Prep: A Novel (46 page)

When I sat down, Niro and Patrick were talking animatedly about a video game, and no one else was talking about anything. Sin-Jun and I spoke briefly—she also was working on applications and had just decided to apply early to Stanford—but our conversation petered out quickly, and a few minutes later, before I was finished eating, she stood to leave. Sitting there with Edmundo and Nicky and the junior boys, I thought that I definitely should have gone to Burlington with Martha. I felt an old, unpleasant sensation of not mattering to anyone present, and it seemed difficult to believe the feeling could return so abruptly, though I couldn’t have said where it was returning from. And then I realized how much my idea of myself had changed. Probably it had changed slowly, starting with Martha becoming my friend in the spring of ninth grade, and perhaps it hadn’t changed again significantly until the previous May when she got elected prefect and I became the prefect’s roommate. And it had shifted once more over the last few weeks, after I first kissed Cross. I felt—not cool, it was hard to imagine I’d ever feel cool, but I felt like a person I myself would have been intrigued by as a freshman or sophomore. Meaning, maybe, that a current freshman or sophomore could be intrigued by me. Except that I had never seen any evidence for such a possibility, and furthermore, intriguing people didn’t stay at school for long weekend; at the very least, they went to Boston.

And then there was the fact that no one knew Cross and I were fooling around. Or officially they didn’t, but I also became aware in this moment how much I’d been counting on the secret getting out, because at Ault, secrets always did. Cross’s roommate Devin had to know, or maybe a girl in my dorm had been walking down the hall to the bathroom at just the moment, around quarter of five in the morning, when Cross was leaving. (Cross had to be the one who leaked the information; I couldn’t.) It wasn’t that I’d been disingenuous when I’d asked Cross not to discuss what was happening. It was just that I’d assumed people would learn of the basic facts without explicit discussion.

The possibility existed that Niro and Patrick and Edmundo didn’t care, of course, but it seemed likelier they didn’t know. Because surely if they knew, they’d somehow show it, surely they would at least look at me for a beat longer when I sat down. After the first time Cross had come over, it had felt so uncertain, and I had imagined that if people caught wind of it, all they’d think was,
Her?
But it was lasting, it had become something Cross was choosing rather than something arbitrary. And this knowledge did not change the way I acted, but certainly it affected the place in the social order where I saw myself; now my regular behavior felt gracious and charming. I could have let Cross’s interest in me go to my head, but look—I was as humble as ever. I didn’t suddenly sit next to Aspeth Montgomery in chapel, or expect to be invited to Greenwich with her.

“Can you pass the ketchup?” Derek Miles asked.

I blinked at him.

“It’s right there,” he said.

I handed him the bottle. He had no idea. It definitely wasn’t schoolwide news, so the only remaining question was whether it was news at any level—senior news, news among Cross’s circle of friends. Did Aspeth Montgomery know? If she didn’t, nobody did. And, no, I thought, she didn’t. She didn’t because if she did, she’d tell Dede, and if Dede knew, she’d confront me; she wouldn’t be able to stop herself.

When I walked back to the dorm, the only light was the one I’d left on in my room. I slept twelve hours that night and did the same for the next two nights, waiting for Cross to come back. On Sunday, Mrs. Parnasset drove a van to the Westmoor mall and left us there for the afternoon. Sin-Jun and I went to a movie about a suburban family whose young son died, and everything about the movie reminded me of Cross, or, more accurately, made me think of him and then keep thinking of things about him that had nothing to do with the movie at all. Sunday dinner was cold cuts; the temperature that night fell below freezing for the first time since the previous winter. Then it was Monday again; Cross, and everyone else, returned to school.

We had sex a few days later because it was inevitable, because now that he was back on campus, I wanted everything and all of him, because I loved him, because I was afraid of losing him, because it felt good or at least because everything up to that point had felt good and it was what came next. The reality, of course, was that the pain made me clutch his arms just below the elbows and arch my head until the crown of it was pressed against the mattress. I was surprised he didn’t offer to stop, but maybe it was good because if he had, I’d have accepted the offer, and I’d just have been postponing the pain. He had brought a condom, and afterward, he went into the bathroom and got wet paper towels to wipe the blood off my thighs. The paper towels were warm, and I thought how at the sinks in Elwyn’s, the hot water always took so long to come out and how he must have waited for it.

Both of us were sweaty and then, as we lay there, clammy; Hillary’s sleeping bag was plaid cotton, not one of those nylon ones that’s supposed to wick away moisture. But our clamminess didn’t really matter, or my belly against his hip—things that I might once have been self-conscious about, I no longer was. At least in the dark, there wasn’t much I felt like I was hiding from him anymore. It was as if for my entire time at Ault up to this moment I’d been in a frenzy, a storm of worry, and now it was all finished and I felt only a profound calm; it was hard to believe the sensation would not be permanent. Actual sex wasn’t as different from more casual fooling around as I’d imagined, but it wasn’t exactly the same, either—afterward, you felt like something had finished instead of just tapering off. And now with every reference in magazines or movies or conversations, I could nod, or at least, when listening to other people, I wouldn’t have to avert my eyes lest they look into them and see that I didn’t really understand. I could disagree, even if I never did so aloud.

He stroked my hair, and there was nothing I wanted to say or wanted him to say; there was nothing I wanted except for this. The soreness made me unsure how soon I’d be able to have sex again, but it wasn’t a bad soreness. It was like after hiking, because of a thing you were glad to have done. Two days later, I picked up my first packet of birth control pills from the infirmary, which made me feel so unlike myself that I would not have been surprised, when I looked in the mirror, to see a forty-year-old divorced mother of two, a cowgirl, an aerobics instructor on a cruise ship in the Caribbean. The real part was being in bed with Cross.

Before and after I was involved with Cross Sugarman, I heard a thousand times that a boy, or a man, can’t make you happy, that you have to be happy on your own before you can be happy with another person. All I can say is, I wish it were true.

In November, I began attending his basketball games; he never came over the night before a game. I sat high up in the bleachers, often next to Rufina, who went because Nick Chafee played, too. The Saturday night games were crowded—I’d get Martha to go with me to those—but during the afternoon ones, other students had their own games, so most of the spectators were parents who lived nearby, random teachers, or JV players. The reason I was free to go was that all seniors got one sports cut and I was taking mine that winter. The strangest part was that I had actually played basketball myself for the last three years, but when I watched Cross, it was like a new game; it was almost like sports were new to me, and I could understand for the first time in my life why people liked them.

For home games, they wore white uniforms with maroon trim; Cross, who played center, was number six. He wore black high-tops, and his legs were long in the long white shorts, his arms pale and muscular in the jersey.

During my own basketball games, I had always, I realized, been half-asleep, paying attention less to the other team than to whether my shorts were riding up, or whether the chicken nuggets from lunch were churning in my stomach. But during Cross’s games, I was alert to the sport itself: the squeak of the players’ shoes, the refs’ whistles, the way the players and coaches would protest after calls they didn’t like. At the Saturday night games, the people in the bleachers around me would chant: “Let’s go, Ault!” or, if Cross was running the ball down the court, they’d say “Sug! Sug! Sug!” I never cheered at all—under the bright lights, among the excited crowd, I always felt tense and slightly nauseated—and at first I was amazed by how much everyone seemed to care. Or maybe, by how little they concealed that they cared.

And then I realized that here, in sports, it was okay to show that something mattered to you. Maybe because it didn’t actually matter, it was okay to invest yourself—investing yourself was almost ironic—but then you really had invested yourself and you really did care yet it was still okay. They’d get angry—I once saw Niro Williams get a technical foul for setting the ball against the court and walking away instead of passing it to the ref—and it was okay to be disappointed and it was okay to try. You could grunt or trip, you could twist your body and make fierce expressions when you were trying to rip the ball from someone else’s hands and all of it—it was fine. When they played Hartwell, Ault’s rival, the teams were within a couple points of each other the whole game, and then Hartwell got eight points in the last minute and a half. When the buzzer sounded, I looked at Cross and was astonished to see that he was crying. I looked away reflexively, then looked back; his face was scrunched-up and red, and he was roughly wiping his eyes and shaking his head, but he wasn’t dashing to the locker room or otherwise trying to hide it. Darden Pittard stood in front of him, and then Niro joined them, and Darden was talking—it looked like he was saying something nice—with his hand set on Cross’s upper arm.

Sports contained the truth, I decided, the unspoken truth (how quickly we damn ourselves when we start to talk, how small and inglorious we always sound), and it seemed hard to believe that I had never understood this before. They rewarded effortlessness and unself-consciousness; they confirmed that yes, there are rankings of skill and value and that everyone knows what they are (seeing those guys who were subbed with two seconds left before the end of a quarter, I’d think how girls’ coaches were never that heartless); they showed that the best things in the world to be were young and strong and fast. To play a great game of high school basketball—it was something I myself had never done, but I could tell—made you know what it was to be alive. How much in an adult life can compare to that? Granted, there are margaritas, or there’s no homework, but there are also puffy white bagels under neon lights in the conference room, there’s waiting for the plumber, making small talk with your boring neighbor.

Once, also in the fourth quarter of a close game, Cross made a shot from behind the three-point line, and when the ball went through the net, his teammates surrounded him, patting his ass, holding up their hands for him to slap. No one in the bleachers glanced at me like they did at Rufina when Nick scored (even teachers glanced at her; I’m not sure they knew they were doing it). Cross didn’t belong to me, and seeing him on the court, I understood that even if he’d been my boyfriend, he still wouldn’t have belonged to me.

I don’t know if Cross himself realized I went to his games. I didn’t mention it because I feared it would seem like a violation of our agreement, either clingy or just too public. And he never talked about the games, though if they’d won and if he came over (he never came over when they lost and only sometimes came over when they won), he was pushier than usual, the way you’re led to believe guys are when you’re eleven years old—that they’ll pull at your clothes and grope you and mash against you. But the fact was that I always wanted to be mashed and groped. Later on, when I tried to imagine how I might have ruined things, that would occur to me—that I’d so rarely resisted, that I hadn’t made it hard enough for him. Maybe he felt disappointed. Maybe it was like gathering your strength and hurling your body against a door you believe to be locked, and then the door opens easily—it wasn’t locked at all—and you’re standing looking into the room, trying to remember what it was you thought you wanted.

As a freshman, I had gone home for Thanksgiving, but never after that—only three weeks elapsed between Thanksgiving break and Christmas break, and the plane fares were high. (“We love you,” my father said once, “but not that much.”) At Martha’s house for Thanksgiving, as in other years, we stayed up late watching movies, woke at eleven a.m
.
, and ate pumpkin pie for breakfast. On the twin beds in her room were two-hundred-count percale white sheets and white duvets that I always worried about getting a pen mark on, and in the cupboards and closets were extra of everything—towels and toilet paper and boxes of cereal; there was even a whole extra refrigerator in the basement. I often wondered, while visiting the Porters’ house, if my exposure to their way of living would be fleeting or if one day I would live in a house as nice as this, if it would be as easy for me to be generous to other people as it seemed for them to be generous to me. It actually appeared true that it didn’t matter if Mrs. Porter had to make an extra serving of lobster bisque because I was there, or if they had to buy an extra ticket to the choral performance at their church (that I would pay for my own ticket, let alone for my own portion of lobster bisque, was not a possibility anyone considered). There were other kids at Ault I had a feeling about, kids who came from poorer families than I did and would probably grow up to make a lot more than I would—they’d be surgeons, or investment bankers. But making a lot of money didn’t seem like something I’d be able to control; I’d gotten as far as Ault, but I wasn’t sure I’d get any further. I wasn’t smart or disciplined the way those kids were, I wasn’t
driven.
Presumably, I’d always be aware of lives like these without living one; I couldn’t confuse familiarity with entitlement.