The arts academy was between two lakes, neither of which students were allowed to touch. It was rumored that there were bugs in the lakes that would make you itch uncontrollably. It was rumored that some seniors ran into the lake after graduating and their diplomas were promptly taken away. I stuck my feet in one day and nothing happened—it was icy and clear because invasive clams had come to the state’s lakes and eaten all the algae. This was supposed to be an ecological disaster, but it made the lakes clear as glass. You could see the green floor of the water, the discarded condom wrappers floating near the top.
The boarding school was set in 1,200 acres of red pines. The closest town was a bus ride away, and the bus only came on weekends. There was a rumor of a boy who followed the highway all the way to the mall to buy a soccer ball. The school doubled as a sleep-away camp in the summer, and the woods were filled with cabins. Breaking into a cabin meant expulsion, but that didn’t stop it from happening. Once, I saw a girl bring a space heater and blanket to a cabin she had unlocked. She said she was making it homey. She also said that if a light flashed outside the window, you better run like hell.
The aim of these forest patrols was to catch students having sex. And students were always having sex: in the forest on blankets, in the forest on logs, in the forest on moss, in unlocked cabins, in empty practice rooms, in dorm basements, in classroom rotunda bathrooms, in theater costume storage rooms, in art studios, in ballet dressing rooms, in parked school buses and fields behind rec centers. By looking for a place to have sex, students learned the landscape of the school, its dirt pits and sand bars, the illuminated sections and the dark ones.
I knew some people who had been caught by the forest patrols. One girl had been caught with a boy in an empty cabin, and the dorm staffer who found her wouldn’t turn away as she went to grab her clothes on the floor. Once, that dorm staffer had shown her a video of girls pouring milk on their breasts when they were in the dorm lobby alone at night. The reason she wasn’t expelled after being caught in the cabin was because she threatened to sue him. Everyone was always threatening to sue, especially if they got caught.
The new president had been fundraising like mad. He unveiled, right on the lake, new dance buildings and a shiny, modern music hall. The cabins on the outer edge of campus were still shabby and wooden, and the dorms were built out of a foamy, rotting concrete, but there was now a large house for the Creative Writing majors that looked like a fishing lodge. A tall pine trunk was anchored in the middle of its lobby. The building frenzy meant that students of one year saw a completely different school than the next. Time was measured in buildings: which ones hadn’t come up yet, which ones should’ve come down.
I was there long enough to see one building unveiled and another torn down. That is, I spent two years at the boarding school, one of which was bad, and the other worse. The characters that filled the place didn’t match the scenery; after it snowed, the school would look like a pristine alpine village, and then a herd of giant Demonia boots would stomp across the new snow. I stomped around with the others, desperate to show how rebellious I was. It was not natural for me, and the thought of getting in trouble made me break out in hives. But I forced myself through them, covering my welts from the others while hopping fences or smoking cigarettes that had been shipped in a Pringles can by someone’s cousin. I even wore the requisite uniform: a pink sateen slip dress, a lace-up corset that cupped breasts I didn’t have, and the same scuffed platforms as everyone else, their soles lifting as I plowed a path through the slush. We looked like we were cruising the alpine village for tricks.
The other cruisers and I would stomp to a few different places: the beanbags on the floor of the writing house, the basement of the upperclassmen dorm, a stick hut we built behind the art studios. Over time, each meeting place became fraught with overlapping moments, group games that led to one person’s humiliation, confessions immediately sent to group chats and mocked in the cafeteria over stir-fry and french fries. We would draw out these moments by writing them up in excruciating detail for the sonnet crowns and lyrical essays we read in front of parents at our graduation ceremonies. We inserted them, wholesale, into the senior thesis movies we screened, the oil paintings we showcased, the breakup songs we performed as our exes sat politely in the audience, waiting for their turn. Our parents, we imagined, would be proud that their children were living lives worth writing about.
After we started to get sick of our usual spots, we would clomp our boots to the lake, where there was a fire pit. In the pit, we would pile logs on top of each other into something like a gate. We were proud of this sculpture; you could see a square of lake, clear and clam-invaded, inside its borders. The lake didn’t even look inviting to touch, just blue and boring. We all threw pebbles at the sculpture and, somehow, it would not fall. When we left the school, it was still standing.
Up a hill behind the fire pit was the Jeffrey Epstein Scholarship Lodge, on the outskirts of the woods, bordering the edges of where we were allowed to prowl. It had been Jeffrey Epstein’s private cabin; at some point in time, he’d been a significant donor to the school. Long vacated, the cabin became a site of much interest among the students as news of his crimes reached campus. The school took down the placard of his name in front of the cabin, but word got around that you could still see the drill holes outlining the letters. We wanted to get up close and personal with evil, to pose in front of it and take pictures, to break down the door and get inside. I went up to the cabin’s porch with the cruisers and we squatted in front of it for a group photo, my round face sandwiched between sharp chins. All of us shivered in our sateen slip dresses. We made dead fish faces at the camera and pretended to bite each other’s ears off.
We felt like we were taunting him, or at least the ghost of him, in this place. He couldn’t have us, and he would’ve wanted us. Of this, we were sure. We teetered on hotness in a Halloween-costume sort of way, something better far away and on a stoop. Some of us thought we could harness this for a few quick bucks: a picture of a foot, maybe, or some old underwear. We never got around to the money, but we always found time to degrade ourselves. One girl gave a thirty-year-old vape store manager a blowjob while he was hawking pink and orange vape cartridges that looked like sippy cups. He died from a blood clot not long after, and she tattooed his name on the inside of her thigh. She was the wildest of us, and we treated her with a kind of awe.
Later, when I turned twenty, I would think about this moment—the sippy vapes, the clot, the hand-poked tattoo—with an exaggerated weariness, as if someone was watching to see if I regretted admiring it. But I was not weary of anything. In fact, I had wished, when I first heard the story, to have been in that vape shop, to have seen the cashier’s desk buck up and down.
Most of the cruisers felt suspended in a sort of protective putty: we were the post-cabin girls, the ones Epstein couldn’t get. Most thirty-year-old men could only stare at us blankly through vape shop windows or peruse our used underwear online for a fee. Most of us were talented at the clarinet or the bassoon and trusted that it would get us to Curtis or some lesser conservatory, maybe Bard. Most of us practiced our art diligently and submitted to contests with nominal winning sums, which we promptly spent on fake freckle pens. None of what you did during this time mattered if you ended up somewhere. The vape store blower would end up at Oxford.
The Jeffrey Epstein Scholarship Lodge looked like a life-size version of a Lincoln Log building set—a symmetrical green roof, logs jutting out from the sides like sandwich trimmings. It was not as sleek as we had hoped; we had imagined a steel basement lair, like the ones from Alaskan sex crime movies. We held out hope that the cabin could be a foil. There could be dark and sinister things still waiting for us, impatient and behind schedule.
We jiggled the doorknob of the cabin’s screened-in porch and stepped inside, peering into the glass windows. There was a bedroom with direct access to the porch, and if you pressed your face close, you could see the cream-colored bed, the textured throw pillows crowding its head. We took photographs of the bedroom with our phones up against the glass, and one girl said she might paint it. We felt close to each other in the face of something assuredly evil that looked like our parents’ houses, or how we imagined each other’s parents’ houses to look. We would never know anything this personal about each other, never anything as specific as how our bedrooms back home were decorated or what grocery store our parents shopped at. We didn’t think that mattered so much. We assumed everyone had roughly the same childhood as ourselves, give or take different breakfast cereals.
A girl took a bobby pin out of her hair and started on the inner lock, something she’d learned by watching YouTube videos on how to escape an Uber’s trunk. The bobby pin jammed around, then clicked open, and we shoved the door closed behind us, crowding around the nightstand with its box of tissues on top. The bed crouched in the middle of the room. We imagined that it held something alive and crawling, like an ant mound. Someone shrieked just to hear it. The noise passed through the room like a loose animal.
We allowed ourselves a tour. The living room was blandly decorated in shapes of taupe, accented with green trim. We were afraid of staining the long, loosely stuffed couches, and no one put their feet up. The responsibility of this cabin was already exhausting. It tied us to each other, but none of us wanted to be linked to any of the others; one girl in the cabin had told me that she always joined big groups of friends because then she didn’t have to talk as much. You could be surrounded on all sides and totally, completely silent.
We all sat on the living room floor, lifting our legs up flat against the walls. This was good for bloating; someone had watched an exercise influencer’s detox video series, and she had said as much. Up close to each other’s faces, we could see how gross we actually looked: pimples stained trails along cheeks, chalky teeth smelled like corn, cold sores hung on glossed lips like barnacles. There was no mirror to confirm what we saw, but we knew: we were surrounded by people who would peel away like scabs when we graduated. We all understood this and were satisfied.
We measured the planks of our stomachs under their sateen covers, and we assured each other that the air inside was going down. Then we stood up, and a girl said we should vacuum our stomachs for some health benefit she couldn’t quite define. Sure, we said. Bunk science, but sure. We stood in a circle, arching our shoulders up like puppets as we sucked in. We looked like we were being pulled by an invisible force latched onto our scalps. The only sound was someone’s leaking breath, like a wilting balloon.
A girl’s sateen dress reflected a circle of white light, spotlighting her ribs pressing through. Her hands were placed firmly on her sides. She seemed chosen. The light kept getting brighter, even though it had darkened outside. I turned to the window. A man was walking up the path, a floodlight wrapped in his fist. The light on the girl’s dress grew brighter, its edges sharp now, and she exhaled all her breath, whistling out.