Prep: A Novel (41 page)

She picked up the exam and flipped through it. I had signed my name under the Ault oath on the first page, which was the same one that appeared on every exam:
With my signature, I hereby verify that I have neither given nor received any help on this test. . . .
On the next page, I’d completed the first problem, which Ms. Prosek clearly had started with so as to put us at ease. I had written a few numbers under the next problem, and then, though it had nothing to do with what the problem was asking, I’d written out the quadratic equation, just in case I’d need it later. After that, from the second page to the seventh, I hadn’t written anything. As she got closer to the end, Martha’s expression vacillated between confusion and dismay.

“Okay.” She turned her wrist to look at her watch, then set the exam back on the desk. “You’re not turning it in like this.”

“I’m not?”

“Jesus Christ, Lee, what’s wrong with you? Do you not understand what’s at stake here? First of all, sit up.”

Obediently, I sat.

“Wipe your mouth,” she said. When I did, crumbs came away on my hand.

She picked up the exam again. “Come over here,” she said, and when I was standing in front of her, she pointed to the desk chair. When I was seated, she set the exam in front of me, open to the second page. “You know some of this, right? Here, where it asks you to write the equation—you know how to do that, don’t you?”

I blinked.

“It’s like, you see that directrix
y
equals two—Lee?”

I looked up at her.

“What’s going on?” she said.

“I can’t do these.” My voice was a little flat but not wobbly, definitely not tearful.

“But you did the first problem.”

“Look at it, Martha. That’s not precalculus. It’s algebra.”

“So you’re giving up? You’re just going to turn in all these pages blank?”

“There’s no point in doing more.”

“What about partial credit?”

“I don’t think you understand,” I said. “I don’t know how to answer these problems. I could write stuff, but it would be gobbledygook.”

“I don’t believe this.”

Based on her tone, I wasn’t sure if she literally didn’t believe it or if she just meant that she was disgusted.

“Move over,” she said, and I had never heard her sound more irritated.

I shifted so I was sitting on only half the chair, and she sat on the other half. She picked up a piece of loose-leaf paper set on top of my dictionary, saw that it had writing on one side, and turned it over. (The writing was a list of vocabulary words for Spanish, a study sheet I was planning to use, but I didn’t dare protest.)

“Give me your calculator,” she said.

She started with the second problem, writing out the equation in pencil on the loose-leaf paper. Briefly, I thought that she could not be doing what she appeared to be doing. But she was. It soon became clear—she definitely was.

“I’m not sure this is a good—” I began, and she said, “Don’t talk to me. We have less than half an hour.”

When she’d gone on to the third problem, she said, “Start copying. And get me more paper.”

I opened the desk drawer—because of the way we were sitting, we both had to lean back—and pulled out a spiral notebook. After I’d passed it to her, I said, “But won’t it look suspicious if too many are right?”

“You’ll get a C or a C minus. There’s no way I can finish the whole thing, and anyway, I’m putting in some mistakes.”

After that, we didn’t speak. There was only the sound of our pencils, and once, after she’d messed up on something, Martha saying “Fuck” before she started erasing. She was the one who kept checking her watch, and it was less than five of noon when she said, “You need to take it over.” She’d gotten to the top of the sixth page.

I stood, clutching the exam, and when I reached the door, I couldn’t help glancing back. “Martha—”

“Just go,” she said, and she was looking at the wall in front of my desk. “Turn it in.”

When I returned to the dorm, Martha had gone to lunch, and she stayed away from the room for the rest of the afternoon, until after dinner. When she finally came back, I stood as she entered and said, “Martha, thank you so much.”

She held up her hand and shook her head. “I can’t, Lee. I’m sorry, but I just can’t.”

I was quiet. “Okay, then,” I said, “well, it’s really great that you’re senior prefect. I’m so proud to have such an accomplished roommate.” The oddest part was that by that point in the day, it was true. The morning, when I’d bolted from roll call, seemed like months ago; by the afternoon, the idea of Martha as senior prefect had already become ordinary.

“Thanks.” Martha seemed extremely tired. For the last several hours, during her absence, I’d had visions of her celebrating her victory, possibly with Cross—turning cartwheels, or being sprinkled with confetti. These possibilities now seemed highly unlikely.

“You don’t seem that excited,” I said.

“It’s kind of been a long day.”

We looked at each other. It was very hard not to thank her again, or to apologize.

“I think you’ll be a really good prefect,” I said. “You’ll be fair.”

Then Martha’s face crumpled, and she started crying. She lifted one hand to her eyebrows as if she were shielding her face from the sun, except that her head was bent toward the floor.

“Martha?”

She shook her head.

I crossed the room and set my palm on her back. What could I say, what else could I do? We just had to wait it out, to let more time elapse from the moment of Martha writing the answers to my exam. Because, I could see, that’s what this day was to her—not the day she’d been elected senior prefect but the day she’d cheated. And I don’t even think it was the fact that she had so much to lose, though she did: If we were caught, she wouldn’t be senior prefect, of course, but that would be because she’d be expelled; we both would. And how titillating it would seem, given that Martha was also a member of the disciplinary committee. But fear of the consequences, I was fairly sure, wasn’t the reason she was crying.

It turned out Martha had won the election, as they say, by a landslide. It had been close with the guy nominees but not close at all among the girls. I didn’t know what this meant—that Martha was cool after all? That coolness had turned out to matter less than I’d believed? After we graduated, the letters of her name were carved into the marble in the dining hall, then painted gold.

I’m also not sure what it means that I felt no guilt at all toward Ault as an institution, or toward anyone specific—not Ms. Prosek, certainly not Dean Fletcher—except for Martha herself. The next day on the way out of chapel, someone tapped my shoulder. When I turned, Ms. Prosek whispered, with an enormous smile on her face, “Seventy-two.” I just nodded, feigning neither surprise nor pleasure. I could feel in that moment how she would forgive me, how now that I’d passed, things between us could go back to the way they’d been before. But what was the point, after the precariousness of our bond had been revealed? It was one thing for a person who didn’t really know me to act distant, but it was quite another for someone to get to know me and then to back away. And besides, I wasn’t sure I still respected her. It seemed like she could have stood up for me more forcefully, or talked to me more directly, but she had acted in the Ault way, all avoidance and decorum. And maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised—after all, during those afternoons at her apartment, I, not Ms. Prosek, had been the outspoken one. The next fall, I requested a sixty-two-year-old physics teacher named Mr. Tithrow as my adviser.

Aubrey—poor Aubrey with his priggish, infinite patience—continued to tutor me through Calculus, and my math grade never dropped below a C senior year. Also that year, Aubrey did not grow. He did grow later—after I was in college, when I was a sophomore and he was a senior at Ault, I received a copy of the alumni quarterly that included a photograph of him with other members of the lacrosse team, and he looked to be at least six feet. He was handsome, though his features contained no trace of their earlier delicacy; it was as if a man had burst from inside his boyish self, complete with stubble.

His handsomeness seemed to me ironic because of something else, something that happened the day I graduated from Ault. After the graduation ceremony, all the faculty and then, adjacent to them, all the seniors lined up on the circle. And then all the other grades got in an opposite line, like two teams shaking hands after a game, except with twenty times as many people. In this way, every senior said good-bye to every non-senior, no matter how well or not well you’d known each other; after the juniors had passed by the seniors, the faculty went, too. The whole process took several hours, and there was much hugging and crying. When Aubrey got to me, I wrapped my arms around him—I was still considerably larger than he was—and thanked him profusely; the bizarre fact of finally graduating had made me hyper. He nodded solemnly, said, “I’ll miss meeting with you, Lee,” and, passing me a sealed envelope, added, “Read this later.” Because I wasn’t curious about what it said, and because I was distracted, I didn’t read it for several days. What it was was a card—another card—with a black cap and gown on the cover, and the words
Congratulations, graduate!
inside. Underneath, Aubrey had written
I would like to express that I have very strong feelings of love for you. I do not expect anything to happen and you don’t have to write back, but I wanted to say it. Good luck with your life. You are extremely attractive.
It was the nicest card I ever got, and I never responded. For a while, I meant to, only I had no idea what words a girl whom a boy had an unrequited crush on would use in a letter to that boy. But I kept the card; I have it still.

And as for Martha—I never understood when I was at Ault why she liked me as much as I liked her. Even now, I’m still not sure. I couldn’t give back half of what she gave me, and that fact should have knocked off the balance between us, but it didn’t, and I don’t know why not. Later, after Ault, I reinvented myself—not overnight but little by little. Ault had taught me everything I needed to know about attracting and alienating people, what the exact measurements ought to be of confidence and self-deprecation, humor, disclosure, inquisitiveness; even, finally, of enthusiasm. Also, Ault had been the toughest audience I’d ever encounter, to the extent that sometimes afterward, I found winning people over disappointingly easy. If Martha and I had met when we were, say, twenty-two, it wouldn’t have been hard for me to believe she’d like me. But she had liked me before I became likable; that was the confusing part.

In the first month of our senior year—we’d gotten the biggest and best room in Elwyn’s, with three windows facing the circle—Martha and I broke two full-length mirrors in the span of a week. There was a radiator beneath the windows, and we set the first mirror on top of it, between two windows, and a breeze came through the screens and knocked the mirror onto the floor. So we went into town, bought another mirror, put it in the same place, and managed to be surprised when that one also fell and shattered. Martha nailed the third mirror to the back of the door, and we left it there when we graduated from Ault.

But I remember the day the second mirror broke, how we’d run into each other in the gym after practice and walked back to the dorm together, and when we opened the door of our room, we saw it at the same time. “Shit,” I said, and Martha said, “How stupid are we?”

She lifted the mirror and propped it against, but not on top of, the radiator. It was cracked in dozens of places, and a few pieces had fallen out altogether and remained facedown on the rug, jagged shards shaped like Tennessee or North Carolina. I was standing behind Martha, and we were reflected over and over in the remaining pieces of glass; her eyes and nose and mouth were as familiar to me as my own.

“Fourteen years of bad luck,” I said, and it seemed an unfathomable stretch—not just in length, though it did seem long, but in terms of how much our lives would change during that time. In fourteen years, we would both be thirty-one. We’d have jobs, and we might be married or have children, we might live anywhere. We would be, by any definition, adult women.

Martha was the closest friend I’d ever had; I was, as always, preoccupied by the present moment (I was hoping to borrow her yellow wraparound skirt for formal dinner); and I was too young then to understand how simple facts of geography and time can separate people. These are reasons I shouldn’t have wondered what I wondered next, as I looked at our reflections in the splintered mirror—whether anything, even bad luck, would be enough to keep us bound to each other over all the years to come.

8. Kissing and Kissing

SENIOR YEAR

Cross Sugarman came back to me in the fifth week of our senior year. It was a Saturday, and Martha was staying with a cousin up at Dartmouth, trying to figure out if she wanted to apply there early. It was nearly three when the door to our room opened; I had gone to bed hours before. I think Cross must have just stood there for a minute, his eyes adjusting from the light of the hallway to the darkness of the room. This is when I woke up. Seeing a tall male figure in the threshold made my heart quicken—of course it did—but I knew by then that the weird things that happen at boarding school usually happen at night. Plus, since none of the dorm rooms had locks, I’d become accustomed to people barging in.

I must have stirred, because Cross said, “Hey.” He said it in that hoarse tone that’s half whisper and half real-voice, different from actual talking, less in volume than in meaning.

“Hey,” I said back. I still wasn’t sure of his identity.

He took a step forward and the door shut behind him. I sat up on the bottom bunk, trying to make out his face. “Can I lie down?” he said. “Just for a minute.”

That was when I realized who it was, but I remained disoriented from sleep. “Are you sick?” I asked.

He laughed. At the same time, he kicked off his shoes and eased into my bed, under the covers, and I found myself scooting toward the wall. There was a particular instant in our shifting when I could smell him—he smelled like beer and deodorant and sweat, which is to say that to me, he smelled great—and I thought,
Oh my God, it’s really Cross.
It seemed the unlikeliest possibility in the world.

The way we settled was that I was lying on my back, looking at the bottom of Martha’s mattress, and he was lying on his side, looking at me. The alcohol on his breath could have conjured up bus stations and old men with dirty clothes and bloodshot eyes, but because I was seventeen and a virgin and because I lived nine months a year on a campus of brick buildings and wooded hills and lovingly mown athletic fields, it conjured for me summer dances at country clubs, lives with wonderful secrets.

“I like your bed,” he said.

How had this happened? Why was he here? And what if I did something wrong and he left?

“Except,” he added, “it’s kind of hot. Hang on.” He pushed back the covers, raised his torso as if doing a sit-up, crossed his arms, lifted his sweater and T-shirt over his head, and tossed them away. “There. Much better.” When he lay back down and pulled up the covers again, relief washed over me—I’d been afraid he was leaving altogether, but now (his shirt was off!) it seemed he was settling in. “So,” he said, “this is what it’s like being Lee Fiora.”

Since our freshman year, we had scarcely spoken and I’d imagined a thousand conversations for us. And now I knew, I was finding out, that none of them had been right at all. “Yeah,” I said, “it’s probably not as exciting as being you.” Immediately, I wondered whether the comment had sounded flirtatious or insecure.

“Oh, I’m sure that being you is
way
more exciting.” (So: I had been flirting.) “All the time,” Cross continued, “I ask myself, why isn’t my life half as cool as that girl Lee’s?”

“A lot of people ask themselves that,” I said and when Cross laughed, it felt like the best thing that had ever happened. I was finding the situation strangely manageable, perhaps because of its strangeness: because we were alone together, because it was the middle of the night, because I had never predicted or tried to plan for it. Then he said, “Hey, Lee.”

“What?”

Perhaps four seconds had passed when I understood that I hadn’t been expected to say anything; I had been expected to turn my head, and if I had, he would have kissed me. The knowledge felt both impossible and definite; simultaneously, I was glad that I hadn’t turned and fearful that I had blown my only chance.

He sighed, exhaling beery breath. (I liked his beery breath—I like it still, on grown men, because of Cross.) “So Martha is at Dartmouth, huh?”

“How do you know that?”

“Let’s see. Maybe because I talk to her about ten thousand times a day.”

This was true, because of their being prefects. Over the summer, I had wondered whether, when we all returned to school, their new connection would affect my own contact with Cross, but it hadn’t seemed to. They ran roll call together, of course, and a lot of times when I was with Martha, sitting at a table in the dining hall or walking out of chapel, Cross would approach, but their exchanges were usually quick or else so long that they went off somewhere together. In these moments, I felt a vast and sickening jealousy, and then a loathing for myself for being jealous of my closest friend, who was herself completely unjealous.

And yet in bed with Cross, it was hard not to think that maybe his link to Martha
had
affected his contact with me—maybe he’d been reminded of me, all those times when he’d spoken to her and not even glanced my way.

“You know what I think?” Cross said. “I think Martha tells you all the secret prefect business. I bet you know everything that goes on at the disciplinary meetings.”

“Of course I don’t,” I said. “That would be a violation of the rules.”

“Yeah, whatever.”

“Do you tell Devin everything?”

“Devin doesn’t care. But you’re probably interested in that stuff.”

“Why would I be interested if Devin isn’t?”

“You just are,” Cross said. “I can tell. You think I don’t know you?”

“I don’t see how you could since you haven’t talked to me in, like, four years.”

“Try three. In fact, less than three years because that surprise holiday was in the spring.”

I think maybe my heart stopped, just for a few seconds. He remembered—he didn’t even try to conceal that he remembered—and he knew that I remembered, too.

I might have tried to prolong, or to amplify, the admission, but he said, “For instance, I’m sure Martha told you all the details on Zane.”

Arthur Zane, a junior, had been busted a few weeks before, in the first month of school, not for drinking or drugs but for breaking into the headmaster’s house late one afternoon while everyone else was at practice and trying on Mrs. Byden’s clothes. The break-in part of the story was what got announced at roll call; the clothing part they had tried to keep quiet.

“I doubt I know any more about Arthur than anyone else,” I said. (He had even put on Mrs. Byden’s panty hose and lipstick. And though he’d left the school, he hadn’t technically gotten kicked out—it was his first disciplinary offense, and besides, Arthur was third-generation Ault—as much as encouraged to find a place where he’d feel more comfortable. “What does that mean?” I’d asked, and Martha had said, “It means Mr. Byden was terrified Arthur would be the first student in the history of Ault to come out of the closet.” Both Martha and I assumed then that cross-dressing was the same as gayness, and also that Arthur was the only gay person we knew—at that point I still didn’t recognize Sin-Jun as
actually
gay.)

“You’re not a very good liar,” Cross said. “Has anyone ever told you that?”

I felt the corners of my lips turn up.

“But here’s the real question,” he continued. “Was he caught in a black strapless dress or a red sequined one?”

“Mrs. Byden would never wear a red sequined dress,” I said. It was true—she mostly stuck to long pleated skirts and cropped wool jackets.

“So you’re going with the black strapless? You’re positive you don’t want to change your answer?”

“Wasn’t he just wearing a brown corduroy skirt and a blouse?”

“You’re
so
busted,” Cross said. “Martha totally tells you everything. I knew it.”

“She tells me nothing.”

“She tells you everything.”

“Okay, fine,” I said. “But if Mrs. Byden did have a red sequined dress and a black strapless dress, any self-respecting transvestite would have picked the sequins.” Saying this, I felt a twinge of guilt—calling Arthur a transvestite wasn’t the cruelest remark I could make about him, but it wasn’t particularly nice, either. But what strikes me now is that I had no idea how much I’d give away in the service of flirting. This was just the beginning! For years and years, there would be so many things I’d do for a guy that I wouldn’t do in my usual life—jokes I wouldn’t normally tell, places I wouldn’t normally go, clothes I wouldn’t normally wear, drinks I wouldn’t normally drink, food I wouldn’t normally eat or food I would normally eat but wouldn’t eat in front of him. I am twenty-four, and I and the guy I like are with a group of people and the person driving is drunk and the seat belts are buried in the seat and I ride along anyway because, apparently, what I want from the guy is worth more than everything else I want or believe. It must be, right?

Cross was silent. I wondered if, after all that, he hadn’t even found my transvestite joke funny. Then I wondered if he had fallen asleep.

That was when, not unlike the way he had that rainy evening in the taxi three years before, he began to stroke my hair. He set his fingers against the top of my forehead and ran them back, smoothing out my hair against the pillow, then set his fingers against my forehead again. Over and over, back through my hair, the glide of his fingertips—I think that maybe nothing else in my life ever felt that purely, uncomplicatedly good. I couldn’t speak because I was afraid if I did, I might start crying, or he might stop doing it. I shut my eyes.

After a long time, he said, “You have nice hair. It’s really soft.” He ran his knuckles along the line of my jaw, over my lips. “Are you awake?”

“Sort of,” I murmured. It was an effort to speak.

“Can I kiss you?”

My eyes flapped open.

I was, of course, obsessed with kissing; I thought of kissing instead of thinking of Spanish verbs, instead of reading the newspaper or writing letters to my parents or paying attention during Indian sprints at soccer practice. But to imagine it and to have Cross next to me wanting to kiss were different. I didn’t know
how
to kiss. Kissing terrified me, as an actual thing you did with another person, and there was no one it would be more humiliating to kiss badly than Cross.

He had propped himself up on one elbow. “Don’t be nervous.” He leaned down and kissed my cheek. “See?”

His lips when they finally touched mine reminded me of the skin of a plum.

“You can kiss me back,” he said.

I pursed my lips toward him; we were kissing. It was harder work than I had imagined, and less immediately pleasing. In fact, it felt intriguing more than enjoyable—the shifting, overlapping wet and dry parts of our mouths and faces, the mild sourness of his mouth (it seemed so
personal
to be tasting Cross’s mouth), and also the way it was hard not to be conscious of the moment as it happened, not to want to pause and acknowledge it, even if only by laughing. I didn’t find kissing funny, but it didn’t seem that serious, either, not as serious as we were acting like it was.

He rose and twisted over me so that his legs were on either side of my hips and he was balanced on his knees and the palms of his hands. He had an erection, I realized, and I was slightly shocked. I’d heard, of course, that all boys wanted was sex, that they masturbated endlessly, and that any of them would do it with any girl, even if she was ugly. But I existed outside this world; no one ever tried to do anything with me.

Except that now, Cross was trying. And was his erection because of me or was it just the situation? And if it was me—was I supposed to have sex with him? It didn’t seem like that would be a very good idea.

Over my nightgown, he gripped my breasts, squeezing one, then pressing his face to it, sucking the nipple through the cotton. I did actually laugh then—it felt ridiculous, like I was nursing him—but Cross didn’t seem to recognize the noise as laughter, which was probably for the best. “Do you like this?” he asked.

If I had liked it a lot, I wouldn’t have been able to admit it. But because I liked it only fine—definitely I didn’t like it better than having my hair stroked—I said quietly, “Yeah.”

He leaned down to reach for the hem of my nightgown—it was white and calf-length, those were the kinds of nightgowns girls wore at Ault—and as he started to push it up (was he planning to take it off me completely?) I stiffened.