In One Person

away from my friends—so that I could
write
.
    “You’ve come here, to the library, to
write
,” she repeated. I remembered that Miss Frost had a habit of repeating what you said. Nana Victoria said that Miss Frost must have enjoyed the repetition, because by repeating what you said to her, she could keep the conversation going a little longer. (Aunt Muriel had claimed that no one liked to talk to Miss Frost.)
    “Yes, I do,” I told Miss Frost. “I want to write.”
    “But why
here
? Why this place?” Miss Frost demanded.
    I couldn’t think of what to say. A word (and then another word) just popped into my head, and Miss Frost made me so nervous that I spontaneously said the first word, which was quickly followed by the second. “Nostalgia,” I said. “Maybe I’m
nostalgic
.”
    “Nostalgia!” Miss Frost cried. “You’re
nostalgic
!” she repeated. “Just how old are you, William?” she asked.
    “Seventeen,” I told her.
    “Seventeen!” Miss Frost cried, as if she’d been stabbed. “Well, William Dean—forgive me, I mean William
Abbott
—if you’re
nostalgic
at seventeen, maybe you
are
going to be a writer!”
    She was the first one who said so—for a while, she was the only one who knew what I wanted to be—and I believed her. At the time, Miss Frost struck me as the most genuine person I knew.

Chapter
3
    M ASQUERADE
    The wrestler with the most beautiful body was named Kittredge. He had a hairless chest with absurdly well-defined pectoral muscles; those muscles were of an exaggerated, comic-book clarity. A thin line of dark-brown, almost-black hair ran from his navel to his pubes, and he had one of those cute penises—I have such a dread of that plural! His penis was inclined to curl against his right thigh, or it appeared to be preternaturally pointed to the right. There was no one I could ask concerning what the rightward inclination of Kittredge’s penis signified. In the showers, at the gym, I lowered my eyes; for the most part, I wouldn’t look at him above his strong, hairy legs.
    Kittredge had a heavy beard, but he had perfect skin and was generally clean-shaven. I found him at his most devastatingly handsome with two or three days’ stubble, when he looked older than the other students, and even some of the Favorite River faculty—including Richard Abbott and Mr. Hadley. Kittredge played soccer in the fall, and lacrosse in the spring, but wrestling was the foremost showcase for his beautiful body, and the wrestling seemed well suited to his innate cruelty.
    While I rarely saw him bully anyone—that is, physically—he was aggressive and intimidating, and his sarcasm was of a cutting-edge kind. In that all-boys’, boarding-school world, Kittredge was honored as an athlete, but I remember him best for how effectively abusive he was. Kittredge was brilliant at inflicting verbal pain, and he had the body to back up what he said; no one stood up to him. If you despised him, you kept quiet about it. I both despised and adored him. Alas, the despising-him part did little to lessen my crush on him; my attraction to him was a burden I bore through my junior year, when Kittredge was a senior—when I believed I had only one year of agony remaining. I foresaw a day, just around the corner, when my longing for him would cease to torment me.
    It would be a blow, and an additional burden, to discover that Kittredge had failed to pass the foreign-language requirement; he would stay at the school for a fifth year. We would be seniors together. By then, Kittredge not only looked older than the other Favorite River students—he truly was older.
    If only at the beginning of those seemingly endless years of our incarceration together, I misheard the nuance in the pronunciation of Kittredge’s first name—“Jock,” I thought everyone called him. It fit. Surely, I thought, Jock was a nickname—anyone who was as cool as Kittredge had one. But his first name, his
actual
name, was Jacques.
    “
Zhak
,” we called Kittredge. In my infatuation with him, I must have imagined that my fellow students found him as beautiful as I did—that we’d instinctively
Frenchified
the
jock
word because of Kittredge’s good looks!
    He was born and grew up in New York City, where his father had something to do with international banking—or maybe it was international law. Kittredge’s mother was French. She was a Jacqueline—in French, the feminine of
Jacques
. “My mom, who I don’t believe