Prep

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  “Hey,” Nick said. “My brother just sent me this Pink Floyd CD. You guys want to go to the activities center and listen?”

  “Maybe,” Maria said.

  “What about you?” Nick looked at Rufina, and I wondered for the first time if he was interested in her. Surely he didn’t want to be her boyfriend‑Ault guys almost never went out with minority girls, and if they did, it was some geeky guy and some Asian or Indian girl, never a black or Latina girl from a city and definitely never with one of the bank boys. But maybe Nick thought Rufina was pretty, maybe that explained his presence here. Because it was, in fact, kind of odd that Nick Chafee was hanging out with a group of girls like us. Even if his own parents weren’t visiting, it seemed he ought to be at the Red Barn Inn with the parents of a friend.

  “You want to, chica ?” Maria said, and she poked Rufina’s upper arm.

  “Ouch,” Rufina said. Maria poked Rufina again, and Rufina said, “Quit it or I’m reporting you for roommate abuse.” Then she laughed loudly, with her mouth open. The intensity of the laugh so exceeded the exchange that had prompted it that I realized that Rufina must be happy. I had never thought of her as happy before, and I wasn’t sure when it had happened, whether her mood was temporary or permanent. I wondered, did she like Ault? Her complaints aside, did she feel as if the school belonged to her? I had a sudden memory from our freshman year of sitting next to her on a bus returning from an away game. It was early November, a bleak day of gray skies, and because the score had been close‑from the second half on, Ault had been losing by only one goal‑the coach had kept us both on the bench for the whole game. At first we had talked a little, and cheered for our teammates, and sometimes stood and walked around or stretched, to stay limber in case we got subbed, but it was so cold that after a while we simply sat there‑Maria had been on the bench, too, and a couple other girls‑and huddled together wordlessly. When the game ended, I didn’t care that we’d lost. Back on the bus, still in my uniform, I took a seat next to Rufina, and my body seemed to thaw and expand. Riding down the highway, the trees on either side brown and bare, the grass dead, the sky nearly white, I was able to submit to the moment, this interval of time. Back on campus, I’d have to navigate the chaos of the locker room (because I hadn’t played in the game, it would seem unnecessary to shower, but I wouldn’t want to be observed not showering) and then the separate chaos of dinner, and then there would be the empty time to fill in the dorm before bed. That wouldn’t be a lull when I could space out because I was where I was supposed to be, because something, if only our return to campus, was being achieved and all I had to do was wait; in my room, I was responsible for myself, the choices were mine. I leaned my head against the back of the seat and listened to the sounds of the bus, the intermittent crackle of the driver’s CB, the voices of the few girls not either sleeping or reading, the shadow of music that was someone else’s Walkman playing an unrecognizable song. The bus seemed the best place for me to be in this moment‑not a great place, I wasn’t enjoying myself, but I’d have had a hard time naming anywhere better. And then beside me, I felt a shaking, and when I turned, I saw that Rufina was crying very quietly. She was looking out the window, and I could see only part of the left side of her face, which was flushed and streaked with makeup; back then, when she’d first arrived at Ault, Rufina had worn a lot of makeup, even during games‑mascara, and black or purple eyeliner. Her right fist was clenched and held in front of her mouth, and she was heaving slightly. How long had she been crying? And was I supposed to say something or pretend I didn’t notice?

  I craned my neck in the other direction, peering up and down the aisle. No one else had any idea. I heard Rufina sniffle, and before I had made a conscious decision to do so, I’d set my fingertips on her forearm. “Do you want me to get Ms. Barrett?”

  She shook her head.

  “Do you want a tissue?” It was a napkin, actually, which I pulled from the backpack at my feet; I’d used it while eating a turkey sandwich on the ride to the game, and it was spotted by some mashed crumbs and a splotch of mustard.

  She removed her fist from in front of her mouth, swallowed, turned to me, and extended her hand, palm up. When our eyes met, her expression was so plaintive that I wished the napkin were clean. She bent her head, blew her nose, then looked out the window again. We were passing a cluster of evergreens, shadowy in the approaching dusk, when she said, “I just want to know if it’ll always be like this.”

  This was not what I’d expected. First, I had not expected that her voice would be as controlled as it was, and I also had expected her to be more specific about what was bothering her: I miss my boyfriend (I’d heard that Rufina went out with someone from back home in San Diego, an older guy who was in the Army) or I can’t believe Ms. Barrett didn’t let us play. What could I say to what she’d said? Either I had no idea what she was talking about or else I understood exactly, and given these two options, I wanted the latter to be true, but if I asked another question, then it wouldn’t be; if I made her explain even a little, it would mean I didn’t understand at all.

  I took a breath. “No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

  I waited to see if either of us would say anything else. She was still looking out the window, and I looked, too, and saw that it had started to snow.

  And now two years had passed, Rufina wore hardly any makeup, she wore her hair not slicked back in a long ponytail as she once had but loose, she talked often and unself‑consciously, even in front of guys like Nick. I wondered if I also had changed since our freshman year. Certainly not as successfully‑I was less naÏve, a little less anxious, but I was fatter, too, I’d gained ten pounds in the last two years, and also my identity felt sealed. Early on, I had imagined I might seem strange and dreamy, as if I spent time alone by choice, but now I was just another ordinary‑looking girl who hung out most of the time with her roommate (similarly ordinary looking), who did not date boys, did not excel in either sports or academics, did not participate in forbidden activities like smoking or sneaking out of the dorm at night. Now I was average and Rufina was happy. And she was sexy, too‑either she had not always been this curvy and golden‑skinned or else I hadn’t noticed. I wondered if she felt like she was wasting her time at Ault, being trapped in Massachusetts during the years she was beautiful.

  “You should come listen,” Nick was saying to Rufina, and then he said to Sin‑Jun and me, “You guys should, too.”

  “You know we have nothing better to do,” Maria said to Rufina.

  “I got work,” Rufina said, which was truly remarkable‑that Nick seemed to be pursuing Rufina and that she was rebuffing him. Not that he was really pursuing her, I knew.

  “I do, too,” I said and stood. Nick was being surprisingly nice, but I couldn’t imagine he truly wanted me to come to the activities center. “Have fun,” I said in what I hoped was a warm way.

  Of course, now I wonder where I had gotten the idea that for you to participate in a gathering, the other people had to really, really want you to be there and that anything short of rabid enthusiasm on their part meant you’d be a nuisance. Where had I gotten the idea that being a nuisance was that big a deal? Sometimes now I think of all the opportunities I didn’t take‑to get a manicure in town, to watch television in another dorm, to go outside for a snowball fight‑and of how refusal became a habit for me, and then I felt it would be conspicuous if I ever did join in. Once when I was a sophomore, I was at a lunch table when Dede was organizing a group of people to go to a restaurant before the spring formal. She went around the table, pointing at each of us and counting, and when she got to me, she said, “Okay, not you because you never go to the dances.” And that was true, but I’d have gone to a restaurant, I’d have put on a dress and ridden the charter bus and sat with my classmates at a big round table in a big room with an oversized red cloth napkin on my lap, I’d have drunk Sprite through a straw, have eaten warm rolls and roast beef and dessert; all of that would have been
manageable. But in the moment of Dede bypassing me, how could I have explained this?

  And there was something else, another reason I didn’t want to go to the activities center with Nick. I believed then that if you had a good encounter with a person, it was best not to see them again for as long as possible lest you taint the previous interaction. Say it was Wednesday and there was an after‑dinner lecture and you and your roommate struck up some unexpectedly fun conversation with the boys sitting next to you. Say the lecture turned out to be boring and so throughout it you whispered and made faces at one another, and then it ended and you all left the schoolhouse. And then forty minutes later, you, alone now, without the buffer of a roommate, were by the card catalog in the library and passed one of these boys, also without his friend‑then what were you to do? To simply acknowledge each other by nodding would be, probably, unfriendly, it would be confirmation of the anomaly of your having shared something during the lecture, and already you’d be receding into your usual roles. But it would probably be worse to stop and talk. You’d be compelled to try prolonging the earlier jollity, yet now there would be no lecturer to make fun of, it would just be the two of you, overly smiley, both wanting to provide the quip on which the conversation could satisfactorily conclude. And then what if, in the stacks, you ran into each other again ? It would be awful!

  This anxiety meant that I spent a lot of time hiding, usually in my room, after any pleasant exchange with another person. And there were rules to the anxiety, practically mathematical in their consistency: The less well you knew the person, the greater the pressure the second time around to be special or charming, if that’s what you thought you’d been the first time; mostly it was about reinforcement. Also: The shorter the time that elapsed from your first encounter to your second, the greater the pressure; hence the lecture‑to‑library agony. And finally: The better the original interaction, the greater the pressure. Often, my anxiety would set in prior to the end of the interaction‑I’d just want it to be over while we all still liked each other, before things turned.

  As I left the table, Rufina called, “You have fun with your parents.”

  My parents‑I had forgotten about them. I walked toward the kitchen to put away my plate and silverware, and I felt a knotting in my stomach. Since they’d decided to come, I’d imagined their visit often, the things on campus I’d want to show them, but now that they were almost here, their impending presence seemed an interruption, an inconvenience even. Not that I didn’t enjoy spending time with my parents, but wasn’t I finally becoming comfortable at Ault, weren’t dinners like this evidence of my increasing sense that I belonged? I had entered the dining hall alone, and then, even though Nick had been there, I’d participated in the conversation, eaten spaghetti‑my entire first year at Ault, I hadn’t dared eat noodles in public‑and weren’t those signs of progress? It struck me suddenly that my parents might be bewildered by me, the Ault version of me for whom it was a daring act to eat spaghetti. In sixth grade, in South Bend, I’d won first place in a pie‑eating contest at my elementary school carnival. I’d scarfed down the pie using no hands, collected a gold plastic trophy shaped like a vase with handles, thrown up in a trash can, and proceeded directly to the U‑Turn, a ride on which my friend Kelli Robard and I sat in a caged compartment that spun and flipped. But I had changed since then. I was different. And no matter what my parents might think, this‑my Ault self‑was now my real self.

  Outside, it was dark and cool. The stars were bright white, and the almost‑full moon was gleaming. The next two days were supposed to be perfect late‑October weather, sunny but not hot, and all over campus, the leaves had turned gold and red. For the last two years, the weather had been similarly ideal for parents’ weekend, which was unsurprising; Ault often seemed to me like a person who always got what he wanted.

  And I didn’t resent this institutional good fortune‑on the contrary, I felt grateful to be a citizen of it. Though I personally did not always get what I wanted, I still was part of Ault’s universe of privilege; I spoke its language now, I knew its secret handshake. My sense of belonging had perhaps never been as acute as on this evening, and I don’t know if I recognized it then‑later, it was obvious‑but surely the timing was no coincidence. It was because my parents were coming and because I knew they would not belong. I think it often comes down to nothing but contrast‑the way that it’s only when you’re sick that you wonder why, during the months and months of being up and about, you never appreciated your health.

  First I was sitting outside the schoolhouse, on the limestone steps leading to the entrance on the building’s north side, because my parents would be driving in the gate fifty yards away. They’d said they would arrive around nine. At six that morning, while I’d still been in bed, the pay phone in the common room had rung and I’d bolted down the steps to answer it, knowing no one else’s parents would call so early. They were just past Pittsfield, New York, my mother said, my father was getting coffee, and they couldn’t wait to see me.

  I was wearing a tan cotton knee‑length pleated skirt, through which I could feel the coldness of the steps, and a navy wool sweater and bluchers with no tights, and I was reading my physics textbook, or at least holding it on my lap. Saturday classes had been canceled and virtually no one was up. It was a cool, sunny morning, and the mist was burning off the huge grass circle and, beyond the buildings, off the athletic fields. I thought of the things I could spend the day doing if my parents weren’t coming‑going running, or making a picnic. (Of course, these ideas were disingenuous. I didn’t much like running, and I’d never make a picnic‑what would I do, dash into town and buy a baguette?)

  I tried to think what my parents wanted from the weekend. I was planning to give them a tour of the campus, and I knew my mother would like to meet Martha. My father was trickier. It seemed so much easier to enter his world‑to hang out at his store, to help him rake the yard in the evening, to bring him a beer from the refrigerator while he watched the game (for years, my brother Joseph and I had fought over who got to open the bottle)‑than to expect him to enter mine. When I was at school, we weren’t in close contact by either phone or mail. He’d written me just once during my time at Ault, three times if you counted the Easter cards that they all signed, while my mother wrote me letters every two weeks or so. Her letters were both newsy and dull‑Ran into Mrs. Nielsen and Bree at the mall last weekend, they asked all about you. Bree said she has a teacher named Pertoski (sp?) for math and he’s real tough, I said I didn’t think you ever had him –and usually after finding an envelope from her in my mailbox, I did not open it immediately; sometimes I even unearthed one in my backpack that I’d been carrying around for three or four days. But when I did open them, I read every word and I kept them all; it seemed mean, it made me feel sad, to put a piece of paper with my mother’s handwriting on it in the trash.

  As for my own letters to my parents, and many of the comments I made over the phone‑they were lies. After all, Ault had been my idea. I’d filled out the applications on my mother’s old typewriter, and the only parts my parents had helped with were the financial aid forms. Then, when I not only got into several schools but got offered scholarships as well, the biggest scholarship from Ault, I had no choice but to go. Why would I have gone to the trouble of applying if I hadn’t wanted to go? But it was clear my parents always saw boarding school more as an “opportunity” than as a definitively good plan. And thus I could never express my unhappiness to them‑not early on, when it was most intense, or later, in its more watered‑down daily form. Even believing I liked Ault, my father would say from time to time, “Why don’t you come back home and go to Marvin Thompson?” Or, after I told him about the nickname, “Aren’t you sick of those Massholes yet?” And maybe I wasn’t that unhappy anyway, if I was so set on staying.

  At ten of nine, it occurred to me that my parents might miss this gate and go to the other one, and then they’d be wandering around campus looking for me.
In my head, they were like Hansel and Gretel heading into the forest, and it seemed necessary that I act as their guardian. I jogged down the steps and hurried around the driveway toward the other gate. This time, I stood just outside it, where surely I wouldn’t miss them. Unless, of course, they’d driven by already, gotten confused, and were at this very moment knocking on the door to a boys’ dorm.

  For several minutes, I leaned against a brick column with a concrete ball at the top. My mind had skittered off to something other than their arrival when I heard a honk. They were twenty feet away, ten feet, then right beside me in their‑our‑dusty Datsun. My mother rolled down the passenger’s‑side window, and from the driver’s side my father called, “Heigh‑ho, heigh‑ho,” and my mother smiled gigantically and stuck her head and arms out and I stepped forward and stooped, and as we embraced I felt a flicker of awkwardness, our faces crushed together, my cheek shoving her big plastic glasses, before I remembered that it was my family and all the usual rules of awkwardness did not apply. “Lee, you look wonderful,” my mother said, and my father grinned and said, “She doesn’t look that good to me,” and my mother said, “Oh, Terry.”

  A silver Saab pulled in behind my parents’ car and idled there, not honking. “You guys should move,” I said. “Here, let me get in.” I opened the back door, and when I climbed inside, it smelled like car trip, stuffy and sour. An empty Burger King bag rested on the seat, and several soda cans rolled on the floor. I could not suppress a comparison between this and the kind of food Martha’s parents brought on their drives down from Vermont: vegetable soup in thermoses and cracked wheat bread and cut‑up fruit that they ate with their real silverware from home. Stowed behind the back seat were my parents’ suitcases, two large, light blue, fake leather squares. When Joseph and I had been younger, we’d made nests out of these suitcases, I remembered suddenly, padding their interiors with blankets, then climbing in and pulling the flaps over us like roofs that we propped up with our heads. The memory filled me with an odd, preemptive exhaustion‑everything about my parents, even their luggage, reminded me of something, or made me feel a certain way.