My High School’s Secret Fantasy Slut League

Our wealthy California school had a hookup game where boys “drafted” girls, then tracked their sex acts. A decade later, my classmates still debate whether “FSL” was harmless teenage hijinks or a symptom of toxic rot in our elite enclave.

Illustrations by Vicky Leta | Edited by Julia Métraux and Brendan Spiegel

It was a Saturday night in early spring 2011, and Charlotte was cold. She wasn’t yet drunk enough not to be. The zipper on her North Face kissed her stomach, and she shivered. Under their jackets, she and her friends were wearing nothing but thin tube tops and leopard-print spandex skirts, matching uniforms purchased from Wet Seal that afternoon to reflect the party’s theme: “Welcome to the Jungle.” This was the weekend ritual in high school: Coordinate outfits, plan the pregame, secure the booze, put on the costumes, drink the booze, take pictures, then trek 20 minutes into the hills to whatever house was hosting that week’s big “DP” (short for “Dance Party”). Above Highland Avenue in the wealthy enclave of Piedmont, California, the land sloped sharply toward the sky, as did the property values. Walls of windows looked out over the San Francisco Bay. The body of water was a black morass in the dark, the city a scintillating constellation beyond it. 

Charlotte and her friends double-checked the address and walked around the side of the mansion, where a few upperclassman boys — “bouncers” — had set up a card table in the driveway. The girls made a pretty cavalry: Thin and striking with natural flaxen threads in their hair, which hung in varying stages of unruliness. An illuminated window in the main house told them that the host’s parents were not just home but awake, though they knew little about what went on in the barn where the party was taking place, and they probably didn’t care to know. One by one, Charlotte and her friends gave their names. Normally, their humor was lewd and sarcastic, but now they quieted, waiting for a boy to run his pointer finger down the guest list, fighting the urge to tell him, “It will be there, I swear.”

Meanwhile, in the basement of a house nearby, James and a group of about 15 boys — many of them his football teammates — were getting loud. James was friendly but reserved, and he remembers enjoying this aspect of their pregame party ritual: the sheer commotion of it. The boys roared over music that made the objects on the counters shudder. Someone had bought a few 30-racks of Bud Light, and crushed cans glinted in the corners of the room. James ran a hand through his hair, although he didn’t need to; it always seemed to soar up and away from his forehead of its own accord. The fabric of his parachute pants whispered like torn paper. Not that anyone could hear it.

Over at the high school auditorium, Audrey was backstage, running late for the party. (“Audrey,” like “James,” “Charlotte” and the other students interviewed for this article, agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity, to mitigate any personal or professional ramifications that might come from talking openly about these experiences.) She narrowed her eyes at her elfin features in the mirror and attempted to scrub off some of the orange rouge she’d daubed onto her cheeks to mimic the symptoms of tuberculosis. The show was Les Misérables, and she was supposed to be a ravaged lady of the night in torn fishnets and a wide-brimmed hat. It felt good to be chosen for the role, especially as a freshman. She didn’t have to fake the exuberance in her voice when she sang alongside a coterie of corseted upperclassman girls: See them with their trousers off, they’re never quite as grand. But tonight, her mind was elsewhere. During the finale, she ducked into the changing room and shimmied into the miniskirt and neon bandeau she had stashed in a string backpack, then escaped out the back door.

I was on that stage, too, as the “lovely lady” in the orange corset. But I didn’t go to the party that night. I hadn’t been invited. Instead, I went to Jean Valjean’s house, where we drank bad vodka and played a bridled game of spin the bottle. I knew why I hadn’t scored an invitation, or rather, I knew all the possible reasons why, including but not limited to: (1) my lingering status as a new kid, (2) my ardent shyness and (3) my nonexistent boobs. Most of those impediments would resolve themselves within the year, but until then, I flitted on the outskirts of the party scene with wary curiosity. Like everyone else, I examined the photo albums posted on Facebook, which would memorialize the sexual circus playing out over at the mansion. Sometimes you could even see whose hands went where.

From the driveway, Charlotte and her friends could hear faint music pulsing from a dark structure at the end of a winding path through the garden. Charlotte hopped from one concrete lily pad to another, then paused before the barn door. She rolled down the waistband on her skirt one last time and took a deep breath. And then: Bodies, so many bodies that she slicked herself with their sweat when she took a step. The lights were off. There was no furniture. A girl crouched in the middle of the floor, peeing. Couples lined the walls, gyrating in the cold white flashes of a digital camera. 

Charlotte would make out with eight people that night; Charlotte’s friend with 11 — or was it 12, or 17? — the alcohol and adrenaline made it hard to remember. The next day, and for years afterward, they would laugh and try to name them all.

But someone was keeping score. In the morning, still bleary-eyed, several of the boys would open their laptops. They would enter a secret Facebook group, and there, conjuring what they’d seen and done in that dark room, they would tally the girls’ scores on their respective brackets of the Fantasy Slut League.