Prep: A Novel (21 page)

“Stop it,” Ms. Moray said, and her voice was loud and sharp. It was strange to hear a normal voice. “That’s enough. All three of you, sit down. But first change out of those clothes.”

Darden and Aspeth and Dede regarded her silently. Their posture was already different—Aspeth’s arms were folded, she wasn’t touching Darden at all—and none of them were smiling.

“We were just—” Dede began.

“Right now,” Ms. Moray said. “Hurry.”

They walked quickly past us, back into the hall. In their absence, the rest of us looked at one another, looked away, looked back; Chris Graves put his head down on the table. When Darden, Aspeth, and Dede returned, they sat without speaking.

“Would someone like to explain what that was about?” Ms. Moray said.

No one said anything. I couldn’t tell if she was asking all of us or just them, and I also couldn’t tell if she was really asking for an explanation—if, like me, she hadn’t understood—or if she was asking for more of a justification.

“Really,” Ms. Moray said. “I’m curious—curious about what could
possibly
make the three of you think it’s either relevant or appropriate to portray Uncle Tom as a pimp and the other slaves as prostitutes.”

Of course. I was an idiot.

“Uncle Tom is a
Christ
figure,” Ms. Moray said. “He’s a hero.”

Darden was looking down, and Aspeth was looking across the room, her face blank, her arms crossed again. To watch Aspeth be scolded was odd and not, as I might have imagined, enjoyable. I would have felt sorry for her, actually, except that she seemed unaffected by Ms. Moray’s comments; she seemed mostly bored. Of the three of them, only Dede was looking at Ms. Moray. “We were being creative,” Dede said.

Ms. Moray smiled unpleasantly. “Creative how?”

“By, like, we were—well, with a modern-day parallel—we just thought it would be fun.”

“I’ll tell you something,” Ms. Moray said. “And this is a lesson that could serve all of you well on that day not so far in the future when you find yourselves out in the real world. The next time you’re being
creative,
the next time you’re having
fun,
you might want to stop and think about how your behavior looks to other people. Because I’ll tell you, what this seems like to me is nothing but racism.”

Everyone looked at her then, even Darden and Aspeth. Racism didn’t exist at Ault. Or it did, of course it did, but not like that. Kids came from all sorts of cultural backgrounds, with parents who had emigrated from Pakistan, Thailand, Colombia, and some kids had families that still lived far away—in my dorm alone, there were girls from Zimbabwe and Latvia. And no one ever made slurs, it wasn’t like you got ostracized if you weren’t white. Racism seemed to me like a holdover from my parents’ generation, something that was not entirely gone but had fallen out of favor—like girdles, say, or meatloaf.

“We weren’t being racist,” Aspeth said. Her voice contained none of Dede’s anxious eagerness, Dede’s earnest wish to set things straight. Aspeth knew she was right, and the only question was whether it was worth demonstrating this to an inferior mind like Ms. Moray’s. “How could we be?” Aspeth said. “Darden is black.”

This was a bold and possibly inappropriate thing to say—Darden’s blackness, in our post-racist environment, was not a thing you remarked on.

“That’s your defense?” Ms. Moray said. “That Darden is—?” Even she seemed unable to say that he was black, which affirmed Aspeth’s power. But then Ms. Moray appeared to regain control. “Listen,” she said. “Internalized racism is still racism. Self-hatred is
not
an excuse.”

I glanced at Darden, who was looking down again. He inhaled, puffed out his cheeks, exhaled, and shook his head. I didn’t think he was self-hating, and I certainly didn’t want him to be—
I
was self-hating, and wasn’t that enough? Did there need to be so many of us?

“There’s also the issue—” Ms. Moray said, but Darden interrupted her.

“We made a mistake,” he said. “How about we leave it at that?” He was looking up at Ms. Moray, his mouth set in a firm line. He seemed to me in this moment like an adult—his deep voice and his physical size and his reasonableness, how it appeared he wanted the situation resolved more than he wanted himself exonerated. I wished that I were friends with him so that I could tell him after class I’d been impressed by his behavior and it wouldn’t just seem like I was trying to get on his good side.

Ms. Moray hesitated. It had seemed before that she was just warming up, but this was a relatively easy way out. “Fine,” she said at last. “But I’ll make one more point. And that’s that this wasn’t only offensive in terms of the racial stereotypes you guys were playing off. I’m also deeply, deeply troubled by the sexism here. And, no, the fact that you’re women doesn’t make it okay for you to objectify yourselves. Our culture teaches women that our primary worth is our appearance, but we don’t have to accept that idea. We can flaunt our bodies, or we can choose to have integrity and self-respect.” Ms. Moray’s voice had turned high, she sounded a little too impassioned, and I saw Aspeth roll her eyes at Dede. She shouldn’t have been using the word
women,
I thought. All of us in the room, except for Ms. Moray herself, were girls.

Later that day—news of what had happened in class spread quickly, and even Martha pressed me for details—I was in the locker room when I heard Aspeth talking about it yet again. “Rah, rah, rah,” she said. “Let’s go burn our bras.”

The next day, while we waited before class for the bell to ring, Ms. Moray said, “Who’s psyched to learn?” Then she pretended to be a cheerleader, waving her hands in the air, shouting, “E-N-G-L-I-S-H—what’s that spell? English!” We didn’t have cheerleaders at Ault, and she was making the joke to show that she forgave us; she didn’t seem to realize that she herself had not been forgiven.

One Saturday afternoon in early November, Martha and I were reading in our room. She was at her desk, and I was lying on my back in bed, on the lower bunk, holding up my Western European history textbook until my hands fell asleep, then shutting my eyes and setting the open textbook over my face, the pages pressed to my cheeks, while I waited for the pins-and-needles feeling to pass. As the afternoon wore on, the intervals during which I was reading shrank and the intervals when my eyes were closed stretched. It was during one of the latter periods that I heard Martha stand and, it sounded like, pull on a jacket. I lifted the book.

“I’m going to town,” she said. “You want anything?”

I sat up. “Maybe I’ll come.”

“I’m just running some errands.”

Although it seemed like she didn’t want me to go, I couldn’t imagine this was the case. The feeling Martha gave me, a feeling I got from no one else except, at times, my parents, was that I was excellent company, that almost no situation existed that would not be improved by the addition of my incisive observations and side-splitting wit. “Martha, don’t you know that buying hemorrhoid cream is nothing to be ashamed of?” I said.

She smiled. “I promise that if I get hemorrhoids, you’ll be the first to know.” She zipped her backpack.

“Martha, why are you—” I began, and at the same time, she said, “I’m getting a haircut.” Then she said, “What were you going to ask?”

“Nothing,” I said. “You’re getting a haircut?”

“Don’t be offended. I think you’re a really good haircutter. I honestly do.”

“I’m not offended.” In fact, I wasn’t yet sure if this was true. “But why are you acting so weird?”

She sighed and, still wearing her backpack, sat down at her desk. In a regretful voice, she asked, “Am I?”

“Yes.”

“I just feel funny about it,” she said. “I mean, why do you cut people’s hair?”

“Why do I cut people’s hair? I don’t know. Why are you asking me?”

We weren’t having a fight. Really, it was difficult to imagine fighting with Martha because she was the most un-angry person I knew. Even in this moment, she seemed, if anything, sad. Still, I felt an unfamiliar tension between us.

“I’m asking because—oh, I don’t know.”

“Say it,” I said. “Whatever you were going to say, just say it.”

She paused. “I think you cut people’s hair, especially boys, as this way of having contact with them without having to really get close.”

“You mean physical contact or just social contact?”

“Well.” She considered the question. “I guess both.”

“So I’m a pervert?”

“No! Oh, no, Lee, that’s not what I meant at all. It’s totally normal to want to be close to people.” Martha’s goal was to be a classics professor, but there were times when I could more easily picture her as a therapist, or possibly an elementary school principal. “But it’s like you’re doing people a favor, and what do you get from it? No one ever helps you clean up. It’s not an equal trade. And I just think you deserve better.”

I looked down at my thighs against the mattress.

“You can be friends with, like, Nick Chafee,” Martha said. “If you want to, that is. Personally, I don’t think Nick is any great shakes. But it’s not like the best you can do is to cut his hair.”

I believed that Martha believed this. Whether Nick Chafee believed it was a different story.

“Maybe I’m making too big a deal of this,” Martha said.

“No, I appreciate you saying something.” I swallowed. “I do.”

Martha stood again. “I just feel like it’s better for me to get a haircut in town. You don’t have to do anything for me.”

“But I would be happy to cut your hair,” I said.

“I know.” She was next to the door, gripping her bike key in one hand. “Thank you.”

“Martha,” I said as she stepped into the hallway.

She turned around.

“Does everyone think that about me? That I cut hair so that—” I wanted to say,
so that I can talk to boys even though I’m a loser,
but Martha hated it when I insulted myself.

“Of course not.” She grinned. “People are too busy thinking about themselves.” (No one was ever better at reassuring me than Martha—before tests, she reassured me that I could pass, and before formal dinner, she reassured me that my clothes looked okay, and before I went home for Christmas or the summer, she reassured me that my plane wouldn’t crash. She reassured me that no one had noticed when I’d tripped walking out of chapel, that I would be happy in college, that it didn’t matter if I’d spilled root beer on her futon cover, and that I didn’t have bad breath; if I doubted her, she would lean her face in and say, “Okay, breathe on me. Go ahead, I don’t care.” Sometimes still I think,
What did I ever give back to you?
) “I’ll be gone a couple hours,” Martha said. “Don’t go to dinner without me, okay?”

I nodded. “I would have been able to tell you’d gotten a haircut. Even if you’d snuck out, I’d know when you got back.”

“Yeah, well.” She grinned. “Remind me never to go into espionage.”

As I watched her leave, my mind shot ahead to a time in the future when we would not share a room, when our daily lives would not overlap. The idea made me feel as if I were being held underwater. Then I thought,
You’re being ridiculous; you have almost three more years together,
and I could breathe again. But I knew, I always knew—and as unhappy as I often was, the knowledge never made me feel better; instead it seemed the worst part of all—that our lives at Ault were only temporary.

Ms. Moray was at the board, showing us how to divide a line in a poem into stressed and unstressed syllables, when I felt Dede nudge my thigh. I turned, but she was looking straight ahead.

A few seconds later, I felt more of a pinch. I looked down and saw that she was trying to pass me a piece of paper. At the top, in handwriting I recognized as Aspeth’s, it said,
RATE-O-RAMA for 11/8.
Beneath this was a grid, with
Dress,
then
Shoes,
then
Makeup
along one side; along another, it said
Aspeth,
then
Dede,
then
Lee.

In the boxes adjacent to her name, Aspeth had written, for
Dress,
“3.4.” For
Shoes,
she had written, “6.0.” And for
Makeup,
she had written, “0.8,” and she had added, the words cramped into the box,
“Can someone please tell this woman the heyday of aqua eyeliner is LONG past?!?”
Dede, meanwhile, had given
Dress
a 2.8,
Shoes
a 6.2, and
Makeup
a 1. Under Aspeth’s comment, she’d written,
“Agree!”
which was the most apt and succinct summary of their relationship I could imagine.

Ms. Moray returned to the table, and I let the piece of paper sit untouched on my lap, like a napkin. But the truth was, I felt cornered by it. Yes, there were things I didn’t like about Ms. Moray, but they had little to do with her clothes. And besides, didn’t Aspeth and Dede understand that written words trapped you? A piece of paper could slip from a notebook, flutter out a window, be lifted from the trash and uncrumpled, whereas an incriminating remark made in conversation was weightless and invisible, deniable in a later moment.

Yet how could I not participate? They had extended an invitation, and if I refused, surely another one would never be offered. At the same time that Jeff Oltiss began reading aloud the Emily Dickinson poem that started “The most triumphant Bird I ever knew or met/ Embarked upon a twig today,” I set my pen against the piece of paper and, over the three empty boxes that awaited my ratings, wrote, “All overshadowed by the pin—a real dazzler!” Before I could think more about it, I passed the paper back to Dede.

After class, I dawdled as I always did. In the stairwell, Aspeth glanced back—she and Dede were about twelve feet ahead of me—and our eyes met. “Such a good call on the pin, Lee,” she said. She’d stopped walking, so Dede had stopped, too, and I caught up to them. “It’s like, whose grandma did she steal that from?” Aspeth continued. “From now on, accessories get a category, too.”

“Definitely,” Dede said.

“So, Lee,” Aspeth said, “I have something to ask you.”

Dread reared up in me. Maybe she’d say,
Have you ever kissed a boy?
Or:
What kind of cars do your parents drive?