Prep

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  In my imagination, he’d been reading in bed and he’d sat up when I entered and I’d crawled onto his lap and wrapped my legs and arms around him. And at first I’d be weeping and he’d stroke my hair, he’d murmur to me, but of course it would quickly turn sexual. And it would be urgent‑we’d clutch and bite, we’d want it the exact same amount. Maybe I’d give him a blow job, on my knees on their dirty rug, and I’d be wearing a shirt on top and nothing on the bottom, and he’d wind his legs around me and dig his heels against my ass; because of me, he’d be in agony.

  Except that he wasn’t there, and that looking at his room, the unfamiliar objects‑I didn’t even know which bed was his‑I realized how absurd it was to have assumed, or just to have hoped, that he’d be in the same mood I was, waiting for me. Quickly, the shift was occurring from disappointment at his absence to terror that he’d appear before I got out. I would seem‑this would be the word he’d use, or other people would‑psycho. That is, as annoying as a girl who cried, but also aggressive.

  He wasn’t waiting for me, he wasn’t looking for me. It would have been a lie to say the only reason I wanted to see him was to smooth over the earlier ugliness, but that was one of the reasons, and had it been so far‑fetched to think he might want the same? Now I think it was far‑fetched, that my impulse was feminine, and that the masculine response (maybe I just mean the more detached response) was to realize that our final interaction had been overblown and unfortunate but that we each understood well enough where the other stood. Another exchange would be reiteration, not clarification.

  I shut the door and hurried down the hall. Back in Elwyn’s, it took a few minutes for my heartbeat to settle. But then it did, and I realized all at once that nothing had actually happened. It felt like I was recovering, but from what? I was by myself, the fan in the window was whirring, the floor was cluttered with half‑empty boxes. “It’s over,” I said. “Everything with Cross is finished.” If I said it out loud, maybe I would finally stop being so hopeful.

  The person giving the chapel talk always sat to the left of the chaplain, and the next morning, that seat was occupied by Conchita Maxwell. I cannot say I was completely surprised. As she climbed the steps to the pulpit, I saw that she was wearing a black linen skirt and a white blouse; she had long ago stopped dressing eccentrically and had grown out her hair. She cleared her throat and said into the microphone, “The article that appeared in last Sunday’s New York Times has left many people in the Ault community feeling angry, hurt, and misrepresented. I am one of those people. As a Mexican American, I took special exception to the article. In no way did it reflect the experience I have had for the last four years, in this place I have come to call my home.” Listening to her, at first I felt hostile, but eventually, I felt sad and then not even that‑more just a distance from the whole situation. Hearing the talk, which relied heavily on rhetoric and was not particularly well written, reminded me of reading someone else’s history term paper about a subject I was not interested in, and, not even on purpose, I found myself tuning out. What I thought of was Conchita and me as freshmen, of teaching her to ride a bike behind the infirmary. How long ago that seemed, how far I felt from her now; I couldn’t remember talking to her even once during our senior year. And, with graduation, we were about to be cut loose from each other completely‑the distance between us would be physical and definitive, and perhaps we’d never speak again. It seemed an impossible thought‑so often did we all come together at Ault that I had begun to believe life contained reckonings rather than just fade‑outs‑and yet I also saw then that as more and more years passed, the time Conchita and I had known each other, the time I had known any of my classmates, would feel decreasingly significant; eventually, it would be only a backdrop to our real lives. At some cocktail party years into the future, in an incarnation of myself I could not yet fathom, I would, while rummaging for an anecdote, come up with one about a girl I’d known at boarding school whose mother took us out for lunch one day while the family bodyguard sat at the next table. In the telling, I would feel no pinch of longing or regret; I would feel nothing true, nothing at all, in fact, except the wish that my companions find me amusing.

  When Conchita had finished, there was the customary moment of silence‑you never applauded after a chapel talk‑and then we stood to sing the hymn. It was the last all‑school chapel service of the year; another service would be held graduation morning, but only for seniors and parents. Always before breaks, including summer vacation, the hymn we sang was “God Be with You till We Meet Again,” and this was what we sang that day. We sang all four verses‑at Ault, we always sang all the verses of all the hymns‑and when we got to the third one, to the lines that went “When life’s perils thick confound you/ Put His arms unfailing round you,” tears welled up in my eyes. Not again, I thought, but after a moment I happened to glance around and then I understood that Conchita’s talk had little to do with what most people were feeling in this moment and that, in at least one sense, I was not alone; the chapel was filled with crying seniors.

  Then there was graduation, which was anticlimactic in the way of any ceremony. My family stayed at the Raymond TraveLodge, the same place my parents had stayed in the fall of my junior year, and the first thing they told me when we met in the school parking lot on Saturday night before walking over to Mr. Byden’s house for dinner was that right after they’d checked in, Tim had taken such a huge shit that he’d clogged the toilet and they’d had to switch rooms because it was overflowing. “He’s six!” Joseph was shouting. “How can a six‑year‑old take a dump that size?” Tim, meanwhile, was blushing and smiling as if he had accomplished something great that modesty prevented him from acknowledging directly. At first, my father ignored me, but everything was so hectic that ignoring me was impractical; he downgraded his anger to talking to me curtly. On Sunday, at the graduation itself, Mr. Byden shook my hand in an entirely neutral way (Joseph told me our father had threatened to confront Mr. Byden and somehow I’d known he wouldn’t). My parents and brothers sat with Martha’s parents and brother at the ceremony‑at last, my mother’s wish to meet Mr. and Mrs. Porter was realized‑and my family left that afternoon, the trunk of the car weighted down with all the possessions I’d accumulated in the last four years.

  For graduation, Tim gave me a pair of socks with watermelons on them (“He chose them himself,” my mother whispered), Joseph gave me a mix tape, and my parents gave me a hundred dollars in cash, which I spent helping buy gas for the people from whom I got rides during senior week‑Dede a few times, and Norie Cleehan and Martha’s boyfriend Colby. The last party was in Keene, New Hampshire, and Colby drove down from Burlington to get us and then kept driving south to drop me off at Logan Airport before they returned together to Vermont. Hugging them both‑I had never hugged Colby, and I never saw him again after that‑and pulling the suitcases from the trunk and checking that I hadn’t left my plane ticket wedged in the back seat, I felt desperate for them to leave and for it all to be done with; I just wanted to be alone. And then they drove away, and I was. I was wearing shorts and a T‑shirt, and both the airport terminal and then the airplane itself were frigidly air‑conditioned. Flying to South Bend, I was freezing, and exhausted from drinking a lot and sleeping not that much over the course of the last week, from saying good‑bye to so many people, from the friendliness‑in the end, only a few classmates had been conspicuously unfriendly to me that week. After the plane landed and I walked through the terminal and collected my luggage and went out to the curb, where my mother and Tim were waiting, the air was a hot thick blast, and Ault was absolutely behind me. I had no reason to ever go back, no real reason‑from now on, it was all optional.

  Of course, I did go back, for both my fifth and tenth reunions. Do you want to know how everyone turned out? They turned out like this: Dede is a lawyer in New York, and I get the idea, though she’s grown more modest with age, that she’s very successful. The summer after we were sophomores in col
lege, I received a card in the mail with a Scarsdale return address. On the front of the card was a picture of Dede in an over‑the‑top college coed outfit‑a pleated skirt, an argyle sweater‑vest over a button‑down shirt, wire‑framed glasses, and a stack of books in her arms‑and under the picture, it said, The problem with a Know It All … and inside, when you opened the card, it said… is that she thinks she Nose everything. Below that, it said, Yes, I have finally done it! My nose job was completed at 4:37 p.m. on June 19. Fewer pounds, fewer ounces. The most welcome arrival of my life! After that, I always liked Dede, I liked her unequivocally, as I never had at Ault. I see her now when I go to New York, we have dinner and talk about men. She makes me laugh, and I don’t know if it’s that she’s funnier or if I just wasn’t willing to see, at Ault, how funny she was.

  Like Dede, Aspeth Montgomery lives in New York, and she owns an interior design boutique, which always disappoints me a little to think about‑it just seems so insignificant. I was right about Darden (he’s also a lawyer), who became an Ault trustee at the age of twenty‑eight. Sin‑Jun, of course, lives with her girlfriend in Seattle and is a neurobiologist. Amy Dennaker, whom I never lived with after freshman year in Broussard’s, is a conservative pundit; I don’t usually watch those Sunday morning political shows, but sometimes when I do, if I’m in a hotel, I see her arguing in a business suit, and she always seems to be enjoying herself. I heard that Ms. Prosek and her cute husband got divorced a few years after I graduated. I hope that it was she who left him, or at least that it was mutual; basically, I just don’t want him to have left her. She no longer teaches at Ault, and I’m not sure where she’s gone. Meanwhile, Rufina Sanchez and Nick Chafee are married; they married two years after she graduated from Dartmouth and he graduated from Duke. In equal measures, this sounds suffocating to me‑high school sweethearts and all that‑and I envy it; I think it must be nice to end up with someone who knows what you were like when you were a teenager.

  I haven’t seen Cross since we graduated because during our fifth reunion, he was living in Hong Kong, working for an American brokerage firm, and then he was planning to come to our tenth reunion‑he lives in Boston now‑but his wife went into labor the night before. Recently, Martha and her husband, who also live in Boston, met Cross and his wife for dinner, and Martha called me afterward and left a message saying, “He keeps golf clubs in his trunk. I’m not sure why I’m telling you this, but it seems like the kind of thing you’d appreciate.” I know what Cross looks like now, because there was a picture from his wedding in The Ault Quarterly. He’s balding, and he has a handsome face, but it’s handsome in a different way. Because I knew it was him in the photo, I could discern his earlier features, but if we’d passed on the street, I’m not certain I’d have recognized him. His wife’s name is Elizabeth Fairfield‑Sugarman.

  Martha is an assistant professor of classics, tenure‑track. I was the maid of honor in her wedding, but the truth is that we talk about twice a year and see each other less than that.

  And as for me: Cross had been wrong, and I didn’t particularly like college, at least for the first few years‑it seemed so vast and watered‑down. But then as a junior I ended up getting an apartment with another girl and two guys, though I knew only the girl ahead of time and knew her only a little. One of the guys wasn’t around much, but the other one‑Mark, who was a senior‑and the girl, Karen, and I made dinner together most nights, and watched television afterward. Upon moving in with them, I thought at first that they were both kind of LMC, but somewhere along the way, I forgot that I thought this. I learned to cook from Mark, and that summer, a few weeks before he moved out, he and I became involved; he ended up being the second person I ever kissed, the second person I had sex with. (Once, I had imagined that the first boy you were involved with was your initiation, that after him the switch had been flicked and you dated continuously, but, at least in my own case, I had been wrong.) After the first time Mark and I kissed, I was talking to Karen about it‑I didn’t know for sure if I liked Mark‑and I brought up Cross. I was planning to say he was someone I had been certain about, but before I could, Karen said, “Wait a second. The guy you dated in high school was named Cross Sugarman?” She began to laugh. “What kind of person is named Cross Sugarman?”

  I actually didn’t‑I don’t‑particularly like talking about Ault. I don’t even really like reading the quarterly, though I always at least page through it. But if I give it real attention, my mood plummets; I remember my life there, all the people and the way I felt. In college, or after, in the course of ordinary conversation, someone might say, “Oh, you went to boarding school?” and I’d feel my heart thickening with the need to explain what the person did not truly care about. By my sophomore year at Michigan, if the subject arose, I would make only the most superficial remarks. It was okay. It was hard. I was lucky to go. These conversations were a lake I was riding across, and as long as we didn’t dwell on the subject, or as long as I didn’t think the person would understand anyway, even if I tried to explain, I could remain on the surface. But sometimes, if I talked for too long, I’d be yanked beneath, into cold and weedy water. Down there, I could not see or breathe; I was dragged backward, and it wasn’t even the submersion that was the worst part, it was that I had to come up again. My present world was always, in its mildness, a little disappointing. I’ve never since Ault been in a place where everyone wants the same things; minus a universal currency, it’s not always clear to me what I myself want. And anyway, no one’s watching to see whether or not you get what you’re after‑if at Ault I’d felt mostly unnoticed, I’d also, at certain moments, felt scrutinized. After Ault, I was unaccounted for.

  But I should say too that I don’t scrutinize others the way I once did. I did not, when I left Ault, carry my vigilance with me; I’ve never paid as close attention to my life or anyone else’s as I did then. How was I able to pay such attention? I remember myself as often unhappy at Ault, and yet my unhappiness was so alert and expectant; really, it was, in its energy, not that different from happiness.

  And so everything has to turn out somehow, and other things have happened to me‑a job, graduate school, another job‑and there are always words to describe the way you fill up your life, there is always a sequence of events. Although it doesn’t necessarily have a relationship to the way you felt while it was occurring, there’s usually some satisfaction in the neatness of its passage. Some anxiety, too, but usually some satisfaction.

  On the night of my graduation from Ault, there was a party at a club in Back Bay, a place Phoebe Ordway’s parents belonged‑they were the ones giving the party. My own parents had already left for South Bend, but other parents were there early on, for dinner, and then they took off and my classmates, many of whom had been openly drinking in front of parents, stayed and danced and cried. I drank beer out of green bottles, and got drunk for the first time, and it felt great and dangerous. Great like I was wearing a cape that made me invisible, so I could observe everyone else without being observed‑at one point, Martha was dancing with Russell Woo (I did not dance at all, of course) and I sat at a round table for eight by myself, utterly unself‑conscious. And it felt dangerous because what was to stop me from just walking up to Cross, there in a group of people near the bar, and doing exactly what I wanted? Which was to wrap my arms around his neck and press my face into his chest and just stand there forever. I had had four beers; no doubt I was less drunk than I believed myself to be, and that’s what stopped me.

  A little before midnight, Martha said she was exhausted and wanted to leave. I was in the middle of a long conversation with Dede, who was smashed and was saying in a strangely beneficent way, “You were always so sad and angry. Even when we were freshmen, you were. Why were you so sad and angry? But if I’d known you were on scholarship, I could have lent you money. You were dating that kitchen guy last year, weren’t you? I know you were.” I was not completely listening to her‑I was watching Cross as he moved arou
nd the room, danced, left, came back, talked for a while to Thad Maloney and Darden. I stayed at the party so I could keep watching him. Martha and I were both supposed to spend the night at her aunt and uncle’s in Somerville, but when Martha left, I stayed. I thought that because I was drunk, maybe everything would be different, that as the night waned, Cross would eventually come to me. But instead, when the DJ played “Stairway to Heaven” as the last song of the night, Cross slow‑danced with Horton Kinnelly and then the song ended and they stood side by side, still close together, Cross rubbing his hand over Horton’s back. It all felt both casual and not random‑in the last four minutes, they seemed to have become a couple. And though they had not interacted for the entire night, I understood suddenly that just as I’d been eyeing Cross over the last several hours, he’d been eyeing Horton, or maybe it had been for much longer than that. He too had been saving something for the end, but the difference between Cross and me was that he made choices, he exerted control, his agenda succeeded. Mine didn’t. I waited for him, and he didn’t look at me. And that was what the rest of senior week was like, though it surprised me less each time, at each party, and by the end of the week, Cross and Horton weren’t even waiting until it was late and they were drunk‑you’d see them entwined in the hammock at John Brindley’s house in the afternoon, or in the kitchen at Emily Phillip’s house, Cross sitting on a bar stool and Horton perched on his lap.

  It was at Emily’s house‑this was the last party, in Keene‑that I opened the note from Aubrey, the note where he declared his love for me. It was three‑thirty in the morning, and I was standing in a field where Norie’s car was parked, searching for the toothbrush in my backpack, when I found the card. I was very moved, not only because what he’d written was so sweet but also because‑even though it was from Aubrey, tiny and prissy Aubrey‑it meant the Times article hadn’t made me untouchable; Cross Sugarman wasn’t the only Ault boy who had ever noticed something worthwhile about me.