Prep: A Novel (33 page)

“It’s all right,” I said. “How’s Sin-Jun?”

“Much more like her old self. I’m actually hoping you’ll go this afternoon and help her dad bring her back to the infirmary.”

Who would watch her to make sure she didn’t try again? I wondered. A nurse?

“We don’t know if she’ll stay at Ault,” Mrs. Morino said. “Mr. Byden and her parents and I are talking with her, but in the meantime, it would be great if you could swing by her room and pack a bag for her so she has some things.”

“Wouldn’t Clara know what stuff she’d want?”

Mrs. Morino sighed. “I take it that you don’t know Clara and Sin-Jun aren’t getting along.”

This did not particularly surprise me. Freshman year, when Clara also had lived in Broussard’s, I’d tried to steer clear of her from the beginning. And it hadn’t been because she was someone who obviously would never be popular, or at least it hadn’t been only because of that; it also had been because she irritated me. She was pale, with dark blond chin-length hair, a middle part, and heavy bangs. She was big, especially in the breasts and thighs, and she favored tapered, bleached jeans and long dumpy skirts. In her demeanor, there was something spacey and innocent, something slow and not discontented, and it was these qualities that I found so irritating. But I doubted most people agreed; she was the type about whom most people would say,
She wouldn’t hurt a fly.
My real frustration with Clara, I think, was that it seemed like she should be insecure but wasn’t.

At curfew, if you ended up sitting next to her, she’d start talking as if you’d been carrying on a conversation before and had been interrupted or as if you’d just asked her a question. She’d do this with anyone—me, Aspeth, Amy Dennaker, even Madame Broussard. The defining aspect of Clara’s stories was that she did not provide context and that you did not, for fear of encouraging her, ask for it. She might, for instance, recount some incident from class: “I didn’t even know the quiz was today. I said to Shelly, ‘Did he tell us there would be a quiz?’ and she said no. And in the beginning of the year, I clearly remember him saying, ‘I don’t give pop quizzes. . . .’ ” As she continued, I’d be thinking,
Shelly? Who’s Shelly? Does anyone named Shelly go to Ault?

Clara also both hummed and sang to herself audibly and unself-consciously; you’d hear her while you were washing your faces at adjacent sinks in the bathroom before bed. I had never been able to shake the sense that she was, in these situations, trying to elicit some sort of reaction—a compliment on her voice, maybe, or an inquiry into what song she was humming. Or maybe she wanted you to see her as carefree and whimsical. Yet at the same time, coexisting with my feeling that her singing was somehow aggressive, I also saw her as genuinely clueless. It was conceivable that she was singing just because she wanted to sing, because she
was
carefree and whimsical. And that possibility made me dislike her most of all.

That afternoon, I came face-to-face with Clara outside her and Sin-Jun’s room; she was carrying a cup of tea.

“I’m here to get the bag of stuff,” I said.

“What for? Is Sin-Jun going home?” Her voice was frantic, and I had a vision of her bursting into tears right there.

“She’s going to the infirmary. Has Mrs. Morino not talked to you?”

“I guess she hasn’t.” Clara’s snappishness was preferable to wailing, but only by a little.

“I’m supposed to get her some clothes,” I said. “Can I go in?”

Clara didn’t reply, but stepped in front of me and pushed open the door. I followed her. They didn’t have bunk beds, like Martha and I did, but twin beds with a little table between them. Clara’s comforter had large roses in red and peach and orange, and Sin-Jun’s was the same one from our freshman year, navy with green piping. It occurred to me that the last time she’d been in the room had been the evening she’d taken the pills.

“Where’s her duffel bag?” I asked.

Clara pointed under the bed but let me get on my knees to retrieve the bag myself. So this was to be a solo project, I thought, and when I was standing again, I pulled open the top drawer of the bureau I could tell was Sin-Jun’s because I recognized the toiletries lined up across the top—the Korean hand lotion with a graphic of a sleeping baby on the bottle, the perfume that I’d always thought smelled like grapefruit. I could sense, as I lifted Sin-Jun’s underwear and undershirts (I’d forgotten that she didn’t wear bras) and dropped them in the duffel, that Clara was watching me intently. When I shut the top drawer, Clara said, “You forgot her pajamas.”

“Where are they?”

Clara reopened the drawer, pulled out a gray tank top and a pair of boxer shorts and passed them to me. Then she stepped back again and folded her arms.

I went drawer by drawer, and we didn’t talk. I set several toiletries in the duffel.

“The shampoo will spill on her clothes,” Clara said. “You should always carry stuff like that inside a plastic bag.”

“We’re not going that far,” I said. I surveyed the room, wondering what else Sin-Jun might want and realized I should have bought her a present. “I guess this is it,” I said. “Unless you can think of anything.”

Clara was watching me suspiciously. “You haven’t been in our room once this whole year.”

“So?”

“So I don’t know why you’re acting like you and Sin-Jun are really close.”

“I’m not.”

“She’s changed since you guys were roommates. I bet there are a lot of things you don’t know about her.”

“Clara, Mrs. Morino
asked
me to come over here. Was I supposed to say no?”

“I just think you’re acting kind of fake.”

“Well, I’m sorry you feel that way.” This was an Aultish thing to say, ostensibly diplomatic yet totally distant. But I actually did feel a twinge of sympathy for Clara. How would I react if, say, Dede were to suddenly usurp my role in Martha’s life? Not that that’s what I was trying to do with Sin-Jun; it was just sort of happening.

“Wait,” Clara said. “Give her this.” She tossed a small white stuffed rabbit toward me. I didn’t catch it, but I picked it up off the floor. “And tell her not to eat too many peach daiquiris. She’ll know what that means.” In a strange way, I identified more with Clara in this moment than I ever had before. Her face was pink and strained, focusing on me. The way she usually seemed—obliviously satisfied—she didn’t seem at all.

By the time I got to the schoolhouse, where Mrs. Morino had told me to meet Mr. Kim, a cream-colored sedan was waiting out front. Mr. Kim emerged from the car, finished a call on his cell phone—it was the first cell phone I’d ever seen—and soberly shook my hand. I had met him twice before: the first time during parents’ weekend when Sin-Jun and I were freshmen, and the second time, later that same year, when Mr. Kim was in Boston for a business trip and came to campus. Both times I’d gone out to dinner with the Kims and both times Mr. Kim had encouraged me to order steak and, unable to think of a reason not to, I’d complied. Mr. Kim was an inch or two shorter than I was, trim, and dressed in a gray suit, a white shirt with no tie, and a beige raincoat that seemed like it couldn’t possibly be keeping him warm; his skin was tan and his hair was thinning, especially in the front, where there were just a few groups of strands, which looked and smelled like they’d been combed back with pomade.

Inside the sedan, the seats were pale leather, and the car was already warm; I always forgot how nice things that cost a lot could be. After we drove away from campus, several minutes passed during which neither of us spoke. Sentences floated in my mind—
How was your flight? When did you arrive?
—but it seemed like asking them would be avoiding the real subject. Yet raising the real subject surely was not for me to do.

Out the window, the trees were bare and scrawny-looking, and the road was lined with dirty snow from the week before. I actually liked the desolation of winter; it was the season when it was okay to be unhappy. If I were ever to kill myself, I thought, it would be in the summer.

“If you did not like Ault School,” Mr. Kim began (so he was thinking, more or less, about the same thing), “you would tell your father and mother.”

“Not necessarily. I wouldn’t want my parents to worry because they can’t do much.”

Neither of us spoke for almost a minute, and then Mr. Kim said, “You would tell teacher or headmaster.”

“I would probably tell my roommate.” Admitting this felt, somehow, like a betrayal of Sin-Jun.

Mr. Kim did not reply, and the silence from before descended again.

After he had turned in to the hospital parking lot and parked, I said brightly, “Are the hospitals different in Korea than here?”

“In big cities, they are the same. In villages, they are not so modern.”

“It’s winter there, too, right? The seasons are the same as here?”

“Yes,” he said. “The seasons are the same.”

Inside, we signed in and boarded the elevator. “What’s your favorite season?” I asked.

He was quiet, then finally said, “When Sin-Jun was small girl, we took her one night to a party. Our friends’ house had many window. While we ate dinner, my friend’s wife said to me, ‘Look.’ Sin-Jun stood before window. Because the night was dark, Sin-Jun saw her reflection in glass. But she did not understand it was her reflection. She thought it was another small girl. When she waved, the other girl waved. When she smiled, the other girl smiled. She begins to dance, and the other girl dances. Sin-Jun is so happy.” Mr. Kim sounded neither pleased nor saddened; he sounded simply confused. “She is filled,” he said, “with so much delight.”

The elevator had arrived on the third floor, pausing, then dropping a little, and I could feel that the doors were about to open. We were both facing straight ahead. Grown men, other people’s fathers, were so strange—often I didn’t completely understand what it was they did at their jobs during the day, and certainly I didn’t understand what occupied their minds. They might tease you or ask you questions, they might even, in elementary school, be your soccer coach, but their attention always felt momentary, before they turned back to the real business at hand. And you
wanted
their attention to be momentary—the ones whose wasn’t seemed creepy. Now, however, the situation felt backwards, it felt as if maybe Mr. Kim was asking for something from me. But if he was, what did I have to give? Another person’s father could grill your hamburger, could pump air into your bike tire, could carry your suitcase out to the car, but what could you possibly do for him? Wasn’t it presumptuous—presuming, specifically, his need and vulnerability—to offer comfort?

As the elevator doors opened I said, “I really think she’ll be okay.”

In fact, Sin-Jun did not seem particularly okay at all. Leaving the hospital, her father passed her his coat—I hadn’t thought to bring one from her room—and Sin-Jun responded irritably, in Korean (it was the most animated I’d seen her since before she’d taken the aspirin). She wouldn’t put the coat on, or even hold it, so Mr. Kim draped it over her shoulders. He turned to me and said in English, “You will stay here with Sin-Jun while I retrieve car.” After he had walked beyond the porte cochere, Sin-Jun went outside as well. I followed her.

“I think your dad wants us to wait inside.”

She gave me an unfriendly look. “I need air.”

It was hard to know how to treat her. My impulse was to act as if she were physically ill—at some level, it had surprised me to see her dressed and waiting for us by the nurses’ station, and then it had surprised me that she simply stood and walked out rather than being pushed in a wheelchair—yet another part of me saw her as not sick at all; I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and tell her to snap out of it. Her lack of affect seemed ridiculous, a parody of a moody teenager. Not, of course, that I
would
grab her by the shoulders, but the reason I wouldn’t was not so much that it would be inappropriate as that, in her new incarnation, I found Sin-Jun intimidating. I could imagine her having disparaging thoughts about me. She had done something fearless and dramatic, something people at school were talking about. The school psychologist was making her way around to all the dorms, starting with girls’, talking to students at curfew—Sin-Jun had set these meetings in motion, quiet and easygoing Sin-Jun—and other students who were aware that I had once roomed with her had been asking about the details of what had happened. The girls at least feigned concern (
Is she okay?
Or,
How awful!
) while the guys’ remarks were more distant:
That’s fucked. What’d she do that for? Was she always psycho?
But this was the thing: Neither the girls nor the guys seemed entirely unimpressed. The fact that Sin-Jun had taken pills made her interesting. It was becoming—I could feel it happening—a phenomenon, another story. It was no longer an act of desperation, or at least not messy, slobbery desperation. And now that Sin-Jun was, by the larger Ault community, being reconsidered (surely, though she hadn’t yet gotten back to campus, she could sense this reconsideration; surely, when you were cool, you were always at least slightly aware of your own coolness), I feared her; perhaps she found me dorky.

“Do you want to play gin rummy tonight?” I said.

Sin-Jun shook her head.

“Or tomorrow,” I added. (I
was
dorky—she’d be entirely justified in thinking so.)

She was standing a little in front of me, scanning the parking lot, and I couldn’t read her face.

“Are you glad you’re leaving the hospital?” I asked.

She shrugged.

“You know how you felt bad before? Do you still feel that bad? Or do you feel better?” It was because she was all but ignoring me that I could ask this; I was comfortable in the world with only one person emoting at a time, and if she’d been weeping and confiding, I’d have been distantly attentive, blandly soothing.

“I am fine,” she said.

“There have been times when I’ve felt depressed.”

Sin-Jun looked at me squarely. “You are depressed?”

“Sure,” I said, and it felt like I was lying. My depression, if that’s what it was, was always so ephemeral; it was possible to be distracted from it by hanging out with Martha, or by listening to a chapel talk, or even—this had to mean it wasn’t serious—by watching television. “There are things that get me down,” I said.