Prep

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  “I know you hear all this sex ed stuff, but I can pull out. I’ll be careful.”

  It wasn’t really because of not having a condom. But it was hard to say what it was because of. And it was hard to believe this moment was existing‑that Cross was trying to persuade me to have sex and I was declining. It did not feel, as I might have imagined, satisfying; instead, it felt weird and precarious.

  “We could do other stuff,” I said.

  He didn’t reply. But the energy had changed, with that single comment. I’d been at the top of the teeter‑totter, perched in the air, and then I’d thudded to the bottom; I was squatting on the ground, calling up to Cross.

  “I want to make you feel good,” I said, and I didn’t even realize until the words were out that they were the same ones he’d uttered the first time he’d come to my room. If he had said, Why? –he’d have to have said it on purpose, a further echo of our earlier conversation‑I’d have thought he was great. I’d have wanted us to watch bad movies together, to go bowling together, to eat too much and tell embarrassing stories. I’d have thought we had the same sense of humor, which‑there was enough Cross gave me, more than enough; it’s not a complaint‑we didn’t.

  “I want to make you‑” I couldn’t say the word come.

  “Come?” he said.

  I was quiet. In all the times we’d hooked up‑he visited every three nights or so, five times so far, and in the time between his visits I always convinced myself that the time before had been his last, he wouldn’t be returning‑he had never come. I had held his penis only once, and it had been another moment in which I’d had no idea what I was doing. All those years of reading women’s magazines, and I couldn’t even remember the fundamentals of a hand job‑I had simply run my curled fingers up and down the length of it. I’d been lying on my side, and he’d begun rubbing my thigh and hip and then his fingers slid down and into me and it had seemed confusing (surely, this notion would strike other people as laughable), it had seemed chaotic even, for both activities to be happening at once. I’d wondered if he was trying to let me know he’d had enough of my hand. I let it fall away from him and rolled my body toward his, and he said, “You like to be close, don’t you?” I was always yanking away the sleeping bag if it got wedged between us, or making sure we touched at all points if we were spooning. And it seemed like these were things he wanted, too, but the truth was that there was almost nothing about Cross or Cross with me that I knew for sure. I’d considered asking Martha about the fact that Cross had never come, but I feared that the explanation would reveal an inadequacy in me so humiliating that it was better not to share it even with her‑wasn’t it a joke how fast high school boys usually came? Also, I suspected that both Martha and Cross were people who’d disapprove of disclosing intimate details. If it would bother only one of them, I might have told Martha, but imagining the double force of their censure stopped me.

  “What are you saying?” Cross asked.

  I didn’t reply, but I understood how now I had to go through with the thing I had not even been certain I was proposing until I had heard in his voice that that was what he took my proposal to be. I had to go through with it not because he would make me, not because he was trying to show me that I was testing his patience but because I actually was testing his patience. And anyway, I had been the one to bring it up.

  “Here,” I said, and I shifted so he’d shift, too. He rolled onto his back, and I got onto my knees and let my hair hang in front of my face‑as if it might veil how my stomach looked from this angle‑and scooted backward. It was very different to be naked above Hillary Tompkins’s sleeping bag, out in the dark but not pitch‑black air, than it was to be naked beneath it. I was straddling him above the knees. Then it was like when you had to do a presentation in class and you felt like you needed some official sign to begin, like a whistle in a race, but instead everyone was just waiting for you and the most official thing that would happen would be that you’d say okay a few times: “Okay. Okay, the French and Indian War, also known as the Seven Years’ War, began in 1754…”

  I even said, “Okay.” Then I crouched down, and as I did, I thought of how probably there were women who did this in daylight, their asses exposed, bobbing toward the ceiling, and how I would never, ever be one of them. I had hoped, without realizing I was anticipating such an event in my own life, that it would feel different from what it was: something bigger than you’d ever under normal circumstances put in your mouth going into your mouth. It seemed difficult to breathe. I didn’t like it‑I definitely didn’t. But then, in its uncomfortableness, I felt a sort of nobility‑a kinship with all the girls who’d done this before me for the boys they liked (I thought of Sophie Thruler, Cross’s girlfriend from freshman year), an affection for myself for being willing to do it, an affection for Cross for being a person I would do it for. It made me feel like an adult, like drinking wine would later, before I liked the taste of it.

  He set his hands on my shoulders, lightly, and occasionally, he’d reach for one of my breasts, he’d swipe it‑I had not thought of him as guarded before, but he definitely was the most unguarded I’d ever seen him‑and he was gasping and moaning in a ragged, sometimes high‑pitched way that startled me. I wondered, did all boys make noises like this? And I felt glad that it was Cross, who could never disgust or offend me, whom I was first seeing this way. If it had been another boy who seemed less cool or less experienced, I might have judged him, chalking up such a reaction to his uncoolness or inexperience.

  In the middle‑until then, I’d been doing with my mouth pretty much what I’d done the other time with my hand, a steady up‑and‑down motion‑I actually did remember a tip from a magazine: Treat his penis like a delicious ice cream cone. I slid my mouth off and began to lick the sides, nodding and turning my head. Less than a minute had passed when Cross shuddered once and then the hot milky liquid was all over my chest. If he’d come in my mouth, I would have swallowed it; I definitely would have. He reached for me, pulling me back up to him, and when I was lying against his chest, he petted my back, squeezed my ass and arms, kissed my forehead. He said, “That was a great blow job,” and I felt prouder than if I’d gotten an A on a math test. Was it possible that I had a particular gift? If I did, it would be like with haircutting (except better) and the fact that I didn’t find the act particularly enjoyable would be irrelevant. When you were really good at something, you just did it, because it was a waste not to. In the next second, of course, I wondered if Cross was only trying to make me feel good, but in the second after that, I thought that if he were, Cross trying to make me feel good was in itself a reason to be happy.

  That episode had been earlier in the week. The first night of long weekend, while I was lying on the futon, the memory still felt bright and thick; I didn’t sense yet how over the next few days I would return to it until it was frayed and diluted, a mental exercise rather than a physical interaction with another person.

  It was completely dark‑it had started getting dark at four‑thirty‑and it occurred to me just to go to sleep for the night, but then I’d probably awaken at eleven p.m., disoriented and hungry. I stood and turned on a light and pulled down the shades, and I felt the first ache of loneliness, the first inkling that staying on campus might have been a mistake. I turned on Martha’s computer and clicked on my college essays folder and, inside that, the file titled “Brown app.” Then I sat looking at the single, incomplete paragraph I’d written the week before: My most unusual quality is that I am from the Midwest yet I have lived in New England for the last three years… I wished that at that moment, instead of facing a computer screen, I was making out with Cross, and that he was reaching up my nightgown or inside my underwear.

  For no particular reason, my back hurt, and I also was thirsty; I definitely wasn’t in the mood to work on an essay. I shut the file and folder and put the screen to sleep; after dinner, possibly, I’d feel more inspired.

  The only other seniors i
n the dining hall were Edmundo Saldana and Sin‑Jun, and they were sitting at a table with a couple of juniors‑three black boys (there were four black boys in the whole junior class) and Nicky Gary, a pale girl with strawberry blond hair who was rumored to be a born‑again Christian, but the weirdest part was that her parents weren’t even born‑again; just she was, on her own. The boys were Niro Williams, Derek Miles, and Patrick Shaley. At other tables, there were slightly larger representations of sophomores and freshmen, and at a fourth table were the few teachers on campus for the weekend.

  What surprised me as I looked around, what I had forgotten since freshman year, was how Ault on long weekend wasn’t really Ault‑it wasn’t full and hurried, there weren’t people I felt fascinated by and felt self‑conscious in front of. Instead, it was cleared‑out buildings. There was nothing that would surprise or entertain you over the next few days. (I used to fear, and I wasn’t completely wrong, that this was what the rest of the world was like. Hardly ever did it matter if you brushed your hair before driving to the grocery store, rarely did you work in an office where you cared what more than two or three people thought of you. At Ault, caring about everything was draining, but it was also exhilarating.)

  When I sat down, Niro and Patrick were talking animatedly about a video game, and no one else was talking about anything. Sin‑Jun and I spoke briefly‑she also was working on applications and had just decided to apply early to Stanford‑but our conversation petered out quickly, and a few minutes later, before I was finished eating, she stood to leave. Sitting there with Edmundo and Nicky and the junior boys, I thought that I definitely should have gone to Burlington with Martha. I felt an old, unpleasant sensation of not mattering to anyone present, and it seemed difficult to believe the feeling could return so abruptly, though I couldn’t have said where it was returning from. And then I realized how much my idea of myself had changed. Probably it had changed slowly, starting with Martha becoming my friend in the spring of ninth grade, and perhaps it hadn’t changed again significantly until the previous May when she got elected prefect and I became the prefect’s roommate. And it had shifted once more over the last few weeks, after I first kissed Cross. I felt‑not cool, it was hard to imagine I’d ever feel cool, but I felt like a person I myself would have been intrigued by as a freshman or sophomore. Meaning, maybe, that a current freshman or sophomore could be intrigued by me. Except that I had never seen any evidence for such a possibility, and furthermore, intriguing people didn’t stay at school for long weekend; at the very least, they went to Boston.

  And then there was the fact that no one knew Cross and I were fooling around. Or officially they didn’t, but I also became aware in this moment how much I’d been counting on the secret getting out, because at Ault, secrets always did. Cross’s roommate Devin had to know, or maybe a girl in my dorm had been walking down the hall to the bathroom at just the moment, around quarter of five in the morning, when Cross was leaving. (Cross had to be the one who leaked the information; I couldn’t.) It wasn’t that I’d been disingenuous when I’d asked Cross not to discuss what was happening. It was just that I’d assumed people would learn of the basic facts without explicit discussion.

  The possibility existed that Niro and Patrick and Edmundo didn’t care, of course, but it seemed likelier they didn’t know. Because surely if they knew, they’d somehow show it, surely they would at least look at me for a beat longer when I sat down. After the first time Cross had come over, it had felt so uncertain, and I had imagined that if people caught wind of it, all they’d think was, Her? But it was lasting, it had become something Cross was choosing rather than something arbitrary. And this knowledge did not change the way I acted, but certainly it affected the place in the social order where I saw myself; now my regular behavior felt gracious and charming. I could have let Cross’s interest in me go to my head, but look‑I was as humble as ever. I didn’t suddenly sit next to Aspeth Montgomery in chapel, or expect to be invited to Greenwich with her.

  “Can you pass the ketchup?” Derek Miles asked.

  I blinked at him.

  “It’s right there,” he said.

  I handed him the bottle. He had no idea. It definitely wasn’t schoolwide news, so the only remaining question was whether it was news at any level‑senior news, news among Cross’s circle of friends. Did Aspeth Montgomery know? If she didn’t, nobody did. And, no, I thought, she didn’t. She didn’t because if she did, she’d tell Dede, and if Dede knew, she’d confront me; she wouldn’t be able to stop herself.

  When I walked back to the dorm, the only light was the one I’d left on in my room. I slept twelve hours that night and did the same for the next two nights, waiting for Cross to come back. On Sunday, Mrs. Parnasset drove a van to the Westmoor mall and left us there for the afternoon. Sin‑Jun and I went to a movie about a suburban family whose young son died, and everything about the movie reminded me of Cross, or, more accurately, made me think of him and then keep thinking of things about him that had nothing to do with the movie at all. Sunday dinner was cold cuts; the temperature that night fell below freezing for the first time since the previous winter. Then it was Monday again; Cross, and everyone else, returned to school.

  We had sex a few days later because it was inevitable, because now that he was back on campus, I wanted everything and all of him, because I loved him, because I was afraid of losing him, because it felt good or at least because everything up to that point had felt good and it was what came next. The reality, of course, was that the pain made me clutch his arms just below the elbows and arch my head until the crown of it was pressed against the mattress. I was surprised he didn’t offer to stop, but maybe it was good because if he had, I’d have accepted the offer, and I’d just have been postponing the pain. He had brought a condom, and afterward, he went into the bathroom and got wet paper towels to wipe the blood off my thighs. The paper towels were warm, and I thought how at the sinks in Elwyn’s, the hot water always took so long to come out and how he must have waited for it.

  Both of us were sweaty and then, as we lay there, clammy; Hillary’s sleeping bag was plaid cotton, not one of those nylon ones that’s supposed to wick away moisture. But our clamminess didn’t really matter, or my belly against his hip‑things that I might once have been self‑conscious about, I no longer was. At least in the dark, there wasn’t much I felt like I was hiding from him anymore. It was as if for my entire time at Ault up to this moment I’d been in a frenzy, a storm of worry, and now it was all finished and I felt only a profound calm; it was hard to believe the sensation would not be permanent. Actual sex wasn’t as different from more casual fooling around as I’d imagined, but it wasn’t exactly the same, either‑afterward, you felt like something had finished instead of just tapering off. And now with every reference in magazines or movies or conversations, I could nod, or at least, when listening to other people, I wouldn’t have to avert my eyes lest they look into them and see that I didn’t really understand. I could disagree, even if I never did so aloud.

  He stroked my hair, and there was nothing I wanted to say or wanted him to say; there was nothing I wanted except for this. The soreness made me unsure how soon I’d be able to have sex again, but it wasn’t a bad soreness. It was like after hiking, because of a thing you were glad to have done. Two days later, I picked up my first packet of birth control pills from the infirmary, which made me feel so unlike myself that I would not have been surprised, when I looked in the mirror, to see a forty‑year‑old divorced mother of two, a cowgirl, an aerobics instructor on a cruise ship in the Caribbean. The real part was being in bed with Cross.

  Before and after I was involved with Cross Sugarman, I heard a thousand times that a boy, or a man, can’t make you happy, that you have to be happy on your own before you can be happy with another person. All I can say is, I wish it were true.

  In November, I began attending his basketball games; he never came over the night before a game. I sat high up in the bleachers, often ne
xt to Rufina, who went because Nick Chafee played, too. The Saturday night games were crowded‑I’d get Martha to go with me to those‑but during the afternoon ones, other students had their own games, so most of the spectators were parents who lived nearby, random teachers, or JV players. The reason I was free to go was that all seniors got one sports cut and I was taking mine that winter. The strangest part was that I had actually played basketball myself for the last three years, but when I watched Cross, it was like a new game; it was almost like sports were new to me, and I could understand for the first time in my life why people liked them.

  For home games, they wore white uniforms with maroon trim; Cross, who played center, was number six. He wore black high‑tops, and his legs were long in the long white shorts, his arms pale and muscular in the jersey.

  During my own basketball games, I had always, I realized, been half‑asleep, paying attention less to the other team than to whether my shorts were riding up, or whether the chicken nuggets from lunch were churning in my stomach. But during Cross’s games, I was alert to the sport itself: the squeak of the players’ shoes, the refs’ whistles, the way the players and coaches would protest after calls they didn’t like. At the Saturday night games, the people in the bleachers around me would chant: “Let’s go, Ault!” or, if Cross was running the ball down the court, they’d say “Sug! Sug! Sug!” I never cheered at all‑under the bright lights, among the excited crowd, I always felt tense and slightly nauseated‑and at first I was amazed by how much everyone seemed to care. Or maybe, by how little they concealed that they cared.

  And then I realized that here, in sports, it was okay to show that something mattered to you. Maybe because it didn’t actually matter, it was okay to invest yourself‑investing yourself was almost ironic‑but then you really had invested yourself and you really did care yet it was still okay. They’d get angry‑I once saw Niro Williams get a technical foul for setting the ball against the court and walking away instead of passing it to the ref‑and it was okay to be disappointed and it was okay to try. You could grunt or trip, you could twist your body and make fierce expressions when you were trying to rip the ball from someone else’s hands and all of it‑it was fine. When they played Hartwell, Ault’s rival, the teams were within a couple points of each other the whole game, and then Hartwell got eight points in the last minute and a half. When the buzzer sounded, I looked at Cross and was astonished to see that he was crying. I looked away reflexively, then looked back; his face was scrunched‑up and red, and he was roughly wiping his eyes and shaking his head, but he wasn’t dashing to the locker room or otherwise trying to hide it. Darden Pittard stood in front of him, and then Niro joined them, and Darden was talking‑it looked like he was saying something nice‑with his hand set on Cross’s upper arm.