Prep

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  She shook her head. “No outgoing calls.”

  The woman looked down to write something, and although I felt utterly uncertain what to do next, her lack of cooperation was oddly satisfying. When a situation swung out of my control, when I’d exhausted all the possibilities, I became blameless.

  I returned to the waiting area and had not yet reached the chairs when I saw David Bardo‑Dave‑and his niece and a woman I took to be his sister. The sister was thin, with long brown hair, and she was wearing jeans and a flannel shirt similar to Dave’s. It looked like the little girl had fallen asleep in Dave’s arms, her head hanging to one side.

  As we approached each other, Dave smiled. “Still here?”

  I nodded.

  He had stopped, and so had I, but his sister was still walking.

  “Everything okay?” he said.

  Really, what was I going to do‑spend the night at the hospital? I might be blameless, but that wouldn’t mitigate the misery of sleeping in the waiting area. “You know how you offered me a ride before?” I said. “Well, if it’s okay, I mean if it wouldn’t be too much trouble‑”

  He was watching me with a vaguely amused look, and I felt the same self‑consciousness I’d experienced during our first conversation, a combination of discomfort‑was he looking at something in particular, did I have some pen mark on my cheek or was someone standing behind me making faces?‑and also flattery. The sense of flattery came from the fact that he was paying attention to me; I could tell that I existed as a distinct person standing in front of him, not a generic girl.

  “If you need a lift, that’s no problem,” he said. “Hey, Lynn.”

  The sister turned; she’d been walking slowly, so she was only about ten feet past us.

  “Hold up,” he said. “We’ve got another passenger. This is Lee. Lee, this is my sister, Lynn.”

  “Hi.” I hesitated, unsure whether we would shake hands, and as I was hesitating, she turned again and continued walking.

  In the parking lot, Dave set the little girl in a car seat, and when he did, she awakened, whimpering even before she opened her eyes. “Hey there, Kaley,” Dave crooned. “It’s okay, Kaley girl. Everything’s fine.”

  Kaley’s lower lip had been quivering, but it stilled; she shut her eyes again, then brought her thumb to her mouth. Dave glanced over his shoulder‑he was standing beside the open back door, and I was standing behind him‑and when we made eye contact, he winked and held up his own thumb. “Better than a lollipop.” He turned around again, fastening the seat belt over Kaley’s car seat, and, with his back to me, I felt myself on the verge of a smirk. But whom would I be smirking for, here in the dark hospital parking lot? To what audience was I trying to express my understanding that a wink, no matter the context, was always cheesy?

  When I looked at Dave’s sister, who was standing a few feet from the car, I saw, to my astonishment, that she was smoking. Our eyes met. She took a long drag, flicked the cigarette onto the pavement, and stepped on it with her shoe. Then she approached the car and opened the back door on the far side.

  “Wait,” I said. “I’ll sit in back, and you can have the front.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” she said, and she climbed in.

  Dave shut the back door on Kaley’s side‑the car was a pale brown Chevy Nova with a dark brown vinyl top and rust eating away the back wheel wells‑then opened the front passenger door. Because of the car parked beside us, there wasn’t enough room for me to get in with him in front of me. We stood looking at each other.

  “Should I move?” I asked.

  “Seems like a good idea.”

  “This way?” I pointed behind me.

  “Here.” He set both his hands on both my shoulders and pushed me‑not hard, and only with his hands‑against the other car. Then he slid by, and after he had, he stopped and glanced back. “Okay?”

  All I needed to say was okay, or yes. But I was silent, I felt stunned. I wanted the instant to exist again when his hands were on my shoulders and we were standing close together. I wanted it to be just us, not his sister or niece, and maybe when we were standing there he would lean forward, he’d tilt his head toward mine or just press his whole body against me. He would feel solid and strong and warm, and when I gripped his upper arms, my fingers would look small and thin, like the fingers of a girl who’d have a boyfriend.

  I swallowed. “Yeah,” I said. “Okay.”

  In the car, he fiddled with the heater as he drove, and from the back, his sister said, “I told you it doesn’t work.”

  “I’m just seeing.”

  “Lenny’s gonna fix it this weekend, but you keep screwing with it now, you’ll make it worse.”

  As she spoke, a blast of air came out of the vents in the front. “Ha!” Dave cried. “It’s a miracle!”

  “A miracle that you never listen.”

  “I got it to work, didn’t I?” He looked at her in the rearview mirror, and he seemed not defensive but chipper. He turned to me. “Your teacher stood you up, huh? That’s no good.”

  “She has a bunch of kids. Maybe things got confused at home.”

  “So you like going to that school?”

  This was possibly the most complicated question I could imagine; I felt that I couldn’t answer it without explaining my entire life. “Sure,” I said.

  “The people are cool.”

  It was hard to tell if he was asking or commenting.

  “Some of them,” I said.

  He laughed. “There’s this one girl,” he said, and I felt my heart pinch; he was going to confide a crush. “She has blond hair, kind of curly. And she just‑” He shook his head. “Nobody can stand her. She stands there and says how disgusting the food is. It’s like, hello, we can hear you. We ain’t deaf.”

  I laughed, to cover my discomfort over the ain’t. Probably it had been on purpose, but it was hard to tell.

  “Most of you guys, though, you’re not too bad,” Dave continued. “Lynn used to work at the school, too.”

  “Really?” I said. “When did you‑?” I’d turned around to look at her, and I saw that she, like Kaley, was asleep.

  Dave glanced back, too. “She’s worn out,” he said. “It’s hard for her with Kaley. But, yeah, Lynn’s the one who got me the job. Put in a good word for me. I’ll probably work there another year or two, at least till I graduate.”

  “Wait, are you in high school or college?”

  “Oh, man, that’s insulting. That’s brutal.”

  “Does that mean college?”

  “I look like I’m fifteen, huh?”

  “No.” It required effort to say what I said next, because it was acknowledging something I was uncomfortable acknowledging (I have been looking at you, I have been paying attention, you also are a specific person to me ); it made me complicit. “You don’t look fifteen,” I said softly.

  “How old do I look?”

  I hesitated. “Twenty?”

  “Twenty‑one. But yeah, I’m at East Rock State, over in Rivertown.”

  I nodded as if I’d heard of it.

  “I’m thinking of doing a business major so I can keep my options open. And then probably College of Fairfield. That’s what I’m thinking.”

  “For graduate school?”

  “For my B.A. I get my associate’s at East Rock, then I transfer the credits.”

  “Okay, of course.” It was not that I was unfamiliar with community college‑that’s what my cousins attended‑more that I wasn’t accustomed to it in the context of Ault.

  “Where are you gonna go?” he said. “Harvard?”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “I bet you’re smart. Get all As.”

  “I’ll probably go somewhere like‑” I stopped. When Martha or I thought we’d done badly on a test, we’d say, I might as well just apply right now to UMass, but invoking UMass as a last resort would, clearly, be a bad idea. “‑to dog school,” I said brightly.

  “What?” Dave looked across
the seat at me.

  “Like obedience school,” I said.

  “You have a dog?”

  “No, no, I’m the dog.”

  He looked at me again, and it was a look I always remembered, long after that night and after I’d left Ault. He was confused and was registering a new piece of information and this was what it was: that I was a girl who would, even in jest, utter the sentence, I’m the dog. It was a good lesson for me. It was a while before I stopped insulting myself so promiscuously, and I never stopped completely, but still‑it was a good lesson.

  In that moment, all he said was, “You’re the dog, huh?”

  And then, because I knew I’d made a mistake and wanted us to leave the place where I’d made it, I said, “I wouldn’t say this if your sister was awake, but I don’t think it’s hot air coming out of the vents.”

  He stuck one palm up. “That’s not hot?”

  “Feel one of these.”

  With his left hand still on the steering wheel, he leaned over; when he held his hand in front of the vent in my corner, his arm crossed over my lap, and his head was only a few inches from mine. I easily could have touched his hair.

  He said, “Shit,” and sat upright again. (I had not worried, as he’d leaned over, that the car would swerve; he seemed utterly competent, not high‑strung enough to have an accident. Or if he did, he’d be calm afterward, he wouldn’t be either angry or panicked.) As he twisted the knobs, he said, “At least I know whose side you’re on. Protecting me from Lynn, huh?”

  “I guess so.”

  “You’re probably real cold. Are you cold?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “You want to‑” He hesitated for a fraction of a second, then nodded his head toward the seat between us. “You can wear my gloves there.”

  “Oh‑” My impulse, as always, was to politely decline, but he picked one up and passed it to me. It was huge and puffy and made of nylon, a glove to chop wood in during a snowstorm. I put it on.

  “See,” Dave said. “It’s warm, right?”

  But the weird intimacy of wearing his glove was constricting me. I could barely talk, certainly I couldn’t talk about the fact that I was wearing his glove, and I couldn’t bring myself to put on the other one.

  “They’re waterproof,” he said, and, in my desperation to change the subject, I blurted out, “Do you think it’s strange for people to go to boarding school?”

  “I guess it depends,” he said. “Leaving home when you’re that young‑I could barely dress myself when I started high school.”

  “Some of the guys in my class can still barely dress themselves,” I said, but when Dave laughed‑he laughed hard‑I thought of my classmates, most of whom dressed themselves just fine, most of whose wardrobes, in fact, I had memorized for no other reason than that I saw all of them all the time. At Ault, I always felt like I didn’t really know the boys in my class, but thinking of them from inside Dave Bardo’s car, they seemed as familiar as my brothers.

  We’d passed through town and were descending the hill just before campus; through the windshield, I saw the dark outline of the chapel’s bell tower. It seemed like we ought to discuss which entrance he’d use and where he’d let me off, but I felt reluctant to raise the subject, just as I’d been reluctant to talk about wearing his glove; it would call too much attention to exactly what was going on.

  He turned in to the south gate and made a right into the dining hall parking lot. He even pulled into a parking space before saying, “Oh, wait, where’s the dorm? I’ll take you to the dorm.”

  “This is fine,” I said. “Thanks so much.” I was already holding the door handle.

  “You sure?”

  “I’m positive. Thanks.” I got out of the car. “Bye. Thank you.”

  He smiled. “You’re very polite.”

  It would be disingenuous to pretend that it was only as I walked across campus, only after it was too late to turn back, that I realized I was still wearing his glove.

  Mrs. Morino approached me as roll call was ending and said, “I’m so sorry about the other night.” I already knew from Mrs. Elwyn, my own dorm head, that they hadn’t forgotten me‑Mrs. Morino had gotten the impression from Clara that I, too, wanted to stay overnight, so she hadn’t returned to the hospital until after eleven.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “How’s Sin‑Jun?”

  “Much more like her old self. I’m actually hoping you’ll go this afternoon and help her dad bring her back to the infirmary.”

  Who would watch her to make sure she didn’t try again? I wondered. A nurse?

  “We don’t know if she’ll stay at Ault,” Mrs. Morino said. “Mr. Byden and her parents and I are talking with her, but in the meantime, it would be great if you could swing by her room and pack a bag for her so she has some things.”

  “Wouldn’t Clara know what stuff she’d want?”

  Mrs. Morino sighed. “I take it that you don’t know Clara and Sin‑Jun aren’t getting along.”

  This did not particularly surprise me. Freshman year, when Clara also had lived in Broussard’s, I’d tried to steer clear of her from the beginning. And it hadn’t been because she was someone who obviously would never be popular, or at least it hadn’t been only because of that; it also had been because she irritated me. She was pale, with dark blond chin‑length hair, a middle part, and heavy bangs. She was big, especially in the breasts and thighs, and she favored tapered, bleached jeans and long dumpy skirts. In her demeanor, there was something spacey and innocent, something slow and not discontented, and it was these qualities that I found so irritating. But I doubted most people agreed; she was the type about whom most people would say, She wouldn’t hurt a fly. My real frustration with Clara, I think, was that it seemed like she should be insecure but wasn’t.

  At curfew, if you ended up sitting next to her, she’d start talking as if you’d been carrying on a conversation before and had been interrupted or as if you’d just asked her a question. She’d do this with anyone‑me, Aspeth, Amy Dennaker, even Madame Broussard. The defining aspect of Clara’s stories was that she did not provide context and that you did not, for fear of encouraging her, ask for it. She might, for instance, recount some incident from class: “I didn’t even know the quiz was today. I said to Shelly, ‘Did he tell us there would be a quiz?’ and she said no. And in the beginning of the year, I clearly remember him saying, ‘I don’t give pop quizzes…’ ” As she continued, I’d be thinking, Shelly? Who’s Shelly? Does anyone named Shelly go to Ault?

  Clara also both hummed and sang to herself audibly and unself‑consciously; you’d hear her while you were washing your faces at adjacent sinks in the bathroom before bed. I had never been able to shake the sense that she was, in these situations, trying to elicit some sort of reaction‑a compliment on her voice, maybe, or an inquiry into what song she was humming. Or maybe she wanted you to see her as carefree and whimsical. Yet at the same time, coexisting with my feeling that her singing was somehow aggressive, I also saw her as genuinely clueless. It was conceivable that she was singing just because she wanted to sing, because she was carefree and whimsical. And that possibility made me dislike her most of all.

  That afternoon, I came face‑to‑face with Clara outside her and Sin‑Jun’s room; she was carrying a cup of tea.

  “I’m here to get the bag of stuff,” I said.

  “What for? Is Sin‑Jun going home?” Her voice was frantic, and I had a vision of her bursting into tears right there.

  “She’s going to the infirmary. Has Mrs. Morino not talked to you?”

  “I guess she hasn’t.” Clara’s snappishness was preferable to wailing, but only by a little.

  “I’m supposed to get her some clothes,” I said. “Can I go in?”

  Clara didn’t reply, but stepped in front of me and pushed open the door. I followed her. They didn’t have bunk beds, like Martha and I did, but twin beds with a little table between them. Clara’s comforter had large roses
in red and peach and orange, and Sin‑Jun’s was the same one from our freshman year, navy with green piping. It occurred to me that the last time she’d been in the room had been the evening she’d taken the pills.

  “Where’s her duffel bag?” I asked.

  Clara pointed under the bed but let me get on my knees to retrieve the bag myself. So this was to be a solo project, I thought, and when I was standing again, I pulled open the top drawer of the bureau I could tell was Sin‑Jun’s because I recognized the toiletries lined up across the top‑the Korean hand lotion with a graphic of a sleeping baby on the bottle, the perfume that I’d always thought smelled like grapefruit. I could sense, as I lifted Sin‑Jun’s underwear and undershirts (I’d forgotten that she didn’t wear bras) and dropped them in the duffel, that Clara was watching me intently. When I shut the top drawer, Clara said, “You forgot her pajamas.”

  “Where are they?”

  Clara reopened the drawer, pulled out a gray tank top and a pair of boxer shorts and passed them to me. Then she stepped back again and folded her arms.

  I went drawer by drawer, and we didn’t talk. I set several toiletries in the duffel.

  “The shampoo will spill on her clothes,” Clara said. “You should always carry stuff like that inside a plastic bag.”

  “We’re not going that far,” I said. I surveyed the room, wondering what else Sin‑Jun might want and realized I should have bought her a present. “I guess this is it,” I said. “Unless you can think of anything.”

  Clara was watching me suspiciously. “You haven’t been in our room once this whole year.”

  “So?”

  “So I don’t know why you’re acting like you and Sin‑Jun are really close.”

  “I’m not.”

  “She’s changed since you guys were roommates. I bet there are a lot of things you don’t know about her.”

  “Clara, Mrs. Morino asked me to come over here. Was I supposed to say no?”

  “I just think you’re acting kind of fake.”

  “Well, I’m sorry you feel that way.” This was an Aultish thing to say, ostensibly diplomatic yet totally distant. But I actually did feel a twinge of sympathy for Clara. How would I react if, say, Dede were to suddenly usurp my role in Martha’s life? Not that that’s what I was trying to do with Sin‑Jun; it was just sort of happening.