Prep: A Novel (3 page)

During the application process, my parents were mystified. The only person my family knew who had gone to boarding school was the son of one of the insurance agents in the office where my mother was a bookkeeper, and this kid’s boarding school had been a fenced-in mountaintop in Colorado, a place for screwups. My parents suspected, in a way that was only honest, not unsupportive, that I would never be accepted to the places I’d applied; besides, they saw my interest in boarding school as comparable to other short-lived hobbies, like knitting (in sixth grade, I’d completed one third of a hat). When I got in, they explained how proud they were, and how sorry that they wouldn’t be able to pay for it. The day a letter arrived from Ault offering me the Eloise Fielding Foster scholarship, which would cover more than three quarters of my tuition, I cried because I knew for certain that I was leaving home, and abruptly, I did not know if it was such a good idea—I realized that I, like my parents, had never believed I’d actually go.

In mid-September, weeks after school had started in South Bend for my brothers and my former classmates, my father drove me from Indiana to Massachusetts. When we turned in the wrought-iron gates of the campus, I recognized the buildings from photographs—eight brick structures plus a Gothic chapel surrounding a circle of grass which I already knew was fifty yards in diameter and which I also knew you were not supposed to walk on. Everywhere there were cars with the trunks open, kids greeting each other, fathers carrying boxes. I was wearing a long dress with peach and lavender flowers and a lace collar, and I noticed immediately that most of the students had on faded T-shirts and loose khaki shorts and flip-flops. I realized then how much work Ault would be for me.

After we found my dorm, my father started talking to Dede’s father, who said, “South Bend, eh? I take it you teach at Notre Dame?” and my father cheerfully said, “No, sir, I’m in the mattress business.” I was embarrassed that my father called Dede’s father sir, embarrassed by his job, embarrassed by our rusty white Datsun. I wanted my father gone from campus as soon as possible, so I could try to miss him.

In the mornings, when I stood under the shower, I would think,
I have been at Ault for twenty-four hours. I have been at Ault for three days. I have been at Ault for a month.
I talked to myself as I imagined my mother would talk to me if she actually thought boarding school was a good idea:
You’re doing great. I’m proud of you, LeeLee.
Sometimes I would cry while I washed my hair, but this was the thing, this was always the thing about Ault—in some ways, my fantasies about it had not been wrong. The campus really was beautiful: the low, distant, fuzzy mountains that turned blue in the evenings, the perfectly rectangular fields, the Gothic cathedral (it was only Yankee modesty that made them call it a chapel) with its stained glass windows. This beauty gave a tinge of nobility and glamour to even the most pedestrian kind of homesickness.

Several times, I recognized a student from a photograph in the catalog. It was disorienting, the way I imagined it might be to see a celebrity on the streets of New York or Los Angeles. These people moved and breathed, they ate bagels in the dining hall, carried books through the hallways, wore clothes other than the ones I’d memorized. They belonged to the real, physical world; previously, it had seemed as if they belonged to me.

In big letters across the top, the signs said,
Drag yourself out of the dorm!!!
In smaller letters, they said,
Where? The dining hall! When? This Saturday! Why? To dance!
The paper was red and featured a copied photograph of Mr. Byden, the headmaster, wearing a dress.

“It’s a drag dance,” I heard Dede explain to Sin-Jun one night. “You go in drag.”

“In drag,” Sin-Jun said.

“Girls dress as boys, and boys dress as girls,” I said.

“Ohhh,” Sin-Jun said. “Very good!”

“I’m borrowing a tie from Devin,” Dede said. “And a baseball cap.”

Good for you,
I thought.

“Dev is so funny,” she said. Sometimes, just because I was there and because, unlike Sin-Jun, I was fluent in English, Dede told me things about her life. “Who are you borrowing clothes from?” she asked.

“I haven’t decided.” I wasn’t borrowing clothes from anyone because I wasn’t going. I could hardly talk to my classmates, and I definitely couldn’t dance. I had tried it once at a cousin’s wedding and I had not been able to stop thinking,
Is this the part where I throw my arms in the air?

The day of the dance—roll call and classes occurred even on Saturday mornings, which was, I soon learned, a good detail to break out for people from home, to affirm their suspicion that boarding school was only slightly different from prison—neither Gates nor Henry Thorpe was at the desk when the bell went off announcing the start of roll call. Someone else, a senior girl whose name I didn’t know, rang the bell, then stepped down from the platform. Music became audible and students stopped murmuring. It was disco. I didn’t recognize the song, but a lot of other people seemed to, and there was a rise of collective laughter. Turning in my seat, I realized the source of the music was two stereo speakers, each being held in the air by a different senior guy—there weren’t enough desks for everyone in roll call, so juniors and seniors stood in the back of the room. The seniors seemed to be looking out the rear doorway. A few seconds passed before Henry Thorpe made his entrance. He wore a short black satin nightgown, fishnet stockings, and black high heels, and he was dancing as he approached the desk where he and Gates usually stood. Many students, especially the seniors, cheered, cupping their hands around their mouths. Some sang and clapped in time to the music.

Henry pointed a finger out, then curled it back toward his chest. I looked to see where he’d pointed. From another door at the opposite end of the room, the doorway near which the faculty stood, Gates had appeared. She was dressed in a football uniform, shoulder pads beneath the jersey and eye-black across her cheekbones. But no one would have mistaken her for a guy: Her hair was down, and her calves—she wasn’t wearing socks—looked smooth and slender. She, too, was dancing, holding her arms up and shaking her head. By the time she and Henry climbed on top of the prefects’ desk, the room was in an uproar. They came together, gyrating. I glanced toward the faculty; most of them stood with their arms folded, looking impatient. Gates and Henry pulled apart and turned so they were facing opposite directions, Gates swiveling her hips and snapping her fingers. Her unself-consciousness astonished me. Here she was before a room of more than three hundred people, it was the bright light of day, it was
morning,
and she was dancing.

She gestured toward the back of the room, and the music stopped. She and Henry jumped down from the desk, and three seniors, two girls and a guy, climbed the three steps to the platform. “Tonight at eight o’clock in the dining hall . . .” one of the girls said.

“. . . it’s the eleventh annual drag extravaganza,” said the other.

“So get ready to party!” shouted the guy.

The room erupted again into wild cheers and applause. Someone turned on the music, and Gates grinned and shook her head. The music went off. “Sorry, but the show’s over,” she said, and students booed, but even the booing had an affectionate sound to it. Gates turned to the three seniors next to her. “Thanks, guys.” She picked up the clipboard where the names of the people who’d signed up to make announcements were listed, and said, “Mr. Archibald?”

Mr. Archibald stepped onto the platform. Just before he spoke, a guy from the back of the room yelled, “Gates, will you dance with me?”

Gates smiled a closed-mouth smile. “Go ahead, Mr. Archibald,” she said.

His announcement was about soda cans being left in the math wing.

Gates passed the clipboard to Henry.

“Dory Rogers,” Henry called, and Dory said the Amnesty International meeting had been switched from Sunday at six to Sunday at seven. During the five or six other announcements, I found myself waiting for more theatrics—I wanted to see Gates dance again—but it appeared the show really was over.

After Henry had rung the bell, I approached the platform. “Gates,” I said. She was putting a notebook in her bag and didn’t look up. “Gates,” I said again.

This time, she looked at me.

“Your dancing was really good,” I said.

She rolled her eyes. “It’s always fun to see people make fools of themselves.”

“Oh, no, you weren’t making a fool of yourself. Not at all. Everyone loved it.”

She smiled, and I understood that she had already known everyone loved it. But she hadn’t been asking for a compliment, as I myself was whenever I said something self-effacing. It was more like—this dawned on me as I looked at her—she was pretending to be regular. Even though she was special, she was pretending to be like the rest of us.

“Thanks,” she said. “That’s nice of you, Lee.”

In the evening, a giddy energy swirled in the courtyard and inside the dorm itself. Boys from the nearby dorms appeared in our common room—boys weren’t allowed upstairs except during visitation—and summoned certain girls. Aspeth, I was not surprised to see, was a popular choice, and Dede often trotted downstairs along with her. They brought purses and nail polish and bras that they fastened, amid lots of shouts and laughter, right over the boys’ T-shirts. I was doing laundry, and as I traipsed between the basement and the second floor of the dorm, I observed the progress of the festivities. The thought of a boy wearing my bra over his T-shirt was horrifying—the empty cups sagging, the fabric straining, or, even worse, not straining, around his rib cage, the fact that when he removed it he’d be able to see the exact size and might leave it on the floor of his room, stepping on it as he climbed into bed. But perhaps my horror stemmed from the fact that, as I was fast realizing, I did not own particularly pretty bras. Mine were beige cotton with a beige bow between the cups; my mother and I had bought them over the summer at JCPenney. These other bras that emerged were satin or lace, black or red or leopard-spotted, bras of the sort that I had thought only adult women wore.

After the dorm cleared out—even Sin-Jun went to the dance with a mascara mustache—I studied Spanish vocabulary words for a while, then went downstairs to the common room to read the old yearbooks that lined one shelf. I loved the yearbooks; they were like an atlas for the school. The ones in our common room went back as far as 1973, and in the past few weeks, I’d nearly worked my way to the present. Over the years, the format hadn’t changed: candid shots in the front, then clubs, sports teams, dorms, entire classes. For, say, that year’s tenth grade, there was a general write-up of the notable events that had occurred between September and June and a little joke about every person: “Can you imagine Lindsay without her curling iron?” Then came the best part, the seniors, each of them with their own page. In addition to the standard expressions of gratitude to family members, teachers, and friends, and the sometimes-nostalgic, sometimes-literary, sometimes-incomprehensible quotations, they were filled with pictures. Many of the boys’ pictures were action shots from games; many of the girls’ showed them with their arms around each other, sitting on a bed or standing on a beach. Girls also had a fondness for including photos from childhood.

You could figure out, if you had the inclination and the time, who in a given year was friends with whom and who had dated whom, and who had been popular, or athletic, or weird and fringy. The graduated students began to feel like distant cousins—I learned their nicknames, their sports of choice, which sweater or hairstyle they’d worn on repeated occasions.

In the three most recent yearbooks, I found several photos of Gates. She played field hockey, basketball, and lacrosse, and she’d lived her freshman and sophomore years in Elwyn’s dorm and her junior year in Jackson’s. Her sophomore year, the little joke about her was, “The crystal ball predicts that Henry and Gates will buy a house with a white picket fence and have twelve kids.” The only Henry at Ault was Henry Thorpe, who I knew was currently going out with a prissy-seeming sophomore named Molly. I wondered if Henry and Gates had really dated and, if so, whether any tension of either the good or bad sort lingered between them. When they danced together at roll call, it had not seemed like it.

It was at the end of the yearbook from Gates’s junior year, which was the newest one, that I came across the picture. The final section, after the seniors’ pages, contained photos of graduation: the senior girls in white dresses, the boys in white pants and navy blazers and boaters. There were pictures of them sitting in rows at the ceremony, a picture of the graduation speaker (a Supreme Court justice), pictures of the seniors hugging each other. Among these—I was not looking for her here and might easily have missed it—was one of Gates by herself. It showed her from the waist up, in a white short-sleeved button-down. She wore a cowboy hat, and her glinting hair fell out from under the brim and spilled over her shoulders. The picture would have been in profile, but it appeared that the photographer, whoever it was, had called her name just before snapping the shutter and she’d turned her head. She might have been simultaneously laughing and protesting, saying something like,
Oh, come on!
But saying it to a person she liked very much.

I stared at the picture for so long that when I looked up again, I was surprised to see the nubbly orange couches and cream-colored walls of the common room. I had forgotten myself, and I had forgotten Ault, at least the real, three-dimensional version in which I, too, was a presence. It was a little after ten. I decided to check in early with Madame and go to bed, and I put the yearbooks away.

In the upstairs bathroom, Little stood before one of the sinks in a pink bathrobe, rubbing oil through her hair.

“Hey,” I said. “How was the dance?”

She made a face. “I wouldn’t go to no drag dance.”

“Why not?”

“Why didn’t
you
go?”