Prep: A Novel (17 page)

Bingo, I thought. Cross was still alive.

In Latin class, Martha told me Conchita had gone to the infirmary before breakfast. She was not at lacrosse practice, and then she wasn’t there again the next day, either. During this time, Martha and I consulted each other frequently, or at least I consulted Martha. The first thing I’d done after leaving Conchita sitting outside on Sunday evening was call Martha from the pay phone in Broussard’s. (If I went to their dorm, of course, I risked running into Conchita.) It had been strange—the truth was, it had been exciting—to need to talk on the phone to someone who was also on campus.

“She’s definitely angry,” Martha told me on Monday, and when I said, “At both of us or at me?” Martha replied, “Mostly at you. She’s being irrational because she feels hurt, but she’ll get over it.” As usual, because she was Martha, this did not sound callous.

After Conchita missed a second practice, I went to the infirmary to find her, and the nurse said she’d returned to her dorm. Standing outside her door, I could hear music that I thought might be Dylan. I knocked, and Conchita called, “Come in.”

Clearly, she’d expected someone else—when she saw that it was me, she drew her lips together and furrowed her eyebrows, like a child making a mad face.

I gestured toward the stereo. “Good song.”

“What do you want?”

“I was worried about you.”

“Before or after you stole my best friend? But the real question is if you were using me to get to Martha all along or if you just took an opportunity when you saw it.”

“Conchita.” I didn’t mean to, but I actually smiled.

She glared at me.

“We’re not on a soap opera,” I said. “Stealing friends isn’t something that happens in real life.”

“How would you know? You didn’t have any friends before me.”

“That’s not true.” I thought of Sin-Jun. Then I thought of Heidi and Alexis, whom I hadn’t spoken to since the night of the dangling pillowcase; I was pretty sure they didn’t count.

“I overestimated you,” Conchita said. “I thought you were smart and neat. But really you’re shallow and conformist. You don’t have an identity, so you define yourself by who you spend time with, and you get nervous that you’re spending time with the wrong people. I feel sorry for Martha because I bet she has no idea what you’re like. If Aspeth Montgomery told you she wanted to be your roommate next year, you would drop Martha in a minute.”

Again, listening to Conchita’s analysis, I felt the sting of truth, and that old relief, a relief bordering on gratitude, that someone recognized me. Flawed as I was, someone recognized me.

“Why don’t you try to be a bigger person?” she said. More softly, she added, “We could still room together. I would forgive you.”

“Are you not going to accept my apology if I won’t room with you?”

“If all you want is for me to accept your apology, I will. There. I accepted it.”

“Will you come back to lacrosse?”

“Missing lacrosse has nothing to do with you. The pollen count has been really high.” She looked away from me. “I need to take a shower.”

I was out in the hall when I heard her door open again, and when I felt her hand against my back, simultaneously, I thought she was trying to hug me from behind—I even thought maybe she was embracing me sexually, maybe Conchita was in love with me—and I knew, I knew in the smallest and most certain part of my mind, that she was killing me.

I turned around.

“You’re dead.” Her voice was flat, not satisfied in any way. Looking back, I think she killed me not because doing so brought her pleasure but because not doing so—granting me an exemption when I had treated her as I had—would have pained her. Later, I tried to piece it together, but since I couldn’t talk to her, my sense of the situation was incomplete. What I came up with was that she had had Edmundo, and that when she’d learned he was my assassin, she’d killed him to protect me—she’d killed him before the weekend, when she would be away from campus and couldn’t be killed herself. She was colluding in my attempt to win, and then she stopped colluding. Or maybe it was more complicated than that, maybe she killed even more people to get to me and offer protection. At the time, it seemed important to figure out the links between us, the chronology of events, but it quickly stopped seeming important at all. I never got into Assassin again after freshman year, though people kept playing the whole time I was at Ault. I’m not sure when it was abolished, or maybe it’s still played, under a different name: Sticker Tag. Or, Elimination. This is the kind of thing you stop knowing when you’re gone from a place, but even before I was gone, I lost interest; I became one of the people who found the game ridiculous and annoying.

But then, at the time, in the hallway: I looked at Conchita’s face, scanning for evidence that she was joking, or would rescind my death. The possibility had to exist because it was so wrong, in my opinion, for her to have killed me. Assassin had nothing to do with the two of us. It had to do with Cross, and what kind of heart did Conchita have if she could remorselessly block the crush of another girl? Only if she liked the boy herself could there be justification; otherwise blocking someone else’s crush was always and absolutely wrong.

And I did see signs—in her eyes I saw them, and around her mouth—that she would reverse her decision, but only for one reason, only if I’d be her roommate, and in a way, Conchita was blameless because I don’t think she knew she would make this reversal, or if she did know, she knew I wouldn’t go along with it. That is to say, she wasn’t blackmailing me. Our friendship was over. Maybe it could have recovered if only she had had a reason to resent me without my having a reason to resent her back. I can imagine that such asymmetry might have created a fragile balance, requiring forgiveness from only one of us. But instead our resentment was mutually supportive, like a wall held up with equal force from opposite sides.

It seems to me now that I was greatly indebted to Conchita; though it wasn’t voluntary on her part, she gave me Martha. She literally created the circumstances that allowed me to get to know Martha, but Conchita also did something bigger and harder to quantify: She reminded me that I knew how to make friends. For this, I owed her a lot, but at the time, I believed that in killing me, she’d gotten her revenge; I believed I owed her nothing at all.

And there was something else that happened that strange week. It happened on Sunday night, before I told Conchita I was rooming with Martha, before she killed me and we said bad and unretractable things to each other: Conchita learned to ride a bike.

That evening, when I showed up behind the infirmary, Conchita was sitting cross-legged in the grass. I got off the bike, and she threw one leg over it. I gripped the carrier. “Okay,” I said. “Ready.” I began to jog as we moved forward.

She glanced over her shoulder. “Now my dad wants to meet you, too,” she said.

I pictured short, bald Ernie Maxwell—I still hadn’t seen a photo of him—and thought how strange it was to say
my dad
and to be referring to someone other people had heard of. “I’ll look forward to it,” I said. A lock of hair fell into my eyes and I lifted my hand and tucked it behind my ear. Conchita was suddenly farther away from me than she’d been before, and I realized with a jolt that I wasn’t holding on. She was riding the bike by herself, gliding forward with perfect balance. I continued to jog, trying to close the space between us, but without me weighing her down, she had picked up speed.

“Hey, Conchita,” I said. “Don’t freak out, but I’m not touching the bike. You’re riding it without my help.”

Immediately, she pulled the brakes and set her feet on the road.

“You were doing so well,” I said. “You should have kept going. I’ll start you over.” It occurred to me that it might not happen again, at least not right away. But that was okay. She’d made progress. Having ridden once, she would know what she was capable of.

“You’re holding on, right?” she said.

“Yeah, I’m holding on. Now pedal.”

I
was
holding on, but very loosely, and I lifted my hand as soon as she gained momentum. She kept going, and I stopped, and she rode away from me. “Lee!” she called. “You let go! I can tell!”

“I know, but you’re okay. Look at you.”

“I’m stopping. Okay? I’m stopping.” She stopped and turned around as she always did, sliding off the seat and dragging the bike sideways.

“Now come back to me,” I called. She was about twenty yards away, and I thought that people might hear us yelling. Then I thought,
Oh, who cares?

“I just start?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Exactly like when I’m there.”

Even from that distance, I could see her inhale and exhale several times, then square her shoulders.

“You can do it,” I shouted.

And then she was riding toward me; she was beaming. The wind pushed back her dark hair, and her knuckles, I observed as she came closer, were white. I began to clap. “Hooray,” I cried. “You’re doing it! You’re on fire!”

She sailed right past me.

“Look at her go!” I called. “Who can catch Conchita Maxwell?”

She lifted her right hand, to wave at me perhaps, and the bike wobbled, and she quickly set her hand back down. I held my breath, but she regained her balance. She was fine, better than fine; she was great. As I watched her hunched back grow smaller and smaller, I felt as happy for myself as I did for her. I had taught Conchita to ride a bike—it was incredible. And this was a feeling, perhaps the only one from our brief friendship, that never went sour.

4. Cipher

SOPHOMORE FALL

In idle moments during sophomore English, I used to look at Ms. Moray’s pin and speculate about how she’d acquired it. It was silver, shaped to resemble an open hardcover book, the pages stacked fatly like wavy hair falling on either side of a part. She wore the pin three or four days a week, and I wondered if there was any logic to when she did. I could imagine the pin having been a gift from her parents—from a mother, especially—or perhaps from a professor or high school teacher who wanted to wish her luck as she entered this tough, worthy profession. Or maybe it was from an old neighbor, or a relative. It wasn’t from a friend or a boyfriend, I was nearly sure—when she came for a year to teach at Ault as an intern, Ms. Moray was twenty-two, which didn’t seem all that young to me because I was fifteen, but it definitely seemed too young to be receiving a frumpy accessory from a peer. Pins were okay for women in their forties, maybe for women in their thirties, but before that it seemed they ought to stick to earrings and necklaces.

When I entered Ms. Moray’s classroom in September, the first thing I noticed was that Cross Sugarman, whom over the summer I’d spent hours and hours thinking about, wasn’t there. Because I had English during the last period of the day and because Cross hadn’t been in any of my other classes so far, his absence exacerbated my fear that I’d never see him this year, that we’d probably never talk, and that he definitely wouldn’t fall in love with me. The second thing I noticed after entering the classroom was that printed in chalk across the blackboard, it said,
“Literature is an ax for the frozen sea within us.”—Franz Kafka.
The third thing I noticed was that some sort of chaos was occurring in the back of the classroom, near one of the open, screenless Palladian windows. Darden Pittard was holding aloft a running shoe, and several other students seated at the long rectangular table were loudly offering advice.

“Just whack it,” Aspeth Montgomery said, and my freshman roommate Dede said, “But you’ll make it mad,” and Aspeth said, “Who cares? It’ll be dead.”

Norie Cleehan, who was a pale skinny girl from Colorado with long limp brown hair and a soft voice, said, “Leave it alone, Darden. It’s not bothering anyone.” I took the empty seat next to Norie. It was a bee, I saw—that was the source of all the chaos.

Across the table, Dede, who had twisted around in her chair to watch Darden, glanced over her shoulder, and our eyes met. “Hi, Lee,” she said. “How was your summer?”

I hesitated, searching the question for sarcasm or hostility. “It was good,” I said slowly. “How was yours?”

“Awesome. I was—eek! Get it away! Get it away!” The bee had just whizzed by Dede’s right ear, and she was pawing the air around her head. The bee flew behind her, and she shouted, “Where is it? Where’d it go?”

Beside her, Aspeth laughed hysterically.

“I got it,” Darden said, but as he stepped forward, the bee shot away from him and toward me. It was a blur zooming at my face. Without thinking, I clapped my hands together in front of my nose, and when I felt a sting and then a stickiness, I knew I’d gotten it. What I wasn’t sure of was whether I’d meant to. The room was silent.

After several seconds, Darden said, “Holy shit, Fiora. Not bad,” and at the same time, the teacher walked through the doorway.

“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” she said, and then she grinned, and you could feel the impression she was making sink over the room, all of us seeing her in the same way:
She’s cool,
we thought.
We got the cool intern for English!
She wasn’t exactly pretty—she had an upturned, vaguely piggish nose, and brown eyebrows that looked even thicker and darker than they were because her chin-length hair was blond—but she was pulled together, kind of sporty. She wore a short-sleeved oxford shirt, a wraparound denim skirt, no stockings, and clogs. Her calves were tan and muscular, the legs of someone who’d played field hockey at Dartmouth. Every fall, Ault had three or four new interns, recent college graduates who came for a year to teach and coach.

She approached the head of the table and pulled a folder from a pale blue suede satchel. “I’m Ms. Moray,” she said. “And don’t even think of calling me Mrs. Moray because that’s my mother.”

People laughed.

“I’m here to teach sophomore English,” she continued. “So if you’re not here to
take
sophomore English, then I recommend that you use this opportunity to make a quick getaway.”

Darden stood, and there was more laughter, and then he sat down again.

Ms. Moray cocked her head. “Okay, wise guy. You’re the first person whose name I want to know.”

“My name’s Darden Pittard.”

She scanned the class list. “Gotcha. That’s a very assonant name. Who knows what assonance is?”

Dede raised her hand. “Is it like
the red robin,
or
the big balloon
?”

“Close. But that’s alliteration, which is consonants. Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds, like D
ar
den Pitt
ar
d. In short, Mr. Pittard, you bring poetry wherever you go.”

“I’ve got an assonant name,” Darden said. “I like that, man.”

I wondered if establishing a rapport with Darden was a strategic move on Ms. Moray’s part—Darden was one of the most popular guys in the sophomore class. People genuinely liked him, and on top of that they liked the fact that they genuinely liked a big black guy from the Bronx.

“Okay,” Ms. Moray said. “Now as for the rest of you—”

I couldn’t bear it any longer. I half-stood, my hands still clamped together, and said, “Sorry, but may I go to the bathroom?”

“Why didn’t you go before?”

“I just want to wash my hands,” I said, and the class started laughing. I didn’t think they were laughing at me, not exactly, and I wasn’t actively embarrassed but I could feel embarrassment hovering in the air. Killing a bee with your bare hands could be considered, by my classmates, gross or weird—like spreading cream cheese on your pancakes in the dining hall, or carrying around your used maxi pads in the schoolhouse during the day and then throwing them away at night in your own dorm room, both of which were things a girl named Audrey Flaherty, a junior who played the cello, was rumored to do. I didn’t want to become my class’s version of Audrey.

As my classmates tittered, Ms. Moray’s gaze darted around the room. She seemed, for a few seconds, confused, and then abruptly resolute. “You can wait until after I take attendance.” She looked back down at the sheet of paper. “Okay, so Oliver—”

“I’m sorry, but I’ll be really fast, and the bell hasn’t rung yet.” I stood all the way up. My desire to wash my hands, to do away with the evidence, felt like a physical craving.

Our eyes met again—I could see in Ms. Moray’s face that she was deciding I was a much different person than I was, a class cutup or a troublemaker—and as we regarded each other, the bell rang. “Yes, it has,” Ms. Moray said. “Take a seat. And the rest of you remember to empty your bladders before class.”

My classmates chuckled—a teacher had used the word
bladder
—and I felt a surge of anger.

“All right,” Ms. Moray was saying. “Oliver Amunsen—where are you?”

Oliver raised his hand.

“Did I pronounce that right?”

Oliver nodded.

“Norie Cleehan?”

“Present,” Norie said in her soft voice.

When Ms. Moray called my name, I said, “Here.” We made eye contact, and she nodded once, as if filing away information:
The name of the obnoxious girl is Lee Fiora.

Aspeth said under her breath, “Raise your hand, Lee.”

I ignored her; my hands, which felt warm and itchy, were still joined, resting on my lap beneath the table.

“Come on,” Aspeth said. “Give us a peek.”

“Is there a problem?” Ms. Moray was looking between Aspeth and me, and she settled on me.

“No,” I said.

“Is there something you want to share with the rest of us?”

No one spoke, and I realized they were all waiting for me. I said, “Well, there’s this.” I lifted my arms and opened my hands to reveal a mishmash of dark congealing liquid and flakes of wings and tiny tufts of black and yellow fur; there was a swollen red lump on my left palm where I’d been stung. Ordinarily, of course, I thought it best to remain inconspicuous, but the gesture had a certain irresistible theatricality, and an inevitability. Sometimes you can feel the pull of what other people want from you, and you sacrifice yourself, you risk seeming odd or unsavory, to keep them entertained.

Like the audience of a sitcom, the class gasped and giggled.

“What is that?” Ms. Moray asked.

“I killed a bee.”

She made a noise that it took me a few seconds to recognize as an irritated sigh. “Fine,” she said. “Go wash your hands and then come back.” Her irritation surprised me; I’d expected it all to be okay between us once she knew what the problem was.

Standing in front of the mirror above the bathroom sink, I felt, underneath my sense of agitation over having made a teacher mad on the first day of class, a vague and surprising happiness, and I tried to think of why. I ran backward through the sequence of events that had just occurred, and then I remembered—after I’d killed the bee, Darden Pittard had called me by my last name. He had said, “Not bad, Fiora.” And it had seemed like no big deal, like I was the same as any other girl, someone a guy could be casually friendly with. These were the types of almost-compliments that I hoarded.

When I returned to the classroom, Dede was saying, “—and my favorite book is
Marjorie Morningstar
because it’s just something you can really relate to. Oh, and I’m from Westchester County.” While Aspeth announced what her favorite book was and where she was from, I tried to think of what I’d say when it was my turn.
Jane Eyre,
maybe—over the summer, back in South Bend, I’d read it in a single twenty-four-hour period, although that had had as much to do with the fact that I’d been bored as that I’d liked the book. But it appeared Aspeth was the last to go. Either Ms. Moray had forgotten about me, or she just didn’t feel like letting me speak.

“All right,” she said. “Now if I can turn your attention to—”

“Ms. Moray?” Aspeth said. “Excuse me, but before we go on, will you tell us where you’re from and what your favorite book is?”

“Why do you want to know?” Ms. Moray’s tone was, if this was possible, flirtatious—pleased but reticent.

“We told you,” Aspeth said.

“Aha,” Ms. Moray said. “Payback.”

“We want insight into your character,” Darden said.

“I grew up in Dubuque, Iowa, which is up north, and I went to the U of I for undergrad—go, Hawkeyes.” She lifted one arm, and a couple guys laughed. So she hadn’t played field hockey for Dartmouth, I thought, and then, knowing she was from Iowa, I recognized a certain Midwesternness in her. It was in her clothes, especially the denim skirt, and also in her gestures. She was not entirely at ease, I realized, and as soon as I thought it, I thought,
Of course she’s not.
Not only was it her first day teaching at Ault, it was her first day teaching, period. This was the moment when I noticed her pin; she wore it on the right side of her shirt, just below her collarbone. “I was a lit major,” she continued. “Phi Beta Kappa—you know, just to toot my own horn.” She laughed, and no one laughed along with her. At Ault, you didn’t toot your own horn; also, you didn’t imagine that acknowledging that that’s what you were doing would make it okay. “It’s tough to pick one book as my favorite,” Ms. Moray continued, “but I’d probably say
My Ántonia.
”

I saw Dede write
My Ántonia
in her notebook. “Who’s that by?” she asked.

“Who wants to tell”—Ms. Moray glanced at the attendance sheet—“Dede who wrote
My Ántonia
?”

No one said anything.

“You guys know, right?”

Again, there was silence.

“Don’t tell me that the students at an elite institution like Ault don’t know who Willa Cather is. I thought you guys were supposed to be the best and the brightest.” Ms. Moray laughed again, and even though I didn’t like her much, I felt mortified on her behalf. This was another misstep, talking about Ault the way a magazine article might, or the way someone in town—someone who worked at the grocery store, or the barber shop—would.