Prep

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  “Wait,” Clara said. “Give her this.” She tossed a small white stuffed rabbit toward me. I didn’t catch it, but I picked it up off the floor. “And tell her not to eat too many peach daiquiris. She’ll know what that means.” In a strange way, I identified more with Clara in this moment than I ever had before. Her face was pink and strained, focusing on me. The way she usually seemed‑obliviously satisfied‑she didn’t seem at all.

  By the time I got to the schoolhouse, where Mrs. Morino had told me to meet Mr. Kim, a cream‑colored sedan was waiting out front. Mr. Kim emerged from the car, finished a call on his cell phone‑it was the first cell phone I’d ever seen‑and soberly shook my hand. I had met him twice before: the first time during parents’ weekend when Sin‑Jun and I were freshmen, and the second time, later that same year, when Mr. Kim was in Boston for a business trip and came to campus. Both times I’d gone out to dinner with the Kims and both times Mr. Kim had encouraged me to order steak and, unable to think of a reason not to, I’d complied. Mr. Kim was an inch or two shorter than I was, trim, and dressed in a gray suit, a white shirt with no tie, and a beige raincoat that seemed like it couldn’t possibly be keeping him warm; his skin was tan and his hair was thinning, especially in the front, where there were just a few groups of strands, which looked and smelled like they’d been combed back with pomade.

  Inside the sedan, the seats were pale leather, and the car was already warm; I always forgot how nice things that cost a lot could be. After we drove away from campus, several minutes passed during which neither of us spoke. Sentences floated in my mind‑How was your flight? When did you arrive? –but it seemed like asking them would be avoiding the real subject. Yet raising the real subject surely was not for me to do.

  Out the window, the trees were bare and scrawny‑looking, and the road was lined with dirty snow from the week before. I actually liked the desolation of winter; it was the season when it was okay to be unhappy. If I were ever to kill myself, I thought, it would be in the summer.

  “If you did not like Ault School,” Mr. Kim began (so he was thinking, more or less, about the same thing), “you would tell your father and mother.”

  “Not necessarily. I wouldn’t want my parents to worry because they can’t do much.”

  Neither of us spoke for almost a minute, and then Mr. Kim said, “You would tell teacher or headmaster.”

  “I would probably tell my roommate.” Admitting this felt, somehow, like a betrayal of Sin‑Jun.

  Mr. Kim did not reply, and the silence from before descended again.

  After he had turned in to the hospital parking lot and parked, I said brightly, “Are the hospitals different in Korea than here?”

  “In big cities, they are the same. In villages, they are not so modern.”

  “It’s winter there, too, right? The seasons are the same as here?”

  “Yes,” he said. “The seasons are the same.”

  Inside, we signed in and boarded the elevator. “What’s your favorite season?” I asked.

  He was quiet, then finally said, “When Sin‑Jun was small girl, we took her one night to a party. Our friends’ house had many window. While we ate dinner, my friend’s wife said to me, ‘Look.’ Sin‑Jun stood before window. Because the night was dark, Sin‑Jun saw her reflection in glass. But she did not understand it was her reflection. She thought it was another small girl. When she waved, the other girl waved. When she smiled, the other girl smiled. She begins to dance, and the other girl dances. Sin‑Jun is so happy.” Mr. Kim sounded neither pleased nor saddened; he sounded simply confused. “She is filled,” he said, “with so much delight.”

  The elevator had arrived on the third floor, pausing, then dropping a little, and I could feel that the doors were about to open. We were both facing straight ahead. Grown men, other people’s fathers, were so strange‑often I didn’t completely understand what it was they did at their jobs during the day, and certainly I didn’t understand what occupied their minds. They might tease you or ask you questions, they might even, in elementary school, be your soccer coach, but their attention always felt momentary, before they turned back to the real business at hand. And you wanted their attention to be momentary‑the ones whose wasn’t seemed creepy. Now, however, the situation felt backwards, it felt as if maybe Mr. Kim was asking for something from me. But if he was, what did I have to give? Another person’s father could grill your hamburger, could pump air into your bike tire, could carry your suitcase out to the car, but what could you possibly do for him? Wasn’t it presumptuous‑presuming, specifically, his need and vulnerability‑to offer comfort?

  As the elevator doors opened I said, “I really think she’ll be okay.”

  In fact, Sin‑Jun did not seem particularly okay at all. Leaving the hospital, her father passed her his coat‑I hadn’t thought to bring one from her room‑and Sin‑Jun responded irritably, in Korean (it was the most animated I’d seen her since before she’d taken the aspirin). She wouldn’t put the coat on, or even hold it, so Mr. Kim draped it over her shoulders. He turned to me and said in English, “You will stay here with Sin‑Jun while I retrieve car.” After he had walked beyond the porte cochere, Sin‑Jun went outside as well. I followed her.

  “I think your dad wants us to wait inside.”

  She gave me an unfriendly look. “I need air.”

  It was hard to know how to treat her. My impulse was to act as if she were physically ill‑at some level, it had surprised me to see her dressed and waiting for us by the nurses’ station, and then it had surprised me that she simply stood and walked out rather than being pushed in a wheelchair‑yet another part of me saw her as not sick at all; I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and tell her to snap out of it. Her lack of affect seemed ridiculous, a parody of a moody teenager. Not, of course, that I would grab her by the shoulders, but the reason I wouldn’t was not so much that it would be inappropriate as that, in her new incarnation, I found Sin‑Jun intimidating. I could imagine her having disparaging thoughts about me. She had done something fearless and dramatic, something people at school were talking about. The school psychologist was making her way around to all the dorms, starting with girls’, talking to students at curfew‑Sin‑Jun had set these meetings in motion, quiet and easygoing Sin‑Jun‑and other students who were aware that I had once roomed with her had been asking about the details of what had happened. The girls at least feigned concern (Is she okay? Or, How awful! ) while the guys’ remarks were more distant: That’s fucked. What’d she do that for? Was she always psycho? But this was the thing: Neither the girls nor the guys seemed entirely unimpressed. The fact that Sin‑Jun had taken pills made her interesting. It was becoming‑I could feel it happening‑a phenomenon, another story. It was no longer an act of desperation, or at least not messy, slobbery desperation. And now that Sin‑Jun was, by the larger Ault community, being reconsidered (surely, though she hadn’t yet gotten back to campus, she could sense this reconsideration; surely, when you were cool, you were always at least slightly aware of your own coolness), I feared her; perhaps she found me dorky.

  “Do you want to play gin rummy tonight?” I said.

  Sin‑Jun shook her head.

  “Or tomorrow,” I added. (I was dorky‑she’d be entirely justified in thinking so.)

  She was standing a little in front of me, scanning the parking lot, and I couldn’t read her face.

  “Are you glad you’re leaving the hospital?” I asked.

  She shrugged.

  “You know how you felt bad before? Do you still feel that bad? Or do you feel better?” It was because she was all but ignoring me that I could ask this; I was comfortable in the world with only one person emoting at a time, and if she’d been weeping and confiding, I’d have been distantly attentive, blandly soothing.

  “I am fine,” she said.

  “There have been times when I’ve felt depressed.”

  Sin‑Jun looked at me squarely. “You are depressed?”

  �
�Sure,” I said, and it felt like I was lying. My depression, if that’s what it was, was always so ephemeral; it was possible to be distracted from it by hanging out with Martha, or by listening to a chapel talk, or even‑this had to mean it wasn’t serious‑by watching television. “There are things that get me down,” I said.

  “Which are things?”

  “Ault is stressful,” I said. “There’s a lot of pressure.” These were the kinds of complaints students made, but they were asinine. Not once in three years had I thought, I’m under a lot of pressure.

  “Grades,” Sin‑Jun said. “They are why you worry?”

  “Not as much as I probably should.”

  She looked at me blankly, and I didn’t know if she couldn’t tell I was making a joke or if she just didn’t find the joke funny. Abruptly, I remembered our first week at Ault, living together in Broussard’s. One evening we both had been ready for formal dinner well before we needed to be‑when you’re new to a place, there’s always too much time to fill‑so we sat on our beds, just waiting. That early on, I was shy even around Sin‑Jun; I hadn’t yet determined the hierarchies in a way that classified her as unthreatening.

  I’m not sure where Dede was‑in the shower maybe‑but the room was quiet except for a window fan and the sounds from outside the screens. I didn’t even play my music then, fearful that my taste in tapes might reveal something humiliating. I decided that I wanted to say to Sin‑Jun, I like your skirt. But sometimes speaking is so hard! It’s like standing still, then sprinting. I kept rehearsing the sentence in my head, examining it for flaws.

  Finally, I said, “Your skirt is pretty. I like the polka dots.”

  She smiled, and the blandness of her smile made me almost certain she had no idea what I’d said.

  “Do you know what polka dots are?” I asked. “They’re the round spots. Like‑well, here.” I got up and pointed at her skirt.

  “Ahh,” she said. “Polka dot.”

  “I have polka‑dotted socks,” I said. I retrieved them from the top drawer of my bureau and held them up. “See?”

  “Very exquisite,” she said. “I also like.”

  I sat back on my bed, emboldened, and said, “You have nice clothes.” I had noticed, actually, that Sin‑Jun had a pair of Levi’s, and I’d speculated about whether she’d owned them in Seoul or bought them in anticipation of enrolling at Ault.

  “You can ask me other words if you want to,” I added. And she sometimes did after that‑usually words she’d heard but couldn’t figure out how to spell, and therefore how to look up herself in her Korean‑English dictionary: centipede, or procrastinate. But more often, I was surprised by what she did know the meaning of: pineapple, sarcasm, honeymoon. I’d wonder, was Ault much harder for Sin‑Jun than it was for me because it was literally foreign and not just unfamiliar? Or was it easier because its currencies were not her own? Perhaps that made it possible to view its dramas more distantly, even to disregard them.

  Except that, as we stood in the hospital parking lot, it seemed apparent that she took her life at Ault quite seriously, that she viewed it not as her American life or her school life but as her actual life.

  “Sin‑Jun,” I said.

  She turned.

  “I’m supposed to tell you something. It’s a message from Clara. She said don’t eat too many peach daiquiris.”

  Sin‑Jun regarded me shrewdly, searching my face.

  “You know what it means, right?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t mean to be nosy, but what’s going on with you and Clara?”

  “Nothing is going on.”

  “I’m not saying she’s a bad person,” I said. “Just that I bet she’s kind of hard to live with.”

  Sin‑Jun reached out and squeezed my hand. Mr. Kim had parked the car in front of us and was climbing from the front seat. “We stop talk about it,” Sin‑Jun said.

  After we’d dropped off Sin‑Jun’s things at the infirmary, Mr. Kim announced that he was taking us to the Red Barn Inn for dinner. It was four‑thirty in the afternoon. As we drove, he lit a cigarette‑at Ault, you never saw an adult smoke‑and when we got to the restaurant, we ordered steak, all three of us. Mr. Kim ate half of his and Sin‑Jun ate almost none and I finished mine, every bite until all that was left was fat and bone.

  The next night, after the dining hall had mostly cleared out, I reentered the kitchen. Dave Bardo’s glove was a wad in the front right pocket of my jeans.

  “Excuse me,” I said to a young woman pulling cellophane over a silver tray of pear halves. “Dave Bardo’s not here, is he?”

  “He just went to put out the trash. You know where the dumpster is?”

  When I started retracing my steps out of the kitchen, she said, “There’s stairs right there.” She pointed to a pale pink door I had never noticed. It had a round window near the top and a grid of thin lines crisscrossing the pane. When I opened the door, I found myself in a stairwell lined with shiny tan bricks; there was something gymnasiumish about the stairwell, and the smell in it wasn’t that different from a gym, either. I had the strange sense that I was not at Ault; no other part of campus, including the actual gym, looked quite like this.

  At the base of the stairs was another door, and after I pushed on this one, I was outside in the winter night, standing at the top of a shorter set of concrete steps, and Dave was at the bottom in a T‑shirt and apron. I could see the curved muscles of his upper arms, the hair on his forearms‑it was dark brown, like a grown man’s, but it was not disgusting to me at all.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hey there.”

  When we spoke, our breath was visible.

  “I was looking for you,” I said.

  “Was I hard to find?” He smiled, and it was that leisurely, half‑expectant smile‑seeing it was like knowing I had remembered something exactly the way it was.

  Not, of course, that this affirmation made me any less flustered. “Here.” I pulled the glove from my pocket and held it out to him.

  He squinted. There was a spotlight on the corner of the dining hall roof, and another one above the door I’d just emerged from, but the darkness still made dark objects shadowy.

  “It’s your glove,” I said. “I accidentally took it when you gave me a ride from the hospital.”

  “No big deal. I had a feeling you’d bring it back. How you been?”

  “Fine.”

  “Just fine?”

  I didn’t know how to answer. I said, “You know what, the mashed potatoes tonight were really good.”

  He laughed. “Thanks.”

  “Is your sister better?”

  “Yeah, she’s good again. I’ve been telling her to take it easy, but you know how it is for single moms.”

  “My friend is better, too,” I said. “I ended up going back to the hospital yesterday to help her dad bring‑actually, I don’t know. It’s kind of a long story. Aren’t you cold with no coat on?”

  “I’m okay,” he said. “You don’t have a coat on either.”

  “But I have a sweater.” I held out one arm, my fingers clutching the cuff, as if to offer proof.

  “That’s a nice sweater,” he said. “Is that cashmere ?” He pronounced it right, but he said it jokily, as if he’d never used the word before. And in fact, the sweater was acrylic. But he assumed‑I’d sensed this before and now I was sure‑that I was rich, that I was one of the true Ault students. Perhaps that explained his attention to me.

  “I’m not sure what material it is,” I said.

  “It looks soft.”

  “I guess so.” I was still holding out my arm, and I realized just seconds before it happened that he was going to touch either me or my sweater, and realizing this made me feel as if the sun was rising inside me and because this was, without a doubt, a good feeling, it is hard to explain why I snatched my arm away. Very briefly, his hand hovered where my arm had been, and my face burned; I couldn’t look at him. When I finally did
, he was regarding me curiously.

  “I heard it might snow,” I said loudly. “Have you heard that? That’s what they’re saying for later tonight.”

  He continued to look at me.

  “So it’s good you have your glove again,” I said. “In case you need to shovel your driveway.” I wanted to say, I’m sorry. But it’s hard to rectify an unspoken mistake by speaking; almost always, it only makes things worse. “I should let you get back inside,” I said, and neither of us moved.

  “I’ll tell you what,” he finally said. “Those mashed potatoes were no good. What you had for dinner‑they were crap mashed potatoes.”

  “I didn’t think they were bad at all.”

  “You want to taste real mashed potatoes?”

  Was I supposed to answer?

  “You ever been to Chauncey’s?” he asked.

  I actually had, my sophomore year. It was, as far as I could remember, indistinct‑nicer than a diner but not fancy. But I said, “I don’t think I’ve been there.”

  “We should go.”

  “Now?”

  “I can’t now. I’m working.”

  “Right. Of course.”

  “What about tomorrow? Tomorrow’s Saturday, isn’t it?”

  “I’m pretty sure I have some school stuff.” Already, I was thinking too much. I was thinking that Saturday was loaded in a way Friday wasn’t‑we had Saturday classes, so Friday was still a school night, but Saturday was pure weekend. If I went out with Dave on a Saturday night, I was pretty sure we’d be going on a date.

  “How’s Sunday?” he said. “Sunday I’m off.”

  What I needed to do was just be calm. I needed to come up with the next words to say, to concentrate only on the immediate task in front of me and not give in to the sense that this moment was a monstrous pulsating flower, a purple and green geometrical blossom like you might see in a kaleidoscope. “Sunday is okay,” I said. “I’ll meet you here.”

  “In the parking lot?”