Prep: A Novel (7 page)

Gates rang the bell to tell people to settle down. Dean Fletcher stuck two fingers in his mouth and wolf-whistled. “Okay, guys,” he said and made a gesture meant to calm us, patting the air with his palms. “Enough. Listen up. We’ll be sending a bus to Boston at ten o’clock, and another bus to the Westmoor mall at noon. Sign up in my office if you want to go. I know I don’t need to remind anyone that while you’re away, all school rules are in effect.” This was what teachers always said before you left campus.

When roll call was over, students surged out of the room, toward Dean Fletcher’s office or else outside, toward the dorms. I headed to the mail room, which was in the basement, and saw through my mailbox window that nothing was in there. I wasn’t sure what to do with myself. My focus up to this point had been avoiding the biology test, and now that I had, I was at a loss. The problem was, I didn’t have anyone to go with to Boston or the mall; I still didn’t have any friends. Surprisingly, this was not a fact that greatly affected my day-to-day life, at least not logistically. At meals, the sections of the dining hall were unofficially divided by grade, and within your grade—it was strangely democratic—you could sit at any table with an empty seat; formal dinner was even better because then there was assigned seating. In chapel you could also sit anywhere. And the rest of the time, wandering the halls between classes, changing in the locker room for practice, you could inconspicuously be by yourself, walking a few feet behind other people, or standing on the periphery.

It was more when things slowed down, during the parts when you were supposed to have fun, that my lack of friends felt obvious—on Saturday nights, when there were dances I didn’t go to, and during visitation, which was the hour each night when boys and girls were allowed in each other’s dorm rooms. I spent those times hiding. Most of the other girls propped open their doors for visitation, but we kept ours shut; Sin-Jun didn’t seem to care and Dede went down the hall to Aspeth’s room.

But on certain occasions, I could not conceal my friendlessness. When we’d taken a field trip to Plimoth Plantation, I’d had to ride on the bus next to Danny Black, a day student whose nose was always running because of allergies; when I asked if I could sit with him, he said in his snot-laden voice, “Fine, but I want the aisle,” then stood while I slipped in. There was also the Saturday when the freshman prefects organized an ice-skating party in the hockey rink, and I went because I didn’t yet understand that just because it was nighttime, just because this had been billed as a party, it didn’t mean I’d find it any easier to talk to people. On the ice, the girls were gliding around in jeans and pink or gray wool sweaters, and the boys were trying to knock each other over. Behind the plastic barrier, those of us who didn’t know how to skate or didn’t own skates stood by the bleachers. Just standing there in the frosty air, not skating, I felt like my feet were frozen lumps, and you could see people’s breath when they spoke. Intermittently, I tried making conversation with Rufina Sanchez, who’d been recruited to Ault from a public school in San Diego and who was so pretty that I’d have been intimidated to talk to her if she were white, but really my attention was on the skaters. Watching them, I felt that familiar combination of misery and exhilaration. After about fifteen minutes, Rufina said to Maria Oldego, who was heavy and from Albuquerque, “This is boring. Let’s get out of here.”
Boring?
I thought incredulously. When Rufina and Maria left, so did the other kids on our side of the rink, and I was alone; then I had to leave, too.

I might have made my life easier by trying to attach myself to Dede, but pride prevented it. And at times, I did attach myself to Sin-Jun, but afterward I often felt depressed, like I had talked too much and, because of the language barrier, like she hadn’t understood me anyway. Besides, Sin-Jun had recently become friends with Clara O’Hallahan, a chubby, annoying girl in our dorm.

As other students filtered into the mail room, I decided I’d stay in the dorm all day. While my classmates spent money on clothing or cassettes, I could study, I thought. Maybe I’d even do well on the biology test. I left the schoolhouse. It had begun to rain outside, and on the circle, a bunch of boys were playing football, slipping and rolling in the grass. Listening to their cries, I felt a familiar jealousy of boys. I didn’t want what they had, but I wished that I wanted what they wanted; it seemed like happiness was easier for them.

As I approached the dorms, I could hear music. It was all the same song, I realized, though it wasn’t coming from a single source and it wasn’t all synchronized. It was the Madonna song “Holiday,” with the lines, “If we took a holiday/ Took some time to celebrate/ Just one day out of life/ It would be/ It would be so nice.” When I reached the courtyard, I saw that in dorm windows—but only the windows of girls’ dorms, I noticed, not of boys’—stereo speakers faced out, balanced against the screens, sending music into the air. I wondered how so many girls had known to do this. It seemed a kind of animal intuition, like elephants in the savanna who know, from generation to generation, the precise spot to find water.

There were speakers in the windows of our room, Dede’s speakers; her parents had sent her a stereo the second week of school. (Dede’s mother also sent her care packages with cashmere sweaters and French chocolate that came in a box where each piece, shaped like a shell or a medallion, had its own correspondingly shaped nest; Dede gave the chocolate to Sin-Jun and me because she was always on a diet. As for the care packages from my own mother, I’d learned to wait until I got back to the dorm to open them. Once she had sent three shiny pink cartons of maxi pads, accompanied by a note that said, in its entirety,
Kroger was having a sale. Miss you. Love, Mom.
) When I got inside, Sin-Jun wasn’t there, and Dede was in her industrious mode, hurrying between the bathroom and our room—filling her water bottle, stuffing her backpack, yelling to Aspeth. From the threshold of our room, she called down the hall, “Is Cross going?” Aspeth said something I couldn’t hear, and Dede sighed and called, “Why not?” Aspeth did not respond. After several seconds, Dede said, “Cross has been so moody lately,” and based on the lowered volume of her voice, it seemed she was speaking to me. “Going out with Sophie is bringing him down,” she added.

Cross Sugarman was the tallest, coolest guy in our class, a white guy who was an even better basketball player than Darden Pittard. Though Cross was a freshman, he was dating a junior named Sophie, which I knew because I’d read it in Low Notes. Low Notes ran in
The Ault Voice,
the school paper; they were festively mean-spirited comments about new couples, ex-couples, and people who had recently hooked up, all written in a veiled way to escape faculty comprehension. There would be people’s initials, and then a pun on their names—for Cross and Sophie, it had been, “S.T. and C.S.: It feels SO good to Cross the grade divide.” The fact that Cross had a girlfriend had, apparently, not prevented Dede from developing an enormous crush on him, which struck me as both predictable and pathetic—of course Dede would fixate on the most popular guy in the class. Liking him was like saying the Grateful Dead was your favorite band, or saying chapel was boring, or the dining hall food was gross. But I knew that Dede had no chance with Cross. Yes, she was rich, but she was also Jewish, and, with a big nose and the last name Schwartz, she wasn’t the kind of Jewish you could hide. She took care of herself, her legs were always freshly shaven, her hair always smelled good, but she simply wasn’t that pretty.

Once in the mail room I’d seen Dede and Cross Sugarman and a few other people standing together. Dede had been shrieking with laughter, looking up at Cross and pulling on his arm with both her hands, and the expression on his face had been one of such mildness, such utter detachment, that I’d actually felt a pang for Dede.

“If Cross thought Sophie was bringing him down, he probably wouldn’t be going out with her,” I said.

“He’s almost broken up with her like five times,” Dede said. “The main reason he’s dating her is because she’s a junior.”

I laughed. “That makes Cross sound kind of lame.” To utter such a statement felt pleasingly blasphemous.

“You don’t know him the way I do.”

“I didn’t claim to. I’ve never even talked to him.”

“Exactly.” Dede was standing before the mirror above her bureau. She applied lip gloss and rubbed her upper and lower lips together while looking at her reflection with wide, serious eyes. “He’s trapped in an unhealthy relationship,” she said. “He doesn’t like her that much, but he feels obligated to her.”

“Maybe you should go for someone without a girlfriend.”

“Oh, I don’t
like
Cross. We’re just good friends.” Dede turned from the mirror. “You’re not going to Boston, are you?”

“No.”

“I am.”

“I can tell.”

“Aspeth and I are going shopping on Newbury Street. And we’re having lunch at this Thai restaurant that’s supposed to be super-cool. Don’t you love Thai food?”

I had never had Thai food before, which Dede probably could have guessed.

“Like Pad Thai,” she said. “Yum, that’s my favorite. Have you seen my tortoiseshell headband?”

“No.”

“You’re not hanging out here all day, are you, Lee?” she said. “You should do something fun. Surprise holiday only happens once a year.”

“Of course I’m not staying here,” I said.

“You’re going to the mall?”

Without thinking, I nodded.

“It’s kind of a trashy mall,” she said. “Remember that time Aspeth and I took a taxi there? It was a waste of time. The shopping is much better in Boston. Oh, but you’re probably going to the movies, huh?”

I nodded again.

“What movie are you seeing?”

I hesitated. “Actually,” I said. “Actually, the reason I’m going to the mall is that—well, I’m getting my ears pierced.” As I said it, I felt blood rush to my face. I had never considered getting my ears pierced; I wasn’t even sure my parents would allow it.

“Oh, Lee! That’s great. That’ll look so good. And you’ll wear dangly earrings, right? Not just studs?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“This is going to be such an improvement.”

It occurred to me to take offense, but it was clear that Dede was only trying to be supportive. There was something guileless about her—all her unpleasantness was close to the surface, like the earth’s crust; once you got below it, she was strangely innocent.

Dede was right; the mall was kind of trashy. The lighting was bright white, and the floor was made of shiny, fake-looking orange bricks. Several of the spaces where stores had once been had chrome grates pulled over them; behind the grates, they were dark, and vacant except for a few boxes or a lone office chair. I walked past a store selling clothes for plus-sized women, a music store, and then a string of restaurants: a sub shop, a pizza place, a diner with lit-up panels of glistening hamburgers. I kept seeing other Ault students in groups of two or three. After the bus had let us off—it hadn’t been full, and no one had taken the seat next to mine—I’d hoped that I would be able to blend into a crowd of strangers, but the mall was almost empty. I told myself that the other students were probably going to the movies, which would start in less than an hour, and then I could wander around in peace. First I had to get my ears pierced.

The mall didn’t have the kind of girlish store that sells barrettes and cheap jewelry. My only option seemed to be the male counterpart to such a store—a place with a motorcycle in the window that had flames running up the back panels, and lots of leather clothing.

A guy in his late thirties, with a long ponytail and a denim jacket with the sleeves cut off, stood behind the counter. “Help you, miss?” he said.

“I’m just looking.” I needed a couple minutes, I thought. I walked to a rack of leather jackets and touched the shoulders. The jackets were very soft and had that deep, bitter smell.

“Help you?” the guy said, and I turned. But this time he was talking to Cross Sugarman, who stood in the entrance of the store looking around. As I turned back toward the jackets, I couldn’t keep from smirking. Cross’s presence didn’t matter to me; what was gratifying was that his absence
would
matter to Dede. Then I remembered how warmly Dede had acted when I’d told her I was getting my ears pierced, and I wondered if I should feel guilty for being spiteful.

I approached the counter. “I want to get my ears pierced.” I paused. “Please.”

“Piercing’s free,” the man said. “Earrings run from six ninety-nine up.”

He unlocked a door to the counter, pulled out a velvet tray of earrings, and slid it toward me. There were moons and crosses and skeleton heads, all in both silver and gold. I felt a twinge of loneliness; getting your ears pierced was an activity to do with another girl, with a friend, so she could help you choose. I pointed to a pair of silver balls, the plainest pair I saw.

“Sit there.” The man nodded his chin toward a stool on the outside of the counter. He came around, and I saw the piercing gun, a white plastic square-edged object that was mostly featureless, with a silver rod that would jump forward, through my ear.

“Do you ever miss?” I asked. I laughed, and my laugh came out high and nervous.

“No,” the man said.

“Does it hurt?”

“No.” He set the gun against my right earlobe.

I thought that if I had a friend, even if it were only Dede, I would squeeze her fingers. I felt a pinching sensation, and then a burn. “Ouch,” I said.

The man chuckled.

I wanted to stand and run from him. But if I ran, I’d have only one ear pierced. The idea that I was trapped made it difficult to breathe. I could feel the gun touching my left earlobe, the man’s fingers in my hair. He pulled back on the trigger, and I shuddered, my shoulders jerking up.

“What the hell!” The man curled his body around so we could see each other’s faces and glared down at me. “You want this done or not?”

“Sorry.” As I looked at him, the composition of his face began to dissolve. A glowing, pulsating greenish spot—like when you look at a lightbulb and then look away—covered the tip of his nose and part of one cheek. A wave broke in my stomach. “Oh my God,” I said softly.