Prep

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  Like the audience of a sitcom, the class gasped and giggled.

  “What is that?” Ms. Moray asked.

  “I killed a bee.”

  She made a noise that it took me a few seconds to recognize as an irritated sigh. “Fine,” she said. “Go wash your hands and then come back.” Her irritation surprised me; I’d expected it all to be okay between us once she knew what the problem was.

  Standing in front of the mirror above the bathroom sink, I felt, underneath my sense of agitation over having made a teacher mad on the first day of class, a vague and surprising happiness, and I tried to think of why. I ran backward through the sequence of events that had just occurred, and then I remembered‑after I’d killed the bee, Darden Pittard had called me by my last name. He had said, “Not bad, Fiora.” And it had seemed like no big deal, like I was the same as any other girl, someone a guy could be casually friendly with. These were the types of almost‑compliments that I hoarded.

  When I returned to the classroom, Dede was saying, “‑and my favorite book is Marjorie Morningstar because it’s just something you can really relate to. Oh, and I’m from Westchester County.” While Aspeth announced what her favorite book was and where she was from, I tried to think of what I’d say when it was my turn. Jane Eyre, maybe‑over the summer, back in South Bend, I’d read it in a single twenty‑four‑hour period, although that had had as much to do with the fact that I’d been bored as that I’d liked the book. But it appeared Aspeth was the last to go. Either Ms. Moray had forgotten about me, or she just didn’t feel like letting me speak.

  “All right,” she said. “Now if I can turn your attention to‑”

  “Ms. Moray?” Aspeth said. “Excuse me, but before we go on, will you tell us where you’re from and what your favorite book is?”

  “Why do you want to know?” Ms. Moray’s tone was, if this was possible, flirtatious‑pleased but reticent.

  “We told you,” Aspeth said.

  “Aha,” Ms. Moray said. “Payback.”

  “We want insight into your character,” Darden said.

  “I grew up in Dubuque, Iowa, which is up north, and I went to the U of I for undergrad‑go, Hawkeyes.” She lifted one arm, and a couple guys laughed. So she hadn’t played field hockey for Dartmouth, I thought, and then, knowing she was from Iowa, I recognized a certain Midwesternness in her. It was in her clothes, especially the denim skirt, and also in her gestures. She was not entirely at ease, I realized, and as soon as I thought it, I thought, Of course she’s not. Not only was it her first day teaching at Ault, it was her first day teaching, period. This was the moment when I noticed her pin; she wore it on the right side of her shirt, just below her collarbone. “I was a lit major,” she continued. “Phi Beta Kappa‑you know, just to toot my own horn.” She laughed, and no one laughed along with her. At Ault, you didn’t toot your own horn; also, you didn’t imagine that acknowledging that that’s what you were doing would make it okay. “It’s tough to pick one book as my favorite,” Ms. Moray continued, “but I’d probably say My Ántonia. ”

  I saw Dede write My Ántonia in her notebook. “Who’s that by?” she asked.

  “Who wants to tell”‑Ms. Moray glanced at the attendance sheet‑“Dede who wrote My Ántonia ?”

  No one said anything.

  “You guys know, right?”

  Again, there was silence.

  “Don’t tell me that the students at an elite institution like Ault don’t know who Willa Cather is. I thought you guys were supposed to be the best and the brightest.” Ms. Moray laughed again, and even though I didn’t like her much, I felt mortified on her behalf. This was another misstep, talking about Ault the way a magazine article might, or the way someone in town‑someone who worked at the grocery store, or the barber shop‑would.

  “Did Willa Cather write O Pioneers! ?” Jenny Carter finally said. “I think my sister had to read that for a class at Princeton.”

  “You mean your sister got to,” Ms. Moray said. “Cather is one of the foremost writers of this century. You should all make a point of reading at least one book by her.” She gestured toward the chalkboard behind my side of the table, where the line from Kafka was printed. It occurred to me then that she must have entered the room before class, written it there, then left again. “How many of you noticed this on your way in?” she asked.

  A few people, not including me, raised their hands.

  “Who wants to read it aloud?”

  Dede kept her hand raised. After she’d read it, Ms. Moray said, “Who agrees with Kafka?” and I spaced out. I had never participated much in class discussions at Ault‑someone else always expressed my ideas, usually in a smarter way than I could have, and as time went on, the less I spoke the less it seemed I had to say. Near the end of class, Ms. Moray gave us our homework, which was to read the first thirty pages of Walden, and, by the following Monday, to write two hundred words about a place where we went to reflect on our lives. “Be as creative as‑” she said, and, as she was speaking, the bell rang. “Yikes,” she said. “Do they think we have a hearing problem? As I was saying, be totally creative with this assignment. If there’s not a place you go, make up one. You guys comprende ?”

  A few people nodded.

  “Then you’re released until tomorrow.”

  We all stood and gathered our backpacks and I looked at the floor around my chair to make sure I hadn’t dropped anything. I was terrified of unwittingly leaving behind a scrap of paper on which were written all my private desires and humiliations. The fact that no such scrap of paper existed, that I did not even keep a diary or write letters except bland, earnest, falsely cheerful ones to my family (We lost to St. Francis in soccer, but I think we’ll win our game this Saturday; we are working on self –portraits in art class, and the hardest part for me is the nose ) never decreased my fear.

  I was one of the last to leave the classroom and when I got into the hall, Darden and Aspeth and Dede were walking a few feet in front of me. I slowed down, letting the space between us widen. They all laughed as they disappeared into the stairwell, and I waited for the door to shut all the way behind them before I opened it again.

  I was standing in front of the stove in my pajamas, heating up chicken noodle soup, when Tullis Haskell appeared in the common room. It was a little after nine on Saturday night, and everyone else in the dorm‑just about everyone else on campus, in fact‑was at the first dance of the school year. While Martha had been getting dressed, fastening her bracelet, applying lip gloss, I’d sat at my desk talking to her. The fact that she hadn’t tried to convince me to go had made me feel a tiny drop of disappointment but mostly a great flood of relief, a sense that finally at Ault I’d made a friend who understood me. After Martha had left, I’d listened as the sounds of the dorm‑running water and radios and other girls’ voices‑became quieter, then stopped entirely. Then I’d changed into the bottoms of my pale blue cotton pajamas and an old T‑shirt, gone downstairs to the common room, flicked on the TV, and dumped the contents of the soup can into a pan. It wasn’t bad to spend a Saturday night by myself. Really, it was all a matter of expectations, and in my second year at Ault, I knew not to expect much. As a freshman, I had at times believed that if my sadness were intense enough, it would magnetically draw a handsome boy to my room to comfort me, and that had served as an incentive, when alone, to lie around and weep. But nothing had ever come of my exertions, and I’d finally realized that time passed faster if you were doing something, like watching TV or reading a magazine. Besides, my nebulous wish for a boy had narrowed to a specific wish for Cross Sugarman, and he would be at the dance, and if I writhed and wailed and chanted his name, he’d still be at the dance.

  I was stirring the broth when I heard a male voice say, “Hey there,” and when I turned, Tullis was standing in the entrance to the common room.

  “Hi,” I said. Tullis was a senior who, at the talent show the previous winter, had played “Fire and Rain” on the guitar. Sitting
in the audience (I had attended the talent show because I could observe it passively, watching other people act enthusiastic without having, as at a dance or a pep rally, to muster any enthusiasm of my own), I had experienced an evolution of powerful feelings toward this boy‑Tullis‑whom I had never previously noticed. First, he set a stool onstage, disappeared, and reemerged carrying his guitar, which hung from a blue and yellow strap. As he crossed the stage, a guy called out, “Serenade me, Haskell,” and Tullis didn’t react at all. (His face was serious and slightly vulnerable, as if he had recently awakened from a nap; he had thoughtful features and a ponytail, unusual for an Ault boy, that was about six inches long.) Watching him onstage, I wondered if he was liked or disliked by his classmates, and, as I wondered, I felt the affinity for him that I felt for all undeserving outcasts‑not for the flat‑out definitively awkward or ugly kids (of whom, at Ault, there were few) but for the people who, it seemed to me, could have been either popular or unpopular and who ended up‑by choice? Could choice have played a role?‑on the periphery. Tullis sat down and strummed the guitar a few times and, without saying anything, began to play. I recognized the song before he started singing, and the feeling of affinity I’d had swelled into something else, something further from sympathy and closer to affection. He understood sadness, clearly, because who could choose to perform “Fire and Rain” without understanding sadness? I tried to decide if he was cute, and as he kept playing, I thought, Maybe he is, and a little later, I thought, He definitely is. By the second verse, I was picturing how something might happen between us, how someday soon we’d pass in the mail room and I’d shyly compliment him on his performance (a performance that was, as I imagined this scenario, less than half‑finished), and he’d shyly thank me, and we’d start to talk and soon, inevitably, we’d be a couple. It would just happen, and then we’d always have each other and the rest of Ault would seem distant: We’d sit together in chapel and make out in the music wing at night and I’d go to his family’s house for Thanksgiving‑I had a dim idea that he was from Maine‑and following the late afternoon meal, we’d go for a walk on a rocky beach overlooking the water, I’d be wearing his dead grandfather’s hunting jacket, and we’d hold hands as he told me for the first time that he loved me. Onstage, Tullis kept his eyes downcast, and when he got to the line, “Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground,” he looked up solemnly and I could feel a shift in the audience. I glanced first to one side and then to the other, and I saw that all the girls in my row, and in the other rows that I could see, were rapt. I began to panic. If we were both loners, that was one thing, but if there was a whole herd of girls vying for his attention, it was hopeless. What overture could I make that would distinguish me without seeming freakish? I couldn’t; it was impossible. The song ended, and when the auditorium erupted, the pitch of the eruption was distinctly feminine. Tullis stood and bowed his head once, and then, as the cheering continued, waved and walked offstage. In front of me, Evie Landers turned to Katherine Pound and said, “I never realized that Tullis is hot.” No! I thought. No! Then, abruptly, I thought, Fine. Fine, Tullis. Go out with another girl instead of with me. I could take care of you, I could make you happy, but if you don’t believe that, then I can’t convince you. At curfew that night, people were still talking about him, and someone said, “Isabel is so lucky,” and I remembered suddenly, just as I’d remembered that Tullis was from Maine, that Tullis was going out with a short, pretty girl named Isabel Burten. By then, though only a few hours had passed, my own welling of emotions seemed ridiculous. It was as if I’d seen a stranger in an airport and embraced him, mistaking him for a relative‑Tullis was no one I ever could have loved or been loved back by; for God’s sake, we’d never even talked! And oddly enough, early the next week, I did pass him in the mail room, at a time when it was quiet, when I could have said something about his performance without feeling self‑conscious, but instead I said, and I felt, nothing at all.

  Seeing him in the common room seven months later, I also felt nothing, or almost nothing‑I did wish that I were wearing a bra. And I was glad that I was making chicken noodle soup, which was innocuous. I had the idea that the more meaty or spicy a food was, the more incriminating to a girl‑a steak‑and‑cheese hoagie with onions, for instance, which I could but never would have purchased from Raymond’s House of Pizza on Sunday afternoon when someone in the dorm organized an order, would be downright mortifying.

  “Do you know how to cut hair?” Tullis asked.

  “What?”

  “Hair,” Tullis said. He held his index and middle fingers sideways and moved them in front of his body, making them open and close.

  I stared at him. I had imagined that he would ask me to try to find someone upstairs and, though I was pretty sure the dorm was empty, I’d been prepared to go and check, just to be polite. “Your hair?” I asked. “Or someone else’s?”

  “Mine. I’m just kind of”‑he shrugged, then reached back and pulled once on his ponytail‑“sick of it.”

  I considered my experience: In kindergarten, I had cut a doll’s hair and found it deeply satisfying to do so, even though the doll had looked terrible and my mother had been displeased. Also, at the age of nine, when my mother had refused to let the woman at Easy Cuts give me layers on the grounds that they were too grown‑up, I had, upon arriving home, snuck into the bathroom and given them to myself. This also had not looked particularly attractive. But to cut Tullis’s hair‑the weirdness of the situation appealed to me. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll cut your hair.”

  “Awesome.” He smiled, and I thought that if I’d known that smile was coming, I’d have told him yes before he’d finished his first question.

  “Do you want to do it here?” I gestured around the common room, which contained a fireplace, a television, two pilly orange couches, five or six pilly blue chairs, a few bookshelves built into the wall, and, next to the kitchenette, a round table with several wooden chairs.

  “Here’s fine,” Tullis said. “Do you have scissors?”

  “Yeah. They’re not, like, special haircutting scissors, though.”

  “That’s cool. And we should probably get a towel. You want me to go get a towel? I’m just in Walley’s.” So that was why he’d stumbled into this common room‑because ours was the girls’ dorm closest to his own. It occurred to me that maybe cutting hair was one of the things, like baking chocolate chip cookies or holding a baby, that all boys thought all girls knew how to do. If he did think that, it was sweet‑I didn’t want to be the one to reveal that he was wrong.

  “I can get a towel upstairs,” I said. I had only my own towels, which I washed in the machines in the basement, but Martha, like most students, got the laundry service. Every Tuesday morning before chapel, you left your used towels, along with your other dirty laundry, in a yellow drawstring bag with your last name printed on it, on the steps of your dorm. When you got out of chapel, there was a new bag waiting with fresh towels and last week’s clothes, now clean. This magical transformation occurred for the fee of three thousand dollars a year. When my father had seen the price in one of the many mailings Ault had sent me the summer before I enrolled, he said that for half that much per student, using only a washboard and a bar of soap, he’d abandon my mother and brothers and move to Massachusetts with me to do the laundry of every kid at Ault.

  I turned off the soup on the stove and hurried upstairs. From our room, I took a towel still in its plastic casing (Martha wouldn’t mind my borrowing, and she didn’t go through all her towels in a week anyway), and I pulled the scissors from my desk drawer and my brush from the top of my dresser. Also, while I was up there, I put on a bra. I considered changing my shirt, but I thought Tullis might notice and think I was trying to impress him; he might think I was dumb enough to imagine all it would take was a different outfit. Heading back to the common room, I took the stairs two at a time.

  “Why don’t you sit here?” I pulled one of the wooden kitchenette c
hairs in front of the TV so he could watch a show while I cut. He sat down, and, from behind, I set the towel over his shoulders, walked around so we were facing each other, and pulled two corners until they overlapped with no space between the towel and his neck. “Take your ponytail out,” I said, and he did. I scrutinized him. Our faces were perhaps two feet apart, mine a little higher than his, and normally it made me squirm to be this close to a boy‑I imagined that my pores appeared enormous, my skin blotchy‑but this situation wasn’t about me; standing before Tullis, I felt dispassionate, practically professional. “Do you want to keep the same shape but you want it to be shorter, or do you want it to be more of a typical guy’s haircut where it’s close to your head all the way around?”

  “What would you do?”

  “I don’t think you want it super‑short.” Because, I thought but did not say, I wouldn’t know how to do that. “But it can be kind of shaped to your head.” I walked around behind him again and began to brush his hair. It was pale brown with lighter streaks, not as soft as a girl’s but still nice. I reached my arm over his right shoulder and tapped my fingertips just under his chin. “Keep your head straight.” Immediately, he lifted his head and pulled back his shoulders. I held the scissors up and snipped a lock of hair. There was a certain physical pleasure in the act, hair against metal, the sound and feel of the slice. I realized that I didn’t know what to do with what I’d cut. “Hold on a sec,” I said, and I took some newspapers out of the trash can and spread them by the chair. I let the lock drop soundlessly and reached for another.

  “You don’t think my hair needs to be wet, do you?” he said.

  This hadn’t occurred to me‑why hadn’t it occurred to me? But it seemed that if I told him to wet his hair at this point, I’d undermine my credibility. “No, you’re fine,” I said. “I can do it this way.”