Prep: A Novel (56 page)

At the arch leading to the dorm courtyard, I was still crying fresh tears, and my shoulders were heaving. “You want to keep walking?” Darden said. “Let’s keep walking.” He guided me past the dorms, and at the schoolhouse we sat side by side on steps outside the entrance. Across the circle, our classmates ate dessert on the terrace. “You just need some time,” Darden said. “But you’ll be fine. You’ll be totally fine.”

Eventually, I stopped sobbing. I thought—I had never thought this about a guy my age—that Darden would be a good father. We watched as juniors emerged from the dorms and the library and walked toward the terrace.

“She was trouble,” Darden said.

At first, I didn’t know who he meant, and then I did.

“I can’t really blame her.” It was the first thing I’d said in at least fifteen minutes, and my voice was croaky. “Unless you tell the reporter something is off-the-record, everything you say to them is fair game.”

“Whatever. She had an agenda. She wanted me to be an angry black guy. She had us all pigeonholed before we set foot in Fletcher’s classroom.”

“But you’re
not
angry.” I glanced at him. “Are you?”

“No more than most people.”

“So why—why did I fall for Angie’s act when you didn’t?”

“Because you’re white.”

I looked at him to see if he was joking; he gave no indication that he was.

“Black people who live in a white world learn to be careful,” he said. “You learn not to make waves.” The only time I had ever heard anyone, including Darden himself, discuss his race was the time sophomore year in Ms. Moray’s class when he and Dede and Aspeth had gotten in trouble for their Uncle Tom skit. “Or let me put it this way. You don’t make waves unless there’s a reason, and it better be good. Because once you do, that’s it. You’re a troublemaker, and they never think of you any other way.”

“Then the opposite must be true, too,” I said. “Mr. Byden must love you now. He probably wants to make you a trustee.”

Darden laughed.

“Did he say anything to you? He hasn’t said anything to me.”

“In passing,” Darden said. “Nothing major.”

“He’s probably so mad at me.” I’d been a little surprised, actually, not to hear from Mr. Byden at all; leaving roll call the previous morning, I’d made eye contact with him, and he’d simply looked away.

“If it’s weighing on you, write him a letter this summer,” Darden said. “For now, let it blow over.”

On the terrace, the juniors had assembled. “I don’t want to make you miss the singing,” I said.

“I’ll live,” Darden said.

Then we could hear them—not the specific words, but the sound of a piano, and voices. It sounded farther away than it was.

“I can’t believe we’re graduating,” I said.

“I’m ready.” He smiled, and it seemed to me a sad smile. There was so much I didn’t know about Darden.

We stopped talking and just listened to the music, the lyrics we couldn’t decipher. When the song had ended, every senior got a white balloon, and they walked onto the circle and released them, all at the same time. The sky was darkening, and the balloons as they floated up were like dozens of tiny glowing moons; people stood on the grass with their necks craned, watching the balloons until they vanished. That wasn’t the last year Ault released balloons, but it was the second to last. They stopped because it was bad for the environment, which isn’t something you can argue with, at least not persuasively. It’s just that—the balloons were so pretty. I’m not saying they should have kept the tradition. But they really were pretty. And it seems like a lot of other things stopped around then, too, like my classmates and I were at the tail end of something. We still listened to music from the sixties and seventies, but kids a few years younger than us, including my brothers, had their own music. And clothes, too. Through my senior year, I wore floral dresses that came to my shins, sometimes with a belt of fabric at the waist, sometimes with puffy sleeves, with a square neck, or a lace collar, or a corduroy Peter Pan collar. Everyone wore these, even the prettiest girls—I wore them
because
the prettiest girls wore them. A few years after college, I gave away all the dresses, though it was hard to imagine who would want them—someone’s grandmother, maybe. By then, teenage girls wore short skirts, fitted shirts and sweaters, and in the years after that, they wore really short skirts and really fitted tops. And technology—I guess e-mail existed when I was at Ault, but I had never heard of it. No one had voice mail, either, because we didn’t have phones in our rooms, and certainly no student had a cell phone. When I think of how a whole dorm would share a pay phone, how most of the time when our parents called either the phone rang and rang without getting answered or else it was busy, it feels as if I’m remembering the 1950s. And I know the world always changes; it just seems like for us it changed kind of fast.

“Darden,” I said. The balloons were long gone, and our classmates were dispersing. Sitting on the steps with him, I felt untouchable, protected from both the judgment of others and time itself—as long as Darden was next to me, we were still at Ault, our futures hadn’t happened yet—but I knew that I had to let him leave. It was partly because I wanted to find out the answer and partly just to keep him there that I said, “Did you ever hear that Cross Sugarman and I—that we were—”

“I heard something about it,” Darden said. “But nothing big.”

“You heard, like, that we were—what did you hear?” (Darden was so dignified, and I was so awkward and insatiable.)

“That you were hanging out for a while. Something like that. I wouldn’t sweat it.”

I couldn’t correct him. To tell him that he was comforting me in the wrong way, in the opposite of the way I wanted—it would cast a shadow over the fact that just prior to this he had understood exactly what I needed.

“Anyhow,” Darden said, “that was months ago. And no one but a fool believes everything they hear in this place.”

Did he mean that he was willing to act like it wasn’t true? Or just that he was ready for the conversation to be over? Probably that, the latter.

We stood. “You’re okay?” he said.

When I nodded, he hugged me. It was the kind of hug he and Aspeth might exchange after walking back from the library to the dorms for curfew, a hearty hug but a throwaway hug. At least, hypothetically, a throwaway hug; for me, it was the first time I’d been hugged by any boy at Ault besides Cross.

“I’m sorry that I screwed up,” I blurted out.

He shook his head. He didn’t say I hadn’t screwed up (he probably thought I had—also, of course, he was probably the one who, in a factual and not cruel way, had made the comment to Angie Varizi about my not being popular). Instead, Darden said, “I know you are.”

Martha came to find me in the library. Since everyone else was outside all the time, the library was where I’d been hiding when I couldn’t stand to be in our room anymore. Seniors were exempt from exams, so there was no work. All that was left was graduation itself and, after that, senior week, during which we’d drive from party to party in Dedham and Lyme and Locust Valley. Because it was the very last part of Ault, and because how could I not, I actually was planning to attend the whole thing.

The past few days had been sunny and endless and I had felt afraid of everyone and despairing about Cross. I’d spent most of the time trying unsuccessfully to pack. Every June before, when we’d had to remove our posters and unscrew Martha’s futon and stack our books in boxes that we stored in the dorm basement, the chore had depressed me—all the space in the room, the blank walls. It reminded me how ephemeral our lives at Ault were. This time, I would fold three sweaters and stick them in a box and then I’d need to get out of the room, and I’d peer out the window, and if the coast was clear, I’d race outside and sprint past the chapel and the dining hall to the library and go into the periodicals room, which was empty and dark and cool, and I’d read magazines, and sometimes in the middle of an article, I would look up and think,
I have ruined everything.
During my time at Ault, I’d always felt I had things to hide, reasons to apologize. But I hadn’t, I saw now. In a strange way, it was as if all along I’d anticipated what would happen with
The New York Times,
I’d known how it would end.

When she entered the periodicals room, Martha was breathing heavily, as if she’d been running. “Scoot over,” she said.

I was sitting on the floor, my back against a wall. I shifted, and she sat down next to me.

She said, “You know how tomorrow’s chapel will be the last one for the year?”

I nodded.

“Apparently, some seniors were looking for a student to give a talk refuting what you said in the article. I guess they’ve found someone.”

“Who?”

“That’s the part I don’t know. The rumor was that they were trying to find either a minority or a white person on scholarship.”

“Good luck. So which seniors?”

“I don’t know that, either.”

I looked at her.

“Who you’d expect,” she said. “Horton Kinnelly. Doug Miles.”

“And is this the part where you tell me I should go?” I said. “To build my character or something?”

“Not to build your character. But I do think you should go because it’s the last chapel.”

“Martha, probably half the senior class will skip.”

“I don’t think so.” She shook her head. “People are getting sentimental.”

I thought of Darden and said, “Not everyone. Not you.”

“Just wait. I’ll be bawling at graduation.”

We were quiet, and I could hear the sound of a saw outside; adjacent to the chapel, the maintenance crew was building the graduation stage. Because the ceremony was supposed to be held outside, all the seniors were obsessed with whether the sunshine would last. I could truly say that I didn’t care—in fact, a part of me would have been grimly satisfied if it rained and we had to move into the gym.

And similarly, a part of me was relieved to know that I would, perhaps implicitly or perhaps not implicitly at all, be scolded in public. This seemed the Ault way, to be held accountable. Already, over the years, I had gotten away with too much.

“I sure blew it, huh?” I said.

Martha was quiet, and then she said, “Well, it’s not like it was an accident.”

I stiffened.
Not you, too, Martha,
I thought. It would be more than I could take, though I realized in that moment that she had never said to me anything like,
You weren’t wrong,
or,
This wasn’t your fault.
What she’d said instead was, in essence,
You can’t let it bother you.
Not to be confused with
I’m on your side.

“You’re not stupid,” she continued. She did not seem particularly accusatory; she seemed to be musing. “In fact, you’re probably the most careful person I know about what you say.”

“Are you suggesting I wanted this to happen?”

“I don’t see it as that black-and-white.”

Sitting there, so close together, I hated her a little bit. But this was not the same as thinking she was completely wrong. Maybe the reason I’d had a premonition about how it would all end at Ault was that I would cause it to end that way. Because how was it possible that I’d lasted four years without ever truly exposing myself, and then blown it in the last week? Could it have been that secretly I had craved the opportunity to say to everyone at Ault,
You think I think nothing. But when I do not speak, I am always thinking. I have opinions about this place, about all of you.
Maybe. Maybe that’s what I’d wanted, but if I’d wanted it, I’d wanted it on my own terms. I had imagined that Angie Varizi could make me seem articulate and persuasive, not bitter and isolated, not vulnerable.

“Are you mad at me because I made you look bad in front of Mr. Byden?” I asked, and as I said it, the idea occurred to me for the first time. “Are you the one who told him to have
The New York Times
interview me?”

Martha said nothing and then she said, “I don’t think anyone is to blame. It’s the way the situation played out. I made a choice to suggest you, he made a choice to have you do it, you made a choice to tell the woman what you told her.”

It was so terrible I almost couldn’t think about it—that Martha had imagined she was giving me a present. She had wanted to be nice, to provide me with the chance to stand out that I’d never been able to provide for myself. I felt guilt bordering on nausea, but I also felt angry, angrier than before. One, because she should have told me—possibly I’d still have said what I said, but I’d have understood that I was meant to praise the school. And two, because there was another thing I was mad at Martha for, it had been simmering for the last few days or perhaps for the last few months, and in the same moment, there in the library, I understood exactly what this murky resentment toward her was, and I understood that I would never be able to express it. I resented her for having said, back in October, that she didn’t think Cross would be my boyfriend. She had made it true! If she’d said she could picture it, it didn’t mean it would have happened. But by saying she couldn’t, she’d pretty much sealed that it wouldn’t. Had she not understood how literally I took her, how much I trusted her advice? She had discouraged me from being hopeful, and how can you ever forgive a person for that? And how could I ever tell her any of this? It would be too ugly. For me to have messed up, to have done a thing that required
her
forgiveness, was not atypical. For her to be the one at fault would unbalance our friendship. I would not try to explain anything, and who knew if I could have explained it anyway? The mistake I had made was so public and obvious, and the one she’d made was private and subjective; I was its only witness. No, I would not tell her anything; I would be good old incompetent Lee, lovably flawed Lee, a golden retriever who just can’t stay out of the creek and keeps returning to the house with wet, smelly fur.

“So you think I betrayed the school?” I said, and I could tell I sounded cranky, but cranky was (Martha would never know this) something we could recover from—cranky was a far cry from what I actually felt.