Prep: A Novel (19 page)

“You don’t think my hair needs to be wet, do you?” he said.

This hadn’t occurred to me—why hadn’t it occurred to me? But it seemed that if I told him to wet his hair at this point, I’d undermine my credibility. “No, you’re fine,” I said. “I can do it this way.”

After a moment, he said, “I always wondered why they make you get it wet at the barber. Like, what does that do?”

Behind him, I tried to keep the smile out of my voice. “It’s just a preference people have,” I said. “Some people think it makes it easier. But, actually,” I added, growing bolder, “it can be confusing because your hair looks longer when it’s wet, so you might cut more than you mean to.” The statement was, in fact, true, but I had no idea where I’d gotten it—a magazine probably.

We didn’t speak for several minutes. At first, I was cutting no more than half an inch at a time, going across the back so it was even, then cutting half an inch more. But he wanted it all off, he’d said, and it
was
awfully long, and my current method wasn’t particularly efficient. In a single snip, I took four inches, and as I did, I felt the glee of the irreversible. I sensed that Tullis was absorbed in the television program, which was about the search for the lost island of Atlantis. A few more minutes passed. He had a fraction of the hair he’d awakened with in the morning. It occurred to me that given how drastic it was, other students would remark on his haircut, and that he might mention that I had done it.
Lee Fiora?
they would say.
How did that happen?
Or maybe just,
Who’s she?
It was possible that news of the event might even reach Cross Sugarman.

“Why didn’t you wait until Monday and go into town for this?” I asked.

“You know how you get an idea in your head and you’re like, ‘Why wait?’ It was time. That’s how I felt.”

I hesitated, then said, “Why aren’t you at the dance?”

“The dance?”

“The one in the student center.”

He laughed. “I know where the dances are. That’s not really my thing, you know?”

“Yeah.” After a pause, I added, “Me neither.”

“I went the first few years here, but it’s pretty much the same week after week.”

“Yeah, I guess.” Never having attended a single dance, I wasn’t in a position to know, but it seemed I might as well agree. “Okay,” I said. “It’s pretty short.”

He reached back and made a loop with his thumb and index finger, as if to catch his ponytail, but all his fingers circled was air. “Holy shit.”

“Is that okay?”

“No, yeah, it’s great.” He rubbed his fingertips a few times against the place where his hairline and his neck met. “It’s totally what I wanted. It’s just different.”

“I still need to clean it up. Put your shoulders back again.”

He did as I’d instructed, and I resumed trimming. The part I was least sure of was the hair that grew from the crown of his head—how long was I supposed to leave it? I walked in front of him again, my body between him and the TV, and I pushed back the hair that fell on either side of his temples. “Do you want bangs? You do, right?”

“Do I?”

“I think it would look kind of weird if you didn’t have them.”

“Sure, then. That’s cool.”

“Close your eyes.”

He did, and for several seconds, I looked at his face. There were freckles across his nose and cheeks that you couldn’t see from farther away, and, on the right side of his chin, a mostly healed zit that he’d popped, from the looks of it, three or four days ago. Also on his chin, there was a little golden stubble around the tip, and there was some above his mouth, too. I felt a tenderness, almost a protectiveness, toward him that surprised me. It was strange to remember that I’d thought I had a crush on him, though I also knew that such a crush, a false crush if crushes were not all by definition false, could rise again with enough distance. But here, with the two of us positioned so close together, he reminded me of myself; he was far too much like me for me to love.

I continued cutting, and every time I stepped away from him to examine my progress, I thought,
Not bad.
Maybe I actually could cut hair.

At last, I said, “Open your eyes. I think you’re done.”

“Is there a mirror around here?”

“In the bathroom.” I pointed to the door next to the phone booth, and when he walked over, I followed him and stood behind him.

“Whoa,” he said, and my heart seized, but then he grinned. He ran one hand back through it. “Hey, nice job,” he said. “Thanks a lot.”

I grinned back at him. “My pleasure.”

“I should pay you or something.”

“Oh, God.” I shook my head. “Of course not.” The thought was mortifying, uncomfortably close to being paid to, say, vacuum a dormmate’s room.

“Hey, you know what?” Tullis said. “Would you mind shaving the back of my neck? Would that be totally gross?”

In fact, the request flattered me.

“I can get my razor,” he added.

“I’ll just use one of mine. It’s no big deal.” The razor I retrieved from my toiletry bucket upstairs was pink plastic. I filled a mug with water from the kitchen sink and set the mug and a bar of soap on top of the television. Tullis sat in the chair again, turning around so he was straddling it, his back to the TV. I dipped my fingers in the water, rubbed them against the soap, then rubbed my fingers against his neck. As soon as I was touching his skin, with him facing away from me, it became possible again to imagine having a crush on him. We didn’t speak at all as I spread the lather, set the razor against his neck, pulled on it, dipped it in the cup of water, set it back against his neck. “Arguments that Atlantis was the island of Thera,” said the television narrator, “are bolstered by evidence of a volcanic eruption on Thera in 1500
B.C.
, which caused the majority of the island to sink into the sea.” What was Tullis thinking? I wondered. What did my fingers feel like to him? But I doubted I was a girl guys saw in that way. Only in the taxi with Cross had I gotten any evidence that someone might.

When I was pretty sure I’d shaved all the hair from his neck, I ran my fingers over his skin, and it was very smooth. “Okay,” I said, and my voice sounded ordinary. “All finished.”

He reached back and rubbed his neck. “Thanks,” he said. “I could have tried to do that, but I’d probably have cut myself, like, ten times.” He stood and carried the chair back to the table, and while he did, I bundled up the hair-strewn newspaper and smashed it down in the trash. I could feel that he was going to leave in the next minute or so. Up until this point, I’d hoped no one would return to the dorm because I didn’t want to have to explain what was going on; if it all got called into question, Tullis might change his mind in the middle. Plus, I’d felt that Tullis and I were developing a sort of rapport (it was low-key, I knew that, it wasn’t like we were now going to be friends) and I hadn’t wanted it interrupted. I could imagine one of the other girls in the dorm approaching, standing in my way probably, shrieking, “Tullis, I can’t
believe
you’re letting her cut so much! Tullis, you are
crazy
!” But now that the haircut was complete and he was about to take off, I felt a twinge of disappointment that no one had seen it happen. I had liked this incarnation of myself, I realized, and I wouldn’t have minded an audience for it. It was like when Tim, the younger of my two brothers, was born, and my mother would let me take him outside and push him in a stroller as long as I stayed on our street and I always thought—I was eleven—that if only the boys from my class, a few of whom did live nearby, could see me, surely they’d all develop crushes on me immediately because I was so cool like this, so grown-up. I mean, taking care of my baby brother? Out all by myself?

I poured the soapy water down the drain and set the mug in the sink. I was still holding the razor. I could imagine saving it, not to use, not to do anything with, just setting it in the cardboard box under my bed where I kept old notebooks and term papers and the programs from school performances. But Tullis might notice if I didn’t throw away the razor, and it might seem weird, it might seem Audrey Flahertyish. I tossed it in the trash.

“Thanks again,” Tullis said.

“No problem.”

He had approached the sink, and we stood facing each other. He stuck out his hand, and we shook. “I see a big future for you,” he said. “Salons all across the country. Celebrity clients.”

I rolled my eyes. “That would be a really good use of my Ault education.”

“You could do worse. All right. I’ll see you around.” He was a few feet from the door when he turned back. “I’m really sorry. This is terrible. But your name—is your name—”

“Lee,” I said. “Lee Fiora.”

“Right, right.” He nodded. “It’s like, Ault’s so small, but by the time you’re a senior—”

“It’s okay,” I said.

“All right. Well, thanks, Lee.” He grinned, and I thought again that he really did have the best smile in the world. Also, I thought, I had given him a first-rate haircut. How this had happened was beyond me.

He was turning again when I blurted out, “Actually—” and he said, “Oh, sorry, I’m Tullis—”

“No, I know who you are. I just wanted to tell you, I know this was a long time ago, but I wanted to tell you that I thought when you played guitar in the talent show last year, that was really good.”

He was still smiling. I loved boys, I thought. All of them.

When he left, he waved the way he had before he’d exited the stage after singing “Fire and Rain.”

The place where Dede went to reflect on life, according to her essay for English class, was a window seat on the landing between the first and second floors of her family’s house in Scarsdale. Darden said he reflected while riding the 2/3 subway, and Aspeth said she reflected during the summer, whenever she took her grandfather’s yawl out on Long Island Sound. (I believed that Aspeth spent the summer on Long Island, and that her grandfather had a boat and even that she went out in it, but not that she went out by herself—it was my observation that beautiful and popular people rarely spent time alone.) Martin Weiher read about how he reflected while on the toilet, and that got a laugh, and then Jeff Oltiss read the same thing, and people didn’t laugh as much for him, because he wasn’t as cool as Martin and because he’d gone second.

No one had volunteered when Ms. Moray had asked if anyone wanted to read their paper aloud, so she’d called on Dede, and then Darden, who was next to Dede, had said he’d go, and the line had continued around the table. After Jeff, it seemed to be my turn. As the progression of readers had approached me, my heart had beat increasingly quickly, and heat had spread over my face. I felt some anxiety about my essay—I doubted that it was particularly well written, and it definitely wasn’t funny—but, more than that, I felt the unhappy anticipation of people watching and listening to me. And now that I was supposed to read, I found that I could not. I just couldn’t. I knew that my voice would come out quivery and breathless and that my consciousness of this fact would only exacerbate it until, ultimately, my own agitation would make it seem physically impossible to endure another second. It would seem as if the moment would simply fold in on itself, though what a moment folding in on itself entailed I wasn’t sure—spontaneous combustion perhaps, or perhaps the floors would buckle and we’d be rolled in on ourselves like ingredients in a gyro.

“I pass,” I said. “We can do that, right?”

“Why do you want to?” Ms. Moray asked.

“I just would rather.”

Ms. Moray sighed, as if I were trying to eat up class time by dithering—as if she herself hadn’t made it seem like reading aloud was optional. “Everyone else has gone,” she said. “If you don’t go, it’s not fair.”

I was not sure that I’d ever heard an adult attempt to support an argument by claiming unfairness. But if I challenged Ms. Moray again, I could tell that this, whatever it was, would become solid and tangible; it would be a situation, something people would talk about after class was over.

I looked down at my essay, which I’d typed the night before on Martha’s computer. “Reflecting on one’s life is an important part of reaching decisions and understanding one’s ethics and values,” I began, and I could tell that my voice was barely audible. “Many people, like Henry David Thoreau, have a special place they go where it is quiet and peaceful. For me, this place is at my father’s—” Here I trailed off completely. Abruptly, I understood why I had felt so hesitant before. “I can’t read this.”

“You were doing fine,” Ms. Moray said.

I did not look at her or my classmates, though I felt them watching me.

“You can start over again if you want,” Ms. Moray said, and her voice contained a kindness it hadn’t before.

“No,” I said.

“Lee, no one is judging you. You need to get comfortable reading your work aloud because you’ll be doing it a lot this year.”

I said nothing.

“Can you tell me why you don’t want to read?”

I could feel then not that I
would
cry but that I might; the possibility had sprung into existence. It would be best to speak as little as possible.

Ms. Moray sighed again, but it was a new sigh, not the impatient one from before. “You don’t have to go today,” she said. “But in the future, be prepared to read whatever you’ve written, and that goes for all of you. No exceptions. Norie, you’re up.”

At the end of class, Ms. Moray said, “Lee, talk to me before you leave.”

I finished putting away my books and then remained in my chair, my backpack zipped on the table before me. I held my essay on my lap, prepared to give it to her. After all, it didn’t matter that much what
she
thought—I believed that teachers were like doctors, detached in their judgments.

When the room had cleared out, Ms. Moray sat down across from me. She was wearing a lavender mock turtleneck and a black blazer—it had gotten cool already—and the book pin was affixed to the left collar of her blazer. Below her left breast was a short horizontal line, perhaps three inches long, of white chalk, which I was pretty sure she was unaware of; also, her skin was a little greasy, especially at the corners of her nose.