Prep: A Novel (12 page)

Then the song ended. I didn’t want to look up, to make eye contact with Conchita; I didn’t particularly want to be in the same room with her.

“Here’s another good one,” she said. “It’s called ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues.’ ”

The word
homesick
gave me hope, but the song was just clever chanting. It sounded political, and I wanted another song of longing. Conchita played a few more songs, switching CDs, sometimes cutting off the songs midway. By the end, the one I still liked the best was “Lay, Lady, Lay.” As I was leaving, Conchita said, “You can borrow the album.”

“That’s okay.”

“You’re welcome to.”

“I don’t have a CD player,” I said.

“Do your roommates? You room with Dede and Sin-Jun, right?”

She really had done her research.

“Dede has a stereo,” I said. “But we’re not good friends.”

I had my hand on the doorknob when she said, “Want to get dinner in town? The dining hall is having halibut, so I just thought if you’re not busy.”

If there was no formal dinner, you were allowed to leave campus, but I never did. The only time I went into town was on the weekend, when I borrowed Sin-Jun’s bike and rode to the grocery store to buy toothpaste or saltines.

“We could get pizza or go to that Chinese place,” Conchita said.

I’d never set foot in either restaurant. Somehow, the more time that passed without my going, the more I felt like going required an invitation; these places seemed to belong to other people, to juniors and seniors, or to rich students, or to students with friends. But here, in this moment, I’d received an invitation. Conchita liked me, I thought. She was kind. If I accepted her offer, I could do the things that other people did. “Let’s get pizza,” I said. “I’ll go get a bike and meet you back here.”

“Wait.”

I turned.

“I don’t have a bike,” she said.

“I don’t either. I’m borrowing Sin-Jun’s.”

She hesitated. “I mean I don’t know how to ride a bike.”

I blinked at her.

“I’ve walked before,” she said. “It doesn’t take that long.”

Outside her dorm, we headed out the campus gates and turned onto the two-lane road. “So you just never learned?” I said, and I hoped that she couldn’t tell how astonished I was. I had never heard of anyone over the age of five who didn’t know how to ride a bike.

“There wasn’t any special reason if that’s what you’re asking.”

“But when you were little, didn’t the kids in your neighborhood ride bikes?”

“I didn’t know the other kids that well.”

I thought of my own neighborhood, how gangs of children between the ages of eight and twelve would ride around, how I had done so myself. We’d go down to the park and back, and just before darkness, as the streetlights were flickering on and the hum of the cicadas was thickening, we’d pedal home, sweaty, with streaks of dirt on our faces.

“Do you wish you knew how?” I asked.

“I haven’t thought about it much.”

We both were quiet. Then I said, “I could teach you. At least I could try.”

She did not respond immediately, but I could feel a kind of happy nervousness come over her, a tentative excitement. I couldn’t see her face because we were side by side, but I sensed that she was smiling. “You don’t think it’s too late for me?” she asked.

“Definitely not. It’s one of those things where once you know how, you can’t believe you ever didn’t know. It would probably only take a few days.” I thought about how Conchita wouldn’t want other students to see. “We could use the road behind the infirmary,” I said. “We could do it in the morning, maybe, before chapel.”

My first target in Assassin was Devin Billinger, a boy in my class who had, at that time, no particular significance to me. In my mailbox, I found the slip of paper with my name and his name typed on it and, attached by a paper clip, the sheet of round orange stickers. All around me, other students were finding their assignments, talking noisily. It was the beginning of sixth period, and I left the mail room to walk to the dining hall for lunch. I was just outside the stairwell leading from the basement to the first floor when, amazingly, I came face-to-face with Devin himself. Like me, he was alone. We made eye contact and did not say hi, and he turned into the stairwell.

I was still holding the assignment sheet and the stickers. I peeled off a sticker with my index finger and thumb, keeping it affixed to my fingertip. Immediately, both my hands began to shake. I entered the stairwell. “Devin,” I said.

He stopped a few steps up and looked back. “Huh?”

Without saying anything, I closed the space between us. When we were standing on the same step, I reached out and placed the sticker on the upper part of his left arm. “You’re dead,” I said, and I bit my lip, trying not to smile.

He looked at his arm as if I’d spit on it. “What the fuck is that?”

“It’s for Assassin,” I said. “You’re my target.”

“It hasn’t started yet.”

“Yes, it has.” I held out my wrist to him, so he could read my watch: It was ten after one.

“This is bullshit.” His voice was more than irritated; possibly, though I didn’t know him well enough to be certain, he was furious. He glared at me and turned, as if to continue up the steps.

“Wait,” I said. “You have to give me your target.”

“I don’t have to do anything.”

We looked at each other, and I actually laughed. In theory, pissing off Devin Billinger should have unnerved me. He was one of a group of six or seven guys in our class known as bank boys—most of them were from New York and most of their dads had jobs having to do with investments and brokerage and other money-related matters I had no grasp of. (Technically, a bank boy didn’t have to be from New York or have a banking father—he just had to seem as if he could.) But the reality of Devin’s anger was more ridiculous than scary; he reminded me of a pouting six-year-old. “Are you planning to cheat?” I asked.

“Why are you so righteous? It’s a game.”

“And I’m just playing by the rules.”

Devin glared at me, then shook his head. He reached into his pocket, withdrew some small crumpled bits of paper, and thrust them toward me. “Here. Are you happy?”

“Yeah, I am,” I said. “Thank you.”

The next morning, when we were supposed to meet for Conchita’s first bike lesson, gray clouds hung overhead and thunder rumbled in the distance. I wondered whether Conchita would show up; she seemed like someone who might change her plans due to the mere intimation of bad weather. But when I got to the road behind the infirmary, she was waiting, wearing a hot pink transparent rain slicker and a matching hat—a sou’wester, like what fishermen wear, except that I had difficulty imagining any fisherman in transparent pink.

I had ridden over on Sin-Jun’s bike, and I slowed down, came to a stop next to Conchita, and climbed off. “Start by getting on the bike,” I said.

She slung one leg over so she was straddling the crossbar, her feet planted on the ground.

“Now sit down,” I said.

She eased backward.

“Put your feet on the pedals.”

“Are you holding on?”

“Yeah, of course.” I’d been gripping the carrier, and I moved one hand to the crossbar and one to the back of the seat. “Does that feel steadier?”

She lifted her right foot and set it on the pedal, then lifted her left foot. But the pedals had toe clips, and Conchita missed the opening and kicked the pedal so it spun several times. “Sorry,” she said.

“Just try again.”

The second time, she successfully inserted her foot.

“Okay,” I said. “Now kind of push down. You use—I guess you use your thigh muscles.”

She pushed. The right pedal went down, and the left pedal came up, and then nothing else happened.

“You keep doing it,” I said. “That’s what makes the bike go forward.”

She began pumping again. Her motions were still jerky, but they were continuous, and she was moving. I jogged along.

“I feel like I’m tilting to one side,” she said.

“You sort of are. The faster you go, the smoother the ride will be.”

“This is Sin-Jun’s bike, right?” she said. “You must get along with her better than Dede because you didn’t want to borrow Dede’s stereo.”

“Sin-Jun is more laid-back,” I said. “Dede’s okay, but she’s not laid-back.”

“Dede’s problem is that she wants to be Aspeth Montgomery.”

This observation was accurate. But it was also odd—Conchita’s tone made her seem familiar with Dede, when I suspected they’d never had a conversation.

“Do you think Dede and Aspeth will room together next year?” Conchita asked. Though request forms weren’t due until late May, rooming had, since spring break, become a common topic of conversation.

“I doubt it.” Dede would like nothing better, I knew, but in the final hour, I didn’t believe that Aspeth would agree to it.

“Imagine wanting to room with Aspeth,” Conchita said. “She’s so mean.”

“Do you know her?”

“Oh, I’ve known her forever.”

This didn’t seem possible. Aspeth lived in my dorm, not Conchita’s, and even if the two of them had been on sports teams or in classes together, Aspeth was always surrounded, literally buffered from the rest of Ault, by a group of girls like Dede. I thought of Aspeth’s long pale hair, the clothes she wore—now that it was spring, pastel button-down shirts and khaki skirts and white or navy espadrilles—and her tan, shapely legs and the light sprinkling of freckles across her nose, which always made her look as if she had spent the afternoon playing tennis in the sun. Then I glanced at Conchita on the bike beside me, her glowing pink rain slicker and hat, her dark puffy hair. “I didn’t realize you guys were friends,” I said.

“I’ve known Aspeth my whole life. Our dads used to work together. I’ve been in her class since kindergarten.”

“I thought Aspeth was from Connecticut.”

“Her family only moved there a few years ago. Before that, they lived in Texas.”

“So do you guys hang out much?”

Conchita turned to look at me, an expression of faint amusement on her face. “Yeah, constantly. Haven’t you seen us?” Then she said, “Lee, when will you quit playing dumb with me? Aspeth and I were friends when we were little, but she stopped talking to me in fifth grade because she became too cool.” Conchita sounded matter-of-fact, not resentful. I think that she accepted her status as an outsider, that perhaps she had done so even before she came to Ault, while I remained perpetually hopeful that circumstances would conspire to make me beloved.

“So what about Sin-Jun?” Conchita said. “Do you think you two will room together?”

“Maybe.” I was pretty sure Sin-Jun was planning to room with plump, yappy Clara O’Hallahan. I imagined they’d let me get a triple with them, which would be better than a single, but not by much. Just as rooming with Aspeth would secure Dede’s status as a bona fide popular person, rooming with Sin-Jun and Clara would signify, if only to me, that I really was one of the mild, boring, peripheral girls.

We were well past the infirmary. “Let’s turn around,” I said. “We can just keep going up and back.”

On Wednesday, after killing Devin, I’d killed Sage Christensen (she was a sophomore on the lacrosse team), and at dinner I’d killed Allie Wray, a senior. Both exclaimed in surprise when I tagged them, but neither seemed to care particularly. “I’m so bad at these games,” Allie said agreeably as she passed over her stickers and her target.

Yet I, apparently, had an aptitude for Assassin, and I found myself wondering—it was impossible not to wonder—if I had any shot at winning the whole game. What if I surprised everyone? What if all the boys (boys, definitely, were more into it) got so preoccupied killing each other that they forgot about me and I just stuck around, beneath the radar? Because, undeniably, the qualities that I usually lamented in myself—my invisibility, my watchfulness of others—now served me well. Maybe at the end there would come the unlikely inevitability of victory, like when I played hearts with my family and, every so often, shot the moon.

And even if I didn’t win Assassin, I still liked the extra pulse it created in the dining hall and the schoolhouse. Some people would tell you who they had, and some people were secretive—it was like grades—and supposedly a bunch of sophomores had drawn up an enormous chart, like a family tree that circled in on itself, connecting all the players. But of course, such a chart wouldn’t remain current for long, because people’s status changed hourly. I also heard that Mrs. Velle, the registrar, had given out other students’ class schedules to Mundy Keffler and Albert Shuman, who were seniors, but that after more people came by her office asking for schedules, she refused. Waiting in line for breakfast, I was told by Richie Secrest, another freshman, that at least half the student body had been killed in the first twenty-four hours. I wasn’t surprised—both Dede and Sin-Jun had been dead by the previous evening. I was toasting my bagel when I heard Aspeth say to Cross Sugarman, “If I hear another word about that goddamn game, I’ll scream.”

“Yeah, because you’re out already,” Cross said. “Don’t be a bad sport.” (In such proximity to Cross, I stared at the floor, feeling clammy and unattractive from having been outside with Conchita.)

“No,” Aspeth said. “Try because it’s lame. And because there are enough basket cases at this school as it is.”

“Sure,” Cross said. “I completely believe you.”

They were standing about three feet from me, and then their bagels fell down the slide to the front of the toaster, and they were gone. So Cross was still in, I thought, and that was when I had the idea: If I stayed alive, eventually the game would lead me to him. Or it would lead him to me, which would be even better. For Cross to be in possession of a piece of paper with my name on it, for him to travel around campus in search of me, to reach out and place a sticker on my body—the possibility made me almost sad, almost terrified, with hope. For the first time since we’d ridden in the taxi together more than a month before, we’d be forced to talk; he’d have to acknowledge me.

Life is clearest when guided by ulterior motives; walking to chapel, I felt a sense of true purpose. I was on my way to kill McGrath Mills, a junior from Dallas whom I’d inherited from Allie Wray. I’d heard McGrath was good at lacrosse, and I thought that an athlete would probably be harder to kill—there was more of a chance he’d be into the game.