Prep: A Novel (52 page)

When she spoke again, Angie’s voice was softer. “Does that story ring any bells?”

“One time, when I was a sophomore—” I said and then stopped.

“Go on. This might feel weird, Lee, but I’d argue that it’s awfully important.”

“Sophomore year, I had a teacher for English who people didn’t like very much. I was walking with other students after class one day, and one of them, this girl, said something about the teacher being LMC. She was talking about the teacher’s clothes.”

“What does LMC mean?”

“That’s what I was wondering. So later I asked my roommate, and my roommate, who would never say something like that, seemed kind of embarrassed. She said she wasn’t sure but she thought it stood for lower- middle-class.” Martha had known that was what it stood for; I could tell that she’d just felt self-conscious explaining it to me. When I’d told her why I was asking, she had said, “Aspeth is so ridiculous.”

“Unbelievable,” Angie said.

“People here aren’t obviously snobby, but their idea of what’s normal—well, another thing I remember for some reason is you can take the bus to Boston on Saturdays if you don’t have a game. And the dean gets on before you leave campus to say all school rules are in effect, and then he meets the bus when it comes back at the end of the day and randomly searches people’s bags. One time last year, the bus was about to pick us up in Boston, and I ran into some girls by Fanueil Hall. They were girls from my dorm. We were all at a clothes store, and one of the girls was taking stuff off the racks and carrying it up to the cash register without trying it on. I said to the other one, ‘Doesn’t she want to see if it fits?’ and the girl said, ‘She’s just buying stuff to wrap the alcohol in.’ She didn’t say
alcohol,
but that’s what she meant. It was probably a hundred dollars’ worth of clothes.”

Angie shook her head. “What kind of alcohol had she bought?”

“Probably vodka. That’s the one you can’t smell on people’s breath, right?”

“I take it you’re not a drinker yourself.”

“No.”

“Do you think being here on scholarship makes you less likely to violate school rules?”

I thought of Cross and felt a little injured—why exactly did Angie think I
was
less likely to violate school rules? But all I said was, “Possibly.”

“How about other scholarship kids? Do they drink or smoke?”

“I don’t really think of people as scholarship and not-scholarship.”

“You don’t know who’s receiving aid and who isn’t?”

“You know. But nobody discusses it.”

“Then how do you know?”

“You can tell by people’s rooms—whether or not they have stereos, or if the girls have flowered bedspreads, or if they have silver picture frames. Just the quality of their stuff. And their clothes—everyone orders clothes from the same catalogs, so you’ll see lots of people in an identical sweater, and you know exactly how much it cost. And things like, you can send your laundry to a service or you can do it yourself in the dorm machines. Or even some of the sports, how much the equipment costs. Ice hockey is a really expensive sport, but something like basketball isn’t that much.”

“Is it safe to assume you don’t have a flowered bedspread or silver picture frames?”

“I have a flowered bedspread.” I had asked for it for my birthday freshman year. As for silver picture frames, as for everything else—Martha was my beard.

“There’s another thing,” I said. “Probably the biggest clue about who’s getting financial aid and who isn’t is race. Nobody ever talks about it, but it’s just sort of known that people from certain minorities are almost always on scholarship.”

“Which minorities?”

I hesitated. “You can probably guess.”

“You’re not going to offend me, Lee.”

“Well, blacks and Latinos. That’s basically it. People from other minorities, like Asians or Indians, usually aren’t on scholarship, and blacks and Latinos usually are.”

“So how can you tell if a white student is on scholarship?”

“I doubt there are that many of them who are,” I said. “That many of us.” For a moment, I couldn’t think of anyone in the senior class besides me, and then I remembered Scott LaRosa, who was from Portland and was captain of the boys’ ice hockey team. He had a pale meaty face and a Maine accent, but he also was big and confident. In our class, I couldn’t come up with anyone else.

“Why do you think so few white students receive financial aid?”

“We don’t add diversity to the school. And there are plenty of white kids whose parents
can
pay.”

“It seems like you’ve spent a lot of time here feeling left out.”

Once, this observation might have made tears well in my eyes—she
understood
—but now it just seemed like part of the conversation. And besides, though I wanted Angie Varizi to like me, I was not entirely sure that I liked her.

“Of course I’ve felt left out some of the time. But that’s to be expected, right?” I smiled. “I’m kind of like this nobody from Indiana.”

“Do you feel different from your family when you go back home?”

Out the window, a breeze rose, and I could hear the leaves in the beech tree rustle. “It would be depressing if I did, right?” I said. I was quiet, and then I said, “You know how we were talking before about why I came to Ault? And I said two reasons? Well, there’s another one I didn’t say. It’s kind of hard to explain, but it’s probably the main reason.” I took a deep breath. “When I was ten, my family went on vacation to Florida. It was a big deal, like neither of my parents had been before. It was the summer, and we drove down. We were staying on Tampa Bay, and one day, we were driving around and sightseeing, or maybe we got lost, but we ended up in this neighborhood with huge houses. It wasn’t like a new development—the houses looked old-fashioned. A lot of them were white shingled, and they had bay windows and porches with rocking chairs on them and big green lawns and palm trees. In front of one house, a boy and girl who were probably brother and sister were playing soccer. I said to my dad—I was at the age where you don’t really understand the difference between something costing a thousand dollars and a million dollars—I said, ‘We should buy a house like this.’ I thought they were pretty, and I thought my family would be happy in one. And my dad started laughing. He said, ‘No, no.’ ” I had, I remembered, been sitting in the front seat beside my father; my mother had been in back with my brothers, because Tim was an infant. I’d felt close to my father in this moment, believing I’d come up with a good idea. “My dad said, ‘Lee, people like us don’t live in these houses. These people keep their money in Swiss bank accounts. They eat caviar for dinner. They send their sons to boarding school.’ And I said to him”—Had it all really hinged on this, had this been the reason I’d become who I was, the reason I’d enrolled at Ault? In a way, it couldn’t have been because it was far too small. But maybe it always comes down to small reasons, incremental turns, conversations you almost didn’t have, or heard only part of—“I said to my dad, ‘Do they send their daughters to boarding school?’ ”

“Wow,” Angie said.

“By the time I applied to Ault and other places, I doubt my parents remembered that conversation. And I didn’t remind them of it, obviously.”

“You were ready to trade up,” Angie said.

“I’m not sure I’d put it like that. I mean, I was ten at the time.” I could tell that we were near the end of the interview. During parts of it, my heart rate had sped up, my cheeks had flushed—there was something exciting about talking to her, as if I had waited a long time to say these things. But thinking of my family in the car together, none of us knowing that in four years I would leave home, made me feel sad and emptied out.

“Listen, Lee,” Angie said. “You’ve given me a lot of great information. I can’t thank you enough for your candor.” She passed me a business card, and the part that said
The New York Times
was in that fancy script just like at the top of the newspaper. “Call me if you have any questions.”

When I left the room, I passed Darden Pittard in the hallway. “What am I in for?” he asked.

“It was kind of weird,” I said.

“Good weird or bad weird?”

Five minutes earlier, I’d have said good weird, but an odd feeling was expanding in me. I had told Angie Varizi a lot about myself, and it was hard to say why, except that she’d asked. “I don’t know,” I said. “Just weird.”

During the break between third and fourth period, I found Martha in the spot where we often met, by the community service bulletin board in the mail room. Other students buzzed past us.

“How’d it go?” she said. “Was the guy nice?” She unwrapped a granola bar and broke it in two, holding a piece toward me. I shook my head.

“It was a woman,” I said. “I guess she was nice, but I feel like maybe I said too much. She asked a lot about tuition-type stuff.” The strange part was, the more I thought about it, the less I could remember what I’d said.

“Really?” Martha’s mouth was full, which made her voice garbled, but I could tell from her raised eyebrows that she was surprised. She swallowed. “Why would she want to know about that?”

“I have no idea.”

We looked at each other. Surely there was a conversation Martha and I could have had somewhere along the way about the differences between us, but given that we hadn’t, it was too large to embark upon now.

“That seems random,” she said.

“Do you think I should be worried?”

Martha smiled. “Nah. I bet you were her favorite interview of the day.”

When it was over, you didn’t need to ask, you knew, and yet—you could still be caught off guard; your sense of the situation could be at odds with your wish for a particular outcome. That Saturday night when I was sitting on the edge of one of the tubs in a T-shirt and shorts shaving my legs, Martha walked into the dorm bathroom. “I thought you might be in here,” she said.

“Hey. The dance isn’t over, is it?”

“No, but it was kind of hot and boring. So you know Aspeth?”

“You mean Aspeth we’ve gone to school with for four years?”

Martha bit her lower lip. “She and Sug are good friends, right?”

“Martha, what are you trying to say?”

“They were dancing together. A lot.”

A jittery sensation began to rise from my stomach to my chest. “Do they not usually dance together?”

“I guess I’ve never really noticed. There was just something obvious about it tonight. Neither of them was dancing with anyone else. And then they were by the snack bar and he was leaning against that railing”—I knew the snack bar, I knew the railing; I had walked through the activities center many times, but only during the day, when it was quiet and dusty-looking—“and she was leaning against him.”

“Facing him?” I asked.

“No, no. They were both facing out. I think he had his arms around her waist.” Until this moment, Martha had remained standing by the tile wall. Now, she came and perched on the tub next to me. “I’m sorry, but I thought you’d want to know.”

I looked at my half-shaven legs.

Martha said, “Aspeth is dumb,” and there were many things that Aspeth Montgomery was, but dumb had never been one of them.

After that, I was on the lookout. And it was true that Cross and Aspeth were often together, but maybe no more than they ever had been. It was late May, and as the weather got nicer, seniors were outside on the circle constantly, an even bigger group—after lunch and during free periods and on the weekends—and more than once, as I walked by and pretended not to look at the flock of them, I could make out Aspeth shouting, “I do not!” Or another time: “That’s so gross!” Why didn’t I ever join them? I wanted to, but there would be that one unbearable moment after I approached when I stood on the fringes of the group, and they would shade their eyes and look up and wonder why I was there. There was something I would have to say, there was a place in the grass I would have to sit, a posture I would have to sit in. For other people, these decisions seemed effortless, not decisions at all; for me, they had never stopped being decisions.

I couldn’t tell anything for sure, though, and I thought that by remaining vigilant, I was protecting myself. Then, in the year’s last issue of
The Ault Voice,
next to an editorial titled “Plaid Shorts Should Be Allowed in the Schoolhouse,” Low Notes included the line, “C.S. and M.R.: Sugar daddy is singing a new melody.” New issues of
The A.V.
were distributed once a month at roll call, and those roll calls were unusually quiet, as most students read during the announcements; several teachers always admonished us to put the papers away, and no one did. I, too, read during roll call but I’d taken to avoiding Low Notes in public because I was always terrified—or maybe I was hopeful—that there’d be a mention of Cross and me, and that someone would observe me reading it. This meant that it was not until that evening that I read the line and even before I really comprehended it, I felt flooded with a hot nauseated blend of shock and recognition. I was astonished, and also, I was not really surprised at all. And Martha, as usual, wasn’t around—she was at a meeting—and she didn’t return to the dorm until curfew. The moment curfew ended, I whispered, “I need to talk to you.”

In our room, I picked up my copy of the paper and held it out to her. “Look at this.”

I pointed, and her eyes moved over the page. It seemed to be taking her longer to read it than it should. Finally, she said, “Who’s M.R.?”

“Melodie Ryan. Who Cross was in
Hamlet
with. I’ve never heard anything about this, but they must have—I don’t know. He hasn’t been here for more than a month, Martha,” I said, and I burst into tears.

She patted my back.

“It has to be, right? But maybe it’s not because Melodie is spelled I-E and this is just with a Y. So is it?”

Martha looked distressed. “I don’t know.”

“Has he said anything to you? Is he going out with Melodie Ryan and everyone knows and I don’t? Is he going out with Aspeth?”

“If Cross has a new girlfriend, I don’t know it, either. But, Lee, before you tear yourself apart, remember how silly Low Notes are.”