Prep

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  Angie shook her head. “What kind of alcohol had she bought?”

  “Probably vodka. That’s the one you can’t smell on people’s breath, right?”

  “I take it you’re not a drinker yourself.”

  “No.”

  “Do you think being here on scholarship makes you less likely to violate school rules?”

  I thought of Cross and felt a little injured‑why exactly did Angie think I was less likely to violate school rules? But all I said was, “Possibly.”

  “How about other scholarship kids? Do they drink or smoke?”

  “I don’t really think of people as scholarship and not‑scholarship.”

  “You don’t know who’s receiving aid and who isn’t?”

  “You know. But nobody discusses it.”

  “Then how do you know?”

  “You can tell by people’s rooms‑whether or not they have stereos, or if the girls have flowered bedspreads, or if they have silver picture frames. Just the quality of their stuff. And their clothes‑everyone orders clothes from the same catalogs, so you’ll see lots of people in an identical sweater, and you know exactly how much it cost. And things like, you can send your laundry to a service or you can do it yourself in the dorm machines. Or even some of the sports, how much the equipment costs. Ice hockey is a really expensive sport, but something like basketball isn’t that much.”

  “Is it safe to assume you don’t have a flowered bedspread or silver picture frames?”

  “I have a flowered bedspread.” I had asked for it for my birthday freshman year. As for silver picture frames, as for everything else‑Martha was my beard.

  “There’s another thing,” I said. “Probably the biggest clue about who’s getting financial aid and who isn’t is race. Nobody ever talks about it, but it’s just sort of known that people from certain minorities are almost always on scholarship.”

  “Which minorities?”

  I hesitated. “You can probably guess.”

  “You’re not going to offend me, Lee.”

  “Well, blacks and Latinos. That’s basically it. People from other minorities, like Asians or Indians, usually aren’t on scholarship, and blacks and Latinos usually are.”

  “So how can you tell if a white student is on scholarship?”

  “I doubt there are that many of them who are,” I said. “That many of us.” For a moment, I couldn’t think of anyone in the senior class besides me, and then I remembered Scott LaRosa, who was from Portland and was captain of the boys’ ice hockey team. He had a pale meaty face and a Maine accent, but he also was big and confident. In our class, I couldn’t come up with anyone else.

  “Why do you think so few white students receive financial aid?”

  “We don’t add diversity to the school. And there are plenty of white kids whose parents can pay.”

  “It seems like you’ve spent a lot of time here feeling left out.”

  Once, this observation might have made tears well in my eyes‑she understood –but now it just seemed like part of the conversation. And besides, though I wanted Angie Varizi to like me, I was not entirely sure that I liked her.

  “Of course I’ve felt left out some of the time. But that’s to be expected, right?” I smiled. “I’m kind of like this nobody from Indiana.”

  “Do you feel different from your family when you go back home?”

  Out the window, a breeze rose, and I could hear the leaves in the beech tree rustle. “It would be depressing if I did, right?” I said. I was quiet, and then I said, “You know how we were talking before about why I came to Ault? And I said two reasons? Well, there’s another one I didn’t say. It’s kind of hard to explain, but it’s probably the main reason.” I took a deep breath. “When I was ten, my family went on vacation to Florida. It was a big deal, like neither of my parents had been before. It was the summer, and we drove down. We were staying on Tampa Bay, and one day, we were driving around and sightseeing, or maybe we got lost, but we ended up in this neighborhood with huge houses. It wasn’t like a new development‑the houses looked old‑fashioned. A lot of them were white shingled, and they had bay windows and porches with rocking chairs on them and big green lawns and palm trees. In front of one house, a boy and girl who were probably brother and sister were playing soccer. I said to my dad‑I was at the age where you don’t really understand the difference between something costing a thousand dollars and a million dollars‑I said, ‘We should buy a house like this.’ I thought they were pretty, and I thought my family would be happy in one. And my dad started laughing. He said, ‘No, no.’ ” I had, I remembered, been sitting in the front seat beside my father; my mother had been in back with my brothers, because Tim was an infant. I’d felt close to my father in this moment, believing I’d come up with a good idea. “My dad said, ‘Lee, people like us don’t live in these houses. These people keep their money in Swiss bank accounts. They eat caviar for dinner. They send their sons to boarding school.’ And I said to him”‑Had it all really hinged on this, had this been the reason I’d become who I was, the reason I’d enrolled at Ault? In a way, it couldn’t have been because it was far too small. But maybe it always comes down to small reasons, incremental turns, conversations you almost didn’t have, or heard only part of‑“I said to my dad, ‘Do they send their daughters to boarding school?’ ”

  “Wow,” Angie said.

  “By the time I applied to Ault and other places, I doubt my parents remembered that conversation. And I didn’t remind them of it, obviously.”

  “You were ready to trade up,” Angie said.

  “I’m not sure I’d put it like that. I mean, I was ten at the time.” I could tell that we were near the end of the interview. During parts of it, my heart rate had sped up, my cheeks had flushed‑there was something exciting about talking to her, as if I had waited a long time to say these things. But thinking of my family in the car together, none of us knowing that in four years I would leave home, made me feel sad and emptied out.

  “Listen, Lee,” Angie said. “You’ve given me a lot of great information. I can’t thank you enough for your candor.” She passed me a business card, and the part that said The New York Times was in that fancy script just like at the top of the newspaper. “Call me if you have any questions.”

  When I left the room, I passed Darden Pittard in the hallway. “What am I in for?” he asked.

  “It was kind of weird,” I said.

  “Good weird or bad weird?”

  Five minutes earlier, I’d have said good weird, but an odd feeling was expanding in me. I had told Angie Varizi a lot about myself, and it was hard to say why, except that she’d asked. “I don’t know,” I said. “Just weird.”

  During the break between third and fourth period, I found Martha in the spot where we often met, by the community service bulletin board in the mail room. Other students buzzed past us.

  “How’d it go?” she said. “Was the guy nice?” She unwrapped a granola bar and broke it in two, holding a piece toward me. I shook my head.

  “It was a woman,” I said. “I guess she was nice, but I feel like maybe I said too much. She asked a lot about tuition‑type stuff.” The strange part was, the more I thought about it, the less I could remember what I’d said.

  “Really?” Martha’s mouth was full, which made her voice garbled, but I could tell from her raised eyebrows that she was surprised. She swallowed. “Why would she want to know about that?”

  “I have no idea.”

  We looked at each other. Surely there was a conversation Martha and I could have had somewhere along the way about the differences between us, but given that we hadn’t, it was too large to embark upon now.

  “That seems random,” she said.

  “Do you think I should be worried?”

  Martha smiled. “Nah. I bet you were her favorite interview of the day.”

  When it was over, you didn’t need to ask, you knew, and yet‑you could still be caught off guard; your sen
se of the situation could be at odds with your wish for a particular outcome. That Saturday night when I was sitting on the edge of one of the tubs in a T‑shirt and shorts shaving my legs, Martha walked into the dorm bathroom. “I thought you might be in here,” she said.

  “Hey. The dance isn’t over, is it?”

  “No, but it was kind of hot and boring. So you know Aspeth?”

  “You mean Aspeth we’ve gone to school with for four years?”

  Martha bit her lower lip. “She and Sug are good friends, right?”

  “Martha, what are you trying to say?”

  “They were dancing together. A lot.”

  A jittery sensation began to rise from my stomach to my chest. “Do they not usually dance together?”

  “I guess I’ve never really noticed. There was just something obvious about it tonight. Neither of them was dancing with anyone else. And then they were by the snack bar and he was leaning against that railing”‑I knew the snack bar, I knew the railing; I had walked through the activities center many times, but only during the day, when it was quiet and dusty‑looking‑“and she was leaning against him.”

  “Facing him?” I asked.

  “No, no. They were both facing out. I think he had his arms around her waist.” Until this moment, Martha had remained standing by the tile wall. Now, she came and perched on the tub next to me. “I’m sorry, but I thought you’d want to know.”

  I looked at my half‑shaven legs.

  Martha said, “Aspeth is dumb,” and there were many things that Aspeth Montgomery was, but dumb had never been one of them.

  After that, I was on the lookout. And it was true that Cross and Aspeth were often together, but maybe no more than they ever had been. It was late May, and as the weather got nicer, seniors were outside on the circle constantly, an even bigger group‑after lunch and during free periods and on the weekends‑and more than once, as I walked by and pretended not to look at the flock of them, I could make out Aspeth shouting, “I do not!” Or another time: “That’s so gross!” Why didn’t I ever join them? I wanted to, but there would be that one unbearable moment after I approached when I stood on the fringes of the group, and they would shade their eyes and look up and wonder why I was there. There was something I would have to say, there was a place in the grass I would have to sit, a posture I would have to sit in. For other people, these decisions seemed effortless, not decisions at all; for me, they had never stopped being decisions.

  I couldn’t tell anything for sure, though, and I thought that by remaining vigilant, I was protecting myself. Then, in the year’s last issue of The Ault Voice, next to an editorial titled “Plaid Shorts Should Be Allowed in the Schoolhouse,” Low Notes included the line, “C.S. and M.R.: Sugar daddy is singing a new melody.” New issues of The A.V. were distributed once a month at roll call, and those roll calls were unusually quiet, as most students read during the announcements; several teachers always admonished us to put the papers away, and no one did. I, too, read during roll call but I’d taken to avoiding Low Notes in public because I was always terrified‑or maybe I was hopeful‑that there’d be a mention of Cross and me, and that someone would observe me reading it. This meant that it was not until that evening that I read the line and even before I really comprehended it, I felt flooded with a hot nauseated blend of shock and recognition. I was astonished, and also, I was not really surprised at all. And Martha, as usual, wasn’t around‑she was at a meeting‑and she didn’t return to the dorm until curfew. The moment curfew ended, I whispered, “I need to talk to you.”

  In our room, I picked up my copy of the paper and held it out to her. “Look at this.”

  I pointed, and her eyes moved over the page. It seemed to be taking her longer to read it than it should. Finally, she said, “Who’s M.R.?”

  “Melodie Ryan. Who Cross was in Hamlet with. I’ve never heard anything about this, but they must have‑I don’t know. He hasn’t been here for more than a month, Martha,” I said, and I burst into tears.

  She patted my back.

  “It has to be, right? But maybe it’s not because Melodie is spelled I‑E and this is just with a Y. So is it?”

  Martha looked distressed. “I don’t know.”

  “Has he said anything to you? Is he going out with Melodie Ryan and everyone knows and I don’t? Is he going out with Aspeth?”

  “If Cross has a new girlfriend, I don’t know it, either. But, Lee, before you tear yourself apart, remember how silly Low Notes are.”

  “But they’re usually right.” I wiped my nose with the back of my hand. “Remember that one about Katherine Pound and Alexander Héverd, and no one believed it at first? But it was true.”

  “But it can just mean Melodie and Cross hooked up,” Martha said. “Not that they’re a real couple.”

  I started crying harder‑to me, hooking up was being a couple. Apparently, I had persuaded Martha that the Low Note was right, and it hadn’t been hard to do.

  “You need to talk to Cross,” Martha said. “You’re allowed to ask him stuff, Lee. And, at this point, what is there to lose?”

  But the next day was Friday and it seemed to me inappropriate to corner Cross on a weekend. Because (yes, I was nuts, and I also think there’s a decent chance I’d operate on this logic again, given the opportunity) what if he and Melodie had something planned and I interrupted it? Or just ruined his mood before a romantic evening? I hated the idea of being a pain in the ass, the kind of girl who always wanted to talk. Talking to him was, of course, exactly what I wanted to do, but not in a cornering way, not tediously.

  On top of that, it wasn’t just any weekend‑it was the weekend Angie Varizi’s article was supposed to run in the Times. She had warned me that it might be bumped at the last minute, depending on breaking news, but if everything proceeded normally, it would appear on Sunday.

  Looking back on this period, I feel both a retroactive dread and a sense of protectiveness for myself as I was then, for how distraught I felt about Cross, how earnestly sad at the prospect of graduating from Ault. I feel the way you do watching a movie in which a teenage girl is in the house alone at night, in a storm, and the electricity goes out, or a movie in which a young couple share a romantic dinner and emerge from the restaurant into a snowstorm that seems to them beautiful, then climb into their car to drive home along curving roads. The same way you want to yell, Get out of the house! Stop the car! what I want to say to the younger me is, Just go. If you leave now, your memory of Ault will be unspoiled. You will think that your feelings about the school are complicated, but you still will possess the sweet conviction that it was the place that wronged you and not the other way around.

  Over the course of the weekend, I kept forgetting and remembering the article. On Sunday, Martha and I awakened around eight, a little early, but it wasn’t because of that. Walking to the dining hall, we were discussing what shoes we’d wear for our graduation ceremony, which was a week away. At Ault, you wore not a cap and gown but a white dress, and the boys wore khaki pants and navy blazers and straw boaters. Then we started talking about how the year before, Annice Roule had tripped on the stairs leading up to the stage when she went to collect her diploma.

  The usual handful of students was in the dining hall, but the weird thing was, they were all sitting at the same table. The freshmen and sophomores and juniors had joined the seniors Martha and I always sat with‑Jonathan Trenga and Russell Woo, Doug Miles, Jamie Lorison, Jenny and Sally. The other weird thing was that no one was speaking. All their heads were ducked, and I realized that they were reading.

  “Are they reading my article?” I asked Martha, and then, from ten feet away, I could see that they were‑two or three of them were clustered around each copy of the paper. “Holy shit,” I heard Jim Pintane, who was a junior, say. When we reached the table, some of them looked up, and then all of them looked up. For a long moment, no one spoke.

  Finally, in a cold voice, Doug Miles said, “It’s the infamous L
ee Fiora.”

  Everyone at the table was still staring at me.

  “I must admit,” said Jonathan, “I didn’t know you had such strong opinions.” His tone was harder to gauge‑not unfriendly, but not friendly, either.

  “What does it say?” I asked slowly, and when no one answered, Martha said, “This is ridiculous.” She grabbed one of the newspaper sections. “Come on,” she said.

  As I followed her to another table, Doug called, “Hey, Lee.”

  I turned around.

  “Didn’t anyone ever tell you that you don’t piss in your own pool?”

  We sat at another table, side by side, without getting our food. My heart hammered, and my fingers were trembling. The section Martha had taken was open to the second page of the article, not the page where it started. Martha flipped backward. The article started on the front page, I saw‑the front page of the front section. The headline was BOARDING SCHOOLS CLAIM TO CHANGE, STUDENTS TELL DIFFERENT STORY. Below that, in smaller letters, it said WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE WHITE, MIDDLE‑CLASS‑AND AN OUTSIDER. A large photograph featured, oddly enough, the nonwhite Pittard brothers sitting on a couch in a dorm common room. Darden was demonstrating something with his hands and his brother Eli, who was a freshman, was laughing. But the first paragraph was not about the Pittards; it was about me:

  Among the cliques in Lee Fiora’s senior class at Ault School in Raymond, Massachusetts, is a group of male friends known as the “Bank Boys”‑so named, as Miss Fiora explained, “because all their dads work for banks. Not really all of them do, but that’s what it seems like.”

  The clique’s appellation is one of the few references, however oblique, that Ault students make to money. In general, at this school, whose small classes, pristine grounds, and state‑of‑the‑art facilities come with a $22,000 price tag, and at other elite schools across the Northeast, the subject is taboo. Thus is created an environment which, according to Miss Fiora, defers to the rich and shortchanges everyone else‑including Miss Fiora herself. “Of course I feel left out,” Miss Fiora, who receives a financial aid package which covers approximately three quarters of her tuition, recently told a visitor to Ault. “I’m a nobody from Indiana.” Miss Fiora is white; for nonwhite students, particularly African Americans and Hispanics, she feels that the difficulties of life at Ault are only compounded.