Notes on a Silencing by Lacy Crawford

Author:Lacy Crawford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2020-07-13T16:00:00+00:00

Then for a while nothing happened. I have no recollection of Christmas that year, except that I was very sick again. My pediatrician’s office tested me for mono. It was negative.

In January I returned to school, and one morning in that dead second week of January—flat light, rutted ice—I again left Elise in her dark and overheated room and walked alone to breakfast.

I crossed the low edge of the quad and continued onto the frozen path along the Library Pond, from which the dark trail snaked up toward Drury House and my former calculus tutees. (I was no longer asked for extra help with problem sets.) I came to the road and crossed back up the hill toward the Wing entrance of Upper House, pulling open the great wooden door and hearing it squeal and slam behind me. Cold air followed, and still more of it pressed in from the wall of windows on my right. The name panels on the left were dull. It was icebox light, blued with shadow, and even in this pretentious Gothic corridor you could feel the forest all around you.

I found that going to breakfast was a better way to start the day than not. The kitchens were warm, and the bustle of people feeding themselves helped me feel less lonely.

I turned off the hall and climbed the stairs to Center Upper to pick up my friends. The fire doors were always closed (the terror of fire was the sole constant of the buildings crew, who’d have quit and left the state if they knew how many candles and bongs were lit around campus each afternoon and night), and when I pulled open the door onto my friends’ hall, the wheeze of the self-closing hinge caused them to look up. Caroline, Sam, Brooke, Maddy, Meg, and Tabby were sitting on the floor as always, backs to the wall between their respective doors, books in their laps, preparing for the day.

“Morning,” I called out.

Whatever withdrawals on their friendship my deviance had made, these girls had sustained some affection for me until just now. I had finally reached the limit. All of my friends, every one of them, looked down as suddenly as if the floor had vanished beneath them. It was Budge, I understood. Candace was their friend, and I could not be excused. I had no idea how they’d found out. Again, I’d said nothing. I had thought what I’d done was only about destroying myself, and that no one else would discover it, or care.

I waited a moment longer. It was excruciating, standing there, but also fascinating: an entire hallway of wonderful young women, friends I had laughed with and skated with, friends whose heads had balanced on my shoulder when the winding shivers of the soccer bus put us to sleep, friends whose adventures with boyfriends and lovers I knew in minute detail—these friends were refusing to acknowledge me in any way. They were performing something for me, I knew. Indifference is easy.

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