Prep: A Novel (34 page)

“Which are things?”

“Ault is stressful,” I said. “There’s a lot of pressure.” These were the kinds of complaints students made, but they were asinine. Not once in three years had I thought,
I’m under a lot of pressure.

“Grades,” Sin-Jun said. “They are why you worry?”

“Not as much as I probably should.”

She looked at me blankly, and I didn’t know if she couldn’t tell I was making a joke or if she just didn’t find the joke funny. Abruptly, I remembered our first week at Ault, living together in Broussard’s. One evening we both had been ready for formal dinner well before we needed to be—when you’re new to a place, there’s always too much time to fill—so we sat on our beds, just waiting. That early on, I was shy even around Sin-Jun; I hadn’t yet determined the hierarchies in a way that classified her as unthreatening.

I’m not sure where Dede was—in the shower maybe—but the room was quiet except for a window fan and the sounds from outside the screens. I didn’t even play my music then, fearful that my taste in tapes might reveal something humiliating. I decided that I wanted to say to Sin-Jun,
I like your skirt.
But sometimes speaking is so hard! It’s like standing still, then sprinting. I kept rehearsing the sentence in my head, examining it for flaws.

Finally, I said, “Your skirt is pretty. I like the polka dots.”

She smiled, and the blandness of her smile made me almost certain she had no idea what I’d said.

“Do you know what polka dots are?” I asked. “They’re the round spots. Like—well, here.” I got up and pointed at her skirt.

“Ahh,” she said. “Polka dot.”

“I have polka-dotted socks,” I said. I retrieved them from the top drawer of my bureau and held them up. “See?”

“Very exquisite,” she said. “I also like.”

I sat back on my bed, emboldened, and said, “You have nice clothes.” I had noticed, actually, that Sin-Jun had a pair of Levi’s, and I’d speculated about whether she’d owned them in Seoul or bought them in anticipation of enrolling at Ault.

“You can ask me other words if you want to,” I added. And she sometimes did after that—usually words she’d heard but couldn’t figure out how to spell, and therefore how to look up herself in her Korean-English dictionary:
centipede,
or
procrastinate.
But more often, I was surprised by what she did know the meaning of:
pineapple, sarcasm, honeymoon.
I’d wonder, was Ault much harder for Sin-Jun than it was for me because it was literally foreign and not just unfamiliar? Or was it easier because its currencies were not her own? Perhaps that made it possible to view its dramas more distantly, even to disregard them.

Except that, as we stood in the hospital parking lot, it seemed apparent that she took her life at Ault quite seriously, that she viewed it not as her American life or her school life but as her actual life.

“Sin-Jun,” I said.

She turned.

“I’m supposed to tell you something. It’s a message from Clara. She said don’t eat too many peach daiquiris.”

Sin-Jun regarded me shrewdly, searching my face.

“You know what it means, right?” I said.

“Yes.”

“I don’t mean to be nosy, but what’s going on with you and Clara?”

“Nothing is going on.”

“I’m not saying she’s a bad person,” I said. “Just that I bet she’s kind of hard to live with.”

Sin-Jun reached out and squeezed my hand. Mr. Kim had parked the car in front of us and was climbing from the front seat. “We stop talk about it,” Sin-Jun said.

After we’d dropped off Sin-Jun’s things at the infirmary, Mr. Kim announced that he was taking us to the Red Barn Inn for dinner. It was four-thirty in the afternoon. As we drove, he lit a cigarette—at Ault, you never saw an adult smoke—and when we got to the restaurant, we ordered steak, all three of us. Mr. Kim ate half of his and Sin-Jun ate almost none and I finished mine, every bite until all that was left was fat and bone.

The next night, after the dining hall had mostly cleared out, I reentered the kitchen. Dave Bardo’s glove was a wad in the front right pocket of my jeans.

“Excuse me,” I said to a young woman pulling cellophane over a silver tray of pear halves. “Dave Bardo’s not here, is he?”

“He just went to put out the trash. You know where the dumpster is?”

When I started retracing my steps out of the kitchen, she said, “There’s stairs right there.” She pointed to a pale pink door I had never noticed. It had a round window near the top and a grid of thin lines crisscrossing the pane. When I opened the door, I found myself in a stairwell lined with shiny tan bricks; there was something gymnasiumish about the stairwell, and the smell in it wasn’t that different from a gym, either. I had the strange sense that I was not at Ault; no other part of campus, including the actual gym, looked quite like this.

At the base of the stairs was another door, and after I pushed on this one, I was outside in the winter night, standing at the top of a shorter set of concrete steps, and Dave was at the bottom in a T-shirt and apron. I could see the curved muscles of his upper arms, the hair on his forearms—it was dark brown, like a grown man’s, but it was not disgusting to me at all.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hey there.”

When we spoke, our breath was visible.

“I was looking for you,” I said.

“Was I hard to find?” He smiled, and it was that leisurely, half-expectant smile—seeing it was like knowing I had remembered something exactly the way it was.

Not, of course, that this affirmation made me any less flustered. “Here.” I pulled the glove from my pocket and held it out to him.

He squinted. There was a spotlight on the corner of the dining hall roof, and another one above the door I’d just emerged from, but the darkness still made dark objects shadowy.

“It’s your glove,” I said. “I accidentally took it when you gave me a ride from the hospital.”

“No big deal. I had a feeling you’d bring it back. How you been?”

“Fine.”

“Just fine?”

I didn’t know how to answer. I said, “You know what, the mashed potatoes tonight were really good.”

He laughed. “Thanks.”

“Is your sister better?”

“Yeah, she’s good again. I’ve been telling her to take it easy, but you know how it is for single moms.”

“My friend is better, too,” I said. “I ended up going back to the hospital yesterday to help her dad bring—actually, I don’t know. It’s kind of a long story. Aren’t you cold with no coat on?”

“I’m okay,” he said. “You don’t have a coat on either.”

“But I have a sweater.” I held out one arm, my fingers clutching the cuff, as if to offer proof.

“That’s a nice sweater,” he said. “Is that
cashmere
?” He pronounced it right, but he said it jokily, as if he’d never used the word before. And in fact, the sweater was acrylic. But he assumed—I’d sensed this before and now I was sure—that I was rich, that I was one of the true Ault students. Perhaps that explained his attention to me.

“I’m not sure what material it is,” I said.

“It looks soft.”

“I guess so.” I was still holding out my arm, and I realized just seconds before it happened that he was going to touch either me or my sweater, and realizing this made me feel as if the sun was rising inside me and because this was, without a doubt, a good feeling, it is hard to explain why I snatched my arm away. Very briefly, his hand hovered where my arm had been, and my face burned; I couldn’t look at him. When I finally did, he was regarding me curiously.

“I heard it might snow,” I said loudly. “Have you heard that? That’s what they’re saying for later tonight.”

He continued to look at me.

“So it’s good you have your glove again,” I said. “In case you need to shovel your driveway.” I wanted to say,
I’m sorry.
But it’s hard to rectify an unspoken mistake by speaking; almost always, it only makes things worse. “I should let you get back inside,” I said, and neither of us moved.

“I’ll tell you what,” he finally said. “Those mashed potatoes were no good. What you had for dinner—they were crap mashed potatoes.”

“I didn’t think they were bad at all.”

“You want to taste real mashed potatoes?”

Was I supposed to answer?

“You ever been to Chauncey’s?” he asked.

I actually had, my sophomore year. It was, as far as I could remember, indistinct—nicer than a diner but not fancy. But I said, “I don’t think I’ve been there.”

“We should go.”

“Now?”

“I can’t now. I’m working.”

“Right. Of course.”

“What about tomorrow? Tomorrow’s Saturday, isn’t it?”

“I’m pretty sure I have some school stuff.” Already, I was thinking too much. I was thinking that Saturday was loaded in a way Friday wasn’t—we had Saturday classes, so Friday was still a school night, but Saturday was pure weekend. If I went out with Dave on a Saturday night, I was pretty sure we’d be going on a date.

“How’s Sunday?” he said. “Sunday I’m off.”

What I needed to do was just be calm. I needed to come up with the next words to say, to concentrate only on the immediate task in front of me and not give in to the sense that this moment was a monstrous pulsating flower, a purple and green geometrical blossom like you might see in a kaleidoscope. “Sunday is okay,” I said. “I’ll meet you here.”

“In the parking lot?”

“It’s kind of hard to find my dorm,” I said. “And they’re weird about letting guys inside.”

“Gotcha. What about seven o’clock. Is seven good?”

I nodded.

“These are gonna be the best mashed potatoes of your life. Poems have been written about these mashed potatoes.”

By you?
I wanted to teasingly ask him. But I couldn’t because my anxiety was exploding, the flower was swirling outward infinitely. “I have to go study,” I said. As I walked down the steps, I could have brushed against him. But there were so many tricks I didn’t know then, so many gestures that I’d have thought would lock you in and represent promises. I turned sideways so we didn’t touch at all.

When I was on his other side, he turned and patted my shoulder. “You be good, Lee.”

This is what I want to tell my sixteen-year-old self. Say,
I’ll try.
Say,
I won’t do anything you wouldn’t.
You’re not promising him anything! What I said was, “Now you have your glove back.”

When I told Martha what had happened, she cried, “You have a date!” and leaped out of her chair to hug me.

“But it’s on Sunday.”

“So what?” She pointed at me and said in a singsong, “You have a date with Dave Bardo, you have a date with Dave Bardo.”

I wanted her to stop. And it wasn’t because I was afraid that if we presumed too much, we’d jinx it. It was more that it just sounded weird, it sounded hard to understand.

“I barely know him,” I said.

“That’s the point. You go out for dinner, and you
get
to know him.”

“Why would he have asked me out?”

“Lee, I can’t read his mind. Maybe he just thinks you’re pretty.”

I winced. This possibility was not flattering to me; it was terrifying. There were other things a guy could think I was, and he wouldn’t be entirely wrong—nice, or loyal, or maybe interesting. Not that I was always any of those things, but in certain situations, it was conceivable. But to be seen as pretty was to be fundamentally misunderstood. First of all, I wasn’t pretty, and on top of that I didn’t take care of myself like a pretty girl did; I wasn’t even one of the unpretty girls who passes as pretty through effort and association. If a guy believed my value to lie in my looks, it meant either that he’d somehow been misled and would eventually be disappointed, or that he had very low standards. What I wanted to know about Dave was, had he noticed me before that time in the hospital, or had I piqued his interest during that conversation? But why would he have noticed me before, or why would I have piqued his interest then? Was I the best that he could do?

“I don’t know about this,” I said. I pictured sitting across the table from Dave at Chauncey’s, and then, as I reached for the bread, knocking over my water glass. The worst would be when he reassured me that it was no big deal. And it would be no better if
he
knocked over a glass. It would not comfort me if he, or any guy, said softly, with a smile meant just for me (in fact, softly and with a smile meant just for me would be the deadliest parts),
You know, I’m nervous, too.
Or,
I don’t know what I’m doing, either.
He should just be competent and shut up—that would be ideal.

“What exactly are you afraid of?” Martha said.

“I know. I’m being weird.”

“No, really. Answer the question. What are you afraid of?”

I was afraid that Dave had chosen Chauncey’s because he thought it was nice, when it wasn’t that nice. I was afraid he’d tell some jokey story, ostensibly to the waitress but really for my benefit, and I’d be worrying the whole time about whether it was actually going to be funny, and if it wasn’t funny, would I be able to muster up appropriate laughter? And to compensate, not wanting to miss the punch line, I’d begin tittering halfway through. I was afraid of how even though I would put on lotion before I left the dorm, I’d feel like the skin around my mouth was peeling, and this suspicion would be another conversation under the one we were having, a continuous murmur that would rise in volume as we sat there. It would be demanding more of my attention, most of my attention, then almost all of it, and just before I went to the bathroom to check for sure (as if, thirty seconds after I came out of the bathroom, I wouldn’t start wondering about the peeling all over again), I’d be tilting my head and shifting my chin to prevent him from looking at me straight on. It was so hard to feel comfortable with another person was the problem, and what guarantee was there that it would be worth it?

“First dates are supposed to be awkward,” Martha said. “And then after you’ve been going out for six months, you look back, and you think about how funny it was when you didn’t know each other.”

“So I should go?”