Prep: A Novel (14 page)

I passed the cookie dough back to Sin-Jun, and she hesitated. “Maybe I’m not eating no more.”

Amy was watching us.

“Did you want some?” I asked and, even though it was Sin-Jun’s, I held out the package.

Amy dug out some dough with her middle finger and forefinger, and it struck me—I had never considered it one way or the other—that she was probably a person who did not wash her hands after going to the bathroom. “I’m on your side,” Amy said. “I say bring McGrath down.”

So then she’d have something to tease him about, I thought. I wasn’t unsympathetic—I understood machinations, the need for an excuse.

“The problem is that his friends will be like bodyguards now,” I said.

“True.” Amy nodded.

“Maybe you crawling through his window while he sleeps,” Sin-Jun said. “At night he has no bodyguard.”

I laughed, and then my eyes met Amy’s. “I’d be breaking visitation,” I said. “I’d have to go before the disciplinary committee.”

“You shouldn’t go
in
there—” she began, and then I knew, I said, “Oh, like send down a threat? Or dangle something?”

“Yeah, just make him nervous.”

“I know what,” Sin-Jun said brightly. “We use fishing pole!”

“Where the hell would we find a fishing pole?” Though Amy sounded was scornful, I reminded myself that she was talking to us of her own volition.

“There is some in basement,” Sin-Jun said. “I have seen in storage.”

“I know what you’re talking about,” I said. “Back by that metal locker.” The basement ran beneath several dorms, creating a through-way rumored to be used by students who made illicit night visits to members of the opposite sex. “But we can’t go down there after curfew,” I said.

“We ask Madame,” Sin-Jun suggested.

“
Ask
her?” Amy said.

“It can’t hurt to try,” I said.

When we knocked on the door to Madame Broussard’s apartment, she answered quickly. Neither Amy nor Sin-Jun said anything, and I realized I was the leader by default. “Hi,” I said. “We have a question. This is kind of weird, but you know Assassin? And you know McGrath Mills? He’s my target, and we want to make him feel scared. Just as a joke. So I know it’s after ten, but we’re hoping—”

“We need to go down to the basement and get a fishing pole,” Amy said. “For two minutes. Can we?”

“For what reason do you need a fishing pole?” Madame asked. Overall, she seemed far less surprised by our appearance at her door than I’d have anticipated.

“We want to send something down to McGrath’s room, like a note,” I said. “He lives underneath Heidi and Alexis. But we’ll be quiet, and we won’t take very long.”

“But if you do such a thing”—Madame began, and I thought she was going to say,
you will violate curfew.
What she said instead was—“McGrath will know he is your target.”

“No, he knows already,” I said. “I tried to kill him when we were leaving chapel, and a bunch of his friends saw me.”

“These were other junior boys?” It was astonishing—Madame seemed genuinely interested.

“Yeah,” I said. “Mostly guys from his lacrosse team.”

“Well.” Madame nodded her head once, decisively. “I think we teach these boys a lesson.”

And then all three of us, Amy, Sin-Jun, and I, were following her out of the common room and down the basement steps, and it turned out the fishing poles weren’t where we remembered, and we paused, momentarily stumped, and then I said, “We don’t
need
a fishing pole. We could just use a broom or something,” and we were climbing the stairs and crowding around the common room closet, then hurrying down the hall to Heidi’s and Alexis’s room and as we explained the idea again, this time with Madame joining in, their expressions shifted from confusion to amusement to enthusiasm, enthusiasm that seemed as abrupt and as weirdly sincere as our own.

“You know what you should use is a pillowcase,” Heidi said. “Then you can write really big.” She rummaged in her laundry bag, and this seems distinctly Aultish to me now, the casual sacrifice of a pillowcase in the service of a joke. There was so little attention paid to the fact that pillowcases, like everything else, cost money. Heidi tossed it to me, and Alexis passed over a black marker.

With the cap off, I paused. “What am I writing?”

All of us were silent, a loaded, electric silence. “I know where you live,” Alexis suggested.

“I see you when you’re sleeping,” Heidi said.

“I smell your blood,” Amy said. “And it smells”—she glanced at Madame—
“très délicieuse.”

“We will not bring the French into this,” Madame said.

“So far, I like ‘I see you when you’re sleeping’ the best,” I said. “But does that sound too Santa Clausy?”

“I am always watching,” Sin-Jun said.

We looked at one another, the six of us—it felt, with this number of people, not unlike a meeting convened to make a serious decision—and as Heidi and Amy nodded, I said, “That’s good. It’s simple but creepy.”

Amy moved several books off a desk so we could spread the pillowcase flat. Then I wrote, in capital letters,
I’M ALWAYS WATCHING.

“Draw an eyeball,” Heidi said.

I made the almond shape, the iris and the pupil, the lashes on both the bottom and the top.

“You must sign it as well,” Madame said.

I hesitated. “With my name? Or no, what about—” I wrote,
Love, your assassin,
and Sin-Jun clapped. “It is perfect.”

When we taped the pillowcase to the broomstick, it was obvious that it would work better with two poles; Alexis ran off and returned with a mop. Heidi lifted the screen and Amy and I—I knew she wanted to be directly involved in the dangling, I could feel how focused she was on McGrath—stuck our upper bodies out into the night. I was holding the broom upside down, clutching the neck of it near the bristles, and she was holding the mop. Light emanated from the window below us, which meant their shades weren’t down. Leaning over, Amy knocked the mop handle against the brick exterior of the building. “Yoo-hoo,” she called. “Special delivery, boys.”

Ten seconds passed. I felt a rising worry that neither McGrath nor his roommate, Spencer, would notice, and my apprehension was not even really for them but for us in the room, how our plan would have come to nothing. And then I heard shuffling down below, a few male voices. “Hey, Mills,” someone called, and a few seconds later, unmistakably, there was the sound of McGrath’s laughter. He poked his head out a window one over and twisted around, looking up at us.

“Hey, baby,” Amy called. (I would never, ever have said
Hey, baby
to Cross Sugarman.)

“Hi, McGrath,” I said.

“What the hell is going on out here?” McGrath said. “Y’all are crazy.”

Another guy stuck his head out and said—not to us but to someone back in the room—“This is hard-core.” Behind me, Alexis and Heidi and Sin-Jun and Madame crowded close. Heidi opened the other window, and after a moment she also was hanging outside the building.

Then a third person—there seemed to be a group in the guys’ room, too, at least three or four of them—reached out and grabbed the pillowcase.

“Hey!” Amy said. “No touching!”

“That’s not what you tell most guys, Dennaker,” said the guy grabbing the pillowcase; it was Max Cobey.

“Bite me,” Amy replied.

“Who else is down there?” Heidi asked.

“Who else is up there?” Max said. “It sounds like a herd of elephants.”

“As a matter of fact, it’s a bunch of incredibly hot women wearing nothing but G-strings and lipstick,” Amy said. “And for only ninety-nine cents a minute, you can call up and talk to any one of us. Operators are standing—”

“That is enough for now, Amy,” I heard Madame say, and I was half-relieved and half-disappointed. “We will leave the boys alone.”

“We gotta go,” Amy called down. “Farewell, so long, auf Wiedersehen, good-bye.”

We began pulling up the mop and broomstick, and McGrath, who had disappeared into the room, stuck his head back out. “I don’t get to keep it?” he said. “After all that harassment?”

“You can keep it,” I said, as if it were my pillowcase to give away. “But only if you promise to use it tonight.”

“I’m gonna use it
every
night,” McGrath said, and that was the last I heard before I was back in the room and the night was outside again.

On Friday morning after Latin class, as we were collecting our books, I said to Martha, “You’re going tomorrow, right? With Conchita?” Martha and I had hardly spoken before, and initiating conversation made my heart pound. But it would be weird to ride into Boston together, never really having talked, when we’d spent the last seven months sitting side by side in Latin. Especially when I had the feeling that the reason we’d scarcely talked was because of me—on the very first day of class, when I was so terrified to be at Ault that I could barely make eye contact with people, Martha had said, “I’ve never taken Latin. Have you?” and I had said, “No,” looked away, and folded my arms. A few months later, Tab Kinkead had farted while standing at the chalkboard translating the sentence
Sextus is a neighbor of Claudia;
most people hadn’t heard, but when I’d seen Martha try without success to stifle her laughter, I’d known for sure that I’d made a mistake—she was someone I could have been friends with.

In the hallway, Martha was saying, “Conchita’s mom is super-nice.”

“Do you know where we’re eating?” I asked. Logistical questions were, in my opinion, the best questions of all; they were the most innocuous.

“We’re meeting at Mrs. Maxwell’s hotel, so we’ll probably go somewhere around there,” Martha said. “You’re on the lacrosse team with Conchita, aren’t you? She really likes you.”

I could feel what I was supposed to say in response—
Conchita’s great,
or
I really like her, too
—but I just couldn’t form the words. Martha’s remark made her seem, not in a bad way, like a camp counselor: generous and encouraging, happy to see people getting along.

“What sport are you doing?” I asked.

“Crew, and actually I’m pretty sure this’ll be my only free Saturday for the whole spring, so I’m glad to be going somewhere.”

“Is crew as intense as everyone says?”

“It’s beautiful to watch, but when you’re in the boat, you’re basically grunting and sweating the whole time.”

“Whenever I see people rowing, I always think of Jonas Ault in, like, 1880,” I said. “I can picture him wearing one of those unitard things and sporting a handlebar mustache.”

Martha laughed. Later, one of our jokes was that she was an easy laugh, a laugh slut. But something I always appreciated about her was how she made you feel witty. “Oh, yes, “ she said, adopting an affected tone. “Crew is very civilized.”

“A sport for gentlemen, “ I said, and I wondered why I’d never spoken to Martha before.

I knew from the list posted outside Dean Fletcher’s office that McGrath was a server at Ms. Prosek’s table this week, and it was this knowledge that had helped me, as I’d lain awake around four o’clock in the morning, formulate a plan to kill him. Like all servers, McGrath would arrive to set the table twenty minutes before formal dinner started. When he did, I decided (and it was a decision so thrilling, an idea so perfect, that after it came to me, I did not fall asleep again before my alarm clock beeped at six-thirty), I’d be waiting beneath that table to place the sticker on his leg.

After lacrosse practice, I rushed to the dining hall and arrived by five-thirty, ten minutes before McGrath was due. Only five or six students were in the dining hall, including that night’s dining hall prefect, a senior named Oli Kehlmeier. (Being one of the three dining hall prefects was actually desirable—they oversaw the waiters at formal dinner, which meant they could boss around the younger boys and flirt with the girls.) Oli was busy spreading white cloths on the tables—it surprised me to see a dining hall prefect in fact working—and I decided to take a cloth myself from the stack near the doors to the kitchen.

I smoothed the cloth over Ms. Prosek’s table, then scanned the dining hall. No one was paying attention to me. I moved a chair out of the way, crouched, crawled under the table, and pulled the chair in. I was sitting with my heels pressed to my rear end, my knees forward, but that quickly became uncomfortable, and I switched to sitting Indian-style. There wasn’t much room to maneuver. My elbow knocked a chair, and I froze, but I heard nothing from the outside—no proclamation of poltergeist, no face appearing at the level of my own to ask what the hell I was doing—and I relaxed again. A few old-looking globs of gum were stuck to the unfinished underside of the table, I noticed, and I could smell both the table and the floor, though neither of them smelled particularly like wood; they smelled more like shoes, like not-so-dirty running shoes, or a child’s flip-flops.

At twenty of six, I tensed, anticipating McGrath. As more and more servers arrived, I felt certain that every set of approaching footsteps was his. All the tables around Ms. Prosek’s appeared occupied, and surely, I thought, they would see me, surely they’d notice the pale blue fabric of my skirt (was it gross that I was sitting on the floor in my skirt?), or see my sandaled foot. But no one approached. At the table to the right of mine, the server, I could tell by her voice, was Clara O’Hallahan, and she was singing to herself; she was singing the Jim Croce song “I Got a Name.” A little later, I heard a boy say, “Reed was in a bad mood today, huh?” and a girl said, “No worse than usual.” I waited to hear someone mention Assassin, but no one did. Eventually, the voices all became a blended, increasingly noisy hum, punctuated by the clinking of silverware and glasses. It was ten of six. McGrath wouldn’t dare miss formal dinner when he was serving, I thought, or would he? Just for skipping, you got table wipes, but if you were the server, I was pretty sure you got detention.

He arrived at four of six; well before he’d gotten to the table, I heard his cheerful drawl. Someone must have remarked on his lateness because he was saying, as he came closer, “It’s the two-minute method. Watch and learn.” Above my head, he set down what sounded like plates, then silverware. Before I could stick him, he’d left again, and he returned with a tray of glasses. His calves were mere inches from me—he was wearing khaki shorts, his leg hair was blond and thick—and he was whistling.