Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson Page A

from behind her mask, “you a virgin?”
    Natalie saw the freshman blushing full-face and the upper-classmen blushing behind and above their masks, and thought, I hope they don’t ask me, and, It’s the girls with masks on their faces blushing too. Could it be, she wondered tiredly, that a mask is no protection at
all?
”
    â€œCertainly,” said the girl on the stool, surprised at the question, and blushing as well as the rest.
    â€œTell us a dirty joke, then,” said someone else.
    â€œI don’t know any,” said the girl, writhing, obviously repressing a seemingly forgotten story that came unfortunately to mind. “I don’t listen to
those
.”
    â€œExcused,” said the leader. The girl came off the stool and retired, blushing and explaining, to oblivion among her friends; she had passed; she had at that moment taken on a protective coloration among the general run of girls in the house; she was not in any way eccentric, but a good, normal, healthy, American college girl, with ideals and ambitions and looking forward to a family of her own; she had merged.
    â€œNext,” said the leader. She gestured at random, and her gesture was answered with alacrity by someone who, seating herself on the stool, showed that she, and no other, was possessed of the information the masked girls wanted to hear, and that she was, in addition, prepared to lie valiantly to deprive them of it and to exalt herself in the eyes of the freshmen girls.
    She gave her name in a pleased voice and eyed the circle defiantly, as though daring any of them to match her siren experience or to question it.
    Natalie, who needed abruptly to establish her own position, leaned to the girl next to her and whispered, “I won’t answer them.”
    â€œShhh,” said the girl next to her, bending forward to hear the victim on the stool, who was delivering the punch-line of a joke. The girls in the masks did not laugh, or at least did not show beyond the masks that they were laughing. “That’s not very dirty,” said one.
    â€œIt’s the best I know,” said the girl on the stool innocently.
    â€œExcused,” said the leader helplessly. Then, unbearably, unbelievably, she looked squarely at Natalie. “You,” she said.
    â€œNo,” said Natalie, but the desire to assume the stool, if not the confessional, drove her. Sitting in the center of light, with everyone watching her, she knew at once and for all time the hard core of defiance with which she might always face unknown faces staring; she knew with strength that it would be as easy, or even easier, to resist than to expose herself.
    She gave her name (
was
it her name?) and then, when asked if she were a virgin—and this question, gaining adherents from the unkind and the merely curious, was being asked now by three or four voices at once, and even, Natalie saw from the high point of the stool, being echoed by the traitor freshmen themselves—said briefly, “I won’t answer.”
    The worst she had expected was another push, but obviously everyone was afraid to push her with everyone else watching; no single girl there dared expose her own self (“Are
you
a virgin? Well?”) with any untoward gesture by now; no single girl dared, however much she desired, take on the limelight; because perhaps by now one small gesture of resistance from the freshmen would have dissolved the upperclassmen into tearful dismayed people, without superiority, and tearing off their masks, saying, “It was
her
idea—I wouldn’t have done it at
all
except . . .”
    Someone said menacingly that she had better tell, and someone else said that if she didn’t
want
to tell, well, that proved it.
    â€œTell a dirty joke,” said the leader.
    â€œI will
not
,” said Natalie, who, like everyone else there, was more afraid of being found not to know dirty jokes than of being found to