Prep

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  It was unbearable to know that to act would be to mess things up, to know that my own impulses were untrustworthy. I just wanted it to be the middle of the night and for him to come over (certainly, on crutches, he would not be coming over for some time) and to lie on me and for me to stop wanting everything I wanted when he wasn’t around. When I think of Cross now, a big part of what I remember is that sense of waiting, of relying on chance. I couldn’t go to his room‑it was decided. And that meant that in order to convey to him my concern about his injury, I would have to run into him in the hall when few or no other students were around, and when I did, I’d have to quickly intuit his mood to find out if adjustments were to be made so that we could keep seeing each other.

  I realize now: I ceded all the decisions to him. But that wasn’t how it felt! At the time, it seemed so clear that the decisions belonged to him. Rules existed; they were unnamed and intractable.

  I went to the play with Martha, and when Cross came onstage‑the play was Hamlet and after he’d had to quit basketball, he’d been assigned the part of Fortinbras, which previously Mrs. Komaroff, the drama teacher, had simply cut‑everyone laughed. We weren’t really supposed to see him as Fortinbras; the point was that it was Cross Sugarman on crutches, in an ancient mink coat. He had, at that point, not been to my room for nine days.

  The roles of Hamlet and Ophelia were played by Jesse Middlestadt and Melodie Ryan. Jesse was a senior from Cambridge, thin and flush‑cheeked and jumpy. He was someone girls liked without having crushes on him‑I was always glad when I ended up at his table in the dining hall because he talked a lot and he was entertaining‑and someone that I was surprised guys seemed to like, too. Melodie was a junior with long curly blond hair, a widow’s peak, and big blue eyes. I knew she was considered very attractive, and what I always thought of when I saw her was how as a freshman she’d gone out with a senior named Chris Pryce and how, according to rumor, the two of them had had anal sex. It was never clear to me whether they’d done so once, or repeatedly; either way, whenever she came onstage, I’d think, But doesn’t it hurt? I kept wondering if she’d wanted it, too, or if she’d just been accommodating Chris.

  In the scene before Ophelia drowns herself, Melodie and Jesse kissed, and I felt jealous of them, of how, because of their parts in the play, they’d had to become comfortable kissing so publicly, how during the weeks of rehearsal they’d had that kiss to count on. Every day, they’d known they would touch another person, and it didn’t depend on anything external; it didn’t matter what they did or didn’t do.

  I should have signed up for drama, I thought, but for that also, it had become too late.

  The same day that I got rejected from Brown and accepted by Mount Holyoke and the University of Michigan (at that point, I’d already been accepted by Beloit, rejected by Tufts, and had a rejection yet to come from Wesleyan), I ran into Cross outside Dean Fletcher’s classroom. The last period of the day had just ended, and both of us were alone.

  “Hey,” he said. “Congratulations on Michigan.”

  I couldn’t imagine how he knew.

  “You think you’ll go?”

  “Probably.” I definitely would and the reason I would, which I’d discuss with no one except Mrs. Stanchak and my parents, was that tuition would be a lot cheaper than at a private college, plus they were offering partial financial aid. Mount Holyoke was closer to Boston, but it wasn’t that close, and by then I knew without having to say it to myself or to anyone else‑it was all ending. The parts of Ault that didn’t have to do with Cross were ending and the parts that did, and if I wasn’t a girl he talked to in front of other people, I certainly wasn’t a girl he’d travel across the state for, or host in his dorm at Harvard. All of which made a conversation about college seem, between the two of us, utterly irrelevant. Hours before, when I’d opened the three letters, I’d cared a great deal‑I’d cried, of course, over Brown, before growing bored with my own tears‑but with Cross in front of me, it just seemed far away. It was March, and we attended Ault, and our lives after this were as distant as a bazaar in Morocco.

  I gestured toward his crutches. “Are you in pain?”

  He said, “Not really,” in a way that made me think the opposite had to be true. His tone was upbeat; I couldn’t imagine Cross complaining bitterly about anything that truly bothered him, and, honestly, I had difficulty imagining what would bother him, though surely there were things that did. For the first time, it occurred to me that maybe it had been rude, maybe I’d been somehow neglectful, not to get in touch with him right after his injury. I had a flashing memory‑why hadn’t I thought about this before?‑of how nice he’d been when I’d fainted at the mall our freshman year.

  “I’m sorry this happened,” I said.

  “I don’t blame you.”

  “No, but I mean‑”

  “I know what you mean. I’m joking.”

  Looking up at him, I wanted, once again, to say how much I loved him. How could I want to say it even in daylight? From outside, there was the sound of a boy yelling something, and then another boy yelling back. It was three in the afternoon, that lull after classes and before practice. I cannot say that I was surprised when he cocked his head toward Dean Fletcher’s classroom. “You want to go in there?”

  My pulse quickened, and I could feel the heaviness in my belly that was both excitement and anxiety. Very quietly, I said, “Sure.”

  The door to the classroom wasn’t all the way shut, and he pushed it open with the tip of his right crutch, then shut it again, still using the crutch, from the other side. It was a gray day, and gray light came through the windows; Cross did not turn on the overhead lights. It was a classroom with a long rectangular table, and he pulled two chairs out from the table, facing each other, and after he’d sat in one, I thought the other one was for me; then I saw that he meant it to be for his foot. I hovered to one side, waiting to be directed, and I hated my own giggling passivity. Did he say what he said next because he knew I wanted to be told what to do, or had he decided already, before we entered the classroom?

  Either way: I said, “Am I supposed to sit in your lap?” and he said, “If you want to” (of course, I asked, “Am I hurting you?” and he said, “No, not at all”), and I thought that things were okay, that he just wanted to hold me like I wanted to hold him, but we had been kissing for less than a minute when he murmured, “If you gave me a blow job now, that would be so great.”

  It was a hardwood floor, and my knees ached almost right away. And I didn’t want to lean the weight of my upper body against his thighs because‑because as long as this was supposed to be, for him, an enjoyable experience, he deserved to enjoy it entirely; my posture didn’t need to be his concern.

  And now there was no doubt: I had seen his penis, I was seeing it at this very moment. So strong was my own wish for him not to see my body that I had at times imagined he shared it; clearly, he did not. Why was taking off your clothes not embarrassing to other people? His pulled‑down corduroy pants and boxers didn’t seem remotely sexy; they made me think of him shitting. And which students would sit on this chair tomorrow having no idea Cross’s bare ass had rested against it? And the warm, sour, thrusting weight in my mouth, the pressure of his palm on the back of my head‑this was what I had missed in the last few weeks, this was what I was being denied?

  With a great groan, he pulled out of my mouth and came all over my sweater (it was tan wool, with cables); while he was still not paying attention, I rubbed at the cum with the back of my sleeve, already imagining asking Martha to send out the sweater with her other dry cleaning. I stood and stepped away, wanting to leave‑in my dorm, he was always the one who made us part, and I was the one who would have let him stay forever‑and the unpleasantness of the moment felt like something to hold on to; if I could keep it, I would never again be at his mercy.

  He had pulled up his pants but not yet buckled his belt. Still seated, he said, “Come here,” and I was skeptical and i
rritated and I stepped closer doubtfully, and then he wrapped his arms around my waist and pressed his face to my breasts and hugged me tightly and my eyes filled with tears. There was nothing to do but rest my hands behind his shoulders, to touch his hair with my fingers; he always said how soft my hair was, but the truth, which I never told him, was that so was his.

  Spring break was pretty much like Christmas break had been, except that the house was empty during the day because my brothers’ vacation had already occurred. In the quiet, I sat around watching television and not showering and a few times, in especially pathetic moments, opening my parents’ Ault directory, which I was pretty sure they had never used for anything, to look at Cross’s listing. This was, of course, a thing I had already done so many times on campus that the sight of his typed name and home address had long ago lost their potency.

  When I saw family friends, which I tried to do as little as possible, they congratulated me on Michigan, and in accepting their good wishes, it became real to me that that was where I’d spend the next four years. On the Saturday before I was to return to Ault, my mother and I drove to Ann Arbor, where it was thirty degrees and the sidewalks were still icy. We wandered around the cold campus and she bought me a hooded sweatshirt, even though I told her I didn’t need it. We drove back to South Bend in the evening, because my father had said it was fine with him if we stayed overnight at a hotel but it wasn’t going to be on his nickel.

  He was the one who took me to the airport, and I was, again, overwhelmingly relieved to be leaving. He hugged me by the car, gave me a five‑dollar bill to buy lunch, then drove away. After I checked my suitcase, I walked through the terminal crying. When you go to boarding school, you’re always leaving your family, not once but over and over, and it’s not like it is when you’re in college because you’re older then and you’re sort of supposed to be gone from them. I cried because of how guilty I felt, and because of how indulgent my guilt was. Standing in a store that sold bottled water and birthday cards and T‑shirts that said Indiana in ornate writing, less than twenty minutes away from my family’s house, I missed them so much I was tempted to call my mother at work and ask her to come wait with me for my plane; she’d have been alarmed, possibly frantic, but she’d have done it. But then she’d know what she’d probably only suspected‑how messed up I really was, how much I’d been misleading them for the last four years.

  It would be better once I got on the plane, better still back on campus. But while I was in their city, it just seemed like such a mistake that I had ever left home, such an error in judgment on all our parts.

  I received the note from the headmaster’s office more than a month after spring break. It was on Mr. Byden’s official stationery, with the crest of Ault at the top, though the note itself, hardly seeming to warrant such formality, was only two lines long: There’s something I’d like to discuss with you. Please ask Mrs. Dershey to set up a time for us to meet. A cold dread came over me. So this was what it was like to be busted‑of course, in the end, I’d been caught. And it did not feel romantic or adventurous in the least. It was twelve‑fifty p.m., and I was alone, when I’d always imagined that Cross and I would be caught together. Maybe I’d been ratted on and Cross hadn’t‑maybe another girl (Hillary Tompkins would be my first guess) had said she’d seen me with an unidentified boy.

  I walked upstairs from the mail room and headed straight to Mr. Byden’s office; it would be best just to know the damage. And also to get some reassurance‑probably I would not be kicked out, but that was the first thing I wanted to confirm.

  When Mrs. Dershey saw me, she said, “About the article, right? Wait just one moment.” She stood and knocked on the door to Mr. Byden’s office. I looked out the window, which offered a view of the grassy circle. Directly across the circle from the schoolhouse was the dining hall, and I could see people leaving lunch. Feeling just as I had when I’d learned my junior year that I might be spring‑cleaned (how abruptly your life could become derailed, and how sickeningly familiar it seemed when it did), I located Martha walking with Sin‑Jun; though I couldn’t make out their faces, I recognized Sin‑Jun’s black hair and Martha’s shirt, which was a pink button‑down.

  “Lee,” Mrs. Dershey said. “He can see you right now.”

  Mr. Byden was at his desk. “Come in, come in,” he said. “Don’t be shy. If you’ll just have a seat there while I finish up one piece of business.”

  Mr. Byden tried to make himself accessible to students‑my sophomore year he’d dressed up as Santa Claus for the last roll call before Christmas, and he taught an elective on ethics every spring‑but he still intimidated me, and I’d managed to avoid ever having a real conversation with him. He knew my name because he made it a point to memorize all the new students’ names within the first month of classes. Whenever we’d passed each other since my freshman year and he’d said, “Hello, Lee,” or, “Good evening to you, Lee,” I’d been tempted to tell him he could forget me, that it was okay if he used the space in his brain to retain, say, the phone number of some rich old alum.

  I sat facing his desk, in a chair that had blue‑and‑red‑striped brocade fabric and wooden arms. Another chair just like mine was a few feet away, and behind me‑I surveyed the room while Mr. Byden wrote‑were a couch and a low cherry table and several more armchairs. There was also a fireplace, with a white marble mantel, and above it a portrait of Jonas Ault, circa 1860. I had never been in Mr. Byden’s office before, but I recognized the portrait from the school catalog. Jonas Ault, as we heard in chapel every year on Founder’s Day, had been the captain of a whale‑hunting ship, the rebellious youngest son of a wealthy Boston family. One night before he departed for a sea voyage, his young daughter Elsa pleaded with him to stay at home, and Ault refused. While at sea, the men encountered a storm so severe that Ault swore, as the ship rocked and waves crashed over the gunwales, that if he made it back to shore alive he would give up the whaling trade. He and all his men survived, but when they returned to port, he learned that three days prior Elsa had died of scarlet fever. In her memory he founded Ault School. (Not Ault Academy‑that’s what my parents sometimes called it, but the correct name was Ault School.) Though the story possessed a certain romantic doom that appealed to me, what I always wondered was, why did Ault found a school for boys in memory of his daughter? Even if she’d lived, she would have had to wait until she was 104 years old before she was allowed to attend.

  “Allrighty,” Mr. Byden said. “I appreciate your prompt response. If you’ll bear with me, I’ve got a few questions for you, and then I’ll more fully explain why I called you in. Does that sound acceptable?”

  “Yes,” I said. Then I added, “sir.” I meant it to be respectful, but coming out of my mouth, the word sounded almost sarcastic. The Southern students I knew pulled off sir and ma’am effortlessly.

  “You came here as a freshman, correct?”

  It wasn’t the question I’d expected. I nodded.

  “And how would you characterize your Ault experience? Just in the broadest terms, and keep in mind that there’s no right answer.”

  This, I knew, was never true.

  “I like it here,” I said. Meaning, Don’t kick me out. Preferably, don’t even bust me.

  “Tell me about the highlights.”

  Maybe I wasn’t in his office because of Cross. Because surely this couldn’t be the way most busts began. And, as I considered it, it occurred to me that if I were going to be busted, it would probably be not by Mr. Byden but by Mrs. Elwyn, or possibly Dean Fletcher.

  “Just tell me what comes to mind first,” he said.

  I glanced out the window and saw several seniors, including Martha and Sin‑Jun, lying on the circle. Since spring break, even before it had become truly warm, there’d almost always been seniors sitting or lying in a group on the circle; it was like a massive volunteer effort they were completing in shifts. I hadn’t once hung out there because I knew it would make me feel conspicuous and l
ike I was wasting time. It had never bothered me to sit in the dorm, listening to music, staring into space, but wasting time alone felt less like wasting time than like keeping my despair in check.

  I looked back at Mr. Byden. The highlight of my Ault experience, as I saw it at that moment, was Cross. “The highlight of my Ault experience has been my friends,” I said.

  “There’s something about living in the dorms, isn’t there?” Mr. Byden said. “A real closeness that develops.”

  “And Martha and I have roomed together for three years, which is nice.”

  “Believe me, I know all about you and Martha. I hear great things about the two of you.”

  From whom? I thought.

  “How about academics?” Mr. Byden said. “There was a bit of a problem with precalculus, was there not?”

  I felt a new flare of panic‑maybe this was what our meeting was about, I thought, maybe after all these months, they’d figured out I’d cheated‑but Mr. Byden was smiling. His expression seemed to say, Math‑isn’t it pesky?

  “Things have been better this year,” I said. “I’ve been able to stay on top of it.”

  “And you’re off to the University of Michigan if I’m not mistaken.”

  I nodded.

  “A fine institution,” he said. “One of the really outstanding state schools.”