”
“I think she felt that she was protecting Anna by letting it go, protecting her from scandal, I guess, and from whatever backlash there might be were George to face expulsion or lose his college admission. A part of me thinks that she didn’t really want to deal with the scandal, either, but I’m hoping that wasn’t the case. She said she thought the mountains would clear Anna’s head, but she realizes now that Anna needs therapy.”
“Well, that’s good at least. God, I don’t think I like Aunt Eve very much right now.”
Mom sighed. “Eve is the most fragmented person I know. She has all of these parts of herself locked away that she can’t bear to look at.”
“Like what?”
Mom was quiet for so long that I began to wonder if she had heard my question. Just as I was about to ask again, she spoke. “That’s probably not mine to share, sweetie. But I suppose what I’m trying to say about Eve is that it’s easy to fall short of your ideals.”
“Do I?”
“Of course not,” said Mom. “You’re nerfect.”
It was a joke between the two of us, a reference to the little figurine I had given her for Mother’s Day years ago, before my father died. It was shaped sort of like a peanut with legs, arms, and googly eyes. A plaque on its base read: “Pobody’s Nerfect.”
Mom hugged me and kissed the top of my head, told me I was her brave girl and that she was so sorry Anna had experienced what she did. I leaned into her, breathing in the familiar scent of her perfume, a mix of essential oils that smelled of orange blossom and clove.