The Best American Crime Writing 2006 Read Free Page A

Williamsport, Pennsylvania. He'd come to attend a summer camp that the school conducted for choirboys.And after auditioning, he was invited to stay and enroll as a fifth-grader.
    Lessig's father, who ran a steel-fabricating firm, was adamantly opposed."There's no way I'm going to send you away to school!" he thundered on hearing the suggestion. But Lessig was seduced by what the school promised, and the next summer, he asked again. His father was torn, but finally relented for the sake of his son's future. "It was a kind of Billy Elliot moment," Lessig says. "You could see him making this sacrifice-just hating the idea of losing me."
    Lessig's first hint of Hanson's proclivities came one day when another boy scaled a wall outside the mansion. Climbing down, the boy told Lessig he'd seen Hanson in bed with a student. Lessig's response was total disbelief. "I remember thinking I could no longer trust this kid," he says. "It was obviously so ridiculous."
    In the fall of his eighth-grade year, Lessig learned otherwise. On a Friday night, after Hanson had taken the boys shopping at the mall in Princeton, they all came back, as they often did, and gathered in his quarters to watch TV. As Lessig sat beside Hanson on the couch, the music director covered their laps with a blanket and proceeded to fondle him. Forever after, Lessig would remember the movie that was playing on TV: Run Silent, Run Deep.
    The following June, on Lessig's fourteenth birthday, after the choir had returned from touring in California, Lessig was preparing to head home for the summer when Hanson pulled him into his room-"to give me a 'birthday present,' " Lessig says. "I remember feeling totally overwhelmed by him. It wasn't forcing in the sense of violence… It's not like I was afraid. But there was this recognition of, wow, there's nothing I can do. Here I am. Bam. It's over."
    And yet, of course, it wasn't.
    Lessig had been a bright light at the school since his first year there.With a perfect-pitch soprano voice, he'd been a soloist next in line behind Bobby Byrens ("My idol," Lessig says). And with a sharp and probing mind already in evidence, he soon emerged as an academic star and student leader, a striver, intensely driven. Now, in his ninth-grade year, Lessig was named head boy, which made him "in charge of taking care of the kids," he says."There was no proctor when I was head boy; I was discipline. And there were kids who were real shits-it was a Lord of the Flies-like experience."
    Being head boy also signified something else: He was Hanson's favorite. And accordingly he was assigned a room next door to the music director's, at the far end of a hallway on the third floor. By midway through the year, the two of them were essentially living together."We put up a door in front of our rooms, blocking off the hallway, blocking out the rest of the world.We created a suite. And there was a classroom right next to it. So every day the teacher comes up, watches me come out of that door-which is also Hanson's door-and walk into class. There's no way anybody doesn't know what the hell is going on. But nobody says anything."
    Lessig may have been head boy, but he wasn't Hanson's only prey. All along, Lessig says, he knew that Hanson was sleeping with "at least ten" other boys. "The weird thing about the sexuality was that there was no jealousy attached to it at all," he explains. "It was totally recreational. It was just like playing squash. He's playing squash with me, he's playing squash with him. Who cares? What does it matter?"
    Among the boys, Hanson's promiscuity was well known, Lessig says. He would call students out of class to satisfy his cravings.The private voice and piano lessons he administered were especially notorious:"It was five or ten minutes of music, then it would turn into other things," Hardwicke recalls. And while none of this was ever spoken of explicitly among the boys, there was ribbing, teasing, nodding, winking-constant signals of