Part One: Chapter 1
PART ONE:
BREAKDOWN
I
On the campus of Cabot Academy, which likes to refer to itself as “an elite girls’ boarding and preparatory school set in bucolic Concord, Massachusetts,” Mr. Carter Cobb was a god. A frequently published poet and short story writer who for some vague number of years had been teaching only half the usual load of classes so as to leave him time to work on a novel, he had an avuncular and caring manner, sparkling bespectacled green eyes, and an acerbic wit that, taken together and in spite of his diminutive and usually rumpled physical presence, somehow made him seem the nearest we Cabot girls could envision to “sexy,” at least on the Cabot faculty.
“CC,” as we called him, taught only two classes, and the distinction I had just attained in achieving acceptance in both of these tiny seminars for my senior year at Cabot was every bit as much a reason for envy among my peers as if my parents had shipped out my favorite Arabian pony, and wired the funds for the school’s annual stable fee, from our home in Deerfield, Illinois. As it was, my mother and father had done these things, and I am well aware that I will betray a certain tendency toward complacent entitlement by saying here that I had been no more surprised by this fact than I was to learn that I was accepted in CC’s Creative Writing and AP English Fiction seminars for the coming fall.
But if it is true that I had been raised to expect privilege and distinction, let me hasten to add that I never wanted them. Au contraire! I wanted to rebel violently against these and indeed all the trappings of my family’s obscene wealth, but where was a girl to start? Probably not at Cabot Academy, where one was considered almost a revolutionary if she, say, joined in the annual Walk for Hunger. So I bided my time.
“Ali, CC is going to marry you,” gushed my girl Nic Beaudry as I rode up to the bulletin board in front of the English Department building on my roan pony, Luis Aparicio, who I had named, as a little girl, after my father’s favorite Chicago White Sox baseball player. “You’ll be sitting in class with him twice as much as anyone else and he won’t be able to resist you.”
Nicole stood with a couple of other rising seniors who were checking the acceptance lists for various of the more coveted course offerings for the coming fall. It was the last day of the spring term, and Nicole had not been accepted for either of CC’s seminars, but she was on an even shorter acceptance list for AP Physics, an acceptance that probably would have driven me to swallow a bottle of sleeping pills. As it was, the AP English Fiction class was going to require me to read a novel a week all summer in preparation, but I didn’t mind. I loved to read, and it pleased me that it would be CC who would be making the selections for my summer reading list.
“Sure he’s going to marry Alicia,” chimed in our roommate Bebe Dodd. “Just as soon as he switches his sexual orientation and decides that he prefers boys instead or girls.”
“Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” I adlibbed a bit tartly, preferring to law down a reference to a recent TV comedy show rather than so suffer any further discussion of my boyish, decidedly late-blooming body. Probably because I had so many things in my life that were the envy of “my girls,” as I called Nicole and Bebe, they were always ready to zing me with these little barbs, and my body gave them plenty of ammunition. I had always been very athletic, which may have been part of the reason I hadn’t had my first period until just a few months earlier, and even now my period seemed to follow its own quirky schedule rather than coming along every 28 days like it was supposed to. My hips and legs were straight and angular, there wasn’t the usual pleasing fat on my butt, and my breasts, well, even to use the word “breasts” was to stretch the definition of the word a bit. They were all nipple, although in my defense I should add that the nipples themselves were very lovely and prominent, pert and brown and quite often standing at full attention.
Luis Aparicio and I cantered off in a minor huff, since we preferred – rather than endure any more of Bebe’s smart mouth -- to enjoy a good last run around the campus before Luis Aparicio was trucked back to Deerfield for the summer. I may have been a late bloomer physically but my flesh burned just as much as that of any girl of seventeen for the attention and the touch that would make me feel at peace, at one, in love with another person. I knew this about myself from the way my breathing changed sometimes in the presence of certain boys, from the occasional effects of a slow dance with one of the more industrious boys from Middlesex School or Belmont Hill School at one of our Saturday night social travesties, but most of all I knew it from my nipples, which sent wild signals up and down my body at the slightest, most incidental brushing contact with a male, or sometimes, to be perfectly honest, with anyone.
I had become used to the delays in my development and I was even able to handle most of the jokes, but not very many months before I had been shy even to address in front of my friends or my Cabot teammates on the cross-country and lacrosse teams, afraid they would tease me and call me a boy for my lack of the full curves they were developing, the perky, full, upturned breasts and the womanly flaring of their hips and their otherwise flat bellies. My belly wasn’t otherwise flat,” it was just plain flat. Even the signature womanly adornment – a tuft of precious fur where it was most desired – was all but denied me. If I was not completely hairless there, below my belly button there was nothing but the thinnest growth of golden peach fuzz and I was worried already that I would stay innocent forever: that neither boy nor man would ever sample the peach itself.
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