Prep: A Novel (54 page)

“Oh, I’m not the only one. God, no. Personally, I subscribe to the idea that it’s better to receive than to give if you know what I mean. But it’s a collective effort passed down from generation to generation. Naturally, it gets updated every year.”

“What a classy tradition.”

“Listen.” His eyes narrowed. “Before you get on your high horse, you might want to know who this year’s custodian is.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Do you not believe me?” he asked, and I sensed because of the way he said it, by how much he hoped I’d challenge him, that he was telling the truth.

“Given that he’s the custodian,” Devin continued, “I’d say it’s pretty ungenerous of him not to fill in certain blanks. But therein lies the paradox.”

“Maybe he respects other people’s privacy,” I said, and Devin laughed so heartily, and so spontaneously, that I felt sure he wasn’t just trying to torment me.

“Chivalrous Sug—that’s how you see him, isn’t it? That’s great. It’s classic.”

I needed to leave—for real this time, because there was nothing to gain from staying.

“Let it be said”—here, Devin sounded genuinely admiring—“that no one ever played Ault better than Cross Sugarman. It’s practically obscene.”

Leave, Lee,
I thought, and heard myself ask, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just that you’ve got to hand it to him. He gets the grades, he gets the positions, he gets the girls, but most of all, he gets the respect. I bet you hardly know the guy.”

Perhaps this was what I’d been waiting for—an insult that was undeniably true. “You’re an asshole,” I said, and I stepped into the hallway, letting the door close behind me.

My parents finally reached me the next morning; they had called repeatedly on Sunday, but whenever another girl in the dorm knocked on our door, I asked her to tell them I wasn’t there. This was considered poor dorm-phone protocol, necessitating a return trip downstairs to the common room, but nobody said no—I could see how other people deferred to the dubious celebrity the
Times
article bestowed on me. By right after Sunday chapel, which I’d skipped for the second time ever, everyone knew. I hadn’t left the dorm for the rest of the day, but I had seen it in girls’ faces. “Were people talking about it at lunch?” I’d asked Martha, and she had said, “Sort of.” Which had been gentler than saying
yes.

The way my parents got to me was by calling at six-fifteen a.m. on Monday morning. Abby Sciver knocked on our door, waking us up, and I could tell from her bleary expression that she’d just awakened, too, presumably because of the phone’s ring. “It’s your dad, Lee,” she said, and it was far too early to ask her to take a message, or to have my father believe that I was otherwise occupied.

It wasn’t just him. He was on one phone, and my mother was on the other. At the same time, he said, “What kind of crap is this?” and my mother said, “Lee, if you feel like a nobody, I wish you wouldn’t feel that way because you’re so special.”

“Mom, I don’t—it’s not—please, will you guys not overreact?”

“I just have one question for you,” my father said, “and that’s why have you been lying to us for the last four years?”

“Go easy, Terry,” my mother said.

“I’ll go easy when she answers me.”

“I wasn’t lying,” I said.

“You asked us to make sacrifices for your education, and we made them. We bought your books and your plane tickets, and why do you think we did that? Because you told us it was worth it. You said you loved it up there living in a dorm and going to your brilliant classes. And now you say, no, here’s my misery and here’s how the school treats me and I’ve been given every advantage but it wasn’t what I wanted. Well, I don’t know what the hell you wanted, Lee.”

Listening to him, I found it hard to locate the center of his anger. People at Ault were angry at me for making critical remarks in a public forum, but my father’s displeasure was, obviously, personal.

“Dad and I know you have lots of friends,” my mother said. “For heaven’s sake, Martha is president of your class, and she’s just crazy about you. And Sin-Jun, and the Spanish girls—”

“Mom, you don’t have to name all my friends.”

“But, Lee, what the lady wrote about you just isn’t true. That’s what I’ve been telling Dad. It’s not your fault if you trusted the media because your headmaster told you to.”

“And we’re supposed to come see you graduate in a week?” my father said. “Your mom and I are supposed to take off from work and pull your brothers out of school so they can say, ‘We never got behind your daughter, but thanks for all the checks you wrote.’ You know what I say to that? Thanks but no thanks.” My father had never understood, and I had never really tried to get him to, that the checks he wrote were utterly insignificant, practically symbolic in their tininess. I think he’d genuinely convinced himself that if he pulled me out of Ault, Mr. Byden would have to, say, trade in his Mercedes.

“So are you not coming to my graduation?” I asked.

“Of course we’re coming,” my mother said.

“You’re lucky it’s over,” my father said, “because if it wasn’t, it still would be over for you. No way would we send you back for another year.”

“Lee, just think how nice it will be to go to college closer to home. You had a big adventure in high school, and now you can know, well, maybe where you’re from isn’t so bad.”

“I never thought where I was from was bad.”

For the first time, the phone line was silent.

“Have a lot of people said stuff to you about the article?” I asked. Who that my family knew read
The New York Times
?

“Mrs. Petrash told us her mom called them first thing yesterday morning,” my mother said. “That’s how we knew to get it. Do you know that woman is over eighty, but her eyesight is sharp as a tack. And, Terry, who left a message?”

“I didn’t hear any message. And with all due respect, Linda, I’m not real interested in Edith Petrash’s eyesight right now.”

“What do you want from me, Dad?” I wasn’t fighting with him, and I didn’t feel hostile. Mostly, I felt ashamed. I understood—this was the reason I’d avoided their calls the previous day—that I had failed them. My father was right that I had lied. But lying was not the real transgression; rather, my failure resided in my inability to lie consistently. We had made a deal, the three of us—
if you let me go, I will pretend that going was a good idea
—and I had violated the terms of our agreement. In the end, the way I betrayed my parents stayed with me longer, and felt far worse, than the way I betrayed Ault.

“I want you to stop being so impressed by bullshit,” my father said.

“What Dad means is that being rich doesn’t make you a better person.”

“Good luck getting her to believe that, Linda,” my father said. “You really think Lee’ll listen to two simpletons like her parents?” Then, in the voice of his I disliked the most, he added, “Sorry we couldn’t buy you a big house with a palm tree, Lee. Sorry you got such a raw deal for a family.”

At roll call, Cross was wearing a navy blue polo shirt, but the brightness of daytime, the brutal energy, always stalled me. I’d approach him after formal dinner, I decided, but he wasn’t there. The new dining hall prefects from the junior class had been elected the week before (how quickly, really even before you graduated, you became obsolete—for a little while, because you were a senior, the school was yours and then it wasn’t yours at all anymore), and Cross must have skipped the meal altogether, now that he could. As people were leaving, I walked over to Devin and tapped his shoulder. He turned around. “Where is he?” I asked.

Devin regarded me disdainfully. “The last I knew, he went to shoot hoops.”

As I walked to the gym, the fading sunlight was yellow and the air smelled like cut grass. Though I’d imagined that Devin might have misled me and I’d find the gym locked for the night, the door swung open when I pulled it. Climbing the stairs leading to the basketball court, I could hear the pound of a ball against the floor.

He was alone. For a few seconds, I stood in the doorway, as he must have once stood, unobserved, in the doorway to my room. He dribbled up the court and shot from the three-point line. The ball dropped through the net, and I began clapping.

He looked up from retrieving the ball. “Hey.”

As he walked toward me, his face was red, and beads of sweat rested on his forehead and ran in streaks from his hairline down his neck, and down his arms and legs as well. I was wearing a cotton skirt and a linen blouse, but all I wanted was for him to embrace me. Of course, he wasn’t going to—it was still light out, we were standing up, he was holding the ball. And besides, he hadn’t touched me in more than six weeks.

“I came by last night,” I said.

“Yeah, Devin told me. Sorry I missed you.” As we regarded each other, he seemed to realize that I was waiting for more. “I was down the hall in Thad and Rob’s room,” he added. I had never known him to lie, but it seemed so much likelier, it seemed so heartbreakingly logical, that where he’d really been was with Melodie Ryan.

And then I couldn’t help it—I’d wanted to ease into the conversation, to not seem overwrought—and I asked, “Did you see Low Notes?”

I often imagined that my own unseemly frames of reference would elude other people, but Cross said, “Yeah, I saw them.”

“And?”

“
The A.V.
is written by a bunch of losers.”

I looked down at the floor, the painted lines and blocks against the shiny wood. “But is it true?” I said, and my voice caught. I had never wanted to cry in front of Cross, because girls who cry—especially girls who cry while having
talks
—are so ordinary. “Is she your girlfriend?” I asked.

“I don’t have a girlfriend,” Cross said.

I blinked several times—no tears had actually fallen—and said, “Right. How foolish of me.”

He said nothing, and I understood that whatever I had to say, I’d have to say outright; he wouldn’t tease it from me.

The knowledge, unfortunately, wasn’t much help—I still couldn’t say what I wanted to because it was lodged inside me like a bowel movement and all that was coming out was hot stuttering air. “I guess the big question,” I said, “is am I fish or cheese?”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“No, I’m really curious.” I made my voice earnest.

“Devin’s a prick,” Cross said. “And letting him upset you is a waste of time.”

“If he’s a prick, why do you room with him?”

“He wasn’t always this way. He’s bitter now because he’s going to Trinity.”

So Cross had also been experiencing roommate tension this year; all along, we could have commiserated. Surely there were other, ordinary things we could have talked about if only we’d known—how annoying it was to wait in line to take a shower every morning, for example.

“Anyway,” Cross said, “that’s trash talk. It’s what guys say in the dorm when they’re showing off.”

“But you’re the custodian of the list.”

“The what?”

“Devin said—”

“Lee, Devin’s full of shit. I don’t know how much more plainly I can put it.” Even saying this, Cross wasn’t angry; he hadn’t yet made the investment that being angry would require, and I had the strong feeling that he wanted to go back to shooting baskets. “Frankly,” he said, “I’m having a tough time seeing what this conversation is about.”

I probably knew then that this was my one chance, which made it harder, not easier, to say what I meant. “I just don’t understand what you were doing with me,” I said. “I mean ever. Sometimes I try to see this all from your perspective, and none of it makes sense. You come into our room and you’re all drunk and maybe you knew I’d had a big crush on you or maybe it was just random. And I’m this dorky girl but I cooperate. I melt at the slightest touch. So we fool around, whatever. But then you come back. That’s what I don’t get. God forbid you ever talk to me at dinner, but you keep coming back for the whole year.” Actually, not for the whole year—not much past spring break. And wasn’t I only able to say this because he’d stopped coming? It felt like I was trying to salvage something, but wasn’t it all already finished?

Cross shifted the basketball so he was holding it against his right hip. “Saying that I never talked to you at dinner—you’re acting like I tried to hide something.”

“Well?”

“Are you for real? Lee, people knew about—about”—I think he was hesitating to say
us
—“about what was going on,” he finally said. “You’re crazy if you think nobody knew. And regardless, you’re the one who set the terms. You can’t deny that.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You said let’s not tell people about this, don’t kiss me at breakfast. It never seemed like you wanted a boyfriend.”

“So is that why you didn’t send me a flower on Valentine’s Day? Because I told you don’t send me flowers, was that it?”

“That’s exactly what you told me.”

“You would never have been my boyfriend,” I said.

His jaw tensed, which meant that at least I was getting to him.

“You wouldn’t have,” I said. “I’m sure of it.”

“That must be nice to be sure of things.”

Simultaneously, I had the impulse not to contradict him—just to let his comment sit there so that later I could cling to its implication—and I had the impulse to destroy it for the lie it was.

“I’m not sure of everything,” I said. “But I’m sure of this. You would never have been my boyfriend.”

For a long time, we watched each other. Finally—not meanly—he said, “Yeah, you’re probably right,” and I began to cry. (When I went over the conversation, and over and over and over it, thinking of that part continued to make me cry. It never made things any better to remember that I had forced the admission.)

“Lee,” he said, and his voice was pleading. “Lee, it was—there were a lot of things that were good. You were funny. That was one of the things.”

I wiped my eyes.

“You were—this will sound weird, but you were businesslike. It was as if you expected me to come back and were trying to plan for it.”

I had been
businesslike
?