"I guess I was nine or ten," Jack said.
"And the boarders were how old?" Ellie asked.
"They would have been your age," Jack told her.
"That's sick!" Ellie said.
"Nothing happened, did it?" one of the boarders asked Jack.
"No, of course not--I just remember being frightened," he replied.
"Well, you were a little boy," one of them pointed out. "Of course you were frightened."
"Look, there's my stupid shoe," Ellie said. The loafer lay kicked aside, against the corridor wall.
"How will you ever make a movie of The Slush-Pile Reader?" one of the young women asked him.
"It's potentially so gross," another of the girls said.
"The film won't be as explicit as the novel," Jack explained. "The word penis won't ever be mentioned, for example."
"What about vagina?" one of the girls asked.
"Not that, either," he said.
"Why didn't she just get her vagina fixed?" Ellie asked. Of course Jack knew she meant the Michele Maher character, but his thoughts went entirely to Emma.
"I don't know," Jack answered.
"There must have been some psychological reason, Ellie," one of her fellow boarders said. "I mean it's not exactly knee surgery, is it?"
The young women, Ellie among them, nodded soberly. They were such sensible girls--children at heart but, in so many other ways, more grown up than Emma at that age, not to mention Ginny Jarvis and Penny Hamilton (or Charlotte Barford, or Wendy Holton). Jack wondered what had been so different or wrong about him that those girls had ever thought it was acceptable to abuse him.
These girls wouldn't have harmed a little boy. Jack felt, in their company, like a nine-or ten-year-old again--only he felt safe. So safe, and like such a little boy, that he suddenly announced: "I have to pee." (It was exactly the way a nine-or ten-year-old would have said it.)
The young women were unsurprised; they responded to his announcement in a strictly practical fashion. "Do you remember where the boys' washroom is?" Ellie asked him.
"There's still only one," another of the young women said.
"I'll show you where it is," Ellie told Jack, taking his hand. (It was exactly the way she would have taken a nine-or ten-year-old by the hand; for some reason, it broke Jack's heart.)
It had all been his fault, he thought--the way those older girls in his time at St. Hilda's had taken such an unnatural interest in him. It must have been something they detected in him. Jack was convinced that he was the unnatural one.
Jack pulled his hand away from Ellie. He didn't want her or her friends--these incredibly healthy, normal young women--to see him cry. Jack felt he was on the verge of dissolving into tears, but in that unembarrassed way that a nine-or ten-year-old might cry. He was suddenly ashamed of what the real Michele Maher might have called his weirdness.
"I can certainly find the boys' washroom by myself," Jack told them--laughing about it, but in an actorly way. "I believe I could find that washroom from the darkness of my grave," he added, which made it sound like his journey to the boys' washroom was a heroic voyage--meant to be undertaken alone, and in full acceptance of such perils as one might encounter along the way.
Jack was soon lost in an unfamiliar corridor; perhaps the old school had been repainted, he was thinking. The stairwells were the likely haunts of ghosts, he believed--Mrs. McQuat, his departed conscience; or even Emma, disappointed by the brevity of his prayer. The voices of the boarders no longer accompanied him on his journey; Jack wasn't followed, or so he thought.
Ahead of him, not far from a bend in the corridor, was the dining hall--all closed up and dark. Did a figure, old and stooped, emerge from the shadows there? It was an elderly woman, no one Jack recognized but surely not a ghost; she looked too solidly built for a spirit. A cleaning woman, from the look of her, he thought. But why would a cleaning woman be working at St. Hilda's on a Sunday, and where were her mop and pail?
"Jack, my dahleen--my leetle one!" Mrs. Machado cried.
To see her, to know it was really her, had the effect on Jack of her high-groin kick of so many years ago. He couldn't move or speak--he couldn't breathe.
He'd recognized that Leslie Oastler had a certain power over him, and always would have. But in all his efforts, conscious and unconscious, to diminish his memories of Mrs. Machado, Jack had underestimated her implacable authority over him. He'd never defeated her--only Emma had.
Gone was her waist--what little she'd ever had of one. Mrs. Machado's low-slung breasts protruded from the midriff of her untucked blouse with the over-obviousness of an amateur shoplifter's stolen goods. But what she'd stolen from Jack was more obvious; Mrs. Machado had robbed him of the ability to say no to her. (Or to anyone else!)