The closet door was locked shut.
For the first few hours, she kept expecting the door to open. Connolly Hall locked itself every night at ten. No one could remember when the rule had started. It was simply how things were done. Amy pounded the door with her fists and kicked at it the way an animal kicks when it knows it has been trapped, all to no avail. She threw her weight at the door again and again. It didn’t move. Echoes of her mother’s jest that she was built as solid as a bricklayer rebounded within her thoughts, coated in bitter irony. But mostly, she screamed.
The dormitory stood empty, its inhabitants dispersed for the holidays. A custodian’s touch would not grace the timeworn wooden floors for another six weeks, till after the New Year.
Connolly Hall was the oldest dormitory on campus. Miss Galway’s School for Girls had been built in the 1870s by an Irish beer baron for his homely but clever daughters—chinless, heavyset women who went on to lives of happy spinsterhood, filling their houses with books and leaving behind libraries that shaped generations of young women in the first wave of feminism. For decades, the building served as a refuge for smart or quirky Lost Girls, its walls holding the marks of their passing. Amy’s mother had mourned its transformation into a co-ed dormitory, warning that boys would arrive, and with them the slow erosion of spaces meant to belong only to women.
Her predictions were eerily realized. Once the headmistress’s announcement hung in the air, a tableau of dissent unfolded and coalesced into a symphony of protest. The elderly matron shared the news that their home, the sprawling campus of Miss Galway’s School for Girls, would combine with the struggling Bosco Academy. After more than a hundred years, the fervor for military academies had dwindled, leaving Bosco to grapple with an indistinct reputation, a refuge for the not-so-apt scions of the elite. Enrollment, once a bustling stream of wealthy and privileged knuckleheads, had trickled down to a shallow puddle.
Heather Jo Whitham’s shoe flew with fervor, obscenities hurled into the ether, while Melissa Pernhault passed out at Amy’s feet. Amy stood apart, the stirring of something strange coursing through her loins. The date was etched in history, the last day of May in the tumultuous year of 1980. Co-ed education would come to Miss Galway’s this September. Amy knew life would change for everyone.
After a monotonous summer spent reading to the blind, an obligation her mother framed as a lesson in character and empathy for college admissions, Amy greeted the coming semester with a renewed sense of purpose. An entire morning was dedicated to the meticulous art of packing her trunk. Amy discreetly hid behind the sturdy radiator, the oversized dictionaries, and stacks of SAT guides, manifestations of her mother’s well-intentioned but overbearing demands. Framed images of her long-gone father and sister would also not make the cut for space in the trunk. Amy strategized cute shorts, knit ponchos, Jordache jeans, and peasant blouses like a knight preparing her armor for battle.
Miss Galway had gotten rid of its repressive uniform policy two years earlier after the student union held six community forums on freedom of expression, gathered the signatures of all 150 girls, and finally threatened a boycott. The aftermath was a sartorial landscape of comfort, where pajama bottoms mingled with Chemistry lectures and oversized flannels became the uniform of the World Lit classroom. Unkempt ponytails emerged as an anthem of rebellion, an emblem of liberty that swayed with the breeze of unburdened choice. Most of the girls found this state of comfort liberating, enjoying the freedom of underarm hair, bra-less days, and elastic-waisted pants. It was an era of unshackled freedom.
But this autumn would be different, and Amy would be ready. There were only twenty boys left at Bosco Academy. Yet within this delicate equation, those twenty boys represented twenty chances, an array of possibilities, each a prospective avenue to love’s embrace.
Amy stole her mother’s lipstick, a drab red, and a small bottle of Revlon’s Charlie perfume. She stared at her face in the mirror with profound disappointment. Round-faced, lacking a jawline of any note and devoid of the coveted angles she saw on others, Amy lifted her chin toward the heavens, hoping for some miraculous stretch that might turn her into the swan-necked beauties of her classmates, girls who hid their burgeoning glory in oversized sweatshirts and L.L. Bean duck boots. Her hair was pretty good. This was something Amy had more control over. In her possession lay a packet of hair dye, swiped from one of her unsuspecting wards at the blind home.
Adopting the guise of a clandestine alchemist, Amy ensconced herself within the confines of the third-floor bathroom, locking the door as if sealing an initiation rite. In this covert sanctuary, a ritual commenced as chemicals mingled and were applied to her dry, mousy hair. Time ticked on while her tiny boom box serenaded her with the falsetto hues of Christopher Cross, a soundtrack to her transformation. Amy met the stinging embrace of the chemicals seeping into her scalp with a fervor she could scarcely contain. She released the towel turban from her head and shook out her cascading new locks, reminiscent of Farrah Fawcett removing her motorcycle helmet in the opening credits of her detective show. It was not bad. It was defiantly yellow. A beautiful hue similar to margarine.
The following day, her mother used words like “brassy” and “common” to describe her only living daughter’s hair. It was a clear sign of transformation, and Amy liked it. She was ready to meet a Bosco boy. Amy smiled at her appearance in the mirror, disregarding her only living parent’s comments.
On that hot September morning, the entire school stood in front of the steps of the Main Building waiting for the Bosco bus to arrive. Most were numb, all were curious, and many felt betrayed by a change already underway. Homemade buttons adorned flannel shirts, displaying the male symbol slashed through with a red line, a stark declaration against the intrusion of boys into their sanctum. Heather Jo Whitman, a walking embodiment of disdain, bore her glares like ceremonial weapons, polished, useless, and displayed for effect, the personification of misandry still waiting for a real enemy.
“I’d slit every one of their throats if I could,” she muttered to Amy, who thought her friend’s rage was cartoonish. Melissa Pernhault stood apart from the group, hot tears running down her trembling chin. How foolish, Amy thought. Tears were for things like forty-year-old fathers dying of pancreatic cancer or seven-year-old girls being hit by trucks. Both were experiences Amy had known all too well. She did not want to think of them.
The boys disembarked the bus with an endearing awkwardness, their arrival met by the keen scrutiny of girls, who had taken on the role of Darwin observing the Galapagos, wondering which animals would evolve to take them over. The boys, oozing testosterone, each carried a matching longshoreman’s bag slung over a shoulder and walked in a straight line toward Connolly Hall. The building had been under construction over the summer to shore up the foundation and update the bathrooms with urinals and whatever else was required for male biological needs.
Connolly House was a four-story Victorian with rambling hallways and fifteen bedrooms of uneven size, all trimmed in red chestnut wood. Mr. Thadeous Connolly had purchased the dense, impenetrable lumber from the West Indies for his barrels and donated a season’s surplus to Miss Galway for the construction of the school’s first building. It would later become the foundation for a network of six structures for women spread across sixteen acres in the isolated Hudson Valley.
The hallways were built extra wide to accommodate rolling barrels, a practical precaution in case the experiment in female education proved a lark and the building needed to be repurposed. Mr. Connolly could not have known that a century later his namesake would become the school’s first boys’ dormitory. Connolly Hall had been renovated many times. Some rooms were converted to storage. Others were locked and quietly forgotten.
Amy pulled out her pocket comb and quickly feathered her yellow hair.
The closet was empty. Cleared for the holidays. No hidden cache of Hostess Twinkies or Snoballs to comfort Amy in this prison. She listened to the wind blowing the snow outside. She searched unsuccessfully for a hanger that could be transformed into a tool to cut through the door.
And so began the first of many days of Amy scratching her nails into the hard chestnut wooden door. At first, she wasted hours on the frame, which was far too thick. Then she decided her efforts would be better spent on the inner panel, which could not be more than an inch thick. She remembered her father’s old beagle scratching at the back door of their summer house, exposing white stripes beneath the varnish and creating what her father called a real eyesore.
Once her father became truly ill, the dog stopped being walked. No one said this aloud. It simply happened. With the walks gone, the dog’s behavior unraveled. He scratched at doors until the wood bled white beneath the varnish. He could not be taught otherwise.
Amy watched this and learned. She took the dog’s persistence as a kind of instruction. If something was locked, you scratched. If it did not open, you scratched longer. That was what the body knew to do.
The dog had been bred for work, for following scent and command, for staying with the hunt until it was finished. When there was no work left, the instinct did not disappear. It turned inward. It looked for a door.
When her father died, her mother gave the dog away to one of the local farmers, the same man who had found her sister’s body by the highway. Amy never saw the dog again. She began scratching and did not stop.
With remarkable speed, the ranks of unclaimed boys dwindled one by one. By November’s arrival, most of Bosco Academy’s male students had formed alliances with eager counterparts from Miss Galway’s. The campus pulsed with an electrifying mix of pent-up desire as repressed teenagers passed clandestine notes in class, created gestures of love in the form of carefully curated mixed tapes, and transformed private acts like hand-holding into unabashed public displays of intimacy. Amy had never seen anything like it. Girls were changing.
Melissa Pernhault, once a reservoir of tears, now walked proudly beside a stocky, short boy with a prematurely grown mustache, the first visible proof of adulthood, hinting at other strange hair beginning to claim his body. These were places Amy did not yet have language for but could not help imagining, alongside the newer mysteries of hickies and Iron Maiden’s melodies.
Heather Jo Whitham, the cynic turned believer, now wore Revlon Touch & Glow, an optimistic smear that did little to soften her glare and was rewarded with a kiss on Field Day from a midfielder with flowing hair like a lost Cassidy brother. Amy remained adrift as her classmates reveled in these changes. Her attempts at alluring encounters were met with an indifference that left a bruise on her confidence.
She woke every morning at six o’clock and took a hot shower followed by a cold one, the first to open her pores; the second to close them, before any other girls were awake. She had read in a magazine that boys hated giant pores. She curled her eyelashes, applied mascara, and brushed a faint green or blue across her large eyes, big enough to make Margaret Keane envious. Then she began the longer work: pumicing dead skin from her heels, moisturizing her elbows, knees, and ankles, filing her nails down to nothing sharp or wrong.
By breakfast at eight o’clock, she had achieved the casual “no bother” look boys liked, or so the magazines claimed.
Amy sat down with her Frankenberry cereal and looked around at the newly paired couples sharing buttered toast, experimenting with coffee, and staring at one another as if the other were so damned special. Amy surrendered her spoon to the pink milk, devastated by her loneliness. The storm was coming. The ark was filled to capacity with pairs, and Amy found herself the lone unicorn of the menagerie.
Although she had over two hundred Algebra equations to complete and a report on Elizabeth Cady Stanton to write, Amy set aside her academic responsibilities and indulged in a self-pitying walk through the forests of Miss Galway’s sixteen acres. Her choice of clogs was regrettable as she moved into the swampier stretches of the grounds, and she considered whether to bother returning to campus to make the requisite weekend phone call to her mother. It had been more than five years since that awful summer. By then, her mother had given Sundays over to drink, to a soft, recurring fog where the broken family could be mourned without interruption. She returned again and again to the same refrain.
“When you lose your parents, you’re orphaned. When you lose a husband, you’re widowed. And when you lose a child, you’re what?”
There was no word for it. No language willing to carry something so vile.
A good daughter would have called. Her mother was her only living parent. The only one left. Amy did not call.
She was just beginning to turn back when something caught her eye.
In the near distance, she noticed a boy digging a hole. Shaggy-haired, his back soaked in sweat and his cheeks red from exertion, he worked steadily, lifting heavy, wet dirt into mounds around a hole already deep enough to alarm her. Amy sucked in her breath and hid behind a tree. She pulled her loyal comb from her back pocket and feathered her hair into controllable waves. Summoning her courage, she stepped out from her hiding place and edged closer. Her voice, a mix of curiosity and invitation, broke the forest’s hush.
“Hey?” she said.
The boy lurched forward as if caught. He dropped the shovel, adjusted his crotch, and peered through his unkempt bangs toward the sound of her voice.
“Digging a hole,” he said defensively. “Not breaking no rules.”
The Bosco boys often found themselves in conflict with Miss Galway’s Code of Conduct, and disciplinary remediation was swift. Wayward boys were assigned hours marching around the flagpole at sunrise for offenses like smoking, skipping study periods, or nocturnal rooftop escapades. Amy could not recall anything in the Code about digging a hole.
Amy leaned in, her voice dropping into a conspiratorial whisper. “Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone.”
It was enough. The promise of silence loosened him. He stood there with the shovel, unsure where to put his hands. They exchanged names. His was Raymond Boy. Around his throat hung a small silver dagger, decorative but sharp enough to suggest danger if you believed in such things.
Amy circled him the way she imagined a seasoned detective might, patient and intuitive, uncovering details by asking very little and listening hard. His father had ties to a cosmetics empire, a faint residue of glamour clinging to the family name. His mother had flown west to Palo Alto in pursuit of herself through Erhard Seminars Training. And Bosco, she learned, had claimed him young. Nine years old. A place to put a boy while his parents attended to more important lives.
Behind them, the hole yawned wider. Each shovel of dirt made it deeper, more deliberate. Amy did not ask why he was digging. She did not need to. The hole was the point. It gave them a reason to stand close, to linger, to agree without speaking that some acts did not require permission as long as no one was watching.
“I bet you don’t know a lot of girls,” Amy said, hoping his inexperience with single-sex institutions matched her own.
“Aw, I had plenty of girlfriends.” He proceeded to catalogue his exploits with a local farm girl named Gretchen, a colleague from a magic camp in the Catskills, and a figure model from Marymount College. It was a list of amorous encounters that had fast-tracked his entrance into the adult world and lent him an air of worldliness. This, Amy assumed, explained why he kept to himself and why he scared off her female contemporaries. But she was not afraid. Only one boy out of the twenty remained unclaimed, and Amy would rise to the occasion and seize him as hers. She did not consider why he was digging holes alone in the woods.
The following month and a half felt infinite. Amy would have serious explaining to do about her failing grades, but the thought barely registered. How could she be expected to care about Algebra or Elizabeth Cady Stanton when every minute of the day now belonged to Raymond Boy? Time bent around him. Hours vanished. She woke and slept inside his name.
She loved their cafeteria dates most of all, staged in full view of Miss Galway’s School for Girls, where everyone could see that she had been chosen. She watched him eat sardines from the can in silence, unembarrassed, as if the room existed for their witness. He shared his ancient Books of the Dead, purchased from his father’s art dealer, a man with one yellow eye. She enjoyed collecting native herbs from his lists, plants that had always grown across the Miss Galway campus but seemed newly revealed. She learned to admire his taxidermy, the patience of it, the care. He taught her the proper term, mounting, and let her try. First, a raccoon. Then, a Pekingese he claimed had died of old age. She believed him. She believed everything. This was the happiest she had ever been. For the first time, the world narrowed to something she could understand. He assured her of things she did not yet know to doubt.
It came as a surprise when Raymond locked her in his dorm closet. He said he would be back in an hour, but Amy guessed he had been forced from campus, perhaps manhandled by the litigious custodians and forbidden to return to Connolly Hall. She imagined him in the back of his father’s limo, staring sadly out the window, thinking of her, lost without her.
Her fingers had been worn down to bloody nubs, her fingernails long gone, and her stomach ached from emptiness. In many ways, this was her fault. She had known it was forbidden to enter the boys’ dormitory. She knew she was breaking the Miss Galway Code of Conduct when she climbed Connolly Hall hand over hand, tore a nail loose on the stone, leapt from the narrow eave beneath the window, and hauled herself through the third-floor opening into Raymond’s bedroom, bleeding a little and proud of it.
Heather Jo Whitham had warned her she was losing her sense of self. Melissa Pernhault attempted a lecture on self-respect, even though everyone knew Melissa, the hypocrite, had let her short, stocky, mustachioed boyfriend touch her left breast. The good one.
She heard a rumble. Someone had entered the room.
Raymond was an addiction that was worth everything. Even this. Even three days in a closet. That was how she understood it as she sat in the dark. Each night returned to her in pieces: slipping out together to dig holes while the ground was still wet, the weight of the shovel, the sound of dirt falling back on itself. Then the dancing. Not dancing exactly, but the careful way Raymond showed her to move, slow and deliberate, the steps repeated until they felt natural. He said it helped you listen better. He counted under his breath, not like music, more like keeping track. Amy followed him barefoot through the wet leaves, doing her best to remember the order, pleased when he nodded as if she’d done it right.
After, Raymond read from his books. One of them stayed with her, a thin volume he treated with particular care. He said its name quietly, Liber AL vel Legis, as though saying it too loudly might be rude. He told her it was important. Not comforting, exactly, but honest. He said it explained how things worked and what was expected once you agreed to listen.
Under the silvery light of the moon, nothing else had mattered. Nothing else had been real. Their connection had flourished there, she told herself, every stolen moment fixed in her memory like something promised, something permanent.
Amy heard the jangle of keys. Her voice was gone, shredded by hours of screaming. She knew he would return to save her. She mouthed his name. She tried to tap the door to let him know she was alive, to show him she had waited, but her body would not move. Her exhaustion was complete.
As she lay there, something Raymond had said drifted back to her, gentle at the time, almost kind: You just have to wait. That’s the work.
She heard the key enter the lock, the clicking and clacking as the pieces aligned and turned. The door opened. Light from the snowy day flooded the room and burned her eyes.
There stood her father and little sister, hand in hand. The nine-year-old held a leash attached to a familiar beagle.
Her father smiled and said, “You get to be with us now.”
