Prep: A Novel (50 page)

My pulse quickened, and I could feel the heaviness in my belly that was both excitement and anxiety. Very quietly, I said, “Sure.”

The door to the classroom wasn’t all the way shut, and he pushed it open with the tip of his right crutch, then shut it again, still using the crutch, from the other side. It was a gray day, and gray light came through the windows; Cross did not turn on the overhead lights. It was a classroom with a long rectangular table, and he pulled two chairs out from the table, facing each other, and after he’d sat in one, I thought the other one was for me; then I saw that he meant it to be for his foot. I hovered to one side, waiting to be directed, and I hated my own giggling passivity. Did he say what he said next because he knew I wanted to be told what to do, or had he decided already, before we entered the classroom?

Either way: I said, “Am I supposed to sit in your lap?” and he said, “If you want to” (of course, I asked, “Am I hurting you?” and he said, “No, not at all”), and I thought that things were okay, that he just wanted to hold me like I wanted to hold him, but we had been kissing for less than a minute when he murmured, “If you gave me a blow job now, that would be so great.”

It was a hardwood floor, and my knees ached almost right away. And I didn’t want to lean the weight of my upper body against his thighs because—because as long as this was supposed to be, for him, an enjoyable experience, he deserved to enjoy it entirely; my posture didn’t need to be his concern.

And now there was no doubt: I had seen his penis, I was seeing it at this very moment. So strong was my own wish for him not to see my body that I had at times imagined he shared it; clearly, he did not. Why was taking off your clothes not embarrassing to other people? His pulled-down corduroy pants and boxers didn’t seem remotely sexy; they made me think of him shitting. And which students would sit on this chair tomorrow having no idea Cross’s bare ass had rested against it? And the warm, sour, thrusting weight in my mouth, the pressure of his palm on the back of my head—this was what I had missed in the last few weeks, this was what I was being denied?

With a great groan, he pulled out of my mouth and came all over my sweater (it was tan wool, with cables); while he was still not paying attention, I rubbed at the cum with the back of my sleeve, already imagining asking Martha to send out the sweater with her other dry cleaning. I stood and stepped away, wanting to leave—in my dorm, he was always the one who made us part, and I was the one who would have let him stay forever—and the unpleasantness of the moment felt like something to hold on to; if I could keep it, I would never again be at his mercy.

He had pulled up his pants but not yet buckled his belt. Still seated, he said, “Come here,” and I was skeptical and irritated and I stepped closer doubtfully, and then he wrapped his arms around my waist and pressed his face to my breasts and hugged me tightly and my eyes filled with tears. There was nothing to do but rest my hands behind his shoulders, to touch his hair with my fingers; he always said how soft my hair was, but the truth, which I never told him, was that so was his.

Spring break was pretty much like Christmas break had been, except that the house was empty during the day because my brothers’ vacation had already occurred. In the quiet, I sat around watching television and not showering and a few times, in especially pathetic moments, opening my parents’ Ault directory, which I was pretty sure they had never used for anything, to look at Cross’s listing. This was, of course, a thing I had already done so many times on campus that the sight of his typed name and home address had long ago lost their potency.

When I saw family friends, which I tried to do as little as possible, they congratulated me on Michigan, and in accepting their good wishes, it became real to me that that was where I’d spend the next four years. On the Saturday before I was to return to Ault, my mother and I drove to Ann Arbor, where it was thirty degrees and the sidewalks were still icy. We wandered around the cold campus and she bought me a hooded sweatshirt, even though I told her I didn’t need it. We drove back to South Bend in the evening, because my father had said it was fine with him if we stayed overnight at a hotel but it wasn’t going to be on his nickel.

He was the one who took me to the airport, and I was, again, overwhelmingly relieved to be leaving. He hugged me by the car, gave me a five-dollar bill to buy lunch, then drove away. After I checked my suitcase, I walked through the terminal crying. When you go to boarding school, you’re always leaving your family, not once but over and over, and it’s not like it is when you’re in college because you’re older then and you’re sort of supposed to be gone from them. I cried because of how guilty I felt, and because of how indulgent my guilt was. Standing in a store that sold bottled water and birthday cards and T-shirts that said
Indiana
in ornate writing, less than twenty minutes away from my family’s house, I missed them so much I was tempted to call my mother at work and ask her to come wait with me for my plane; she’d have been alarmed, possibly frantic, but she’d have done it. But then she’d know what she’d probably only suspected—how messed up I really was, how much I’d been misleading them for the last four years.

It would be better once I got on the plane, better still back on campus. But while I was in their city, it just seemed like such a mistake that I had ever left home, such an error in judgment on all our parts.

I received the note from the headmaster’s office more than a month after spring break. It was on Mr. Byden’s official stationery, with the crest of Ault at the top, though the note itself, hardly seeming to warrant such formality, was only two lines long:
There’s something I’d like to discuss with you. Please ask Mrs. Dershey to set up a time for us to meet.
A cold dread came over me. So this was what it was like to be busted—of course, in the end, I’d been caught. And it did not feel romantic or adventurous in the least. It was twelve-fifty p.m., and I was alone, when I’d always imagined that Cross and I would be caught together. Maybe I’d been ratted on and Cross hadn’t—maybe another girl (Hillary Tompkins would be my first guess) had said she’d seen me with an unidentified boy.

I walked upstairs from the mail room and headed straight to Mr. Byden’s office; it would be best just to know the damage. And also to get some reassurance—probably I would not be kicked out, but that was the first thing I wanted to confirm.

When Mrs. Dershey saw me, she said, “About the article, right? Wait just one moment.” She stood and knocked on the door to Mr. Byden’s office. I looked out the window, which offered a view of the grassy circle. Directly across the circle from the schoolhouse was the dining hall, and I could see people leaving lunch. Feeling just as I had when I’d learned my junior year that I might be spring-cleaned (how abruptly your life could become derailed, and how sickeningly familiar it seemed when it did), I located Martha walking with Sin-Jun; though I couldn’t make out their faces, I recognized Sin-Jun’s black hair and Martha’s shirt, which was a pink button-down.

“Lee,” Mrs. Dershey said. “He can see you right now.”

Mr. Byden was at his desk. “Come in, come in,” he said. “Don’t be shy. If you’ll just have a seat there while I finish up one piece of business.”

Mr. Byden tried to make himself accessible to students—my sophomore year he’d dressed up as Santa Claus for the last roll call before Christmas, and he taught an elective on ethics every spring—but he still intimidated me, and I’d managed to avoid ever having a real conversation with him. He knew my name because he made it a point to memorize all the new students’ names within the first month of classes. Whenever we’d passed each other since my freshman year and he’d said, “Hello, Lee,” or, “Good evening to you, Lee,” I’d been tempted to tell him he could forget me, that it was okay if he used the space in his brain to retain, say, the phone number of some rich old alum.

I sat facing his desk, in a chair that had blue-and-red-striped brocade fabric and wooden arms. Another chair just like mine was a few feet away, and behind me—I surveyed the room while Mr. Byden wrote—were a couch and a low cherry table and several more armchairs. There was also a fireplace, with a white marble mantel, and above it a portrait of Jonas Ault, circa 1860. I had never been in Mr. Byden’s office before, but I recognized the portrait from the school catalog. Jonas Ault, as we heard in chapel every year on Founder’s Day, had been the captain of a whale-hunting ship, the rebellious youngest son of a wealthy Boston family. One night before he departed for a sea voyage, his young daughter Elsa pleaded with him to stay at home, and Ault refused. While at sea, the men encountered a storm so severe that Ault swore, as the ship rocked and waves crashed over the gunwales, that if he made it back to shore alive he would give up the whaling trade. He and all his men survived, but when they returned to port, he learned that three days prior Elsa had died of scarlet fever. In her memory he founded Ault School. (Not Ault Academy—that’s what my parents sometimes called it, but the correct name was Ault School.) Though the story possessed a certain romantic doom that appealed to me, what I always wondered was, why did Ault found a school for boys in memory of his daughter? Even if she’d lived, she would have had to wait until she was 104 years old before she was allowed to attend.

“Allrighty,” Mr. Byden said. “I appreciate your prompt response. If you’ll bear with me, I’ve got a few questions for you, and then I’ll more fully explain why I called you in. Does that sound acceptable?”

“Yes,” I said. Then I added, “sir.” I meant it to be respectful, but coming out of my mouth, the word sounded almost sarcastic. The Southern students I knew pulled off
sir
and
ma’am
effortlessly.

“You came here as a freshman, correct?”

It wasn’t the question I’d expected. I nodded.

“And how would you characterize your Ault experience? Just in the broadest terms, and keep in mind that there’s no right answer.”

This, I knew, was never true.

“I like it here,” I said. Meaning,
Don’t kick me out. Preferably, don’t even bust me.

“Tell me about the highlights.”

Maybe I
wasn’t
in his office because of Cross. Because surely this couldn’t be the way most busts began. And, as I considered it, it occurred to me that if I were going to be busted, it would probably be not by Mr. Byden but by Mrs. Elwyn, or possibly Dean Fletcher.

“Just tell me what comes to mind first,” he said.

I glanced out the window and saw several seniors, including Martha and Sin-Jun, lying on the circle. Since spring break, even before it had become truly warm, there’d almost always been seniors sitting or lying in a group on the circle; it was like a massive volunteer effort they were completing in shifts. I hadn’t once hung out there because I knew it would make me feel conspicuous and like I was wasting time. It had never bothered me to sit in the dorm, listening to music, staring into space, but wasting time alone felt less like wasting time than like keeping my despair in check.

I looked back at Mr. Byden. The highlight of my Ault experience, as I saw it at that moment, was Cross. “The highlight of my Ault experience has been my friends,” I said.

“There’s something about living in the dorms, isn’t there?” Mr. Byden said. “A real closeness that develops.”

“And Martha and I have roomed together for three years, which is nice.”

“Believe me, I know all about you and Martha. I hear great things about the two of you.”

From whom?
I thought.

“How about academics?” Mr. Byden said. “There was a bit of a problem with precalculus, was there not?”

I felt a new flare of panic—maybe this was what our meeting was about, I thought, maybe after all these months, they’d figured out I’d cheated—but Mr. Byden was smiling. His expression seemed to say,
Math—isn’t it pesky?

“Things have been better this year,” I said. “I’ve been able to stay on top of it.”

“And you’re off to the University of Michigan if I’m not mistaken.”

I nodded.

“A fine institution,” he said. “One of the really outstanding state schools.”

I smiled at him without saying anything. With people outside of Ault, you pretended that you were lucky to go to the University of Michigan and maybe, depending upon whom you were comparing yourself to, you really were; but Mr. Byden and I both knew that within Ault, it wasn’t lucky at all.

“Do you feel prepared for college?” Mr. Byden asked.

“Yes, definitely. I’ve gotten an excellent education.” This, in fact, was true.

“Any favorite classes?”

“Eleventh-grade history with Dean Fletcher was great. And tenth-grade history, with Mr. Corning. I liked environmental science pretty much, too. I had Mrs. McNally for that. Really, all my teachers here have been good. It’s just that I haven’t always been so good at the subjects.”

Mr. Byden laughed. “Nobody’s perfect, right? But I know you’ve contributed a lot to this place, Lee, in your own way.”

What on earth did he want from me, I wondered, and at that moment, he said, “I’ll get to the point.
The New York Times
is planning a feature on the school.”

“Wow.”

“Well, it’s certainly an opportunity, but media attention is always a double-edged sword. It’s smart to approach any situation like this with a degree of caution, especially in this day and age, when the general public isn’t all that enamored with the idea of prep school. The
Times
is a first-rate paper, of course, but sometimes the media tends to simply reinforce existing stereotypes instead of taking the time to tell the real story. Do you know what I’m saying?”

“I think so.”

“All of us at Ault are awfully proud of the school, and when the
Times
comes here to do the interviews, we want them talking to kids who can convey that pride. I’m not saying, if you’ll pardon the expression, that we want to feed them a line. What we’re looking for are students who can provide a view of the school that’s balanced as well as truthful. My question for you is, can I persuade you to be one of those students?”