Tracy Flick Can't Win (Tracy Flick #2)
Tom Perrotta
The Hall of Fame is a tremendous, tremendous honor.
—Joe Montana
Now we got bad blood.
—Taylor Swift
PART ONE: I Know That Guy
- 1 - Tracy Flick
There was another front-page story in the paper. For months it had been an almost daily occurrence, one powerful man after another toppled from his pedestal, exposed as a sexual predator: Harvey Weinstein in his bathrobe, Bill Cosby with his quaaludes, Matt Lauer and his secret button; the list went on and on. It was a satisfying spectacle—a small measure of belated justice—but it was troubling too, because it kept stirring up memories I would have preferred to leave alone, as if I were being asked to explain myself to the world, though I wasn’t exactly sure who was doing the asking.
That morning’s scandal was celebrity-free, and for me, at least, even more disturbing than usual: a “beloved” drama teacher at a fancy boarding school accused of having “inappropriate sexual and romantic relationships” with several former students, the allegations stretching all the way back to the 1980s. The teacher—he was retired now, living quietly in Tulum—denied the charges; a lawsuit had been filed against the school, its trustees, and three different headmasters who had “abetted the decades-long cover-up.” There was a black-and-white yearbook photo of the teacher in his younger days—he was standing onstage, boyish and shaggy-haired, directing a student production of Oklahoma!—along with color photos of two of his accusers. The women were attractive and successful, both around my own age—a dermatologist and an art historian—and they gazed at the camera with eyes that were somehow steely and wounded at the same time. He groomed me so skillfully, the art historian said. He told me exactly what I wanted to hear. The dermatologist had a bleaker assessment: He stole my innocence. It pretty much ruined my life.
“Mom,” Sophia said. “Are you okay?”
I looked up from the newspaper. My ten-year-old daughter was watching me closely from across the table, the way she often did, as if she were trying to figure out who I was and what was going on in my head. I’d never had to do that with my own mother.
“I’m fine, honey.”
“It’s just—you looked a little angry.”
“I’m not angry. That’s just how my face gets when I’m thinking.”
She considered this for a second or two, then wrinkled her nose.
“There’s a name for that,” she said. “It’s not very nice, though.”
“So I’ve heard.” I glanced at the wall clock. “Finish your oatmeal, sweetie. We need to get moving.”
* * *
Aside from the handful of people who knew about it at the time—my mother, the Principal, my guidance counselor—I never talked to anyone about what happened to me in high school. Until the past few months, I hardly even thought about it anymore, because what was the point? It was ancient history, a brief misguided affair—that’s the wrong word, I know, but it’s the one I’ve always used—with my sophomore English teacher, a few regrettable weeks of my teenage life. It wasn’t that big a deal. We made out a few times, and had sex exactly once. I realized it was a mistake, and I ended it. My life wasn’t ruined. I didn’t get pregnant, didn’t get my heart broken, didn’t miss a step. I graduated at the top of my class, and went to Georgetown on a full scholarship.
It was Mr. Dexter who couldn’t handle the breakup, and kept pestering me to get back together. My mother found a note he wrote on one of my essays—it was a little unhinged—and she went to the Principal, and Mr. Dexter vanished from the school, and from my life. It was all very sudden and surgical. I guess you could say the system worked.
As a grown-up—as a parent and an educator—I had no doubt that what he did was wrong, and that his punishment was just. In the privacy of my own heart, though, I couldn’t manage to hate him for it, or even judge him that harshly. There was a mitigating factor at work, an extenuating circumstance. It didn’t exonerate him, exactly, but it made him less culpable in my eyes, more worthy of sympathy or compassion, whatever you want to call it.
That circumstance was me.
The thing you had to understand—it seemed so obvious to me at the time, so central to my identity—is that I wasn’t a normal high school girl. I was unusually smart and ambitious, way too mature for my own good, to the point where I had trouble making friends with my peers, or even connecting with them in a meaningful way. I felt like an adult long before I came of legal age, and it had always seemed to me that Mr. Dexter simply perceived this truth before anyone else, and had treated me accordingly, which was exactly the way I’d wanted to be treated. How could I blame him for that?
That was my narrative, the one I’d lived with for a very long time, but it was starting to feel a little shaky. You can’t keep reading these stories, one after the other, all these high-achieving young women exploited by teachers and mentors and bosses, and keep clinging to the idea that your own case was unique. In fact, it had become pretty clear to me that that was how it worked—you got tricked into feeling more exceptional than you actually were, like the normal rules no longer applied.