Prep

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  By early February of my senior year, I was giving so much thought to the flower exchange that when the form showed up in my mailbox, it was surprising that it had arrived at a moment when, in fact, the flower exchange was not foremost in my mind. Once the form was in my possession, it felt immediately incriminating, as if, instead of being the generic form given to everyone, it was one I’d already filled out. I quickly stuffed it in my backpack.

  In the room that night, Martha said, “I swear it feels like I was just doing this for last year. Doesn’t it feel like that?”

  “I guess so,” I said. I paused. “Do you think I should send one to Cross?”

  “If you want.”

  I was composing my next thought‑I felt tightly wound, and inarticulate, on this subject‑when Martha added, “I probably will.”

  “Will what? You mean you’ll send Cross a flower?”

  She nodded.

  “What color?”

  She started laughing. “Red, of course. Lee, what do you think?”

  It wasn’t funny to me. And it seemed surprising that she couldn’t guess this.

  “So you’d send him a pink one?”

  “Do you not want me to? If you don’t, I won’t.”

  This was how she always disarmed me, with her openness and her flexibility. She let me choose, and then I was the one who had made the choice.

  “No, of course you should,” I said. “Since you work together so much, and since you’re friends.” What was I doing reassuring her about Cross, how had we arrived at this point? Abruptly, I did not want to be having the conversation anymore.

  The night the fire alarm went off‑this was also in early February‑Cross and I had fallen asleep, and I heard the terrible screaming siren and opened my eyes in a panic, first because I didn’t understand what was happening and then because I did. Already, Cross had scrambled out of bed and reached for his clothes. In the not‑fully‑dark darkness, his penis was swinging, his thighs and chest were pale. The truth was that I had never really looked at his naked body, that even when given chances, I’d averted my eyes (I was not at all sure that a penis was a thing I wanted to see), and I wouldn’t have been looking at this moment if the room had been light or the alarm hadn’t been wailing. These distractions, the fact that he was distracted, allowed me. Then our eyes met, and he said, “Get up”‑I think he might have been shouting, but his voice was barely audible over the alarm. I stood. I had my nightgown on already; sometimes, though he didn’t like it when I did, I’d pull it on again after we’d had sex. He fastened his pants, shrugged on his shirt and sweater. He reached for the doorknob, then looked back at me, and yelled, “Come on.” In the threshold of the door, he hesitated, turning his head both ways down the hall. To the right was Martha’s and my room, two other rooms, the bathroom, a fire escape door that led I didn’t know where; to the left were more rooms and the staircase to the common room. From behind Cross, I looked into the hall, and remarkably, no one was in it yet. Cross took off. He went right, dashing down the hall and pushing through the fire escape door, and I thought, Oh my God! and then I realized the fire alarm was already going, he couldn’t set it off, and the door had not yet swung shut behind him when Diana Trueblood and Abby Sciver emerged from their room, both of them wearing fleece sweatshirts over their nightgowns.

  What I felt, standing there, was abandoned. It seemed nothing so much as rude for Cross to have sprinted away like that, without saying good‑bye, without kissing me quickly or even touching my shoulder or my cheek.

  The hall had become crowded, and over Diana’s and Abby’s heads I made eye contact with Martha‑she had exited our room, seen me, turned around and come out again, this time carrying my coat and running shoes. When she handed them to me, Martha raised her eyebrows: Where’s Cross? I shook my head: We didn’t get caught.

  Outside, the siren was immediately quieter, as if the sound were wrapped in a blanket. The air was icy. We stood in a cluster in front of the entrance to Elwyn’s, our breath visible, and some girls were barefoot and then someone spread a sweatshirt on the ground, and all the barefoot girls crushed onto it, pressing into one another. Mrs. Elwyn called out our names and checked us off on her list, and girls complained and swore in hoarse voices, but there was also a certain festivity to the moment‑fire drills were always a little bit festive.

  Groups similar to ours stood in front of the entrances to other dorms. All the dorms on our side of the circle had emptied into the courtyard, and you could look into the rooms where the lights were on and the shades were up and see people’s posters, the sweaters on the top shelves of open closets. Among the boys outside Barrow’s, I searched for Cross and I found him, in his puffy black coat‑so he’d made it all the way back to his room with time to spare. He was talking to Devin and some other boys, and I felt a momentary confusion. Had we really just been lying in the same bed, did we even know each other at all? He was only forty feet from me, but there might as well have been a deep lake between us.

  There was, in the swiftness with which he’d slipped from the dorm, something almost offensive. He’d made it out unseen only by a matter of seconds, which still meant he’d made it out unseen; it was the same as if he’d been sleeping all night in his own bed. What I wished was that he’d been as disoriented as I had, that he hadn’t thought to use the fire door (only I would not have thought to use the fire door) and he’d come down the main staircase with me, both sheepish and aloof as the other girls looked at us, and then he’d slunk over to his dorm, and maybe he wouldn’t be caught by a teacher, or maybe I did want him to be caught, I wanted both of us to be‑we wouldn’t get kicked out because breaking visitation was a minor offense, but everyone would know. My regret surged and billowed, as regret does in the middle of the night; everything had happened so quickly, the chance to have caused a different outcome was still so recent. Later, after we were allowed back inside, after I’d gone to sleep in the room with Martha and awakened in the morning, I thought that in the moment of standing outside our separate dorms, it hadn’t been too late. I could have gone to him, I could have created a reason or just created a scene; I could have wept. It was like being drunk, how you so rarely feel drunk enough to do the thing you want to, you still feel pinned back by your own sense of the rational or the proper, but the next day, hung over, you realize just how drunk you were. You had a window of opportunity. If you had used it, you probably would have embarrassed yourself, but in not using it, you wasted something irretrievable.

  As the alarm blared, it was so cold and most people weren’t wearing coats. Some of the girls around me had started howling up toward the sky, like wolves. “Let us back inside,” Isolde Haberny cried to no one in particular, and Jean Kohlhepp said‑she wasn’t crooning, she said it plainly‑“I just want this to be over with.”

  Now I think, Jean. Jean! You got your wish. The fire drill is finished, but so is everything else. Did we believe we could pick and choose what passed quickly? Today, even the boring parts, even when it was freezing outside and half the girls were barefoot‑all of it was a long time ago.

  I didn’t pay much attention at curfew two nights later when I saw Hillary Tompkins, Hillary whose sleeping bag I thought of as my own, with Cross’s dried cum all over it. Hillary was rarely in the dorm at night, but I knew there was a big test in AP Chemistry the next morning, and if I assumed anything, I assumed Hillary had stayed over to study.

  Then she raised her hand during announcements, and when Mrs. Elwyn called on her, Hillary said, “Yesterday in my room, I found some underwear, and they were not clean.”

  Other girls laughed, and Hillary was almost smiling, but she also seemed sincerely irritated. “I threw them away,” she continued, “so if they were yours, I guess you have one less pair of underwear. I have no idea how they got there, but please try to have some consideration and don’t throw your crusty underwear into other people’s rooms.”

  Gina Marquez, a boisterous junior, cried, “Hear, hear!”
and started clapping, and almost everyone else clapped, too. My face was burning, and tremors of anxiety shot through my chest. I glanced at Martha, who was not applauding and not smiling. But she also was not looking at me, her eyes were not wide with sympathy. Martha was the kind of person who would never leave her underwear around, whereas I was the kind of person who thought I wouldn’t but actually would. The fire drill, Martha’s posture seemed to say, was no excuse.

  “Was it a G‑string?” Gina called, and Mrs. Elwyn said, “Settle down, ladies.”

  It wasn’t a G‑string. The underwear were white with moons and stars; the moons were blue slivers, and the stars were small and yellow.

  I had decided well ahead of time that I wouldn’t, on the eve of Valentine’s Day, stay up late and go digging through the bucket of flowers. I’d just go to sleep and in the morning, whatever would be there would be there. After all, it was especially unseemly for a senior to show eagerness.

  I had sent pink carnations to Martha, Sin‑Jun, and, in the end, also to Cross. I couldn’t take the risk of sending him a white carnation or a rose, but I also couldn’t bear to send him nothing. On the card, I wrote, Cross, Happy Valentine’s Day! Love, Lee. Surely this would release the pressure of my longing a little.

  And then at three o’clock in the morning, I awakened for the fourth time, amidst swirling repetitive dreams about the flowers‑that he had sent me none, that he had sent me some but I had not been able to find water to put them in, that he had sent a dozen roses to Aspeth and each of them had been grotesquely huge, an eight‑foot bouquet. I went to the bathroom and when I was washing my hands afterward, looking at myself in the mirror above the sinks, I knew what I would do, what I’d been planning to do all along.

  The common room was light‑its lights, like the hall lights, always stayed on through the night‑but silent. There were two plastic buckets, and the sight of them made my heart lurch; how unsettling it was for the question I had wondered about for so long to actually be answered. My fingers trembled as I approached, and I looked around the common room, just to make sure no one was lurking. When I was standing with the buckets in front of me, I reached for one flower, then another and another. I was handling them gently at first, planning to leave no evidence of my search, but soon I was shoving through them, pushing aside the ones with someone else’s name on the front of the note. Which had been, so far, all of them. By the time I found the first with my name, my search had taken on the quality of a binge. And that note was only from Martha‑the note was around a rose‑but I didn’t bother to open it because I recognized her handwriting. In the whole rest of the first bucket, there was nothing for me.

  I moved on to the next one, which contained about half as many flowers; this time, I checked the roses first. And then I saw one with my name, the letters all in caps, in blue ink, and I felt a crazed glee, a balloon of exhilaration. I was ripping it open, and it was taking way too long‑it must have taken less than a single second‑and I was thrilled and hot and shaking with gratitude, thinking Finally, finally, finally, and these feelings spilled over into the point of recognizing that the flower was not from Cross but from Aubrey‑from Aubrey? Aubrey? –and so at the same time, the traces of my earlier happiness were making me think, Maybe Cross is my boyfriend now, maybe I convinced him over the last few months, it took a while but he saw that I had good in me, while, because I had realized the truth‑it was like line sprints in basketball, how on the last one down the length of the court you were going so fast that you couldn’t stop immediately even though the drill was over‑I also was thinking, Why the fuck would Aubrey send me a rose? But he was only a sophomore, and a boy, and probably didn’t understand the way the flower exchange worked. The card said, You have made a lot of progress in math. Good job! From, Aubrey.

  My own delight, born and killed off in front of no one, was humiliating; it was humiliating that I was someone who cared so much about things so small. And this disappointment was a good check, but still, after digging through the remaining flowers, I managed to be disappointed again to find that Cross had sent me nothing. No one had besides Martha and Aubrey‑not even Sin‑Jun. As with a binge, I had the wish then to undo what had just happened. Even if the results were the same and I’d still receive only two flowers, why couldn’t I get up in the morning like a normal person, remember that it was Valentine’s Day as I was passing through the common room on the way to breakfast, calmly pull out my flowers, put them in a vase back in my room, and forget about the whole thing?

  It turned out to be worse than I thought. I discovered in the morning that Martha had gotten seven flowers‑certainly in the past, before she’d become prefect, she’d never gotten more than four‑and one was from Cross. She put all of ours in the same vase, and we didn’t discuss them at all, except that she said to me, “Your note was funny.” But she didn’t ask if Cross had sent me a flower, or tell me he’d sent one to her. The way I found out was by looking through her notes myself, when she was out of the room. The flower he’d given her was a pink carnation, as all of hers were. But still. It wasn’t that Cross hadn’t sent flowers; it was that he hadn’t sent flowers to me.

  The next thing that happened‑this was near the end of February‑was that Cross hurt his ankle. After Valentine’s Day had passed without comment, except that he’d said when he came over the next time, “Thanks for the flower,” a period of eight days went by without his visiting. When I saw him in the dining hall on the eighth night, I passed within three feet of him and stared straight ahead. I don’t know if I was trying to show him that I cared or that I didn’t, but either way, it worked; he awakened me in the night and we went to Hillary’s room and said nothing, either of us, about his absence. I didn’t have the feeling it had anything to do with the carnation I’d sent; the carnation, it turned out, hadn’t seemed to have much significance one way or the other.

  I wondered if the balance between us was shifting. Not that things had ever really been balanced‑I was in love with him, and he was unreadable to me‑but that imbalance had had its own patterns, and also its own clarity.

  I’d been having the sense lately that I ought to pull back a little. I skipped three of his basketball games in a row, and that was why I wasn’t there the day he tore his ankle ligament. They were playing Armony, whose center was six six. Cross went up for a layup, got fouled‑Armony’s center blocked his shot‑and came down on his ankle. He ended up having to go to the hospital, where they wrapped his ankle and put him on crutches; obviously, with less than three weeks left until spring break, he was out for the season.

  I found out all of this hours later, when I pieced together the sequence of events from the conversation at dinner and from Martha, who’d been apprised of the incident by Mr. Byden because they’d decided to delay a disciplinary committee meeting scheduled for that night. Listening to my classmates at dinner, I felt an initial spike of fear that he’d been seriously hurt. When I realized he hadn’t, what I felt was a sense of territoriality‑didn’t the misfortune belong to me, too? “Is he back from the hospital?” I asked. It was the first thing I had said, and only the two people sitting closest to me turned. One of them was Dede and the other was John Brindley, who’d also been in the taxi that time freshman year.

  “I’m pretty sure he’s back in the dorm by now,” John said. “Are you gonna go by?”

  I was uncertain at first that he was even talking to me. Given my link to Cross, it was a perfectly reasonable question. But given that that link was invisible, the question was bizarre. Why on earth would I go by Cross Sugarman’s room? We hardly knew each other.

  “Why would Lee go see Sug?” Dede said, and John looked between the two of us. What have you heard? I longed to ask. If he’d been a jerk, a guy who liked to make innuendos, surely he’d have revealed more. But John was nice, and it was possible that the question was just arbitrary.

  “No reason,” he said, and I said, trying to sound low‑key, “I might go by.” I felt Dede star
ing at me and did not meet her gaze.

  And then there occurred a period after dinner when I was planning to go. John’s question had given me permission‑after all, he was the one who’d thought up the idea of my visiting. At eight fifty‑five, because visitation started at nine, I brushed my teeth and sprayed on perfume and then I looked at myself in the mirror and sat down at my desk. How could I go to Cross’s dorm? Who knew who’d be there‑presumably Devin would‑or what if Cross was just hanging out in the common room, maybe he’d ordered pizza and was watching TV and the other guys sitting around wouldn’t understand why I was there, and there was a good chance that neither would Cross. So either he’d be not outright rude but aloof, or else he’d be polite, he’d try to make me feel comfortable, and his trying would be the worst part‑the effort of it all. And what were the chances of his being a little woozy but clearly glad to see me, of scooting over and then, when I sat next to him on the couch, resting his arm around my shoulders, of neither of us needing to explain anything except that I’d ask how his ankle was? The chances were infinitesimal. I bent over in the chair and leaned my forehead against the heels of my palms. To long for him like this‑it was excruciating. And it was excruciating that he was always so close by. For the whole year, it had been like this, the proximity of our dorms, the knowledge that I literally could, in less than a minute, get up and walk out of the room and find him and touch him, but that really I couldn’t do this at all‑it made me crazy. No crush is worse than a boarding school crush; college is bigger and more diluted, and in the office, at least you get a break from each other at night.