her clenched knees unfurled like the petals of a ripening peony. She didn’t think anything when he didn’t call over the weekend. And told herself he must not have seen her when she walked by his locker early Monday morning. At lunch, she strolled over to the table where he was sitting and stood for a minute, waiting for him to see her and to smile and invite her to sit. After far too many beats, after his friends were staring at her, half of them confused, half of them smirking, he looked up and raised an eyebrow.
“Hi,” she said, trying to hold on to confusion because what came after that, she knew, was going to be worse.
“Can I help you with something, Beatrice?”
She knew her face was flooding with color, knew she was probably flushing from head to toe; she could feel her knees sweat. Somehow she mustered enough breath and energy to turn and walk away. She heard him mumble something to the rest of the table, and they all burst out laughing, a few pounding the table in uproarious amusement.
(Years later, in a feminist literature class during a discussion on pornography, she would hear the term “beaver” for the first time and would remember with shattering clarity the feel of that flask in her mouth, the sulfur taste of silver, the smell of whiskey and peat. She would burn with shame for days, weeks, realizing what “Trapper” indicated and what it had meant when Conor slid his hand beneath the elastic of her underwear that night and whispered, very much to himself, Seventeen.)
“I’m so dumb,” she’d said over and over to Leo, crying and wiping her nose. “I just can’t believe I was so dumb.”
“Conor Bellingham?” Leo didn’t get it. That guy was a loser.
“He wrote the best story,” she said. “Did you read it? Did you read the last line?”
“The one he lifted from The Great Gatsby? Yeah, I read it. He’s lucky I didn’t turn him in for plagiarizing.”
Bea didn’t think it was possible to feel worse, but she bent at the waist and groaned. “I’m so, so dumb.”
Leo wrote the limerick the next day using the byline “Anonymous.” He typed it up and made copies and before lunch nearly the whole school had enjoyed his handiwork, featuring an unnamed student, his string of romantic conquests, and the moment in the backseat of his car when the boy would get the girl alone and inevitably, lamentably, prematurely ejaculate. The identity of the boy was obvious to the students but so cleverly done, so easily denied, that it didn’t cause trouble for Leo. And then there was this: For Conor himself to object would mean casting himself as a premature ejaculator, which Leo knew he’d never do. At first, everyone thought Bea was “Anonymous,” and even though she never denied it, any number of women Conor had mistreated claimed credit for the piece and then started writing their own punishing rhymes (with Leo’s subtle encouragement and often with his assistance) about Conor and soon other school miscreants. Finally the administration stepped in and put a stop to anything by the increasingly notorious and multiheaded Anonymous that became the highlight of that school year. Later, Bea would think how the silly limerick was really the start of what Leo would create with SpeakEasy—at the beginning anyway, before it turned kind of desperate and dirty.
She opened her Millay to one of the poems Tuck had loved and sometimes read to her: I pray if you love me, bear my joy. She was too antsy to read the whole thing. She refilled her cup of tea. Jesus, she was horny. How long had it been? She went into her room and rummaged through her bedside drawer for her miniature vibrator. She pulled it out and switched it on. Nothing. The batteries were dead.
She looked up and saw herself standing in front of the mirror, braids sloppy and uneven from sleep, some of the hairs around her face turned gray and wiry. She was winter pale and her eyes were bloodshot and unfocused from the weed. Was this who she was now? A middle-aged woman with a spent vibrator and a pile of typed pages that she was hoarding like they were dead cats? She was extremely high. She could hear Lena Novak’s voice as if Lena were standing in her bedroom. “It must be hard—being Beatrice Plumb.”
“Must be hard to be me,” she said to her reflection. “Hard to