Prep

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  So Little had stolen Sin‑Jun’s money this time; her plan actually wasn’t a bad one. And I was supposed to help. Before, I’d have done so unwittingly, believing when I turned Dede in that she really was the thief. Now, because I’d know it wasn’t Dede but could pretend to have proof, I’d be doing so on purpose.

  “You didn’t think I took from you, did you?” Little said.

  I glanced away.

  “I’d never take from you. Damn, girl.” Her voice was cheerful; maybe if I hadn’t been able to see her, I’d have bought the act. But her eyes were full of unspeakable longing and sadness. As we stood at the threshold watching each other, I felt a sense of recognition so profound that I almost believed I would keep her secret.

  2. All School Rules Are in Effect

  FRESHMAN WINTER

  A fter Madame Broussard checked us in at curfew, the common room cleared out except for Dede, me, and Amy Dennaker, who was inside the phone booth; she kept laughing and saying, “Shut up !”

  I looked down at my notebook. “Okay,” I said to Dede. “What’s the reproductive pattern for the protist Euglena ?”

  “Binary fission,” Dede said.

  “Right.” In my head, I repeated, binary fission, binary fission, binary fission. It astonished me that Dede, who seemed to expend most of her energy grooming herself and trying to be ingratiating with people more popular than she was, retained such information effortlessly while I was averaging a C in biology. It was not clear to me how I’d arrived at this juncture gradewise, because before entering Ault, I’d never received lower than a B plus in any class. Either Ault was a lot harder than my junior high had been, or I was getting dumber‑I suspected both. If I wasn’t literally getting dumber, I knew at least that I’d lost the glow that surrounds you when the teachers think you’re one of the smart, responsible ones, that glow that shines brighter every time you raise your hand in class to say the perfect thing, or you run out of room in a blue book during an exam and have to ask for a second one. At Ault, I doubted I would ever need a second blue book because even my handwriting had changed‑once my letters had been bubbly and messy, and now they were thin and small.

  “What about for bacteria?” I said. “What’s the reproductive pattern called?”

  “For bacteria, it’s binary fission and conjugation. It can be‑”

  “What are you guys doing?” Amy Dennaker had emerged from the phone booth and was regarding us with more interest than usual. The month before, in February, Amy had scored a hat trick in the ice hockey game against St. Francis and then, in the third period, broken her nose. This made her, to me, even scarier. “If you’re studying for tomorrow, don’t bother,” Amy said.

  Dede and I looked at each other. “We have a biology test,” I said.

  “No, you don’t.” Amy grinned. “You didn’t hear it from me, but tomorrow is surprise holiday.”

  “What’s that?” I said, and at the same time, Dede said, “That’s awesome. Are you sure?”

  I turned to Dede. “What’s surprise holiday?” I said.

  “How do you know?” Dede asked Amy.

  “I can’t reveal my sources. And you can never be totally positive. Sometimes, if Mr. Byden thinks too many students know, he’ll cancel it. But look at it this way: It can’t be on a Wednesday because of sports, it’s not usually on a Monday or a Friday because it would be lame if it was just attached to the weekend, and it’s almost always before spring break. So that leaves Tuesday and Thursday, and the boys’ basketball game against Overfield was rescheduled for next Tuesday. Next Thursday, some presidential speechwriter dude is coming to speak fourth period. And the week after that is the week before spring break. You never know for sure until you see the green jacket, but basically, process of elimination says it’s tomorrow.”

  Dede was nodding. Apparently, she had heard about the green jacket.

  “Here’s another thing,” Amy said. “Alex Ellison has a history paper due tomorrow, but he told people at dinner that he hadn’t even started it.”

  “Why does that matter?”

  “Alex rooms with Henry Thorpe, and since Henry is one of the senior prefects, he would know for sure. The prefects are the only students who find out ahead of time. And Henry would definitely tell Alex.”

  “Would Henry be allowed to tell?” I asked. Both Dede and Amy looked at me as if they had forgotten my presence.

  “No,” Amy said. “But so what?” She seemed to suddenly remember who I was: a dorky freshman she didn’t know very well, sitting with my only slightly cooler roommate. Clearly, she had not meant to be this generous with her time or her information. “Do what you want,” she said. “You guys can study all night long if it floats your boat.”

  I waited until she had disappeared up the staircase, then turned to Dede. “So are you going to explain this to me or not?” I still didn’t particularly like Dede, but there was no one I felt closer to at Ault. Back in December, Little Washington had been asked to leave less than twenty‑four hours after I talked to Madame Broussard, and when we gathered in the common room for curfew you could feel the difference, the new emptiness. Little herself was gone‑her parents had come to get her and, just like that, her room was cleared out‑and so was the suspense of who was stealing, or when it would happen next. Around two in the morning, I was having such bad stomach pains that I went into the bathroom, sat on the floor by the toilet, and stuck my finger down my throat. Nothing emerged, but I gagged a few times, then leaned over the bowl, considering the toilet from this angle‑the calm water, the curving porcelain. I had been there for about twenty minutes when Dede pushed open the unlocked stall door. “Could you leave me alone?” I said, and she said, “You did the right thing. You didn’t have a choice.”

  In the common room, Dede said, “Surprise holiday is an Ault tradition. Once a year, classes get called off to give us a break.”

  I thought of my C in biology and wasn’t sure I deserved a break.

  “When you see the green jacket at roll call, that’s when you know,” Dede continued. “Mr. Byden might be making an announcement and he’ll take off his jacket, and the green jacket will be on underneath, or someone will jump out from under the prefects’ desk wearing it. Something like that.”

  “So we don’t have our test?”

  “I guess not. At least until Friday.”

  “Then we don’t need to study.”

  “Well.” Dede bit her lip. “We probably should just to be safe.”

  “I’m tired,” I said.

  “If we study now, we won’t have to tomorrow.”

  I looked at her‑she was so responsible. It was as if I were seeing a version of myself from a year before, the version who had convinced my parents to let me go to Ault, against their better judgment, by saying it would be a first‑rate educational experience. Now I was a different person, someone unlike Dede. She could study because she approached her life straightforwardly. But I was living my life sideways. I did not act on what I wanted, I did not say the things I thought, and being so stifled and clamped all the time left me exhausted; no matter what I was doing, I was always imagining something else. Grades felt peripheral, but the real problem was, everything felt peripheral.

  “I’m going to bed,” I said. I left Dede in the common room, peering at her biology notes.

  At breakfast, Hunter Jergenson recapped a dream she’d had involving space aliens, which prompted Tab Kinkead to ask if maybe it hadn’t been a dream after all but an abduction, and then Andrea Sheldy‑Smith, who was Hunter’s roommate, told a long story about how she had accidentally used Hunter’s toothbrush, and Tab said to her, “So basically you guys have made out?” I was constantly amazed at the ridiculous topics raised by other people, especially by other girls, and I was equally amazed by the enthusiastic responses their ridiculousness elicited. Of course, maybe being ridiculous was the point‑the way they didn’t give off the painful feeling that something was at stake.

  No one at the table
brought up surprise holiday, and I felt a growing suspicion that either Amy had been wrong or‑this possibility had occurred to me in the middle of the night‑she had duped us. At chapel, Mr. Byden spoke about the importance of humility, and I scrutinized his expression for a sign that there would be no classes. He did not give one. Generally, I liked chapel: the rickety straw seats, the dim light, the impossibly high arched ceilings, the sound of the organ when we sang hymns, and the wall in back where the names of Ault boys who had died in wars were carved into the stone. But today I was restless.

  At roll call, I could feel an extra sense of anticipation, a chatty exuberance. At the desks around mine, no one was studying, as people usually were before and during the announcements; everyone was talking and there were loud, frequent bursts of laughter from every direction. Aspeth Montgomery, the blond, mean girl for whom Dede functioned as an acolyte, was sitting on the lap of Darden Pittard, who was our class’s cool black guy; Darden was good at basketball and from the Bronx and wore a gold chain and rugbies that pulled across his muscular back and broad shoulders. (The other black guy in our class, who wasn’t cool, was Kevin Brown‑Kevin was a skinny chess whiz who wore glasses, whose parents were both professors at a university in St. Louis.) I saw Darden make fish lips at Aspeth, as if to kiss her, and then I saw her take his face in her hand, her thumb on one cheek and her index finger on the other, and pretend to scold him, and as I watched, I thought that probably, almost definitely, today was surprise holiday. How could it not be?

  Henry Thorpe had to ring the bell three times before people were quiet enough for roll call to start. The first announcement, from Mrs. Van der Hoef, was that anyone going on the Greece trip in June needed to make sure their parents had sent in the five‑hundred‑dollar deposit. Then a junior boy whose name I didn’t know said he’d left his math notebook in the library and if you saw it, please give it to him. The third person to go was Dean Fletcher, who ambled up to the platform where the prefects’ desk was, which Henry and Gates stood behind. After Little’s expulsion, my interest in Gates had waned almost completely. Not because of anything Gates herself did but, I think, because I associated Gates with Little and with all my discomfort surrounding that situation. Gates soon seemed like someone a friend of mine, rather than I myself, had once been preoccupied by. I still felt a flicker of interest when I saw her, but only a flicker.

  “A couple things,” Dean Fletcher said. “First off, breakfast ends at exactly five to eight. I’ve been getting reports of you guys complaining to the dining hall staff ’cause you overslept but you still want your pancakes.” People laughed, mostly because everyone liked Dean Fletcher. “When the staff tells you they’ve stopped serving, it means you better hustle to chapel. Got that? Next thing is, the mail room is a pigsty. Your mothers would be ashamed of you.” He reached into a cardboard box set on the prefects’ desk; I had not previously noticed it. “Exhibit A,” he said, and my heart rate increased, but all he held up was a rumpled New York Times. “Papers go in the recycling bins.” The next thing he held up was a pair of earmuffs. “Anyone want to claim these? Nope? Then I get to keep ’em for myself.” He clamped them on his head, and then I knew for sure. “Or‑” he said, and he looked around the big room at all of us waiting. He smiled. “How about this?” All I saw before the room erupted was a flash of hunter green fabric. Everyone around me was screaming. Girls hugged, and boys slapped each other on the back.

  I did not scream or hug anyone. In fact, as the noise gained momentum, I felt its opposite, a draining of excitement. But not a draining of tension‑my body was still stiff and alert, and the impulse I had, strangely, was to weep. Not because I was sad but because I was not happy, and yet, like my classmates, I’d experienced an emotional surge, I too felt the need for expression. This phenomenon‑being gripped by an overwhelming wave of feeling that was clearly not the feeling of the people around me‑had also happened at a pep rally: It made me uncomfortable, because I didn’t want anyone to notice that I wasn’t jumping up and down or cheering, and it also thrilled me, because it made the world seem full of possibilities that could make my heart pound. I think, looking back, that this was the single best thing about Ault, the sense of possibility. We lived together so closely, but because it was a place of decorum and restraint and because on top of that we were teenagers, we hid so much. And then, in dorms and classes and on teams and at formal dinner and in adviser groups, we got shuffled and thrust together and shuffled again, and there was always the chance that you might find out one of the pieces of hidden information. This was why I felt excited when life was different from normal, when things happened‑snow and fire drills and the times we had chapel at night, evensong, when the sky outside the stained glass windows was black. Depending on circumstances, a wild fact could be revealed to you, or you could fall desperately in love. In my whole life, Ault was the place with the greatest density of people to fall in love with.

  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 int
imidated 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.