Prep: A Novel (39 page)

“Dede probably told you stuff out of context,” I said.

“You think?”

“What do you want, Aspeth?” I asked. “Why do you care what I said to Dede?”

Aspeth seemed to reconsider me. She removed her arm from the seat back, sat up straight, and folded one leg over the other. “Does Martha really think she’ll get elected?” she asked, and the lazy, teasing quality was gone from her voice.

“What are you doing?” I said. “Campaigning?”

An odd look crossed her face—a recomposing of her features to form the same expression they’d formed before—and it dawned on me that campaigning was precisely what Aspeth was doing.

“Martha won’t win,” she said. “This is what will happen. About half the class will vote for Gillian, maybe a little less. And a little more than half the class will vote for me, except let’s say a tenth of the class will vote for Martha. You see what I’m saying? She’ll get my votes. And that means Gillian will win.”

I couldn’t help smiling. “You just said yourself that those aren’t your votes. They’re Martha’s.”

“You’re missing the point. Do you want Gillian to be senior prefect?”

I shrugged.

“Of course you don’t. Gillian’s a fucking pill. But all these dimwits in our class will vote for her because she’s been sophomore and junior prefect, and they’re little status quo lemmings.”

“Why don’t you like Gillian?” I asked. Gillian and Aspeth were in more or less the same friend group, and I’d never heard of friction between them.

“Who does?” Aspeth said. “Gillian’s a bore.” During our conversation, Aspeth had never once lowered her voice, and she didn’t now, though dozens of our classmates were still milling around the front of the auditorium; for the fearlessness of her bitchery, I felt a surge of admiration. “The only person more boring than Gillian is Luke,” Aspeth continued. “She probably falls asleep while he’s boning her.”

I felt a brief wish for Aspeth to ask what I thought of Gillian, so I could voice my assent; she didn’t.

“Martha needs to drop out of the election,” Aspeth said. “There’s nothing at stake for her. If she had a shot at winning, it would be one thing, but I think we’ve established that she doesn’t.”

Again, I couldn’t help but be impressed by the purity of Aspeth’s condescension, her utter lack of interest in wheedling or bribery. Martha should drop out of the race simply because Aspeth was Aspeth; for the same reason, Aspeth should be elected.

“Maybe you should talk to Martha yourself,” I said.

“Why? I just talked to you.” Aspeth unfolded herself—she had the longest legs of any girl in our class, fantastic legs, and she was wearing a khaki skirt that ended six inches above the knee—and stood; apparently, her business with me was finished. She seemed about to walk away, but then she took a step toward me and leaned over. Her honey blond hair fell in front of my face, and when she pressed one finger against the rooming sheet still on my lap, I could feel her fingertip on my thigh, through the paper. “I’d give the cat pee thing some thought,” she said. She turned to look at me, and our faces were so close, how could I not have thought of kissing her? She tapped her finger a few times, smiled knowingly, and said, “Just some friendly advice.” Then she was gone, the smell of her shampoo lingering in the air. I actually knew what kind of shampoo Aspeth used because Dede used it, too, though its scent didn’t cling to Dede’s hair like it did to Aspeth’s. When I was at Ault, that shampoo was the smell of popularity; after I graduated, it became the smell of Ault itself. One afternoon after work, in my early twenties, I was at a CVS and I held a bottle toward a friend and said, “I think this is the best-smelling shampoo in the world,” and she gave me a bemused look and said, “So buy some.” And I’d thought by then that I’d outgrown my Ault self, but still, the suggestion was revelatory; paying for it at the cash register, I had the same residually fraudulent sensation you experience the first time you buy alcohol after turning twenty-one.

After lunch, as Martha and I were leaving the dining hall, I saw Ms. Prosek thirty yards in front of us, walking by herself. I grabbed Martha’s elbow and stopped walking. “Hold on,” I said. “Just let her get a little further ahead.”

At exactly that moment, Ms. Prosek glanced over her shoulder. Seeing us, she motioned for me to approach.

“Did she just hear me?” I asked.

“She couldn’t have.”

“That was totally weird.”

“Catch up with her. She’s waiting for you.” Martha pushed me forward a little. “You’ll be fine.” After I’d walked a few steps, she added, “Take deep breaths.”

“I was hoping I’d run into you,” Ms. Prosek said when I was alongside her. “How’re things?”

“They’re okay.” As we walked, I snuck a look at her.

“I know about your conversation yesterday with Dean Fletcher,” she said, “if that’s what you’re wondering. I’m curious about how you’re feeling.”

I didn’t say anything—I honestly didn’t know what to say—but when my self-consciousness about the silence overrode my confusion about how to respond, I said, “Fine.”

Then it was Ms. Prosek’s turn not to talk.

The problem was, Ms. Prosek was not just the teacher whose class I was bombing, whose flunking grade might result in my expulsion—she was also my adviser, and, until quite recently, even for the first several months after my math grade had plunged, our relationship had been nothing but chummy. I’d gotten to know Ms. Prosek freshman year because she was the thirds basketball coach. She didn’t seem personally offended when we lost a game, as some of the other coaches did, but we somehow got her to promise that if we ever won, she’d do three back handsprings right there on the court—she’d been a college gymnast—and she did; it was the day we played against Overfield. Afterward, when she was standing there a little unsteadily, with her hair askew and the other team gawking at us, Ms. Prosek said, “I definitely should have worn a different bra.” On the days when we weren’t playing the same school as JV and varsity, instead of riding the bus we rode in a van that Ms. Prosek drove, and on the way back to campus, she’d take us to McDonald’s.

There were two things I admired deeply about Ms. Prosek, and they reinforced each other. The first thing was that she seemed liberal—she was, though I did not completely understand the meaning of the word at the time, a feminist—and she was neither belligerent nor apologetic in the expression of her views. She once drove a van of students into Boston for a pro-choice rally (I didn’t go because I was a freshman and I thought maybe I wasn’t supposed to) and she wore no makeup and, on Sundays, she wore a blue bandanna that pushed back her curly hair. The second thing about Ms. Prosek that impressed me was that she had an extremely handsome husband. His name was Tom Williamson, he worked in D.C. as a speechwriter for a Democratic senator, and he wasn’t around much except on the weekends, but sometimes he’d just materialize for formal dinner in a coat and tie, or you’d see them running together, and girls would elbow one another:
There goes Ms. Prosek’s cute husband.
Ms. Prosek herself was attractive but not beautiful, maybe not even what most people would call pretty, and it filled me with wonder—that she was not beautiful and he loved her, that she was smart and opinionated and he loved her, that it seemed, from the way you’d see them talking or touching in a casual, not particularly romantic way (his arm around the back of her chair with his fingers just grazing her shoulder, his head tilted toward her as she said something while they made their way down the crowded steps outside the dining hall after dinner) like maybe he even loved her a lot and like she really loved him back.

“I won’t lie,” Ms. Prosek said. “I’m worried about you. Do you and Aubrey have a study plan?”

“Kind of. But I guess I don’t understand if the exam is only a week away, why did Fletcher wait until yesterday to threaten me with spring-cleaning?”

I wanted her to refute that Dean Fletcher had made any such threat. Instead, she said, “Are you telling me you would have done things differently if you’d known what the consequences were?”

“No,” I said, and I could hear how defensive I sounded.

“Lee.” Ms. Prosek set her hand on my shoulder. I stiffened, and she removed her hand. We had reached the entrance of the schoolhouse and stopped walking, as if we’d agreed ahead of time not to carry the conversation inside.

I looked at her with what I hoped were widened, receptive eyes; the stiffening had been involuntary.

“Just focus on the math. I want you to be really familiar with the exponential and the logarithmic functions. Okay? Let’s cross those other bridges when we come to them.”

Easy for you to say,
I thought, and it was unpleasant to feel animosity toward Ms. Prosek. Starting in the fall and continuing into March, I’d gone over to her house on Sunday afternoons, after her husband had left for D.C. for the week. (Though once he’d still been there and he’d answered the door and said, though we’d never met, “Hi, Lee,” and I had felt excited enough to take flight.) Ms. Prosek and I would review the material, and she’d be making soup or vegetarian chili and she’d give me some. When we talked about math, I tried, out of respect, to concentrate, but often I got distracted just as I got distracted with Aubrey. I was completely attentive, however, when the subject wandered to a recent chapel talk or an article in
The Ault Voice,
or to speculation about other students and teachers. Ms. Prosek never expressed her own views, she often shook her head when I was critical of someone, but she was usually smiling as she did so, and I could tell she found me interesting. Maybe, after all, it wasn’t her cute husband or her politics or her sportiness that made me like her—maybe it was only that she found me interesting and that in her presence, even more than in Martha’s, I
felt
interesting. And then one afternoon, shortly after spring break, she seemed subdued, she kept steering us back toward math when we swerved away. When I’d arrived, she’d said she had a headache, and I thought that was why, but after perhaps half an hour—I was in the middle of explaining why I thought Mr. Corning was in love with my old dorm head Madame Broussard—Ms. Prosek said, “Lee, I want to tell you something. I had to send a letter to your parents. I could get away with not sending one last semester because you’d just gotten the C on the midterm, and things were looking up. But now I’m really concerned.”

I wanted to reassure her that I didn’t have the kind of parents who would freak out over such a letter, but I wasn’t sure that was the point. And still, then, I didn’t feel real panic about my grade. What I felt was shame that I’d been gossiping so casually, that I’d made myself so at home here at her dining room table. I’d imagined that she was charmed by me, when really I was a bad student eating up her free time, making inappropriate comments about her colleagues.

“Your grade last semester was a D,” Ms. Prosek said. “That doesn’t leave you any wiggle room. If you flunk for the semester, you flunk for the year. And you’re flunking now. You have a forty-nine.”

I had known I was doing badly, but a forty-nine was worse than I’d realized.

“I’ll make a deal with you,” she said. “And I’ll offer the same option to all the students, but—” She didn’t finish because she didn’t need to—
you’re the one I’m doing this for.
The deal was to work on a project for extra credit, and that was what I made the timeline for. And Ms. Prosek did laugh when she saw that I’d included her on it, but things weren’t the same between us. In her apartment the afternoon that she’d told me I had a forty-nine, she had not, as she usually did when I left, confirmed that we were on for the following Sunday. And I could have asked in class that week, but I didn’t—I didn’t want to burden her—and because I hadn’t asked, I didn’t go the next Sunday. In class the Monday after that, we made eye contact as I was sitting down, and she pressed her lips together as if she were going to say something, but she didn’t; anyway, other students were around. I still saw her almost daily, of course, but outside of class, it was only in passing, or in a group—when it got warm in April, she had all of her advisees over for a cookout.

Standing in front of the schoolhouse, I said, “But, I mean, I’m not a bad seed. Am I?”

“Of course you’re not a bad seed.”

“I know I’m not great at sports, or I’m not, like, an
asset
to Ault. But I don’t break rules. It just seems like maybe I should get the benefit of the doubt. I don’t see why this exam has to be the difference between if I stay or not.”

She sighed. “I don’t know why you have the idea you’re not an asset to the school. You have just as many supporters as anyone else. Beyond that, I hope you understand that no one is trying to be punitive. But, Lee, you’re already a year behind most of your classmates in math. The school has requirements, and in order to get a diploma a year from now, you need to fulfill them. And what guarantee do we have that the same situation won’t arise in calculus? At a certain point, I don’t think it’s fair to you to keep putting you in over your head.”

“This won’t happen with calculus,” I said.

“No?”

“If I had it to do over, it would be different,” I said. “I know it would.”

She was quiet again, and then she said. “I think it would, too. I think we let this get away from us. But you have to realize that our concerns are academic, not personal.” She was squinting into the sun and because of this, it was difficult to discern her expression when she said, “I really don’t think they’ll spring-clean you.”

The first thing I thought was,
They?
Maybe when it came down to it, she could not save me, but wasn’t it a lie to act like she couldn’t prevent the situation from arriving at that point? Surely, if she wanted to, she could give me a D; she could fudge and never discuss it, even with me.

The second thing I thought was that I’d have to tell Martha—contrary to what she’d said, apparently teachers did use the expression.

Classes ended that Friday, and for the week before that, we hadn’t been doing much anyway; in Latin, Mrs. Pfaff brought in Rice Krispie treats her ten-year-old daughter had made, and in Spanish, we watched Mexican soap operas. In the dorms, some people had already started packing, which I hated doing—I saw the naked walls and cleared-away surfaces as unkind reminders of just how fleeting it all was, just how illusive the idea that any of it belonged to us.