Prep: A Novel (45 page)

Or maybe for him it was. But it never was for me.

If people asked, which not many did, I said I was staying on campus for long weekend to work on college applications. Really, I was staying at school because school was the place of Cross. He was leaving, of course—I knew, not because we’d talked about it but because I’d listened to a conversation in the dining hall, that he and a few other guys were going to Newport to stay with Devin’s mother and stepfather—but at least school would be the place he’d been and was coming back to, whereas Martha’s house in Burlington, where I’d gone every long weekend since freshman year, would only be a detour; all I’d be doing was waiting to leave.

Martha was taking the bus, a bus I’d been on with her many times, and just before she caught the one from Ault that would transport her and other students into Boston and leave them off at South Station, she stood facing me in the room. “Are you sure you don’t want to come?” she said. “I promise I won’t distract you.”

“It’s better for me to stay here,” I said. “But tell your parents hi.”

Martha looked at me. “You’re okay, right? Nothing’s wrong?”

“Go,” I said and hugged her. “You’ll miss the bus.”

I was relieved as I watched the buses pull away. In the room alone, I lay on the futon, not reading, not sleeping, not even shutting my eyes, and I thought of Cross. I thought of him otherwise, of course, but it was while I was doing things, and when I tried to think of him at night, I usually fell asleep; but lying alone on the futon was almost like meditating. Everything that had happened between us, every comment he’d made, each way he’d touched me, I could now think about for longer than the thing had taken to occur.

For a while, I was glad it was getting dark, glad that campus was mostly empty—the only people who stayed around for long weekend were the ones who didn’t get invited somewhere, or were too poor to travel, or both. There was a long weekend every term, and as a freshman, I’d stayed on campus for all three, though it was hard to remember how I’d spent them—reading magazines probably, and waiting for it to be time to go to a meal, and feeling isolated. But maybe this was the beginning of my luck, maybe from now on, I’d get what I wanted most, though I wasn’t sure I’d ever want anything more than I wanted Cross.

He had been coming over for three weeks by then, and we’d almost had sex. A few nights before, we’d both had all our clothes off, and his penis had been jabbing at me not so it hurt but so it felt like something I wanted. I had opened my legs to him and neither of us had spoken because if we did, it could only be to acknowledge what was happening.

Finally, I said, “Do you—”

He was kissing my shoulder. He did not say anything but I could feel him listening.

The moment stretched. He propped himself up to look at me. My hands had been set on either side of his rib cage, but I became self-conscious and pulled my arms in, as if to block a ball from hitting my chest. He moved my arms, first one, then the other, and set them at my sides. I liked this about him, how he didn’t let me get away with things. If it was like we were starting from the beginning every time, it wasn’t that I was testing
him.
It was more like needing proof:
You want to be here; you want to touch me.
In these moments, when I was stiff or bashful, he’d say, “No shyness,” and burrow into me, and
shyness
seemed such a generous word for it.

“Do I what?” he said. He was smiling.

What could I ever say to equal Cross’s face above mine, Cross’s smile? Down below, the stabbing was milder now, but both of us were still moving.

He settled back onto me and said, “You have the softest hair in the world,” which was a compliment I loved. Because I couldn’t control it, it seemed true, not like if I were wearing perfume and he said I smelled good.

He was nudging my legs further apart, starting to enter, and I felt the first flash of not actual pain but anticipatory pain. But I didn’t know I was resisting until he said, “What?” Then he said, “It’s cool,” which I thought for a split second was his way of reassuring me that it was okay if I didn’t want to go through with it. But that wasn’t what he meant—he was still easing my legs open with his own.

“I just don’t think—” I said, and then he stopped. It was good he stopped, and also a letdown. I wanted to say that I was sorry, but I knew I shouldn’t. “It’s not that I don’t want to,” I said.

“Does that mean you do want to?”

In a small voice, I said, “Yes.”

“Then what’s wrong?” He asked it softly, not accusingly.

I didn’t say anything.

“Are you afraid it’ll hurt?”

I sometimes wondered if Cross knew just how inexperienced I was; this question indicated that he did, or at least that he knew I was a virgin.

“I’ll go really slow,” he said.

“We don’t even have a condom.”

“I know you hear all this sex ed stuff, but I can pull out. I’ll be careful.”

It wasn’t really because of not having a condom. But it was hard to say what it
was
because of. And it was hard to believe this moment was existing—that Cross was trying to persuade me to have sex and I was declining. It did not feel, as I might have imagined, satisfying; instead, it felt weird and precarious.

“We could do other stuff,” I said.

He didn’t reply. But the energy had changed, with that single comment. I’d been at the top of the teeter-totter, perched in the air, and then I’d thudded to the bottom; I was squatting on the ground, calling up to Cross.

“I want to make you feel good,” I said, and I didn’t even realize until the words were out that they were the same ones he’d uttered the first time he’d come to my room. If he had said,
Why?
—he’d have to have said it on purpose, a further echo of our earlier conversation—I’d have thought he was great. I’d have wanted us to watch bad movies together, to go bowling together, to eat too much and tell embarrassing stories. I’d have thought we had the same sense of humor, which—there was enough Cross gave me, more than enough; it’s not a complaint—we didn’t.

“I want to make you—” I couldn’t say the word
come.

“Come?” he said.

I was quiet. In all the times we’d hooked up—he visited every three nights or so, five times so far, and in the time between his visits I always convinced myself that the time before had been his last, he wouldn’t be returning—he had never come. I had held his penis only once, and it had been another moment in which I’d had no idea what I was doing. All those years of reading women’s magazines, and I couldn’t even remember the fundamentals of a hand job—I had simply run my curled fingers up and down the length of it. I’d been lying on my side, and he’d begun rubbing my thigh and hip and then his fingers slid down and into me and it had seemed confusing (surely, this notion would strike other people as laughable), it had seemed chaotic even, for both activities to be happening at once. I’d wondered if he was trying to let me know he’d had enough of my hand. I let it fall away from him and rolled my body toward his, and he said, “You like to be close, don’t you?” I was always yanking away the sleeping bag if it got wedged between us, or making sure we touched at all points if we were spooning. And it seemed like these were things he wanted, too, but the truth was that there was almost nothing about Cross or Cross with me that I knew for sure. I’d considered asking Martha about the fact that Cross had never come, but I feared that the explanation would reveal an inadequacy in me so humiliating that it was better not to share it even with her—wasn’t it a joke how fast high school boys usually came? Also, I suspected that both Martha and Cross were people who’d disapprove of disclosing intimate details. If it would bother only one of them, I might have told Martha, but imagining the double force of their censure stopped me.

“What are you saying?” Cross asked.

I didn’t reply, but I understood how now I had to go through with the thing I had not even been certain I was proposing until I had heard in his voice that that was what he took my proposal to be. I had to go through with it not because he would make me, not because he was
trying
to show me that I was testing his patience but because I actually was testing his patience. And anyway, I had been the one to bring it up.

“Here,” I said, and I shifted so he’d shift, too. He rolled onto his back, and I got onto my knees and let my hair hang in front of my face—as if it might veil how my stomach looked from this angle—and scooted backward. It was very different to be naked above Hillary Tompkins’s sleeping bag, out in the dark but not pitch-black air, than it was to be naked beneath it. I was straddling him above the knees. Then it was like when you had to do a presentation in class and you felt like you needed some official sign to begin, like a whistle in a race, but instead everyone was just waiting for you and the most official thing that would happen would be that you’d say
okay
a few times: “Okay. Okay, the French and Indian War, also known as the Seven Years’ War, began in 1754. . . .”

I even said, “Okay.” Then I crouched down, and as I did, I thought of how probably there were women who did this in daylight, their asses exposed, bobbing toward the ceiling, and how I would never, ever be one of them. I had hoped, without realizing I was anticipating such an event in my own life, that it would feel different from what it was: something bigger than you’d ever under normal circumstances put in your mouth going into your mouth. It seemed difficult to breathe. I didn’t like it—I definitely didn’t. But then, in its uncomfortableness, I felt a sort of nobility—a kinship with all the girls who’d done this before me for the boys they liked (I thought of Sophie Thruler, Cross’s girlfriend from freshman year), an affection for myself for being willing to do it, an affection for Cross for being a person I would do it for. It made me feel like an adult, like drinking wine would later, before I liked the taste of it.

He set his hands on my shoulders, lightly, and occasionally, he’d reach for one of my breasts, he’d swipe it—I had not thought of him as guarded before, but he definitely was the most unguarded I’d ever seen him—and he was gasping and moaning in a ragged, sometimes high-pitched way that startled me. I wondered, did all boys make noises like this? And I felt glad that it was Cross, who could never disgust or offend me, whom I was first seeing this way. If it had been another boy who seemed less cool or less experienced, I might have judged him, chalking up such a reaction to his uncoolness or inexperience.

In the middle—until then, I’d been doing with my mouth pretty much what I’d done the other time with my hand, a steady up-and-down motion—I actually did remember a tip from a magazine:
Treat his penis like a delicious ice cream cone.
I slid my mouth off and began to lick the sides, nodding and turning my head. Less than a minute had passed when Cross shuddered once and then the hot milky liquid was all over my chest. If he’d come in my mouth, I would have swallowed it; I definitely would have. He reached for me, pulling me back up to him, and when I was lying against his chest, he petted my back, squeezed my ass and arms, kissed my forehead. He said, “That was a great blow job,” and I felt prouder than if I’d gotten an A on a math test. Was it possible that I had a particular gift? If I did, it would be like with haircutting (except better) and the fact that I didn’t find the act particularly enjoyable would be irrelevant. When you were really good at something, you just did it, because it was a waste not to. In the next second, of course, I wondered if Cross was only trying to make me feel good, but in the second after that, I thought that if he were, Cross trying to make me feel good was in itself a reason to be happy.

That episode had been earlier in the week. The first night of long weekend, while I was lying on the futon, the memory still felt bright and thick; I didn’t sense yet how over the next few days I would return to it until it was frayed and diluted, a mental exercise rather than a physical interaction with another person.

It was completely dark—it had started getting dark at four-thirty—and it occurred to me just to go to sleep for the night, but then I’d probably awaken at eleven p.m., disoriented and hungry. I stood and turned on a light and pulled down the shades, and I felt the first ache of loneliness, the first inkling that staying on campus might have been a mistake. I turned on Martha’s computer and clicked on my college essays folder and, inside that, the file titled “Brown app.” Then I sat looking at the single, incomplete paragraph I’d written the week before:
My most unusual quality is that I am from the Midwest yet I have lived in New England for the last three years. . . .
I wished that at that moment, instead of facing a computer screen, I was making out with Cross, and that he was reaching up my nightgown or inside my underwear.

For no particular reason, my back hurt, and I also was thirsty; I definitely wasn’t in the mood to work on an essay. I shut the file and folder and put the screen to sleep; after dinner, possibly, I’d feel more inspired.

The only other seniors in the dining hall were Edmundo Saldana and Sin-Jun, and they were sitting at a table with a couple of juniors—three black boys (there were four black boys in the whole junior class) and Nicky Gary, a pale girl with strawberry blond hair who was rumored to be a born-again Christian, but the weirdest part was that her parents weren’t even born-again; just she was, on her own. The boys were Niro Williams, Derek Miles, and Patrick Shaley. At other tables, there were slightly larger representations of sophomores and freshmen, and at a fourth table were the few teachers on campus for the weekend.

What surprised me as I looked around, what I had forgotten since freshman year, was how Ault on long weekend wasn’t really Ault—it wasn’t full and hurried, there weren’t people I felt fascinated by and felt self-conscious in front of. Instead, it was cleared-out buildings. There was nothing that would surprise or entertain you over the next few days. (I used to fear, and I wasn’t completely wrong, that this was what the rest of the world was like. Hardly ever did it matter if you brushed your hair before driving to the grocery store, rarely did you work in an office where you cared what more than two or three people thought of you. At Ault, caring about everything was draining, but it was also exhilarating.)