In One Person

see for myself, without you belaboring the details, that your experience with Miss Frost has affected you in certain positive ways.”
    “Belaboring the details,” I repeated. “Positive ways.”
    “However, Billy, I feel it is my duty to inform you that in a sexual situation of this awkward kind, there is an expectation, in the minds of many adults.” Here Martha Hadley paused; so did I. I was considering repeating that bit about “in a sexual situation of this awkward kind,” but Mrs. Hadley suddenly continued her arduous train of thought. “What many adults hope to hear you express, Billy, is something you have not, as yet, expressed.”
    “There is an expectation that I will express
what
?” I asked her.
    “Remorse,” Martha Hadley said.
    “Remorse,” I repeated, looking straight at her, until Mrs. Hadley looked away.
    “The repetition thing is annoying, Billy,” Martha Hadley said.
    “Yes, isn’t it?” I asked her.
    “I’m sorry that they’re making you see Dr. Harlow,” she told me.
    “Do you think Dr. Harlow is hoping to hear me express
remorse
?” I asked Mrs. Hadley.
    “That would be my guess, Billy,” she said.
    “Thank you for telling me,” I told her.
    Atkins was on the music-building stairs again. “It’s so very tragic,” he started. “Last night, when I was thinking about it, I threw up.”
    “You were thinking about
what
?” I asked him.
    “
Giovanni’s Room
!” he cried; we’d already discussed the novel, but I gathered that poor Tom wasn’t done. “That part about the smell of love—”
    “The
stink
of love,” I corrected him.
    “The
reek
of it,” Atkins said, gagging.
    “It’s
stink
, Tom.”
    “The
stench
,” Atkins said, vomiting on the stairs.
    “Jesus, Tom—”
    “And that awful woman with the cavernous cunt!” Atkins cried.
    “The
what
?” I asked him.
    “The terrible girlfriend—you know who I mean, Bill.”
    “I guess that was the point of it, Tom—how someone he once desired now turns him off,” I said.
    “They smell like fish, you know,” Atkins told me.
    “Do you mean women?” I asked him.
    He gagged again, then recovered himself. “I mean their
things
,” Atkins said.
    “Their
vaginas
, Tom?”
    “Don’t say that word!” poor Tom cried, retching.
    “I have to go, Tom,” I told him. “I have to prepare myself for a little chat with Dr. Harlow.”
    “Talk to Kittredge, Bill. They’re always making Kittredge have a talk with Dr. Harlow. Kittredge knows how to handle Dr. Harlow,” Atkins told me. I didn’t doubt it; I just didn’t want to talk to Kittredge about anything.
    But, of course, Kittredge had heard about Miss Frost. Nothing of a sexual nature escaped him. If you were a boy at Favorite River and you received a restriction, Kittredge not only knew your crime; he knew who had caught you, and the terms of confinement your restriction entailed.
    Not only was the public library off limits to me; I was told not to see Miss Frost—not that I knew where to find her. The whereabouts of the family home she’d shared with her mental-case mother were unknown to me. Besides, that house was for sale; for all I knew, Miss Frost (and her mom) had already moved out.
    I did my homework, and what writing I could manage, in the yearbook room of the academy library. It was always a little before check-in when I passed, as quickly as I could, through the Bancroft Hall butt room, where both the smoking and the nonsmoking boys seemed uncharacteristically disturbed to see me. I suppose that my sexual reputation troubled them; whatever convenient pigeonhole they’d put me in might not be the right fit for me now.
    If those boys had heretofore thought of me as a miserable faggot, what were they to make of my apparent friendship with Kittredge? And now there was this story about the transsexual town librarian. Okay, so she was some guy in drag; she wasn’t a
real
woman, but she
presented
as a woman. Maybe more to the point, I had acquired an undeniable mystique—if only to the Bancroft butt-room boys. Don’t forget: Miss Frost was an
older
woman, and that goes a long way with boys—even if the older woman has a penis!
    Don’t forget this, too: Rumors aren’t interested in the unsensational story; rumors don’t care what’s true. The truth was, I hadn’t had what most people call sex—there’d been no penetration! But those butt-room boys didn’t know that, nor would they have believed it. In the minds of my fellow