The World Cannot Give, page 22
“What’s wrong with them?” Virginia asks.
Laura hopes that it has nothing to do with her and Anton.
“You know—they really are horribly immature.”
Virginia lifts her chin.
“I don’t know why you’re doing choir at all, to be honest.”
“What?”
“It’s just—it’s not like you want to be a professional singer, or anything. Especially with senior year coming up. It’s a real waste of your time. It’s not exactly serious, any longer, not with Tipton at the helm.”
Laura knows exactly what will happen next.
Virginia is going to make her leave choir.
Even now, Laura still loves it. There are moments when she sings, her voice knitting together with Barry’s on Glory be to the Father and to the Son, or when the eerie particularity of her solo is swallowed up in the greater harmony, that she feels the same astounded shiver that she felt on her first Evensong.
But Laura knows she will do whatever Virginia asks. She no longer remembers how to do anything else.
* * *
The next day, at Assembly, the student council candidates all gather to present their videos. Laura shuffles in, alone. Virginia is already backstage.
The choir in their usual spot, under John Devonshire’s portrait. Yvette Saunders is with them, Ralph’s hand on hers.
Laura takes a few tentative steps toward them.
They all freeze when they see her.
“Hello… guys…”
Yvette bursts into peals of laughter.
“Everything okay?”
Yvette laughs even harder. Anton doesn’t even look up.
“Fine,” Brad says, so quickly. “Absolutely fine. Take a seat, Stearns.”
She considers them.
“O-kay?”
“You’re just in time,” Brad says, checking his watch. “Strauss is about to tell us all what miserable sinners we are.”
“Sure she is,” Yvette murmurs.
Ralph shoots her a look; she falls silent. Laura sits as far away from Anton as possible.
Isobel goes first. She uses “Black Sabbath” as her campaign theme song, sauntering onto the stage to near-unanimous raucous applause.
“Morning, fuckers,” she says, while Mrs. Mesrin gesticulates in horror from the side podium. “Let’s do this.”
Mrs. Mesrin launches her video from the St. Dunstan’s computer. It flickers across the screen at the back of the auditorium.
It is a catalog of her various successes at St. Dunstan’s: the removal of the Webster statue, the ongoing faculty reassessment of Evensong, the abolishing of the paternalistic rule that students can’t be unsupervised in the private dorm rooms of the opposite sex.
“All this,” says Isobel in the video, dressed in a boy’s rowing blazer and a bow tie, “without holding any political power whatsoever. Imagine what we can do with the apparatus of the state.
“We’re gonna burn the whole thing down.”
Half the room gives her a standing ovation when she’s done.
Now it’s Virginia’s turn.
There are a few scattered cheers from across Assembly Hall.
To Laura’s surprise, even the choir’s applause is perfunctory: a vague whoo that dies on their lips, Brad and Ralph’s muted Hear! Hear! as they tap the arms of their benches. Anton doesn’t applaud at all.
Virginia marches to the front podium.
She clutches a copy of her speech to her chest. Her skirt goes all the way to her ankles. She looks straight out at the audience.
“Gentlemen,” she says. “And ladies,” she adds, a little too late. “I’m pleased to present to you my vision for St. Dunstan’s.”
She nods at Mrs. Mesrin.
The video starts playing.
Virginia is sitting on the table of the rare-book room in Carbonell. She is wearing her white-sequined dress, which she has hiked up almost all the way to the top of her thighs. Her lipstick is smeared, and her mouth is open in a sultry half pout.
Her underwear is visible.
Brad stiffens. “Jesus…”
“I want you to know,” Virginia-in-the-video murmurs, in a high, kittenish voice Laura has never heard her use before, “how much I’m looking forward to our first time together.”
Virginia, onstage, freezes.
“Oh no.” Brad grabs the arm of his bench. “Oh no.”
Virginia in the video hikes the dress further up her hips. She splays her legs. “I want you to know,” she goes on.
“Well, fuck me!” Ralph is leaning in, his eyes shining with insalubrious glee.
“What is this shit?” one of the Morris boys mutters behind them.
The real Virginia does not move. Animal horror spreads across her face.
The video keeps playing: “What I’ve been thinking about,” this ghost-Virginia murmurs, “what I’ve been waiting for. I’ve dreamed of you discovering…”
She opens her legs. She traces her fingers up her inner thigh.
Laughter drowns out the rest of her words. The Morris boys, the Lyndhurst girls, everyone is laughing, or else screaming in some combination of horror and delight; somebody cries out stop to the video, but nobody does.
Virginia remains frozen onstage, looking wildly from the screen to the audience and back again. Mrs. Mesrin, too, is frozen: staring at the laptop as if she can simply will it to stop.
Isobel moves first.
She strides across the auditorium; she yanks the cord from the laptop so violently it clatters off the podium and smashes on the floor. The video flickers into pixels.
Virginia just stands there: watching the absence where her face has been.
People’s titters syncopate into silence.
Virginia bolts.
“Did you guys see—” Ralph begins, but Laura is already running out of Assembly Hall, down the corridors of Mountbatten, out onto Devonshire Quad. Virginia is ten paces ahead of her; Virginia long and lithe and so unlike that painted figure on the screen: pursing her lips, tracing her fingers.
“Virginia—wait—please!”
Virginia keeps running.
Laura catches up with her, at last, at the edge of the woods.
“Please just talk to me!”
Virginia rounds on her. Her eyes are glassy with tears. “What do you want?”
“What was that?”
“I checked,” Virginia gulps. “A million times. What I sent to Mrs. Mesrin—there’s no way…”
She staggers against a beech tree.
“I checked!”
“Breathe!” Laura grabs Virginia by the shoulders. “Please, you have to breathe.”
Virginia collapses into her arms.
“Tell me what happened.”
“I’m careful.” Virginia is shaking so hard Laura can barely hold her. “God, I’m so careful, I’d never have—God, I’m going to be sick!”
She retches. Nothing comes out.
“He was the only one who had it. The only one—oh God!”
“Who?”
“Brad!”
Virginia’s whole body convulses, then grows still.
Finally Laura gets it.
She remembers Brad’s face, after the Mayfair dance; she remembers all their faces; the way even Ivan Dixon blushed when she sat down.
They’ve seen it, she thinks. All of them.
Her stomach lurches.
It would have been so easy. Anyone with access to the Assembly laptop could have done it, in those frantic minutes when everybody was still finding their seats—slipped to stage right, stuck a USB stick into the computer, switched the files, switched the names.
It couldn’t have been them, she thinks. I know them; I know them.
“It’s not your fault, Virginia.”
“It is my fault.”
“It’s not; listen to me—you did nothing wrong, you—”
Virginia slaps her.
Laura falls back into the dirt.
“God, you’re pathetic!”
Virginia leaps up. “You did nothing wrong, don’t worry, it’ll be okay, don’t you dare feel bad—God, you’re like a little dog!” Her face is as white as the trees. “Just a little yapping lapdog begging to be loved. That’s all you are. You never understood a goddamn thing!”
“Virginia, I—”
Virginia’s just angry, Laura thinks, so desperately. She’s angry; she’s just lashing out; she doesn’t mean—
“Everything we talked about—everything we believed—you didn’t mean a single word, did you? You just smiled and nodded and pretended, and said Yes, Virginia, and No, Virginia. Don’t you dare tell me it wasn’t my fault. My God. You little fool. You make me sick.” She catches sight of Laura’s face. “What?” Her laugh is horrible. “What is it now?”
Laura doesn’t say anything.
“I’m going for a run. Don’t you dare follow me.”
She leaves Laura in the dirt.
* * *
Laura doesn’t know how long she stays like that: mud-covered, disheveled, with bits of twigs falling from her hair.
She is barely conscious of crossing back across Devonshire Quad, of entering Desmond, of sitting down at her desk.
She is barely conscious of pressing her computer keys: of the email, from an anonymous account, that has appeared in her in-box that afternoon.
Virginia Strauss sex tape, the subject line reads. It’s been CC’d to the entire St. Dunstan’s student body.
There is a link.
Laura sits there for a while, staring at the screen, deciding what to do.
She doesn’t delete it.
It’s not that she’s not going to delete it, she tells herself. Of course she’ll delete it. Every single law Laura knows demands that she delete it. There are things you do not look upon, in this world, without turning into salt, or stone, and your best friend half-naked, trailing her fingers up her thighs, is one of them.
Only, there is a bruise on Laura’s lip.
Only, Laura wants to.
It’s not that she wants to see Virginia get off. The idea repulses her. Virginia is not supposed to get off, not ever, except if you count vague holy ways where you see the saints in ecstasy; that’s the whole point of Virginia; that’s why Laura worships her.
There are two kinds of people in this world—how many times has Virginia told Laura this?—there are the ones who matter, and the ones who don’t, the Robert Lawrences and the Gus Parnells, the World-Historical and residents of Ordinary Time; there is transcendence, everywhere, and the heavens crack open like an egg every time a priest tells you to go to a Sunday-night class in Howlham, every time a girl joins choir who shouldn’t, and that is why it is acceptable to send love notes to priests, that is why it is acceptable that Bonnie di Angelis fell off a cliff, that one time, and that is why it is acceptable to slap a person who is just trying to help you and call them a little yapping lapdog who never understood anything, anyway, and Virginia understands this, better than anyone, which is why Virginia is better than sex, except when she’s not, and if Virginia isn’t better then everybody, then Laura doesn’t have to be, either.
That’s what Laura tells herself when she stares at the screen.
She is not a fool. She is not weak. She is not Gus Parnell.
She has something on Virginia at last.
Laura tells herself that she is only going to look at the beginning. She is only going to see whether it’s just some kind of virus, or a deepfake, or spam.
It’s not that she’s watching the video for sex reasons, she tells herself, watching the video.
It’s just she wants to understand.
It’s just that Virginia would never do something like this, and Virginia has done something like this, and Virginia having done something like this means all the times she has made Laura ashamed of thinking about doing something even a little bit close to this make no sense any longer, and nothing makes sense any longer, and this video is the only thing that could explain why.
Somewhere in the video will be the thing that makes Laura understand the video.
It is not Virginia’s white dress, with the sequins popping off. It is not the spines of books, running up the back wall. It is not the look on Virginia’s face; it is not the lilt in Virginia’s voice, it is not how Virginia pantomimes pleasure when her fingers trail up her inner thigh; it is not how Virginia has set the whole thing up, with a tripod and equipment from the AV library, because of course, Laura thinks, with unfamiliar bitterness, if Virginia Strauss is going to make a sex tape of course she has to make it so much better than an ordinary sex tape, and the satisfaction Laura gets from thinking this out loud keeps her watching, a little longer, and then a little longer still, and although the angel in her breast beats its wings in vain, trying to stop her, all Laura can think is that this might be the one hard, strong thing she has ever done in her whole life.
Virginia, she thinks, would never expect her to.
Laura watches all two minutes and thirteen seconds without stopping.
Laura hears the door close.
“I came back to tell you I was sorry.”
Virginia is standing in the doorway.
Her face is drawn. Her eyes are red.
Laura’s pleasure curdles into shame.
“Virginia, I—” She scrambles to close the browser tab. “I—someone sent it to me. I don’t know who, I—”
“They sent it to everybody.” Virginia’s voice is very calm and very quiet. “The whole school’s probably got it by now.”
“I’m so sorry.”
Virginia’s face is blank. “Don’t worry about it. You might as well watch it.” Her nonchalance is more unnerving than her rage. “Everyone else did.”
“Virginia, please, I—”
“I’m very tired,” Virginia says. “I don’t want to talk anymore.”
She goes to the bed. She turns out the light.
“I’m going to bed now,” she says. “Sleep well.”
They lie there, like that, in silence, for a few hours, and then at dawn Virginia rises, wordlessly, and slips out of room 312, and although Laura rushes to the window, and thrusts it open—overflowing with the sorrowful, penitent things she wants to say—she knows, as she watches Virginia vanish into the woods, that Virginia will never hear them.
9
VIRGINIA DOESN’T GO TO CLASS for three days.
By then, the whole school has seen the video.
If it were a normal sex tape—Yvette loudly explains to Gabe Meltzer at Keble breakfast—just an actual horny person being actually horny—people might actually feel sorry for her. It’s not that people don’t know you’re not supposed to share sex tapes people make for you.
But to check out a tripod, and one of the AV library’s cameras, to do it in the rare-book room of Carbonell, in front of all those old copies of Webster, to monologue through it like you’re doing performance art—all this, the St. Dunstan’s population collectively decides—is such a profound self-own that normal campus sexual etiquette can’t possibly apply.
“Complete cringe,” Yvette Saunders concludes.
Besides, Virginia brought it upon herself—with her whole God thing, her performative objection to pornography, what she did to poor Bonnie di Angelis (those rumors, pulled under by time, resurface). The truth—that Virginia is not just a stuck-up, frigid bitch but also a hypocritical one—is a matter of public interest.
It’s like those Republican politicians caught cruising in men’s bathrooms, everyone says. People have a right to know.
Not that anyone knows, exactly, who replaced Virginia’s campaign video with the sex tape. Nobody pays attention to that part. The prevailing theory—which gains tractions first among the girls of the Dewey Decibel System, then spreads to the rest of campus—is that Virginia did it herself, out of some strange psychosexual compulsion to punish her own horniness, or else out of a desperate need for attention.
“Daddy issues,” Gabe Meltzer decides. Tamara Lynd thinks she has a humiliation fetish.
Once you’re willing to make a sex tape in Carbonell, there’s no telling what other sick, demented things you might do. After all, Matt Azibuike half recalls, didn’t she send a bunch of dirty messages to a priest, way back when?
Even if it had been one of the boys who leaked it, everyone collectively decides, Virginia would still have deserved it.
“If you’re smart enough to get straight As every term,” says Julia Feinstein, “you’re smart enough to know boys always spread your nudes.”
Laura racks her brain trying to work out which of them did it.
She rules out Brad immediately. Brad loves Virginia, Laura thinks, maybe as much as she does; he is the only one who would have jumped, that night, on the rocks of Jarvis Point. Ivan Dixon, who bursts into tears at Compline, would never hurt anybody on purpose; Ralph would find the whole thing tacky; Barry doesn’t even have a smartphone.
Even Anton could never have done it. Sure, Laura thinks, he is brutish, and impulsive, and thoughtless—this Laura knows—but he is never deliberately cruel. Cruelty, Laura thinks, involves foresight; it takes initiative. Anton needs Virginia to fill out his college apps.
None of them, she keeps desperately resolving, could have done it. None of them would have done it.
Only, she keeps thinking, one of them did.
* * *
Virginia goes running at dawn. She stays out until curfew. She says a few perfunctory words to Laura—about laundry, or leaving the light on; the rest of the time, it’s like Laura isn’t even there.
Laura tries to apologize again, of course, with halting, mealy-mouthed vagueness, but Virginia doesn’t even let her finish her first sentence.
“It’s fine,” she says. “Forget it.” She won’t.
Laura knows their friendship is over. There is nothing she can do, no excuse she can come up with that will make her, in Virginia’s eyes, any less culpable than whoever sent out the tape in the first place. She has looked on Virginia’s beauty bare. There are things you pay with your life for seeing; this is one.
She is, she thinks, no longer a lapdog, overflowing with yapping love for everything that comes near her.
