Prep: A Novel (13 page)

I’d decided the night before that my best bet was in the rush after morning chapel. Therefore, I’d left breakfast early, without Conchita, and I found a seat in chapel near the back. Usually I sat near the front, but I knew the back was the province of drowsy junior and senior boys and of students using chapel time to finish their homework. As the seats around me filled, I kept an eye out for McGrath. At seven fifty-eight, he took a seat two rows in front of me. While Mr. Coker, a chemistry teacher, gave a talk about how he’d developed patience by observing his grandfather during boyhood fishing trips to Wisconsin, I intently watched the back of McGrath’s head.

Though you were free to leave chapel after the hymn, I usually waited until the recessional was over. On this morning, however, before the last notes of “Jerusalem” rang out, I followed McGrath toward the exit. A bottleneck had formed at the doors—this was why normally I waited—and people were pushing each other and joking around. Parker Farrell, a senior, said, “Hey, Dooley, watch your back!” and then another guy shouted, “Quit grabbing my assassin!”

Two people stood between McGrath and me, and I wormed past one, then the other. With my right hand in my pocket, I’d transferred an orange sticker from the sheet to my finger. On the threshold of the chapel, McGrath was only a few inches from me; seeing the weave of his red polo shirt up close was like seeing the pores on another person’s face.

I withdrew my hand from my pocket and placed the sticker on his lower back, and I had not taken my hand away when Max Cobey, a junior standing to my left, said, “I saw that, whatever-your-name-is freshman girl, and you’re so busted. Hey, Mills, look at your back.”

McGrath turned toward Max, and Max pointed at me.

“She just tried to kill you,” Max said.

McGrath turned around. I was looking down, blushing furiously; without raising my chin, I glanced up, and I saw that McGrath was grinning. “You?” he said.

The swarm was moving forward, and the three of us found ourselves outside, in front of the chapel.

“You’re totally busted,” Max said again, quite loudly, and he pointed down at me; he was several inches taller than I was. But he didn’t seem hostile, as Devin had; rather, he was simply enthusiastic. A few other junior guys, friends of either Max’s or McGrath’s, gathered around us.

“What’s your name?” McGrath said. He had a Southern accent, a slight twang, and he’d stuck the orange sticker from his shirt onto the pad of his middle finger.

“My name’s Lee.”

“Did you try to kill me back there, Lee?”

I darted glances at the faces of the other boys, then looked back at McGrath. “Kind of,” I said, and they laughed.

“Here’s what I’m gonna tell you,” McGrath said. “It’s okay to
try.
But it would be wrong to succeed. You got that?”

“Tell her,” one of the other guys said.

“Let’s recap.” McGrath held up his right hand, the hand with the sticker. “Try, all right,” he said. He held up his left hand. “Succeed, wrong.” He shook his head. “Very, very wrong.”

“I’ll see if I can remember.”

“Ooh,” Max said. “She’s feisty.”

Already, I felt like I had crushes on both him and McGrath.

“All right now, Lee,” McGrath said as he turned away. “I’ll be watchin’ you.”

“Me, too,” one of the other boys said, and he mimed like he was holding binoculars in front of his eyes. Then he smiled at me, before catching up with his friends. (
Simon Thomworth Allard, Hanover, New Hampshire
—that afternoon in the dorm, I studied the school catalog until I’d figured out his identity.)

I was leaving the dining hall after dinner that night, wheeling Sin-Jun’s bike beside me for Conchita’s next lesson, when I glanced over my shoulder and saw Edmundo Saldana, a quiet-seeming sophomore I’d never talked to. Though several students had left the dining hall just before I had, Edmundo and I were alone; I was about ten feet in front of him.

“Are you trying to kill me?” I asked.

He scowled noncommittally.

My heartbeat picked up. “If you try to, I’ll yell,” I said. “And they’ll turn around.” I gestured ahead. I was half-bluffing—probably I wouldn’t yell because it would be melodramatic. But I also might, because of how much I wanted to stay in the game.

“It’s all kind of stupid,” Edmundo said. He mumbled his words, but I was listening intently. “I’m not that into it, you know?”

“So you
are
trying to kill me?” I couldn’t believe that I’d been right—as soon as I’d asked him, I’d realized he could easily have been headed to the library.

“I don’t really care,” Edmundo mumbled. “You want to live, I won’t kill you. I don’t know why they play this.” He was barely making eye contact with me, and I wondered if it was all a setup—he’d pretend not to care while inching closer, and then he’d pounce. But when I thought back to other times I’d noticed him around—Edmundo was from Phoenix, he was (I was nearly sure) on scholarship, and he and his roommate, a rich zitty white kid from Boston named Philip Ivers, supposedly did nothing but play backgammon in their room—it seemed like maybe Edmundo was always this shy and evasive. Certainly, he was an even more uncomfortable person than I was.

“If you don’t care, then will you let me live?” I said. “Will you turn around? Or you just stay here, and I’ll keep walking.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Edmundo said. “You keep walking, fine.”

When I told Conchita what had just happened, she said, “Edmundo has you? Edmundo Saldana?”

“Yeah, why?”

She had climbed onto the bike and was pedaling while I held on—she had definitely made progress, even in just the first lesson. “No reason, really,” she said. “I’m in MSA with him.” MSA stood for Minority Student Alliance, and I knew practically nothing about the group, except that it met on Sunday nights.

“You don’t have a crush on him, do you?” I asked.

“On Edmundo? Are you for real?”

“You just got kind of excited when I mentioned him.”

“I don’t believe in crushes,” Conchita said. “What’s the point?”

The question was unanswerable. What was the point of being a person, what was the point of breathing air?

“Don’t tell me you have a crush on someone,” she said. She glanced at me, inadvertently turning her arms as she twisted her neck. The bike swerved to the left, and she quickly faced straight ahead again. “Who?” she said. “I won’t tell. I promise.”

“I’m not telling someone who thinks all crushes are pointless.” In fact, I had never talked about Cross with anyone. I had not even said his name aloud since surprise holiday. But I had thought of him so often that sometimes when I saw him, it was weird—real Cross, moving-around Cross, Cross talking to his friends.
He
was the person I always thought of?

Part of the reason I hadn’t talked about him was that it preserved his specialness, but another part was that I’d never before had an eager ear. “You really can’t tell anyone,” I said. “I’m serious.”

“I would think you’d know you can trust me,” Conchita said, and she sounded hurt.

“It’s Cross,” I said. “On surprise holiday—”

“Cross? You like
Cross
?”

“Conchita, do you want me to tell you this or not?”

“Sorry.”

“So it was surprise holiday,” I continued, “and we ended up in a—what’s so wrong with liking Cross? Do you even know him?” I was strongly reminding myself of someone, but it took a few seconds to figure out that the someone was Dede.

“He’s in my math class,” Conchita said. “He seems okay, but I’d imagine you liking someone more like—maybe like Ian Schulman.”

“I don’t even know who that is.”

“He’s a sophomore who’s really good at art. He draws comic strips and stuff. And he wears black Converse sneakers.”

“Are you sure that you don’t like him?”

“I don’t have time to,” Conchita said. “Seeing as Edmundo and I are passionately in love.”

In spite of myself, I laughed.

“So go on,” she said. “It was surprise holiday and then what?”

After I’d told her—the mall, the taxi, Cross stroking my hair—she said, “Did he kiss you?”

“John and Martin totally would have seen that,” I said, and as I felt myself implying that circumstances had prevented our kissing, I thought maybe this was why you told stories to other people—for how their possibilities enlarged in the retelling.

“Wait a second,” Conchita said. “Cross has a girlfriend.”

“He wasn’t cheating,” I said, and we were turning around—already, I had lost count of how many times Conchita had ridden up and down the road—so it was possible for her to fix her gaze on me without fear of tilting. “He really wasn’t,” I said. “Kissing is cheating. Sitting next to someone in a taxi isn’t.”

“Would you feel that way if you were Sophie Thruler?”

She had turned the bike around completely and was facing north again. “Go,” I said. “Start pedaling.” The truth was that I rarely thought of Sophie. She was beautiful, she was a junior, and Cross may have been her boyfriend, but he could not possibly matter to her as he mattered to me. If they broke up, I suspected she’d be dating some other guy within a week. But I didn’t even want them to break up—if Cross wasn’t going out with anyone, there’d be danger present in the glance of every other girl, in their proximity to him in chapel, their laughter during conversations. As long as he was off-limits to me, he was off-limits to the rest of the female population, too. “Never mind about Sophie,” I told Conchita. “The point is that now I’m hoping I’ll get Cross or he’ll get me for Assassin.”

“I thought you can’t control who you get.”

“True, but the game is getting exponentially smaller.” I had the fleeting thought that I might be using the word
exponentially
wrong and also that, in front of Conchita, it was okay; she was not judgmental. “The more people I kill, the better my chances of getting to him.”

“You’re assuming he won’t get killed by someone else.”

“I think he’s watching out. Anyway, aren’t you impressed by how I’m using Assassin as a means to an end? I’m being Machiavellian.” In the fall, all freshmen had read
The Prince.

“Mr. Brewster would be proud,” Conchita said. “And just think if you marry Cross—maybe he’ll give you extra credit.”

I looked at her, and she was smiling. And we both were sweating from the activity of the bike, and I could feel then how I had capitulated to Conchita. We were friends. She must have felt the same thing, because she said, “There’s something I want to ask you.”

I knew what she would say. But I feigned oblivion. “What?”

“I was thinking maybe we could room together next year.”

I could picture it easily. In fact, I already had: Our room would have ruffly pink curtains, and I would eat all her food, and we’d listen to Bob Dylan while we studied. It wasn’t the worst scenario imaginable, but it made me uneasy. There was what we already had in common—our dorkiness, our scholarships—and also what we might grow to have in common. (I feared my own malleability.) I saw us staying in the dorm on Saturday nights, donning our pajamas early, ordering Chinese food, throwing water balloons at each other—spazzing out. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to spazz out. I wanted to have boyfriends, I wanted my life to be sorrowful and complicated and unwholesome, at least a little unwholesome. “Wow,” I said. “I hadn’t thought about it. I’d have to check on some stuff before I could say for sure.”

“Stuff with Sin-Jun?”

I nodded. “What about Martha Porter?” I said. “Aren’t you guys pretty good friends?”

“Martha is great. But her roommate, Elizabeth, was bulimic, and she didn’t come back after Christmas. Martha said she’s gotten so used to having a single she’ll probably request one again for next year.”

So other people shared my ambivalence about rooming with Conchita; I wasn’t surprised.

“Just let me know,” Conchita said. “The forms still aren’t due for a while. And in the meantime, my mom is coming to Boston this weekend, and I wanted to invite you to lunch with us on Saturday. I invited Martha, too.”

Oddly enough, given that it was less than an hour away, I had never actually been to Boston—I’d only passed through the city on the way to and from the airport, riding on an Ault bus. But now, when people back home asked how I liked it, I’d be able to give a real answer.

“I’ve told my mom all about you,” Conchita said, and I couldn’t help wondering why Conchita was such a fan of mine, especially when no one else was. How had I charmed her so effortlessly, or less than effortlessly—unwillingly even? Had it been my lack of interest, was the explanation really that simple and obvious?

“I’ll try to live up to her expectations,” I said.

Killing time in the room before curfew—Sin-Jun wasn’t there, and Dede was napping, which probably meant she was planning to stay up late studying for a test—I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror over Dede’s bureau, and it struck me suddenly that I didn’t look like someone who could win a schoolwide game. I wasn’t sure what such a person looked like—just not like me. I had wavy brown hair and thin lips and thick eyebrows (not man-thick but thick for a girl) and I knew I had an overly intense stare. “What are you looking at me for?” my mother would say when she was driving, or, at the kitchen table, “What? Is something in my teeth?” Sometimes I could even feel myself doing it, inspecting another person’s face when we were close together, but it was hard to stop—where else was I supposed to set my eyes? It was even weirder if you never looked at the other person at all.

I stepped closer to Dede’s mirror and peered at my skin, inspecting it for potential breakouts. I had turned my head and was scrutinizing the left side of my jaw when Dede said, in a muffled voice, “What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“If I don’t finish Latin,” she said, “it’ll be all watery.”

“You’re asleep, Dede,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”

At curfew, Sin-Jun and I stood in front of the kitchenette eating raw cookie dough. By the time everyone had checked in and announcements were finished, we were two thirds through the package, and I was beginning to feel sick. Amy Dennaker approached the refrigerator, took out a Diet Coke, and, while not looking at me, said, “McGrath thought it was really funny how you tried to kill him in chapel today. He’s so cocky.” There was something uncharacteristically conversational, almost friendly, in Amy’s tone. “Did you know his room is right below Alexis and Heidi’s?” she added, and I could tell because of how her voice had a bubble of happiness in it: Amy had a crush on McGrath.