“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 problem of kosher food. You know, the dad’s a big rabbi. So they’re sending him to a strict Jewish boarding school in Toronto. He can only come home for closely supervised visits.”
But the Rabbi was never home, and I’d seen Mrs. Taborsky in her red ski jacket struggling to walk their yappy terrier, pulling at its rhinestone-studded leash. If she couldn’t handle some dumb dog, how could she restrain her son?
My father concluded our conversation with some advice: “If that monster ever manages to get into our house again, you lock yourself in the bathroom. It’d take a sledgehammer to bring down that door.”
That’s when I understood: Dad was afraid too.
At our special karate practice, Brad blasted Guns ‘n’ Roses while demonstrating how to hit someone’s nose with my open palm. “The nose is vulnerable on anyone. Even if you’re as big as Hulk Hogan, you can’t build any more muscle on your nose.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“I taught this to all my girls. Even a girl can throw a grown man to the ground that way. No man’s going to mess with them in some dark alley, I can promise you.” My ears flushed a deep crimson. Was that how he saw me, a girl who’d been messed with?
For an hour, we practiced the same three moves, block, block, and pow, right to the face. I followed Brad’s instructions, feeling the anger surge under my forearms. I imagined what it would be like to make real, powerful contact with someone’s smirking face, soft warm skin masking a hard, solid jawbone.
At the end of class, Brad drew a stripe in black marker on the tip of my white belt. “Keep it up,” he said, “and you’ll get to yellow belt.” As Brad clapped my shoulder, I caught a whiff of his aftershave, a mix of pine needles and car wax.
Both Brad’s and Dad’s eyes grew misty, and then mine did too, just a bit.
FIRST DAY
THAT NIGHT, I CRAWLED OUT OF bed, opened my window, and breathed in the night air, so cool it almost felt wet.
Mark’s bedroom windows were dark. He’d been shipped off to serve his sentence at that Canadian yeshiva. Yes, let the Canadians handle him.
What if he genuinely believed that cover story he’d told the cops, that I wanted it? Maybe I’d been the one who was wrong—for being too weak to resist both Mark’s advances and the police’s pressure to break my promise to Mark to keep my mouth shut. If this was my fault, then I’d have to be punished. Perhaps Mark would recruit a gang of his Detroit friends to rake my windows with bullets. Or they’d be waiting at Dalton to choke me with my new tie and string me up the school flagpole, so I’d dangle in the wind.
Whichever punishment they chose, I wished they’d get it over with. The suspense was too terrible. I already felt that first prickle of skin touching skin, the kiss of knuckle pounding cheek, the tingle of shiny blade sparking blood.
* * *
MY FIRST MORNING AS A DALTON boy, I woke to a thrashing thunderstorm that pelted our lawn and clogged drainpipes with grass trimmings and fallen leaves. Worried about traffic, Mom rushed me through my morning bagel. She’d skipped her usual breakfast, a microwaved frozen egg white omelet. According to her daily morning weigh-in, she’d gained