Prep: A Novel (37 page)

“And Conchita seconded the nomination,” Martha added. This actually wasn’t that weird—Conchita and I had rarely spoken since freshman year, but she and Martha had remained friendly.

“Maybe Cross likes you,” I said in a voice that I hoped would not reveal how horrifying I found this prospect.

“Please.” Martha grinned. “We need to go to dinner,” she said. She removed the crown and set it back on her desk. “Someday you’ll meet a guy who loves you so much and you’ll be like, why did I waste my whole time in high school mooning over that self-centered dork?”

“Okay, first of all,” I said, and I could feel myself warming up for the conversation. Talking like this was sustenance for my feelings, it made Cross exist in my life even though we never spoke. “First of all, why do you think he’s self-centered, and second, if I’m going to think I wasted my time, does that mean he’ll never like me back?”

Outside, other students were also walking toward the dining hall, wet-haired, the girls wearing pastel blouses and flowered skirts and espadrilles, the boys in white or pale blue shirts and ties and blazers and khaki shorts. At Ault, evening was always the best time.

“He’s just cocky,” Martha said. “He knows he’s good-looking, he knows he’s good at sports, he knows girls like him. But so what? Big deal.”

“I don’t think he’s cocky,” I said. “I really don’t.”

“Well, he’s sure not insecure. And what was the other question? Oh, yeah, do I think you and Purple Monkey will ever find love together?” Purple Monkey was what we called Cross whenever we were discussing him outside of our room. “Let me look into my crystal ball.” Martha held her hands in front of her as if clutching something round. “Lee, you guys don’t talk. If you want something to happen, you should try talking to him.”

“But I don’t think he wants to talk to me,” I said. “I doubt he feels a major void in his life.” The buoyancy was gone from the conversation, the sense of possibility that came from speaking hypothetically. I could feel myself sinking. And Martha did not contradict what I’d said.

Instead, she said, “You still have to tell me about the meeting with Fletcher. And don’t change the subject this time.”

Now that math had been introduced, I plummeted completely. We were only walking to dinner and even though it was a warm May night, even though the sun out beyond the athletic fields had turned the sky pink and orange, there would, when we got to the dining hall, be liver for dinner, I’d be assigned to a table of sophomore boys who would not bother to conceal their debate about whether Aspeth Montgomery was wearing a bra, Martha would not be elected senior prefect, Cross would never want me to be his girlfriend; things like weather or certain songs could make me forget it sometimes, but I was always still myself. “Fletcher said Ms. Prosek told him my average right now is a fifty-eight,” I said. “And he asked if my parents talked to me after they got the letter at midterm. I told him they told me to study.”

In fact, what my father had said was, “With a grade like that, I hope you’re not actually going to class.” When I explained that I had not missed a single day the entire year, he said, “What then, you’re smoking dope beforehand?” After that, my mother forced him off the phone, got on herself, and said, “But, Lee, remember when Mrs. Ramirez told us you were the best math student she’d ever had?” Which was something I did remember, but, as I pointed out to my mother, that had been in fourth grade.

“The weird part with Fletcher—” I paused.

“What?” Martha said.

“He said, ‘You know that you’re an important part of the Ault community,’ or some bullshit like that and then he was like, ‘But we have some very serious concerns. If you aren’t able to pull up your grade, maybe it’s time to rethink whether Ault is the best place for you.’ ” As I said it, my voice cracked.

“Oh, Lee,” Martha said.

I swallowed. We were passing the chapel, still forty yards from the dining hall.
Salad bar,
I thought.
Napkin. Ice cube.
When I swallowed again, I knew I wouldn’t cry.

“They have no grounds for spring-cleaning you,” Martha said.

“Oh, no,” I said. “Fletcher never mentioned spring-cleaning.”

Martha turned and, feeling her gaze, I turned, too. “Think about it,” she said. “That’s what he meant, even if he didn’t use those words.”

This time, I didn’t feel the shakiness that came before tears; what I felt was a shock in my chest.

“I wasn’t the one who was there,” Martha said. “But I promise you, no teacher ever says, ‘We’re considering spring-cleaning you.’ That’s just what students say.”

I thought suddenly of all the people who had been spring-cleaned since I’d been at Ault. My freshman year, it had been Alfie Howards, a fellow freshman who was always disheveled—papers spilled out of his backpack, his shirt fell out of his pants, his nose ran, and he arrived everywhere late. When other students were moving from breakfast to chapel in the morning, he’d be making his way
toward
the dining hall, headed against the sea of bodies. He probably shouldn’t have been at Ault to begin with—he shouldn’t have been living without his parents—but he was a fourth-generation legacy; for that reason alone, in spite of everything else, I was surprised when he was spring-cleaned. Also sharing Alfie’s fate my freshman year had been Maisie Vilayphonh, a half-Finnish, half-Laotian junior whose parents were rumored to be spies. Maisie, I heard, had been at one boarding school or another since the age of seven; she spoke six languages; she once ordered a thousand-dollar foot-massaging machine from a catalog, left the machine in the common room after using it twice, forgot about it until the leftover water grew scum, then dumped the whole thing in the trash. This wasn’t the reason she was spring-cleaned. The rumor about that was that the school knew she was doing cocaine but they just never caught her at it, though her dorm head, Mrs. Morino, would drop by Maisie’s room at random hours, wondering if Maisie had seen the Morino family cat, or wanting to make sure that Maisie knew there’d be evensong instead of morning chapel on Sunday.

That, actually, was the defining factor of spring-cleaning, what distinguished it from run-of-the-mill expulsion—that it happened not during the spring, as the name suggested, but over the summer, after the school year had finished. And it wasn’t necessarily for one big reason—they never did catch Maisie snorting up—but more for an accumulation of smaller ones.

After my sophomore year, two people had been spring-cleaned: a freshman named Lenora Aiko, a girl from Hawaii who supposedly slept all day and stayed up all night, talking on the pay phone (and jumping in front of the booth whenever someone else tried to use it, insisting that she was waiting on a call), or else watching infomercials and preparing steak in the common-room toaster oven; and another girl, one of my classmates, though I’d hardly known her, a day student named Kara Johnson. Kara was pretty in an angular, even feral way, pale and skinny and smelling like cigarette smoke, always wearing black eyeliner and black jeans, though jeans of any color were forbidden in the schoolhouse. (Once I heard a teacher tell her to go to the dorm and change, and she said that she couldn’t because she was a day student. The teacher told her to call her parents and have one of them bring her different pants, and she said she couldn’t do that, either, because both her parents worked.) Kara and I were in the same Spanish class, and she was never prepared, had never done the translations or the reading, but would sometimes make stabbing attempts at proving otherwise. (I, on the other hand, always did my homework, even for math. It was just that I often did it badly.) A few times, I saw Kara outside the library just before curfew, presumably waiting to be picked up by one of her parents, and a junior or senior guy would be talking to her and you knew, you could tell just by their posture, that the guy cared a lot more about the exchange than Kara did. She seemed like someone who had a complicated life, who was often hung over or fighting with a boy or telling a lie, and, primarily because she was sexy, these circumstances contained a degree of glamour. But one of the nights I saw her waiting outside the library, she was by herself, and it was cold, and though it was not raining, there was something in her huddled form that reminded me of the times before our dog King was hit by a car that my mother and I would give him a bath—he was a Scottish terrier—and how with his fur plastered down King would look half his former size, he’d be shivering, and the sight of him like this was unbearably sad; the only reason that I helped my mother wash him was that I didn’t want her to have to experience the sadness by herself. I don’t think anyone really cared that Kara got spring-cleaned. She hadn’t been friends with any girls, and though guys had chased her when she was in front of them, she didn’t seem like someone they’d give much thought to in her absence.

In every yearbook, there was a page with the heading “Lost But Not Forgotten,” which featured photos of the students who would have, but hadn’t, graduated that year. The picture of Alfie—I saw this as a college freshman, when my Ault yearbook arrived that fall in the mail—showed him as a fourteen-year-old, the age he’d been when he’d left Ault; it was as if, unlike the rest of us, he’d never gotten older. The picture of Kara was slightly blurry and showed her turning, so three quarters of her face was visible—her almond-shaped eyes, her narrow foxlike chin and unsmiling mouth. There were four other people on the page: Little Washington, George Rimas, and Jack Moorey, who left, respectively, in April of our sophomore year and November of our senior year after being caught drinking, twice (for offenses related to alcohol, cigarettes, pot, and pharmaceuticals, as well as for breaking visitation—that is, for minor violations—you got two chances; for harder drugs, for cheating, and for lying, which were major violations, you got only one); and Adler Stiles, who had not returned after winter break of our junior year. People like Adler, the ones who left of their own volition, were enigmatic to me; I almost admired them. No matter how unhappy I was there, Ault was never a place I could turn my back on.

Martha and I had reached the dining hall, and the entrance was mobbed. The possibility that I could be spring-cleaned—that I could have anything, even that, in common with Alfie Howards or Maisie Vilayphonh or Kara Johnson—was utterly foreign. It was an idea I found impossible to absorb here, among so many people; I needed to think about it alone.

“I’m not trying to freak you out,” Martha was saying. “But if that’s what Fletcher meant, you should know.”

“Yeah, of course.”

“But they can’t treat you like you’re a bad seed,” she said. “Because you’re so not.”

We’d crossed the threshold of the dining room, and it was time to split up and find our assigned tables. Martha was looking at me.

“Divide and conquer,” I said, because one of us always said this just before formal dinner. And it worked. Martha smiled, and I smiled, too, so our moods would seem the same. But I don’t think I fooled her. And already, that thing was happening where the scene before me pulled back, or maybe I was the one who shrank from it. It all became both huge and distant, something occurring far away—a blur of nicely dressed students making their way to tables covered by white cloths and silver serving plates with silver lids. Maybe several months from now, when I was enrolled at Marvin Thompson High School in South Bend, I’d be sitting on my bed one evening, doing homework, and this was the image I’d remember, the precise moment when I first knew I’d lost my place at Ault.

At the library, on my way to meet Aubrey, I saw Dede through the glass door of the periodicals room. Her head was bent to look at a magazine, and I wasn’t planning to stop, but then she looked up.
Hey,
she mouthed, and I waved. I made the mistake of holding her gaze, and she held up one finger, mouthed,
Hold on,
set the magazine on a table, and pushed open the door.

“Isn’t it crazy about Martha? I was completely shocked.” Her voice was upbeat and perfectly friendly.

“It’s not
that
shocking,” I said. “Martha would be a good prefect.”

“Well, sure, she’s ‘responsible.’ ” Dede made air quotes, implying I had no idea what—that actually Martha wasn’t responsible? That being responsible was hardly a qualification? “But it’s not like she has a chance,” Dede continued.

When Martha herself had said almost the same thing a few hours earlier, it had seemed only like the dreary truth; hearing Dede, the prediction sounded slanderous.

“You have no idea who’ll win,” I said.

Dede smiled a little tiny smile, and I felt like slapping her. Our antagonism had always contained a certain sisterly intimacy; once, during freshman year, when we’d been standing face-to-face arguing, Dede had reached out and actually pulled my hair, and the sheer immaturity of the gesture had made me burst out laughing. She’d said, almost shyly, “What? What?” but she’d started laughing, too, and then we hadn’t been able to continue fighting. Dede and I were each other’s opposites, I sometimes thought, and therefore uncomfortably similar—she faked enthusiasm, and I faked indifference; she glommed on to people like Aspeth Montgomery and Cross Sugarman, and I made a point of not speaking to them from one semester to the next.

“I’m sure you think Aspeth has it all wrapped up,” I said. “But, frankly, I’ll be surprised if she wins.”
Don’t use the word
bitch, I thought—that would be going too far. “She’s just—” I paused. “Basically, she’s a bitch.”

“Excuse me?” Dede said. “Am I in the twilight zone?”

“I didn’t say
I
think she’s a bitch,” I said. “Let’s not get into semantics.” When I was at Ault, I thought that chalking up a disagreement to semantics sounded very smart. “Dede, I’m not trying to be rude, but your Aspeth worship is getting kind of embarrassing.”

She glared at me. “You know what you are?” I could tell she was digging deep, searching for a particularly biting insult. “You’re exactly the same as you were when we were freshmen.”

Aubrey was waiting in the study room where we usually met; through a window, I could see him chewing on a plastic pen with his head tilted toward the ceiling. He wasn’t doing anything weird, but his posture was so clearly that of a person who believed himself to be alone that I felt embarrassed on his behalf. I knocked on the window before opening the door.