We lay down in the darkness.
Once again, I reminded myself it wouldn’t stay this way, if it stayed at all. Once again, I thought of the way my mom and dad still danced to “Stardust” in the living room. Once at a party, I’d heard my mother say to my dad, “Let’s just go home, it’s more fun at home.”
Neither of us really slept. Just before dawn, a storm exploded, dramatic and erotic, the kind you never see in winter, white metallic lightning that strobed without even enough of a break for us to count, as Nell and I had when we were children:one, one thousand, two, one thousand, booming thunder that shook the windowpanes in their frames. Blizzards and other big storms seem to move your anxiety outside the self, freeing a person to do and say things she might guard more closely in the ordinary world. Pregnancies happen during blizzards and blackouts.
So do murders.
Why did it seem the right time to tell Sam? Did I need to test his devotion? Perhaps in that stormy darkness, I wanted to trust my new beloved with my own darkness, as I had never trusted father, mother, or sister.
How do people get caught for murder? I asked, warming him up. Great detective work? Their own mistakes? Conscience? Some bragged, Sam said. Some couldn’t bear the suspense and confessed. Sometimes, years later, police just got a tip.
“Why does anyone think I know much about this?” he wondered aloud. “Why do people think I defend the Boston Strangler?”
“Do you think anybody could kill? You think a normal person could snap?”
Sam said, “They say anyone could if you were pushed far enough. I don’t think I could.” He added, “My mom used to say that if everyone who ever considered murder or suicide turned purple, this would be the planet of the grapes.”
“That’s kind of funny,” I said. “You never asked me what the worst thing I ever did was.”
“Okay, you’re on.”
“I tried to kill somebody.”
“Who?”
“It doesn’t matter who. No one knows. Well, one other person knows, besides me.”And now you, I thought.
“You mean, the person you threatened?”
“No, even she doesn’t know. But I didn’t just threaten her. I didn’t just fantasize it,” I said. “I tried to kill someone. I would have done it.”
“Why?”
“She humiliated me.”
Sam said, “I don’t understand.”
“My grandmother McClatchey used to say nobody ever died from embarrassment. But they have. Girls killed themselves ashamed of a rape or a pregnancy and boys ashamed of being gay or being weak.”
Adolescents were assaulted by each other and by culture, even by school. What makes girls line up together in an open shower, when just a few metal panels would protect them from shame? My mother told me that, in her day, boys were required to take swimming class naked. Why? How could desperately self-conscious boys learn anything, subjected to humiliation like you read about in British boarding schools? How could teachers have forgotten that they were once fragile adolescents? Or were they ever? On a seventh-grade field trip, the phys ed teacher who was a chaperone yelled, “This girl needs a tampon!” Why? Why did she have to shout?
Sam remembered sixth-grade dancing class at Catholic school, budding adolescents shoved together in the guise of a social grace. The foxtrot? The polka? What for? One wedding decades later? Sister Genevieve, the last nun in America, a PE teacher, who looked like Jack Nicholson, demonstrated the twist in her red polyester pantsuit. It was as though this class was designed to make children hate dancing and hate themselves.
Add wildfire social media and cell phones, “Instagram” becoming a verb, TikTok and chat in a snap, all spreading seeds of shame, even as understanding of those consequences grew as well.
“You’ve thought a lot about this,” Sam said. “This is why you tried to kill somebody.”
“I was in high school.”
“Delinquent,” Sam said.
“It’s not funny.”
“The look on your face is scaring me. I said when we started that you could tell me anything, and you can. But you don’t have to.”
But I did have to, even though the paint was not close to dry on this thing between us. I wouldn’t have told any other guy. It was because of Felicity that I had to.
“I was obsessed with this boy, Lucius McCool. So was another girl, Molly Boone, and he went back and forth between us, week to week...”
