Prep

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  Sports contained the truth, I decided, the unspoken truth (how quickly we damn ourselves when we start to talk, how small and inglorious we always sound), and it seemed hard to believe that I had never understood this before. They rewarded effortlessness and unself‑consciousness; they confirmed that yes, there are rankings of skill and value and that everyone knows what they are (seeing those guys who were subbed with two seconds left before the end of a quarter, I’d think how girls’ coaches were never that heartless); they showed that the best things in the world to be were young and strong and fast. To play a great game of high school basketball‑it was something I myself had never done, but I could tell‑made you know what it was to be alive. How much in an adult life can compare to that? Granted, there are margaritas, or there’s no homework, but there are also puffy white bagels under neon lights in the conference room, there’s waiting for the plumber, making small talk with your boring neighbor.

  Once, also in the fourth quarter of a close game, Cross made a shot from behind the three‑point line, and when the ball went through the net, his teammates surrounded him, patting his ass, holding up their hands for him to slap. No one in the bleachers glanced at me like they did at Rufina when Nick scored (even teachers glanced at her; I’m not sure they knew they were doing it). Cross didn’t belong to me, and seeing him on the court, I understood that even if he’d been my boyfriend, he still wouldn’t have belonged to me.

  I don’t know if Cross himself realized I went to his games. I didn’t mention it because I feared it would seem like a violation of our agreement, either clingy or just too public. And he never talked about the games, though if they’d won and if he came over (he never came over when they lost and only sometimes came over when they won), he was pushier than usual, the way you’re led to believe guys are when you’re eleven years old‑that they’ll pull at your clothes and grope you and mash against you. But the fact was that I always wanted to be mashed and groped. Later on, when I tried to imagine how I might have ruined things, that would occur to me‑that I’d so rarely resisted, that I hadn’t made it hard enough for him. Maybe he felt disappointed. Maybe it was like gathering your strength and hurling your body against a door you believe to be locked, and then the door opens easily‑it wasn’t locked at all‑and you’re standing looking into the room, trying to remember what it was you thought you wanted.

  As a freshman, I had gone home for Thanksgiving, but never after that‑only three weeks elapsed between Thanksgiving break and Christmas break, and the plane fares were high. (“We love you,” my father said once, “but not that much.”) At Martha’s house for Thanksgiving, as in other years, we stayed up late watching movies, woke at eleven a.m., and ate pumpkin pie for breakfast. On the twin beds in her room were two‑hundred‑count percale white sheets and white duvets that I always worried about getting a pen mark on, and in the cupboards and closets were extra of everything‑towels and toilet paper and boxes of cereal; there was even a whole extra refrigerator in the basement. I often wondered, while visiting the Porters’ house, if my exposure to their way of living would be fleeting or if one day I would live in a house as nice as this, if it would be as easy for me to be generous to other people as it seemed for them to be generous to me. It actually appeared true that it didn’t matter if Mrs. Porter had to make an extra serving of lobster bisque because I was there, or if they had to buy an extra ticket to the choral performance at their church (that I would pay for my own ticket, let alone for my own portion of lobster bisque, was not a possibility anyone considered). There were other kids at Ault I had a feeling about, kids who came from poorer families than I did and would probably grow up to make a lot more than I would‑they’d be surgeons, or investment bankers. But making a lot of money didn’t seem like something I’d be able to control; I’d gotten as far as Ault, but I wasn’t sure I’d get any further. I wasn’t smart or disciplined the way those kids were, I wasn’t driven. Presumably, I’d always be aware of lives like these without living one; I couldn’t confuse familiarity with entitlement.

  On Thanksgiving itself, Martha’s cousins came over, and Ellie, who was eight and inexplicably fond of me, squatted behind me on the couch, braiding my hair. When that got boring, she took grapes from the cheese platter and tried to persuade me to open my mouth so she could throw them in, and I actually did a few times, when the adults and Martha and Martha’s brother weren’t looking; I liked Ellie because she reminded me of my own brothers. Mr. Porter carved the turkey wearing an apron that said Kiss the cook, though as far as I could tell, Mrs. Porter and her sister had been the ones to prepare everything. Then we all ate too much; after dessert, I started eating mashed potatoes again and, uncharacteristically, so did Martha.

  It was a good Thanksgiving; I felt lucky to know Martha’s family, to be Martha’s roommate. But under all of it, still, all the time, I thought of Cross.

  Martha’s acceptance from Dartmouth came on December fourteenth and I made her a sign and when people congratulated her, she acted much the way she had when she’d been elected prefect: slightly embarrassed, as if what they had just said instead of congratulations was that they’d seen her taking out the trash that morning in her bathrobe. The next day Cross got into Harvard, and when he came over two nights after that, his reaction to his college acceptance was detached politeness. When I congratulated him and he said “Thanks”‑that, in fact, was all he said‑I felt how I was not a person with whom he’d discuss something as ordinary and personal as college. What kind of roommates he’d end up with, what he’d major in, whether he’d have a shot at playing basketball there‑it was likelier that he’d talk to Martha than to me about such topics. The things he did tell me were self‑contained and anecdotal: that as a three‑year‑old, he’d flunked the entrance exam at a private school because he said that an elephant had five legs (he’d thought the trunk counted); that when he was eleven, he’d gone trick‑or‑treating in his building in New York and a woman on the fourth floor had answered the door in a black teddy and high heels (she hadn’t even had any candy, so she’d given him and his friend an open bag of Oreos). These stories made me feel protective and adoring and also far away from him.

  Ault’s service of lessons and carols was the night before Christmas vacation started, and Cross and Martha were two of the three Wise Men. The senior prefects always played the Wise Men, and then a third senior, an outstanding senior, was selected to join them; to no one’s surprise, this year it was Darden Pittard. When everyone stood to sing “We Three Kings” the three of them walked down the aisle of chapel wearing robes and crowns, bearing their gifts (Martha had been assigned the frankincense). Later that night, when Cross and I were lying in Hillary Tompkins’s bed, I said to him, “You looked handsome in your crown.” This was not the sort of thing I usually said, but we wouldn’t see each other for two weeks, and I was pretty sure I could get away with it. We had already had sex twice that night, and there was between us that air of extra generosity and affection that arises when you’re about to be apart. “I bet you didn’t know I’m an actor, too,” I said. “In fourth grade, my class put on this play about Christopher Columbus coming to America, and I was the star.”

  “You were Queen Isabella?”

  “No!” I punched his shoulder. “I was Columbus.”

  “Really?”

  “Why is that so hard to believe? I was good. I wore pantaloons.”

  “I’m sure you were good,” Cross said. “I just thought a boy would play Columbus.” He pressed his lips against my ear. “But your pantaloons sound very sexy.”

  Later, I remembered this as our best night. Not because it was remarkable but because of its unremarkability‑for all the ways it wasn’t fraught and loaded, for how we got to have sex but also, sort of, we got to be friends.

  The next day classes ended at noon, and I boarded the bus to Logan in front of Mr. Byden’s house. As the bus pulled away, I looked out the window and thought, No, no, no.

  At the airport, in
line to check my bag, I felt more aware of myself as a prep school student than I did at any other time. My age, my clothes, the books in my backpack, probably even my posture‑these all were markers, signifiers of my membership in a subculture I felt I belonged to only when I was away from it. When I was through the line, I walked to the bathroom, passing the terminal’s long wall of paned mirrors, my reflection a cubed giant wearing my clothes.

  What I usually did next was get ice cream and eat it standing in front of a magazine rack, reading, and then just before my plane boarded, I’d buy one magazine‑an especially fat issue, which I’d purposely not have read in the store. There’d be other Ault kids in the terminal, of course, and if we passed, we acknowledged one another, usually without speaking, but I didn’t hang out with them. As a freshman, I’d been too intimidated‑a bunch of students always sat in the back of a restaurant that sold clam chowder and doughnuts, smoking and talking noisily‑and now that I was older, I was still intimidated, at least by the smokers, but I also wasn’t particularly interested; I liked eating ice cream and reading magazines by myself.

  But I had gotten no farther than the entrance to the ice cream shop when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned.

  “When’s your flight?” It was Horton Kinnelly, Aspeth’s roommate, who was from Biloxi. “You should come back with us.” She nodded her head toward the doughnut and clam chowder restaurant. Over the entrance, I noticed for the first time that neon orange lettering spelled out the words Hot n’ Snacks.

  “That’s okay,” I said before remembering myself‑Horton looked at me, but we both pretended I hadn’t tried to decline the invitation‑and adding, “Okay, sure. You’re just in there?”

  She nodded. “Me and Caitlin and Pete Birney and some other people. Have you ever talked to Pete Birney? He’s totally cracking me up.”

  “I’ll come over in a second.”

  As soon as she’d walked away and I’d stepped into the ice cream shop, I realized that I wasn’t buying anything. Because then what‑I’d sit there eating in front of them? Or I’d shove it down beforehand? And what did Horton want with me anyway? Over the years, my path had crossed Aspeth’s many times, but it had virtually never crossed Horton’s.

  I entered Hot n’ Snacks and saw them sitting, as I’d known they’d be, in the back‑not just Horton and Caitlin Fain and Pete Birney but two or three other Ault students, laughing in a haze of smoke. I approached their cluster of chairs, which surrounded two small tables pushed together. Simultaneously, everyone looked up at me. “Hey, Lee,” Horton said, and I thought she’d find a chair for me‑being Horton, she was the hostess‑but then she turned back to Pete. I carried a chair from another table and set it down between Suzanne Briegre, a junior girl with long straight black hair, and Ferdy Chotin, also a junior, who still had braces but was nationally ranked in tennis. They both did something more than nod and less than smile. Everyone was discussing a woman in a movie who had worn cowboy boots and a cowboy hat and nothing else. (Listening to the conversation, I thought, was that what Cross wanted, a girl in cowboy boots and a cowboy hat? Her skin would be taut and tan, and she would never be confused about the mechanics of a blow job. A nervous chant started in my head: What was he doing with me, what was he doing with me, why were we together?)

  Meanwhile, I was observing my schoolmates with a kind of awe, how they had so many sets of behavior in their repertoire. On campus, they attended chapel and turned in papers; here, they lit cigarettes and acted irreverent. And it wasn’t even like all of them were cool, not definitively cool like Horton was. I knew for a fact that Caitlin planned not to have sex before marriage, but here she was, hanging out, casually violating a school rule, showing another side of herself, when I was always me. I didn’t have the impulse, just because I could get away with it, to act any differently at the airport than I did at Ault. And the only time I’d ever smoked was sophomore year at Martha’s house, when we decided to smoke one cigarette each, but Martha stubbed hers out after two puffs, proclaiming it disgusting; I’d kept going, but only for practice. I’d been practicing, I saw now, for a situation like this. But the practice had been a long time ago and incomplete and I wouldn’t take a cigarette if it was offered to me because in the daylight, in front of classmates I hardly knew, it would be almost as bad as kissing in public.

  “She wasn’t a brunette,” Horton was saying. “Her hair was bleached blond.” They were still talking about the woman in cowboy boots and a cowboy hat.

  “Not all of it,” Ferdy said slowly, grinning.

  “Horton,” Pete said‑Pete was a junior who’d won Assassin the year before‑and when Horton looked at him, Pete tapped his temple. “We’re not talking about up here.”

  Horton looked at Pete for a second, then made an expression of distaste. “You’re a foul man, Mr. Birney,” she said, and the guys started laughing.

  “We’re just kidding,” Pete said. “Don’t be pissed. Are you pissed?”

  Horton glared at him without saying anything, then finally, in a small voice, she said, “Maybe.”

  “Maybe!” Pete exclaimed, and I almost thought he liked Horton, but it might have been just more of his repertoire‑that he could flirt enthusiastically with her when they were in the same place, but that he’d have shown no less enthusiasm with another pretty girl. They started talking just to each other, and I wished I were eating ice cream alone and wondered if I’d been sitting there long enough that I could leave without attracting attention.

  At that moment, Horton leaned across the table, extending a pack of cigarettes. “Want one?”

  I shook my head. “No, thanks.”

  “Because of your parents?” Horton said. She had stuck a cigarette in her own mouth and held a pink plastic lighter to the tip of it. The lighter looked both cheap and cool in its cheapness. But how had Horton known that? What made it not simply tacky? “I always tell my parents the restaurant was so full that I had no choice but to sit in the smoking section,” she said.

  “Or,” Suzanne said, perking up, “you say that your friends were smoking but you weren’t. Then it’s like you’re being honest by telling on your friends.”

  I smiled weakly.

  “Horton,” Pete said. “If you give me the one you just lit, I’ll light you another one.”

  “Okay, that makes a lot of sense.”

  “No, it does. Here’s why‑”

  I stopped listening to them. He wanted his mouth to touch where her mouth had touched. He wanted them to be passing something between them, fingers grazing, leaning into each other. In some ways, boys were easier to read than other girls‑with boys, it was pursuit and lust, it was effort. With so many girls, it just seemed to be about receiving, or not receiving, rather than trying. It was saying yes or no, but not please, not come on, just this once.

  I had been at the table less than ten minutes then, and I waited fifteen more before I stood to leave‑to catch my plane, I said. Everyone wished me Merry Christmas, and I waited to see if Horton had anything to say, but she didn’t; it appeared I had been summoned, I had been sanctioned by her, for no particular reason. Or I had been summoned for a particular reason that no one would ever articulate‑because now I was linked to Cross. There were a lot of moments I could point to that indicated that no one knew; that afternoon in the airport, Horton’s invitation to join her table, was one of the few times I thought maybe everyone did.

  In the enclosed space of the car, riding from the airport to our house, I thought that surely my mother could sense the difference in me‑not necessarily that I’d had sex, but something in that direction. But if she were to ask, I’d tell her nothing. I had never been a girl who confided much in her mother, mostly because my mother had never seemed altogether certain what to do with the information I did share. “Mary McShay kissed a fourteen‑year‑old boy at the Y this summer,” I told my mother on the first day of sixth grade.

  “Did she?” my mother asked mildly. “Fourteen sounds a bit old.” B
ut that was all she said‑she didn’t want to know more about the boy, or the nature of the kiss (it had indeed involved tongue), or whether I had plans to kiss fourteen‑year‑old boys myself. I think it was a mixture of my mother’s shyness and her distraction, though the things that distracted her were always motherly, like the fact that she needed to take the lasagna out of the oven; it wasn’t as if her mind was consumed with matters unrelated to our family. Basically, I didn’t consider my mother to be much of a resource, not like Kelli Robard’s mother, who listened to the same radio station we did and knew brands of clothing and the names of the cute boys in sixth grade. My mother was a benevolent but uninformed presence. In fourth grade, when I’d asked her what a hunk was, she’d said sincerely, “It’s a big piece of cheese.”

  And yet she regularly surprised me by what she did know, or at least intuited, but would not comment on unless pressed. My mother was in many ways what I aspired to be‑someone who didn’t spill and opine, not because she successfully stifled her urges to do so but because she didn’t have those urges in the first place.