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“I already told you it’s not in my drawer,” Dede said. “You didn’t borrow it, did you, Sin‑Jun? Like take it and plan on paying me back later? It’s okay if you did.” This was a notably kind remark on Dede’s part.
But Sin‑Jun shook her head. “No borrow,” she said.
Dede exhaled disgustedly. “Great,” she said. “There’s a thief in the dorm.”
“Maybe someone else borrowed the money,” I said. “Ask Aspeth.” Aspeth Montgomery was the girl Dede followed most enthusiastically. She lived down the hall, and I assumed Dede considered it a stroke of singular misfortune that she had been assigned to live with Sin‑Jun and me instead of with Aspeth.
“Aspeth would never borrow money without asking,” Dede said. “I need to tell Madame what’s happened.”
This was the moment when I actually believed that the money had been stolen, or at least I believed that Dede believed it. The next night at curfew, after calling out our names and checking them off the dorm list, Madame Broussard said, “It is with great displeasure that I must tell you there has been a theft.” Madame‑our dorm head, the head of the French department, and a native of Paris‑peered around the room through her cat’s‑eye glasses, which were either (I wasn’t sure which) outdated or retro‑hip. She was in her early forties, and she also wore stockings with seams, tan leather high heels with an ankle strap fastened by one leather‑covered button, and skirts and blouses that emphasized her small waist and not‑small backside. “I will not say how much money it was, nor will I say from whom it was taken,” she continued. “If you know anything about this incident, I request that you step forward. I remind you that stealing is a major disciplinary violation and as such is punishable by expulsion.”
“How much money was it?” asked Amy Dennaker. Amy was a junior with a hoarse voice, curly red hair, and broad shoulders, and she scared me. I had spoken to her only once, when I was waiting in the common room to use the pay phone and she walked in, opened the refrigerator, and said, “Whose Diet Cokes are these?” I had said, “I don’t know,” and Amy had taken one and walked up the stairs. Maybe, I thought, she was the thief.
“The amount of money is not pertinent,” Madame said. “I am telling you of the incident only so you may take precautions.”
“What, you mean like locking our doors?” Amy said and people laughed. None of the doors had locks on them.
“I urge you not to keep large sums of money in your rooms,” Madame said. “If you have ten or fifteen dollars, that is enough.” She was right about this‑you didn’t need cash at Ault. Money was everywhere on campus, but it was usually invisible. You caught a glimpse of it sometimes in things that were shiny, like the hood of the headmaster’s Mercedes, or the gold dome of the schoolhouse, or a girl’s long, straight blond hair. But nobody carried wallets. When you had to pay for a notebook or a pair of sweatpants at the campus store, you wrote your student ID number on a form and, later on, your parents got the bill. “If you see any unfamiliar persons in the dorm,” Madame continued, “you may report it to me. Are there other announcements?”
Dede’s friend Aspeth raised her hand. “I just want to say that whoever is leaving pubic hair in the bathroom sink, could you please clean it up? It’s really gross.”
Aspeth made this announcement every few days. It was true there were often short wiry black hairs in one of the sinks, but, clearly, Aspeth’s complaints were achieving nothing. It seemed like maybe she just liked to make them because they established her firmly in opposition to pubic hair.
“If that is it,” Madame said, “then curfew is complete.” Everyone rose from the couches and chairs and the floor to shake her hand, which was by then a ritual I had become used to.
“If we started a vigilante group, would the student activities committee give us funding?” Amy asked in a loud voice.
“I do not know,” Madame said wearily.
“Don’t worry,” Amy said. “We’d be peaceful vigilantes.” I had seen Amy in action before‑she did imitations of Madame that consisted of clutching her chest and crying out something like Zut alors! Someone has sat upon my croissant! –but I was still surprised by her joking. In chapel, the headmaster and the chaplain spoke of citizenship and integrity and the price we had to pay for the privileges we enjoyed. At Ault, it wasn’t just that we weren’t supposed to be bad or unethical; we weren’t even supposed to be ordinary, and stealing was worse than ordinary. It was unseemly, lacking subtlety, revealing a wish for things you did not already have.
Climbing the stairs to the second floor, I wondered if it was possible that I was the thief. What if I had opened Dede’s drawer in my sleep? Or what if I had amnesia, or schizophrenia, and couldn’t even account for my own behavior? I didn’t think I had stolen the money, yet it also did not seem impossible.
“We’ll get to the bottom of this tout de suite, ” I heard Amy say as I reached the top step, and then someone else, someone standing much closer to me, said, “That bitch is crazy.”
I turned. Little Washington was on the steps behind me. I made a noncommittal noise, to acknowledge her comment, though I wasn’t even sure if she meant Amy or Madame.
“The mouth on her,” Little added, and then I knew she was referring to Amy.
“Amy likes to kid around,” I said. I wouldn’t have minded sharing a moment with Little at Amy’s expense, but I feared doing so in the hallway, where we could be overheard.
“She ain’t funny,” Little said.
I wanted to agree‑less because I actually did agree than because I’d recently been considering trying to become friends with Little. I had first noticed her one night when we returned from formal dinner at the same time; just inside the common room, she said to no one in particular, “I gotta get these shoes off because my dogs are barking. ” Little was from Pittsburgh, the only black girl in the dorm, and I’d heard that she was the daughter of a doctor and a lawyer. She was a star in cross‑country and was supposed to be even better at basketball. As a sophomore, she lived in a single, which normally carried a stigma‑a single implied you didn’t have any friends close enough to share a room with‑but Little’s blackness made her exist outside of Ault’s social strata. Not automatically, though, not in a negative way. More like, it gave her the choice of opting out without seeming like a loser.
“The stealing is weird, huh?” I said.
Little made a dismissive noise. “I bet she’s glad it happened. Now she gets to be the center of attention.”
“Who?”
“What do you mean who? Your roommate.”
“You know it was Dede’s money? I guess there aren’t any secrets in the dorm.”
Little was quiet for a few seconds. “There aren’t any secrets in the whole school,” she said.
I felt a flip of uneasiness in my stomach; I hoped she wasn’t right. We were standing outside her room, and it crossed my mind that she might invite me in.
“Do you like it here?” I asked. This was the problem with me‑I didn’t know how to talk to people without asking them questions. Some people seemed to find me peculiar and some people were so happy to discuss themselves that they didn’t even notice, but either way, it made conversation draining. While the other person’s mouth moved, I’d try to think of the next thing to ask.
“There’s good parts about the school,” Little said. “But I’m telling you that everyone’s in each other’s business.”
“I like your name,” I said. “Is it your real name?”
“You can find that out yourself,” Little said. “Prove my theory.”
“Okay,” I said. “And then I’ll report back to you.”
She didn’t object; it was like permission to talk to her again, something to look forward to. Though, apparently, she would not be inviting me in‑she had opened her door and was about to step inside.
“Don’t forget to hide your money,” I said.
“Yeah, really.” She shook her head. “Folks are messed up.”
Ault had been my idea. I’d researched boarding schools at the public library and written away for catalogs myself. Their glossy pages showed photographs of teenagers in wool sweaters singing hymns in the chapel, gripping lacrosse sticks, intently regarding a math equation written across the chalkboard. I had traded away my family for this glossiness. I’d pretended it was about academics, but it never had been. Marvin Thompson High School, the school I would have attended in South Bend, had hallways of pale green linoleum and grimy lockers and stringy‑haired boys who wrote the names of heavy metal bands across the backs of their denim jackets in black marker. But boarding school boys, at least the ones in the catalogs who held lacrosse sticks and grinned over their mouth guards, were so handsome. And they had to be smart, too, by virtue of the fact that they attended boarding school. I imagined that if I left South Bend, I would meet a melancholy, athletic boy who liked to read as much as I did and on overcast Sundays we would take walks together wearing wool sweaters.
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.