Prep

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  Over the considerable noise, Mrs. Morino yelled, “Look who I brought!” She set an arm around my shoulders and smiled widely.

  “Hi!” I shouted.

  Sin‑Jun did not look at either of us.

  It seemed like maybe I ought to hug her, or maybe not. I stepped forward and set my hand against the mattress by her feet, and at last she looked up. “Hi, Lee.” She sounded tired but not at all emotional‑not embarrassed or regretful or apologetic.

  “I’m glad to see you,” I called. Sin‑Jun hadn’t raised her voice, and I’d been able to hear her fine, but I could not check my own impulse to yell.

  Apparently, Mrs. Morino felt the same way. “I’m running back to campus,” she hollered. She was now rubbing Clara’s back. “I need to put the kids to bed. But, Lee and Clara, when Mr. Morino brings me here to stay overnight with Sin‑Jun, he’ll take you two home. Okay? Does that sound good?”

  No one said anything.

  “We’ll get you back to the dorm in time for curfew,” Mrs. Morino said. “And, Sin‑Jun, we want you to feel much better. Can you do that for us?”

  After Mrs. Morino had left, Clara actually stopped crying and heaved a little, as if catching her breath. I felt the same relief I felt around a shrieking baby who quieted, and also the same unpleasant hunch that this was not the conclusion of the outburst but only a hiatus from it.

  “How long have you guys been in this room?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Clara said, and each word was shaky and elongated.

  I wanted to ask, How long have you been crying? To be this dramatically upset seemed physically draining, and Clara was a heavy girl‑surely she could not sustain such exertion indefinitely.

  I glanced back at Sin‑Jun. When our eyes met, I almost started. The way she looked at me was so hopeless, so exhausted, that it seemed scornful. I had an inkling then that perhaps I’d underestimated her. Perhaps in the past I hadn’t given her credit for having opinions or experiencing discontent‑for being like me. Of course there was nothing I could do for her. I still did not believe she had meant to die, but, yes, she had taken the pills on purpose; she did, after all, possess the requisite will.

  “I’m spending the night,” Clara announced. “You can’t stop me.”

  Sin‑Jun turned her head and addressed Clara for the first time since I’d arrived. “You are not staying in hospital.”

  “You have to let me. I’m not leaving.”

  “Mr. Morino is coming to get us for curfew,” I said.

  “For curfew ?” Clara glared at me. “Sin‑Jun almost died tonight and all you care about is curfew?”

  Even the explicit reference to death‑astonishingly inappropriate, in my opinion‑elicited no reaction from Sin‑Jun.

  “Sin‑Jun, do you want us to stay?” I asked.

  “I want to sleep,” Sin‑Jun said. She glanced toward Clara. “Go back to school.”

  “No! No. I’m not going. I’m calling the Morinos right now and telling them I’m staying. I’ll get a cot, just like Mrs. Morino. I’m staying. Do you hear me?” She’d stood and was edging toward the door but doing so tentatively, as if Sin‑Jun might spring from the bed and tackle her. I was at the foot of the bed, still barely inside the room, and when Clara got close to me, I stepped back. I did not, as she lurched and burbled, want to make physical contact with her.

  When she was gone, the room seemed peaceful. I was both relieved and afraid to be alone with Sin‑Jun. I took Clara’s seat‑I’d get up when she came back‑and Sin‑Jun and I didn’t talk. Finally, I said, “Sin‑Jun, do you wish you didn’t go to Ault?”

  She shrugged.

  “You don’t have to, right? If you told your parents you don’t want to be here, they wouldn’t make you stay.”

  “I not need to tell parents anything. Mrs. Morino is already call them, and my father, he comes tomorrow.”

  Though I hadn’t thought about it before, it made sense that there would be parental intervention. In fact, it surprised me a little that Mrs. Morino had left us alone, without adults, even this briefly. How were we supposed to know how to act by ourselves?

  “Clara is really upset, huh?” I said, then quickly added, “We all really care about you, Sin‑Jun.” It sounded, I thought, like I was reading aloud from a get‑well card. But I saw that tears were welling in Sin‑Jun’s eyes. She blinked and they slid over her eyelids.

  “Yikes,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  She shook her head.

  “Sin‑Jun?”

  She opened her mouth but did not immediately speak, and I felt, simultaneously, the impulse to coax the words from her and the impulse to suppress them. I always thought I wanted to know a secret, or I wanted an event to unfold‑I wanted my life to start‑but in those rare moments when it seemed like something might actually change, panic shot through me.

  “You don’t have to say anything,” I said. “But let me‑at least let me get you some water.”

  She wiped her eyes with the heels of her hands.

  “You’re probably thirsty,” I said and bolted from the room. By the time I found a plastic cup‑someone down at the nurses’ station gave it to me‑then filled it at a drinking fountain, Clara had returned to the room. I set the cup on the table next to Sin‑Jun’s bed and saw that a cup of water already rested there, half‑full, with a straw sticking out.

  “Did Mr. Morino say it’s okay if you stay?” I asked Clara.

  “Why wouldn’t it be?” Clara seemed slightly more composed than she had before. At least her face was no longer actively leaking fluid, and Sin‑Jun also was not crying.

  I looked at my watch. It was eight‑thirty, and curfew was at ten; the Morinos probably weren’t coming for at least an hour. “I should go downstairs,” I said. “I don’t want to keep them waiting.”

  Neither Clara nor Sin‑Jun appeared to be paying attention. “I’m not leaving you alone,” Clara was saying, and I could see that it was only a matter of time before the floodgates reopened.

  “Sin‑Jun, I hope you feel better,” I said. “Okay? Here, I’ll‑” I stepped forward and leaned in to hug her. She did not reciprocate the hug at all, and in my arms she felt brittle and weightless. “Bye,” I said. “Okay? Bye.”

  “Bye, Lee,” she finally said.

  I had not told Clara good‑bye, and as I left, Clara did not say good‑bye to me.

  I was so desperate to be gone from the hospital that back on the first floor, despite the wait in front of me, I walked outside and stood beneath the porte cochere with my arms folded, peering across the parking lot. Campus was about five miles away, but if it hadn’t been dark out, I’d have started off on foot.

  It was dark, though, and it was cold, too. I lasted roughly a minute before I went back inside and sat by a soda machine in the waiting area. I wanted very badly to be in the dorm, wearing my nightgown, beneath my own clean sheet and blankets.

  I had no wallet with me, no money at all. If I did have money, I’d get a root beer, I thought, and then I thought, but if Sin‑Jun hadn’t wanted to die, was it plausible to believe she’d wanted to end up here? The pills had to have been an impulsive decision, a matter of not this; anything except this moment.

  So Sin‑Jun, too‑I had never suspected. Not, probably, that it would have changed the outcome of events if I had. After all, these were not topics you could discuss with someone else; what was there to say to another person about how it felt? You could concoct things you wanted but in certain moments the light shifted or time slowed‑on Sundays in particular, time slowed, and occasionally on Saturday afternoons, if you didn’t have a game‑and you saw that it was all really nothing. It was just endlessness and what you got or didn’t get would hardly make a difference, and then what was there? The loathsomely familiar room where you lived, your horrible face and body, and the rebuke of other people, how they were unbothered, how you would seem, if you tried to explain, kind of weird and kind of boring and not even original. Why did their liv
es proceed so easily? Why was it that you needed to convince them and they needed to be convinced and not the other way around? Not, of course, that you would actually succeed if you tried.

  And then at dinner, we talked about what? Teachers or movies or spring vacation. It was just what you did; you socialized, you interacted. And the things you said, the walk from chapel to the schoolhouse, your backpack, tests, these were a bridge running above the rushing water of what you actually felt. The goal was: learn to ignore what’s down below. Fine if you met someone else who was the same as you, but you had to realize that nothing another person could do would make you feel better about any of it. In an odd way, suicide attempts seemed to me‑I wouldn’t have thought this as a freshman, but I thought it now, two years later‑naÏve. They didn’t achieve anything, the drama they set in motion couldn’t possibly be sustained. In the end, there was always your regular life, and no one could deal with it but you.

  Someone approached the soda machine, and immediately I was waiting for him to leave. When he turned around, he said, “Hey there,” and I nodded without smiling.

  “You okay?” he said. He was a young man, and he was carrying a little girl.

  “I’m fine.”

  “It looked like maybe something was upsetting you.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I don’t mean to invade,” the man said quickly. Then he said, “You don’t recognize me, do you? Sorry, I should have‑here you go.” He was wearing a long‑sleeved flannel button‑down over a white V‑neck T‑shirt, and from between the two shirts he extracted a lanyard on which hung a plastic badge. With the lanyard still around his neck, he held the badge out to me; in his other arm, he held both the little girl, who was observing us impassively, and his unopened can of Pepsi.

  The man was six or seven feet away, and I had to stand and lean in to read the badge. Briefly, I considered not standing, but I stood anyway, more out of curiosity than politeness, and then I was glad I had. Ault School, the badge said across the top. The Ault crest was superimposed over the whole badge, and in one corner was a head shot of the guy in which he was grinning and sticking out his chin, as if he’d been joking with the photographer; below the photo, it said, David Bardo, Food Services.

  “Sorry,” I said. “You look familiar, but I just didn’t‑” I trailed off.

  “Kitchen staff.”

  “That’s right, of course.” And he actually did look familiar, in that vague way of someone you’ve never noticed before. I wondered just how cold I had been acting, and I was mortified. Because yes, I was someone who would be rude to a stranger, especially a male stranger who approached me in a public place; but I would never be rude to a member of the Ault staff. People unfamiliar with boarding schools probably imagined the opposite, that the students were haughty toward the janitors or the secretaries, but this was not the case at all‑twice in the last five years, the senior class had dedicated the yearbook to Will Koomber, who was head of the grounds crew and had a kind of cult following. Will was a black man in his sixties, originally from Alabama, and rumored to be stoned most of the time, which contributed to his popularity. Guys particularly liked him‑you’d see them outside during the day, standing just beyond the mulch while Will squatted and shoveled, and you’d hear them say things like “How’s your old lady, Will?” or, “You always gotta watch those Feds, huh?” The truth was that overhearing these exchanges made me nervous‑the pleasantries seemed so precarious, it seemed so easy for a student to say something offensive and for Will to either react or not be able to react‑but I also believed that Will and the Ault boys genuinely liked one another. I was the one overthinking the relationship, not them. Whenever I myself passed Will, especially if I was alone, he’d deliver some brief bit of third‑person narration‑“She’s in an awful big hurry,” or, “That’s a nice skirt she’s wearing today”‑and I would duck my head and smile, wanting to express my gratitude to him for talking to me, too, and not just to the athletic guys and the pretty girls.

  But the kitchen staff was a little different. Most students didn’t seem to know them, or at any rate, I didn’t. Whenever I was in the dining hall, I was consumed by thoughts of what food to select, of where to sit, and I didn’t pay attention to much beyond my own circumstances. As I stood in front of David Bardo trying to remember the other people who worked in the kitchen, I could come up mostly with rough demographic categories: the women in their twenties, the women in their fifties (in my mind, all the women in both groups had blue eyes and fair hair that they wore in nets or white caps, and all of them were overweight, with pale, chubby forearms). In a humid room adjacent to the kitchen, teenage boys did the dishwashing after dinner. They were often blasting heavy metal, and whenever I set my dirty dishes in the carousel at the front of the room, it surprised me that they were allowed to play that music, and at that volume. Most of these boys were skinny and had bad skin and crew cuts, and one was very fat, the skin on the tops of his cheeks pushing up to give him squinty eyes. The head chef‑you knew because he wore one of those tall pouffy hats‑looked to be in his forties, with a blond beard; sometimes he stood at the end of the cafeteria line, just past the steaming entrées behind the glass barrier, and made remarks whose content seemed like the hints of a helpful waiter at a nice restaurant but whose tone was always tinged with hostility: “You really should try the sole tonight,” or, “If you don’t take any eggplant timbale, you’re seriously missing out.” (Of course no one wanted sole or eggplant timbale‑we wanted hot dogs and grilled cheese.)

  And then, apparently, there was David Bardo. He was probably in his twenties, and he wasn’t tall‑he might have been five nine‑but he was big, barrel‑chested, and broad‑shouldered. He had dark cropped hair and a ruddy face with dark stubble. He looked like someone who might play ice hockey outside, on a frozen pond, or who would own a truck and know how to fix it if it broke down.

  “Yeah, I recognized you right away,” he was saying. “I was like, I know her, she goes to the school. You’re, what, a sophomore?”

  “A junior.”

  “Okay, ’cause you’ve definitely been there the whole time I have, and I started in January of last year. Where’re you from?”

  “Indiana.”

  “That’s pretty far. But some of the kids are from California, right?”

  “I guess so.”

  “I wouldn’t mind checking out California. I’ve got a buddy living out in Santa Cruz now says he’s never coming back. You ever been there?”

  “No.” For some reason, I wished that I had, I wished I could fulfill what I imagined this guy’s idea of an Ault student to be: for one thing, well traveled.

  “I’m thinking of heading out this summer, maybe July or August. Take a road trip, spend a few weeks there.”

  Though I had nothing in particular to say to this, I tried to seem pleasantly interested.

  “You ever driven cross‑country?”

  I shook my head.

  “I do,” the little girl said suddenly, and David Bardo and I both laughed. The girl appeared to be about two, with fuzzy blond hair and heart‑shaped earrings. “Do you like road trips?” I asked her. “Are you going to California with your dad?”

  “No, no,” David Bardo said. “Kaley’s not my daughter. You’re not my daughter, are you, Kaley girl?” He was looking down at her, rubbing her cheek with his thumb, and then he turned back to me. “She’s my niece. Her mom’s having some asthma problems.”

  A strange expression must have crossed my face.

  “No, she’s fine,” he said. “They just gave her a breathing treatment and now she’s resting. Right, Kaley? Mom’s resting? This happens two, three times a year.”

  But it had not been the news about the asthma I’d reacted to; it had been the news that the girl was not his child, the sudden suspicion that this guy was closer to my age than I’d originally thought. I wondered if I’d seemed like I’d been flirting with him, and an agitated feeling came over me; t
he conversation needed to end.

  “Why are you at the hospital tonight?” he said. “If I can ask.”

  I thought of Sin‑Jun, two floors above us, propped against the mattress in her blue gown.

  “You don’t have to say if you don’t want to,” he added.

  “I came here to see a friend who’s sick.”

  “That’s tough.” David Bardo smiled with his lips closed, a sad smile, and the corners of his eyes crinkled. “Hospitals suck, don’t they? Hey, you need a ride back to school or anything?”

  “The Morinos are‑some teachers are coming to get me. But thanks.” I peered out the window‑I could see little beyond the brightly lit entrance‑and as I did, I could feel that David Bardo was watching me. I looked back at him, and for several seconds, neither of us spoke. Then, maybe only to end the silence, I said, “I should, um‑” I gestured toward where I’d been sitting‑an empty chair surrounded by other empty chairs‑as if something there demanded my attention.

  “Sure,” he said. “Well, real nice to meet you. Except we didn’t officially meet, did we? I’m Dave.” He extended his hand.

  By ten‑twenty‑that is, twenty minutes after curfew‑the Morinos still hadn’t shown up. I went to find a pay phone but remembered, when I was standing in front of it, that I had no money. And I had no calling card, either‑when I called home from the dorm, I either called collect or jammed in quarters while we spoke‑and I certainly wasn’t going back upstairs to try to borrow change from Clara or Sin‑Jun. I approached the sign‑in desk and when I asked if I could use the phone, a woman with a frosted‑blond French braid said the pay phone was down the hall.

  “I know,” I said. “But I don’t have any money. And I promise I won’t take long.”