Prep

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  “I’m asking because‑oh, I don’t know.”

  “Say it,” I said. “Whatever you were going to say, just say it.”

  She paused. “I think you cut people’s hair, especially boys, as this way of having contact with them without having to really get close.”

  “You mean physical contact or just social contact?”

  “Well.” She considered the question. “I guess both.”

  “So I’m a pervert?”

  “No! Oh, no, Lee, that’s not what I meant at all. It’s totally normal to want to be close to people.” Martha’s goal was to be a classics professor, but there were times when I could more easily picture her as a therapist, or possibly an elementary school principal. “But it’s like you’re doing people a favor, and what do you get from it? No one ever helps you clean up. It’s not an equal trade. And I just think you deserve better.”

  I looked down at my thighs against the mattress.

  “You can be friends with, like, Nick Chafee,” Martha said. “If you want to, that is. Personally, I don’t think Nick is any great shakes. But it’s not like the best you can do is to cut his hair.”

  I believed that Martha believed this. Whether Nick Chafee believed it was a different story.

  “Maybe I’m making too big a deal of this,” Martha said.

  “No, I appreciate you saying something.” I swallowed. “I do.”

  Martha stood again. “I just feel like it’s better for me to get a haircut in town. You don’t have to do anything for me.”

  “But I would be happy to cut your hair,” I said.

  “I know.” She was next to the door, gripping her bike key in one hand. “Thank you.”

  “Martha,” I said as she stepped into the hallway.

  She turned around.

  “Does everyone think that about me? That I cut hair so that‑” I wanted to say, so that I can talk to boys even though I’m a loser, but Martha hated it when I insulted myself.

  “Of course not.” She grinned. “People are too busy thinking about themselves.” (No one was ever better at reassuring me than Martha‑before tests, she reassured me that I could pass, and before formal dinner, she reassured me that my clothes looked okay, and before I went home for Christmas or the summer, she reassured me that my plane wouldn’t crash. She reassured me that no one had noticed when I’d tripped walking out of chapel, that I would be happy in college, that it didn’t matter if I’d spilled root beer on her futon cover, and that I didn’t have bad breath; if I doubted her, she would lean her face in and say, “Okay, breathe on me. Go ahead, I don’t care.” Sometimes still I think, What did I ever give back to you? ) “I’ll be gone a couple hours,” Martha said. “Don’t go to dinner without me, okay?”

  I nodded. “I would have been able to tell you’d gotten a haircut. Even if you’d snuck out, I’d know when you got back.”

  “Yeah, well.” She grinned. “Remind me never to go into espionage.”

  As I watched her leave, my mind shot ahead to a time in the future when we would not share a room, when our daily lives would not overlap. The idea made me feel as if I were being held underwater. Then I thought, You’re being ridiculous; you have almost three more years together, and I could breathe again. But I knew, I always knew‑and as unhappy as I often was, the knowledge never made me feel better; instead it seemed the worst part of all‑that our lives at Ault were only temporary.

  Ms. Moray was at the board, showing us how to divide a line in a poem into stressed and unstressed syllables, when I felt Dede nudge my thigh. I turned, but she was looking straight ahead.

  A few seconds later, I felt more of a pinch. I looked down and saw that she was trying to pass me a piece of paper. At the top, in handwriting I recognized as Aspeth’s, it said, RATE‑O‑RAMA for 11/8. Beneath this was a grid, with Dress, then Shoes, then Makeup along one side; along another, it said Aspeth, then Dede, then Lee.

  In the boxes adjacent to her name, Aspeth had written, for Dress, “3.4.” For Shoes, she had written, “6.0.” And for Makeup, she had written, “0.8,” and she had added, the words cramped into the box, “Can someone please tell this woman the heyday of aqua eyeliner is LONG past?!?” Dede, meanwhile, had given Dress a 2.8, Shoes a 6.2, and Makeup a 1. Under Aspeth’s comment, she’d written, “Agree!” which was the most apt and succinct summary of their relationship I could imagine.

  Ms. Moray returned to the table, and I let the piece of paper sit untouched on my lap, like a napkin. But the truth was, I felt cornered by it. Yes, there were things I didn’t like about Ms. Moray, but they had little to do with her clothes. And besides, didn’t Aspeth and Dede understand that written words trapped you? A piece of paper could slip from a notebook, flutter out a window, be lifted from the trash and uncrumpled, whereas an incriminating remark made in conversation was weightless and invisible, deniable in a later moment.

  Yet how could I not participate? They had extended an invitation, and if I refused, surely another one would never be offered. At the same time that Jeff Oltiss began reading aloud the Emily Dickinson poem that started “The most triumphant Bird I ever knew or met/ Embarked upon a twig today,” I set my pen against the piece of paper and, over the three empty boxes that awaited my ratings, wrote, “All overshadowed by the pin‑a real dazzler!” Before I could think more about it, I passed the paper back to Dede.

  After class, I dawdled as I always did. In the stairwell, Aspeth glanced back‑she and Dede were about twelve feet ahead of me‑and our eyes met. “Such a good call on the pin, Lee,” she said. She’d stopped walking, so Dede had stopped, too, and I caught up to them. “It’s like, whose grandma did she steal that from?” Aspeth continued. “From now on, accessories get a category, too.”

  “Definitely,” Dede said.

  “So, Lee,” Aspeth said, “I have something to ask you.”

  Dread reared up in me. Maybe she’d say, Have you ever kissed a boy? Or: What kind of cars do your parents drive?

  “Can you cut my hair?” she asked.

  “Oh,” I said. “Sure.” So great was my relief at the mildness of the question that it was only after I’d agreed to it that I remembered my conversation with Martha. Not that it had been conclusive, but it had given me pause.

  “Since there’s no formal dinner tonight, let’s do it at six,” Aspeth said. “Then there’ll still be time to get to dinner before it closes.”

  On nights when there wasn’t formal dinner, Martha and I went to the dining hall at six, the minute the doors opened, and usually I’d been ravenous since quarter after five. There was a group of people we sat with, the other sophomores who showed up early. They were mostly kind of dorky guys, and I was beginning to sometimes actively participate in the conversation instead of simply waiting until someone said something that required a response. But still‑this was Aspeth.

  “Six is fine,” I said.

  I knocked on her door three minutes after six, having arrived at five of, waited until six exactly, decided six exactly was probably worse than being a little early, and waited a few more minutes. From outside the door, I could hear pounding music, and I had to knock repeatedly before Aspeth answered. She was wearing a T‑shirt, a red cardigan sweater with tiny, pearly star‑shaped buttons, underwear, and no pants. Her long blond hair was wet, with grooves running along her scalp where she’d combed it back. She made a face at me, a kind of joking‑apologetic face, then darted to the corner to turn down the stereo, leaving me an unobstructed view of her golden haunches: thin, smooth thighs, and the twin scoops of her ass encased in‑fleetingly, this surprised me, and then it made complete sense, how the choice was both classic and sexy‑white cotton underpants. The music on the stereo was the Rolling Stones, and it occurred to me that Aspeth was the kind of girl about whom rock songs were written. How could Dede bear to be around her? Even though it was just the two of us, I felt like her chaperone.

  When she’d adjusted the stereo, Aspeth said, “Give me two secs. I was hoping my je
ans would be dry, but I don’t think they are”‑here, she gripped in several places a pair of jeans hanging over a desk chair‑“so I have to wear my other ones.” She lifted a second pair of jeans from the top of a laundry basket, stepped into them, and pulled them up, buttoning them over her flat stomach. As she did, I felt my own insignificance‑how I was someone in front of whom she could prance around in her underwear and yank on conspicuously dirty clothes, and how it wasn’t because we were close, it was because she didn’t care what I thought. Whereas I kept trying out in my mind things to say‑Can you believe how cold it’s gotten? –before rejecting them as stilted or boring or the kind of thing a boy who had a crush on her would say while trying to make conversation.

  I looked around. Though Aspeth and I had been in the same dorm the year before, I’d never entered her room. Aspeth’s roommate this year was a girl from Biloxi named Horton Kinnelly‑Dede had longed to become Aspeth’s roommate for sophomore year and had even believed she would, but I don’t think anyone else had shared this belief‑and on the two unmade beds were duvets with floral covers. (As always, the floral duvets made me think of Little Washington.) White Christmas lights, currently turned on, were taped high up along all the walls, and on the north wall they’d hung an enormous orange and green tapestry. Above one desk were lots of postcards and a map of Tibet, and above the other was a blue felt banner that said Ole Miss in white letters. On the third and fourth walls were several huge black‑and‑white posters‑one of John Coltrane, another of a thin, shirtless, staring Jim Morrison (most girls had posters of still lifes from the MFA in Boston)‑as well as the photo collages that were a staple of all Ault girls’ rooms: pictures of you and your friends in fleece hats, skiing, or in bathing suits, at the beach; of you and your friends in formal dresses, before a dance; of you and your friends in Ault sports uniforms, your arms slung around one another’s necks after a winning game. There were computers on both desks, and two stereos, and on all the surfaces there were notebooks and textbooks and catalogs and a combination of cheap and expensive toiletries: a tall white plastic container of hand lotion, some talcum powder, several gold tubes of lipstick, mouthwash, a bottle of Chanel (I had never seen Chanel in real life), a carton of generic band‑aids, and on the floor in front of the door there was a gray peacoat with satin lining, which Aspeth stepped on‑stepped on, with her shoe‑as we exited the room. Also, she left on the lights, Christmas and otherwise, as well as the music. Following her down the hall‑before the haircut, we were picking up someone else, but either I hadn’t caught who it was or she hadn’t said‑I felt overstimulated and vaguely irritated. The room I shared with Martha seemed so quiet and plain, our lives seemed so quiet and plain. Had Aspeth been born cool, I wondered, or had someone taught her, like an older sister or a cousin?

  “So who are we meeting?” I asked. Aspeth was walking quickly, and I was a couple steps behind her.

  She spoke, but I thought I must have heard her wrong, so I said, “Who?”

  She turned. “What? You don’t like him or something?”

  “No,” I said. “I just didn’t‑did you say Cross? Like, Cross Sugarman?”

  She smirked. “Like, the Cross Sugarman? The famous Cross Sugarman? Why, do you have a crush on him?”

  “No,” I said, but I remembered that the more vehement I was, the more obvious it would be that I was lying. “I hardly know him,” I added.

  “I told him I was getting my hair cut and he was like, ‘I’ve gotta see this.’ So I said we’d swing by his dorm and get him.”

  In the last couple months, I had been in the common rooms of nearly all the boys’ dorms. Most of them smelled weird and were littered with pizza boxes, and the more guys present, the more unwelcoming they were, slouching with their hands in their pants, talking and laughing about a topic that was probably but not definitely sex, glancing at me in the hopes that I either had or hadn’t understood their coded remarks and had or hadn’t been offended. Or else they’d be playing some game, throwing around a basketball so that it flew toward my head and I had to stumble away, mid‑clip, from the person whose hair I was cutting, or maybe the game was even more made‑up, maybe they were kicking a pizza box and trying not to let it touch the ground as it became increasingly punctured. The TV was always turned on and set to something jarringly loud or really boring or, as in the case of the Sunday when I’d cut Martin Weiher’s hair while he watched a monster truck show, both. Always before showing up at a boys’ dorm, I’d have made sure I looked nice, maybe borrowed Martha’s perfume, but once there, I’d feel utterly irrelevant, or even worse, like an intruder. Girls always liked when boys were around, but it often seemed to me that boys preferred to be by themselves, talking about girls in the hungry way that, I suspected, they found more gratifying than the presence of an actual girl. Yet strangely, in the loud sour inhospitable lairs of my male classmates, as out of place as I felt, I never really wanted to leave; sometimes I’d prolong a haircut by cutting individual strands, pretending to even things up. (Once I finished a haircut, it was unthinkable that I’d stay, that I’d just hang out. This might have been fine for other girls, but I needed a reason.) I wanted to stay, I think, because the way these boys were, their bluntness, their pleasure in physical acts like wrestling and burping, the way everything was too noisy and disorderly to ever feel awkward‑this all seemed perhaps preferable to, truer and more lively than, the way that girls were. At least it seemed preferable to the way I was, trying to look pretty, trying to seem smart, when wasn’t I just as full of disgusting urges as any boy?

  Inside the common room of Cross’s dorm, a bunch of guys were sitting on the couches, eating hamburgers and french fries and drinking out of huge wax cups‑someone must have persuaded a teacher to drive him to McDonald’s and put in an order for the whole dorm. Usually when I entered a boys’ common room, I stood in the doorway, waiting for someone to notice me and offer assistance. When I entered with Aspeth, Mike Duane, a senior and a big football player, immediately stood and walked toward us. “What’s the word?” he asked and pulled Aspeth toward him in a bear hug. I had never, literally never, been hugged by an Ault boy.

  “Tell Sug to get his ass out here,” Aspeth said.

  “I’ll find him,” said another guy and scrambled off down the hall.

  “Man, Aspeth, why’re you always coming around looking for Sug?” Mike said. “Why don’t you look for me?”

  Aspeth laughed. “Are you lonely?”

  “I’m lonely for a hot girl is what I’m lonely for.” He still had his arm around Aspeth’s shoulder, and he began to rub her back. I would not have wanted Mike Duane to touch me like that. In his hulking strength and his red skin and heavy stubble, there was something potentially scary. “You should have been here‑” Mike began, and then I heard Cross say, “Hey, Aspeth.” He nodded once at me. “Lee.” My heart was beating furiously.

  “Let’s get this over with,” Aspeth said. “I’m starving.” So, in fact, was I‑the smell of food filled the common room, and what I’d much rather have done than cut Aspeth’s hair was grab a pack of french fries, sprint away, and eat them somewhere by myself. Except that Cross had just appeared, and I’d rather have been in Cross’s presence than anything. “Lee, where should we go?” Aspeth asked.

  “I guess wherever.” This was not the haircutting me but the normal‑the shaky and uncertain‑me. “We could just stay here.”

  “It reeks here,” Cross said. “Let’s go to the basement.”

  Mike Duane extracted another hug from Aspeth and then we both followed Cross out of the common room. In the basement, we entered a large room with a concrete floor, fluorescent lights, and narrow horizontal windows close to the ceiling; the room was empty except for a humming soda machine, two laundry machines, and two dryers.

  “I just realized,” Cross said. “You probably need a chair, don’t you?” He turned and disappeared back up the stairs.

  We also needed a towel to put around Aspeth’s shoul
ders, and newspaper to spread on the floor, but he was gone.

  Aspeth yawned. “I’m so fucking tired. I was up until like three in the morning last night.”

  “Wow,” I said. But Cross was requiring so much of my attention and anxiety that I no longer had any left for Aspeth. This piece of time was about his absence, before he returned with the chair.

  “And the night before that I was up until two.”

  I was wondering how far back we’d go in her sleep schedule when Cross reappeared. He was carrying a wooden desk chair with metal legs, holding it by the back so the legs stuck into the air and the seat rested on his shoulder. It seemed an especially boyish, cute way to carry a chair. He set it in front of the soda machine, and Aspeth sat down.

  “You’ll get hair on you,” I said. “You might want to take off your sweater.”

  She did as I said‑so even with Aspeth, I had that peculiar authority‑and passed it to Cross. “How pretty,” he said in a high, feminine voice, and he tied the arms of the sweater over his shoulders. The gesture horrified me.

  “Red’s definitely your color,” Aspeth said.

  “Thanks, doll,” he said in the same voice as before.

  I felt an urgent wish for him to take off the sweater, and to stop talking that way. His behavior wasn’t funny, and the kind of funny it was trying to be was so ordinary, so lame even. Plus, I knew Cross wouldn’t act this way in front of only me, that his performance was for Aspeth’s benefit. Previously, I’d felt a secret hope that he was observing the haircut not because of her but because of me. It was less difficult than it probably should have been to believe that Cross felt exactly the way about me that I felt about him. I didn’t always believe this, but there were times‑between classes, say, when we almost collided in the stairwell, and then we just stood there for a few seconds on the landing, face‑to‑face, not moving, before we continued in opposite directions. If things were normal, wouldn’t he have said something, like hi, and couldn’t it perhaps be a promising sign that instead he’d said nothing?