Prep

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  It went on and on. Angie Varizi had me expounding on race (presumably because no one else, no one who wasn’t white, had been willing to), saying I suspected that Ault regretted the decision to give me a scholarship, telling the anecdote about the girls buying clothes to hide their alcohol. She had me giving a rundown on how to spot scholarship students based on their possessions and their behavior. And, of course, she had me sharing the story of the house in Florida. Throughout the article, my own comments were juxtaposed with hearty endorsements of the school from Mr. Byden, Dean Fletcher, a sophomore named Ginny Chu, Darden Pittard, and recent graduates. Another student who was not named said about me, “She’s not the most popular person in our grade. Not everyone thrives in a place like this.”

  I read the article, in its entirety, only once, and it was that time in the dining hall. Sometimes as I read, I murmured, “Oh my God,” and Martha patted me. By the end of the article, her hand was set on my arm.

  The mess I had made (had I been the one who’d made this mess?) was so awful that it was hard to absorb or quantify. The person I was as of this moment, the person the article made me, was the precise opposite of the person I had, for the last four years, tried to be. It was the worst possible mistake I could have made.

  “Okay,” Martha said. “We have a week left and then we’re out of here forever. So you’ll just live your life like normal. Let other people freak out, and, yes, they will. But it’s not your problem.”

  “I’m going back to the room.”

  “Listen to me,” she said. “We’re getting breakfast.”

  In the kitchen, we picked up trays, filled our glasses with milk and juice, received plates of steaming pancakes. I felt dizzy with regret. I had been an idiot, I thought. Why on earth had I told Angie Varizi my secrets, what good had I imagined would come from it? This was how it always was with me‑I wasn’t able to tell that something was happening (that I was, for Angie’s benefit, digging my own grave) while it was happening. Every single thing about the article was humiliating. Being on scholarship was bad, being unhappy was worse, and admitting to either one was worst of all. I had been indiscreet. That’s what it was. How much better it would have been to fuck up in a normal, preppy way‑to get caught the week before graduation smoking pot, or skinny‑dipping at midnight in the gym pool. To make politically charged complaints to a New York Times reporter, on the other hand, was just tacky.

  When we carried our trays out to the dining room, we passed three freshmen, girls whose names I didn’t even know, and where normally I’d have looked right past them, I couldn’t keep from making eye contact. I wanted to be able to tell from their expressions whether they’d read the article yet, but their faces were blank. What I felt in that moment looking at them was what I continued to feel until graduation‑the suspicion, but not the certainty, that other people were scorning me, the sense that their scorn was not unjustified, and also the knowledge that maybe they were not thinking of me at all.

  I realized already that this would be, in the context of Ault, a very big deal. Yet at the same time, to most students, it was someone else’s big deal. Only to me was it personal. Maybe when kids went home over the summer, people would say to them: Is your school really that snobby? Was that girl as unhappy as she seemed? But it would be a topic of conversation; it wouldn’t be their life.

  I went to bed before dinner Sunday night‑I just didn’t want to be conscious anymore‑and at one‑fifteen, when I’d already awakened eight or nine times and couldn’t stand it any longer, I rose, changed into a T‑shirt and a pair of sweatpants and left the dorm while Martha snored softly. It had rained that day, and the courtyard was dark and shiny. I could have gone through the basement, which was Cross’s usual route, but I was wholly unafraid of getting caught; I have always believed that extreme circumstances protect you from ordinary dangers, and while I recognize my belief as illogical, I have not yet been proven wrong.

  At first, the common room of Cross’s dorm appeared empty. But when the door shut behind me, a head rose from the couch in front of the television. It was Monty Harr, a freshman. The sound to the TV was off, and Monty’s face looked gray.

  “Where’s Cross’s room?” I asked.

  He blinked at me.

  “Cross Sugarman,” I said. “Which room is his?”

  “At the end of the hall on the left,” Monty finally said. He was rubbing his eyes as I walked away.

  There was a poster of a basketball player on the door, a guy in a green uniform leaping through the air with a blurry crowd behind him. I knocked, and when no one responded, I turned the knob and opened it. The light was on inside, and someone was sitting at a desk. At first, because I was looking for Cross, I thought it was him, but the person looked up and I saw it was Cross’s roommate, Devin. Over the last four years, Devin had gone from skinny to almost fat and he had blond hair, dark eyebrows, and a pug nose.

  My bravado, or whatever had propelled me across the courtyard, dwindled. “Hi,” I said in a quiet voice. I looked around the room; both the beds were unmade, and the only light came from a desk lamp and a lava lamp set on the windowsill. No one was there besides Devin.

  A grin had spread across his face. “It’s the woman of the hour.”

  “Devin, please.” I tried to remember if we had spoken to each other since I’d assassinated him in ninth grade. Not much, but still‑weren’t we both people? Might not my palpable desperation elicit sympathy from him just this once?

  “Please what?” he said. “I have no idea where he is, if that’s what you’re asking. Anyway, isn’t it kind of late for a young girl to be out by herself?”

  “I know what time it is.”

  “After that article today, I’d be careful about giving Byden a reason to toss me out.”

  “You don’t get kicked out for breaking visitation the first time,” I said.

  “Forgive me.” Devin smirked. “I didn’t realize you’ve never broken visitation before.”

  “Fuck you,” I said, and maybe my mistake was being the one to make things definitively ugly.

  “I’m tempted to say fuck you, too, but I think my roommate’s got that taken care of.”

  I turned to leave, and Devin said, “A quick question.”

  I paused (of course I did) in the threshold.

  “Are you fish or cheese?”

  I didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about.

  “You have to be one,” he said. “So which is it?”

  Still, I simply looked at him.

  “For the list. You know, we’re keeping a list, we’re checking it twice.” He was actually singing, and it occurred to me for the first time that perhaps he was drunk or stoned. He opened his desk drawer, saying as he did, “You’re one of our missing seniors. Your roommate, too, as a matter of fact, so it’d be great to kill two birds with one stone tonight.” From the drawer, he’d removed a rumpled school catalog. He opened it, flipped to the back, and passed it to me. This was where the class lists were, and in the spaces between people’s last names and the place they were from‑between, for instance, Deirdre Danielle Schwartz and Scarsdale, New York –it said, in capital letters, written with a red marker: FISH. They didn’t all say FISH; some said CHEESE. And they weren’t all written with red marker‑some were in black or blue ballpoint pen. Also, they weren’t next to everyone’s names; they were next to some girls’, and no boys’. I glanced several times between the catalog and Devin; I wasn’t sure what I was reading, but I wasn’t uninterested. Aspeth, I saw, was CHEESE; Horton Kinnelly was also CHEESE; Hillary Tompkins was FISH.

  Finally‑not because he wanted to give me the gift of an explanation, I think, but just because he was frustrated by my lack of understanding‑Devin said, “It’s what you taste like. All girls are one or the other. Get it?”

  A question formed inside me, but before I asked it aloud, the answer formed itself, too: No, not when you kiss them. Not then. Knowing what the list represented, it seemed
like I ought to throw the catalog across the room. But the problem was, I was still curious. The list was so‑it was so weirdly attentive. It was something I myself might have kept, in a parallel universe. “How long have you been working on this?” I asked.

  “Oh, I’m not the only one. God, no. Personally, I subscribe to the idea that it’s better to receive than to give if you know what I mean. But it’s a collective effort passed down from generation to generation. Naturally, it gets updated every year.”

  “What a classy tradition.”

  “Listen.” His eyes narrowed. “Before you get on your high horse, you might want to know who this year’s custodian is.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Do you not believe me?” he asked, and I sensed because of the way he said it, by how much he hoped I’d challenge him, that he was telling the truth.

  “Given that he’s the custodian,” Devin continued, “I’d say it’s pretty ungenerous of him not to fill in certain blanks. But therein lies the paradox.”

  “Maybe he respects other people’s privacy,” I said, and Devin laughed so heartily, and so spontaneously, that I felt sure he wasn’t just trying to torment me.

  “Chivalrous Sug‑that’s how you see him, isn’t it? That’s great. It’s classic.”

  I needed to leave‑for real this time, because there was nothing to gain from staying.

  “Let it be said”‑here, Devin sounded genuinely admiring‑“that no one ever played Ault better than Cross Sugarman. It’s practically obscene.”

  Leave, Lee, I thought, and heard myself ask, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Just that you’ve got to hand it to him. He gets the grades, he gets the positions, he gets the girls, but most of all, he gets the respect. I bet you hardly know the guy.”

  Perhaps this was what I’d been waiting for‑an insult that was undeniably true. “You’re an asshole,” I said, and I stepped into the hallway, letting the door close behind me.

  My parents finally reached me the next morning; they had called repeatedly on Sunday, but whenever another girl in the dorm knocked on our door, I asked her to tell them I wasn’t there. This was considered poor dorm‑phone protocol, necessitating a return trip downstairs to the common room, but nobody said no‑I could see how other people deferred to the dubious celebrity the Times article bestowed on me. By right after Sunday chapel, which I’d skipped for the second time ever, everyone knew. I hadn’t left the dorm for the rest of the day, but I had seen it in girls’ faces. “Were people talking about it at lunch?” I’d asked Martha, and she had said, “Sort of.” Which had been gentler than saying yes.

  The way my parents got to me was by calling at six‑fifteen a.m. on Monday morning. Abby Sciver knocked on our door, waking us up, and I could tell from her bleary expression that she’d just awakened, too, presumably because of the phone’s ring. “It’s your dad, Lee,” she said, and it was far too early to ask her to take a message, or to have my father believe that I was otherwise occupied.

  It wasn’t just him. He was on one phone, and my mother was on the other. At the same time, he said, “What kind of crap is this?” and my mother said, “Lee, if you feel like a nobody, I wish you wouldn’t feel that way because you’re so special.”

  “Mom, I don’t‑it’s not‑please, will you guys not overreact?”

  “I just have one question for you,” my father said, “and that’s why have you been lying to us for the last four years?”

  “Go easy, Terry,” my mother said.

  “I’ll go easy when she answers me.”

  “I wasn’t lying,” I said.

  “You asked us to make sacrifices for your education, and we made them. We bought your books and your plane tickets, and why do you think we did that? Because you told us it was worth it. You said you loved it up there living in a dorm and going to your brilliant classes. And now you say, no, here’s my misery and here’s how the school treats me and I’ve been given every advantage but it wasn’t what I wanted. Well, I don’t know what the hell you wanted, Lee.”

  Listening to him, I found it hard to locate the center of his anger. People at Ault were angry at me for making critical remarks in a public forum, but my father’s displeasure was, obviously, personal.

  “Dad and I know you have lots of friends,” my mother said. “For heaven’s sake, Martha is president of your class, and she’s just crazy about you. And Sin‑Jun, and the Spanish girls‑”

  “Mom, you don’t have to name all my friends.”

  “But, Lee, what the lady wrote about you just isn’t true. That’s what I’ve been telling Dad. It’s not your fault if you trusted the media because your headmaster told you to.”

  “And we’re supposed to come see you graduate in a week?” my father said. “Your mom and I are supposed to take off from work and pull your brothers out of school so they can say, ‘We never got behind your daughter, but thanks for all the checks you wrote.’ You know what I say to that? Thanks but no thanks.” My father had never understood, and I had never really tried to get him to, that the checks he wrote were utterly insignificant, practically symbolic in their tininess. I think he’d genuinely convinced himself that if he pulled me out of Ault, Mr. Byden would have to, say, trade in his Mercedes.

  “So are you not coming to my graduation?” I asked.

  “Of course we’re coming,” my mother said.

  “You’re lucky it’s over,” my father said, “because if it wasn’t, it still would be over for you. No way would we send you back for another year.”

  “Lee, just think how nice it will be to go to college closer to home. You had a big adventure in high school, and now you can know, well, maybe where you’re from isn’t so bad.”

  “I never thought where I was from was bad.”

  For the first time, the phone line was silent.

  “Have a lot of people said stuff to you about the article?” I asked. Who that my family knew read The New York Times ?

  “Mrs. Petrash told us her mom called them first thing yesterday morning,” my mother said. “That’s how we knew to get it. Do you know that woman is over eighty, but her eyesight is sharp as a tack. And, Terry, who left a message?”

  “I didn’t hear any message. And with all due respect, Linda, I’m not real interested in Edith Petrash’s eyesight right now.”

  “What do you want from me, Dad?” I wasn’t fighting with him, and I didn’t feel hostile. Mostly, I felt ashamed. I understood‑this was the reason I’d avoided their calls the previous day‑that I had failed them. My father was right that I had lied. But lying was not the real transgression; rather, my failure resided in my inability to lie consistently. We had made a deal, the three of us‑if you let me go, I will pretend that going was a good idea –and I had violated the terms of our agreement. In the end, the way I betrayed my parents stayed with me longer, and felt far worse, than the way I betrayed Ault.

  “I want you to stop being so impressed by bullshit,” my father said.

  “What Dad means is that being rich doesn’t make you a better person.”

  “Good luck getting her to believe that, Linda,” my father said. “You really think Lee’ll listen to two simpletons like her parents?” Then, in the voice of his I disliked the most, he added, “Sorry we couldn’t buy you a big house with a palm tree, Lee. Sorry you got such a raw deal for a family.”

  At roll call, Cross was wearing a navy blue polo shirt, but the brightness of daytime, the brutal energy, always stalled me. I’d approach him after formal dinner, I decided, but he wasn’t there. The new dining hall prefects from the junior class had been elected the week before (how quickly, really even before you graduated, you became obsolete‑for a little while, because you were a senior, the school was yours and then it wasn’t yours at all anymore), and Cross must have skipped the meal altogether, now that he could. As people were leaving, I walked over to Devin and tapped his shoulder. He turned around. “Where is he?” I asked.

&
nbsp; Devin regarded me disdainfully. “The last I knew, he went to shoot hoops.”

  As I walked to the gym, the fading sunlight was yellow and the air smelled like cut grass. Though I’d imagined that Devin might have misled me and I’d find the gym locked for the night, the door swung open when I pulled it. Climbing the stairs leading to the basketball court, I could hear the pound of a ball against the floor.

  He was alone. For a few seconds, I stood in the doorway, as he must have once stood, unobserved, in the doorway to my room. He dribbled up the court and shot from the three‑point line. The ball dropped through the net, and I began clapping.

  He looked up from retrieving the ball. “Hey.”

  As he walked toward me, his face was red, and beads of sweat rested on his forehead and ran in streaks from his hairline down his neck, and down his arms and legs as well. I was wearing a cotton skirt and a linen blouse, but all I wanted was for him to embrace me. Of course, he wasn’t going to‑it was still light out, we were standing up, he was holding the ball. And besides, he hadn’t touched me in more than six weeks.

  “I came by last night,” I said.

  “Yeah, Devin told me. Sorry I missed you.” As we regarded each other, he seemed to realize that I was waiting for more. “I was down the hall in Thad and Rob’s room,” he added. I had never known him to lie, but it seemed so much likelier, it seemed so heartbreakingly logical, that where he’d really been was with Melodie Ryan.

  And then I couldn’t help it‑I’d wanted to ease into the conversation, to not seem overwrought‑and I asked, “Did you see Low Notes?”

  I often imagined that my own unseemly frames of reference would elude other people, but Cross said, “Yeah, I saw them.”