Skin Game: A Memoir Read Online Free Page A

did of the unforgivable sin of self-importance. I’d called attention to myself—did I think I was something special? Did I think I was better than anyone else? The logic of these accusations was hazy, but the impact powerful. My tormentors deployed them like stealth weapons, the stiletto in the back of the neck to the unsuspecting victim.
    “Oh, go slit your wrists,” they’d mutter, sotto voce, sidling past me in the hallway.
    But the adults—Mrs. Warren and her company, who only yesterday had so rigorously endeavored to plumb my motivations—now maintained an elaborate silence, the lid clamped down on the fire in the pan, and never mentioned the incident again.
    “Hi, Caroline,” they’d cry too brightly in greeting.
    “Hello!” I’d smile back cheerily, accomplice to their plan.
    Why silence? I’m sure because the subject made everyone hideously uncomfortable. Because to speak of it would only be to give it shape and substance and permanence. Because no one could imagine that something might be seriously amiss with me—scrappy and sturdy and reliable me. You remember the niece in The Munsters, the nice perky blond girl who is the wholesomely ordinary note amid the wackiness of her gothic relatives? That was the role to which I appeared to be inseparably wedded: solid and steady Caroline. I always suffered an uneasy suspicion that in the hierarchy of eccentricities that was my extended family, I figured as something of a pedestrian disappointment. Yet I felt an obligation to play my role as it was expected to be performed. I had a responsibility to appear responsible. That’s what people were counting on me for. That’s who they needed me to be.
    There was no way there could be anything really wrong with twelve-year-old me. Puppy love, maybe, or a pimple, or maybe a fight with my sister or a bad grade on a test. “Adolescent angst,” my father used to pronounce such matters, and they rated about as high as dust bunnies and soap scum in relation to Life’s Big Issues.
    How much of the way we end up seeing ourselves is shaped by our own interpretations? When you construct your worldview on a series of misunderstandings, it’s like building a skyscraper with the foundation out of plumb: A fractional misalignment at the bottom becomes a whopping divergence from true by the time you get to the top. What that silence meant to me was that I had committed an act so appalling as to be literally unspeakable.

5
    In the boarding school’s required dress of coat and tie, he managed always, nevertheless, a certain ironic scruffiness, as though condescending to wear the outfit was more an amused indulgence on his part than an actual bow to authority. This boy, this bad-boy sophomore, one of my father’s students. He wasn’t all that bad, really, just indifferent and unambitious, and at the time that looked like bad to me. I thought it was your obligation always to try harder, and it seemed he wasn’t interested in trying at all. He slouched along bored, his tie just this much the wrong side of well-knotted, an incipient shadow of dirty-blond beard sketching the planes of his face, his manner suggesting it was all too much of a bother for him. In the end he’d be just another boy who would never particularly fail and never particularly make much of himself, and didn’t particularly care, but when I was twelve that looked reckless and daring.
    I was twelve and I lived in a boys’ boarding school, and though he was by no means the first of my ardent crushes for the year, for a certain time I believed that all my happiness would lie in the moment when this boy cupped my face in his hands and brushed my lips with his own.
    He was fifteen and he was bored and he flirted with me because why not? It filled the empty hours. We traded clumsy double entendres wrapped within fiery exchanges of feigned antagonism.
    “You little minx!” he’d cry in pretended outrage, lunging after me as I snatched his wallet from the