Here
There are no major highways into the northwest corner of Connecticut that comprises Litchfield County. Travelers from the more densely populated suburbs of New York—from Westchester and Long Island, from Danbury and Greenwich—find themselves frustrated by the path of winnowing thoroughfares, turnpikes and interstates splitting again and again like capillaries from an artery. No matter the starting point, the final approach to Atwater requires navigating Litchfield’s web of two-lane county roads, flanked in most cases by farmland and medium-thick deciduous forest, the only signage suggesting lowered speeds around particularly treacherous curves. In this corner of New England—like the PCH in certain parts of Southern California; like the pavement that cuts between oil fields outside Odessa—these are the roads meant for windows down and music on loud. This is where teenagers wrap themselves around telephone poles.
The vandal—if vandalism is what you wanted to call it—clearly knew this when she considered her options. (Unlike the question of whether the act was vandalism, there was near-unanimous agreement that the culprit was, in fact, a she.) She clearly knew that families dropping their daughters off at school had their pick of county routes to zig and zag across, like ants to the nest. She might have also known that the nearest billboards were at the interchanges and highway overpasses near Waterbury and Hartford; she might have further estimated the number of students who drove that way and decided: Not enough. When she placed her order with Vistaprint—the label was printed neatly on the back of each poster board—for one hundred eighteen-by-twenty-seven-inch signs and one hundred stands, it was with the understanding that the best approach was a scattershot one, shrapnel blasted across the entire county. She likely researched Connecticut laws and local ordinances regarding yard signs and public property and determined that what she was planning was probably not illegal, not exactly, but that it was best to plant the signs under the cover of darkness on a night as close to Opening Day as possible.
And so when the residents of Kent and Goshen and Roxbury woke one morning in late August, the day the boarding school at the heart of their suburban-rural community was set to open for the academic year, and made their way to the little main streets and intersections that held their corner stores and gas stations, they found their roads peppered with little black rectangles, low and squat and set thirty feet from the pavement. It wasn’t until they passed two or three that the words coalesced into meaning, the rs and ps sorted and organized by a fogged morning brain. Longer still it took to identify the purpose of these campaign signs in a nonelection year, and so the phrasing of the placards planted like seeds in a fifteen-mile radius from The Atwater School settled confusedly onto the surrounding community. A RAPIST WORKS HERE, they read, the message positioned next to a sepia-toned photo of a schoolhouse steeple, haloed in black like an antique portrait.
They were gone almost as soon as they’d popped up, lingering only for a day or two, so that those that remained withered like mailbox balloons after a birthday party, wilted and random, more frequent the farther you traveled from campus. They guessed the school came around and tore them up, or maybe it was their neighbors for whom the vulgarity of the signs was too much: Who wanted to look at that word every day? Who wanted to think about that kind of violence? Because of this, few of them had the chance to look up the URL that slugged the bottom of each sign, the one that might have directed them to a petition to extend Connecticut’s statute of limitations on rape and sexual assault, a kind of activism that might have struck them as surprisingly reasonable given the shock of the headline and the tabloidishness of the signs. In time, the townspeople for whom Atwater was a kind of ivory tower would decide the words on the yard signs weren’t meant for them, not really, and the act of vigilante justice would fade in their memories to a kind of sad and misguided prank. They were used to this kind of thing, the whispers of scandal that accompany the very, very privileged. It was never any of their business.
Orientation
Lauren Triplett has vomited in a lot of public places: on the sidelines of a soccer field; in the parking lot of a Dunkin’ Donuts; at Six Flags; at Disney World; once, even, at the edges of a black-diamond run on a mountain in the Adirondacks, orange-pink throw-up melting the powder on contact. And now: Somewhere on the Side of the Road in Rural Connecticut.
Her mother has not bothered to get out of the car. Susan Triplett has a spectacularly weak stomach of her own, and while a person might think that would make her more sympathetic to her daughter’s propensity for motion sickness, in fact it does not.
Instead, Lauren’s dad hangs a few feet off, hands on his hips: “Sorry, kid.”
Lauren spits, her hands still braced against her knees. She eyes her shins for flecks of stray vomit. She’ll need to find a place to brush her teeth. Did she pack mouthwash? That would be easier. “Not your fault,” she says, her eyes not quite meeting her dad’s as she peels herself up, unfurling her vertebrae one at a time. “How much longer?”
“Not much. Fifteen minutes.”
Lauren nods. A large SUV zips past them, its draft shaking the Tripletts’ own Forester and kicking up dead leaves settled at the shoulder. “I hope that’s not one of my classmates.”
Her dad shrugs. “No way they got a good-enough look.”
Lauren rolls her eyes. “Not helpful.”
As they climb back into the car, Lauren’s mother extends a hand into the back seat, passing a tin of mints in her daughter’s direction. “D’you guys see that?” she says, nodding her chin toward the windshield.
“Hmm?” Lauren’s dad starts the car and checks his mirror.
“There,” her mom says, pointing now, the tin of mints aimed at a small poster twenty yards up the road.
Her dad sighs and shakes his head. “What do you think that’s about?”
“I hope it doesn’t have anything to do with your school,” Susan says.
The mint opens Lauren’s nasal passages, and she chokes back a sneeze.
“Mom,” she says, by way of rebuke.
“I’m just saying. These places are all dealing with this stuff now.”
“Sue.”
“What?”
Her father turns on his blinker and eases the car out onto the road. They are quiet as they roll past the sign, all three of them engaged in a kind of mental matching game. The tower in the photo is perfectly nondescript, as though the sign’s creator did a standard image search for steeples and selected randomly from the algorithm’s assortment. There could be another prep school here, Lauren thinks. She remembers from her search that there are a dozen of them in western Connecticut, maybe more, all multisyllabic and old-moneyed: Westminster, Canterbury, Loomis Chaffee. But as their car draws even with the yard sign and Lauren cranes her neck toward the window, tapping her nose accidentally against the glass, she feels the familiar sink of disappointment, of a false hope not borne out. When she decided to apply to Atwater, her desk at home was covered with marketing and admissions materials from the school, thick-papered pamphlets and flyers and viewbooks dipped in navy and white. Almost all of them featured a low-angled shot of an open-air steeple, looming like a fortress watchtower. After she was accepted, she kept the viewbooks and flyers and pamphlets in their haphazard pile like a casual reminder. She absorbed them through the periphery of her mornings and evenings every day for months.
She would know that clock tower anywhere.
Copyright © 2021 by Emily Layden
