Prep: A Novel (53 page)

“But they’re usually right.” I wiped my nose with the back of my hand. “Remember that one about Katherine Pound and Alexander Héverd, and no one believed it at first? But it was true.”

“But it can just mean Melodie and Cross hooked up,” Martha said. “Not that they’re a real couple.”

I started crying harder—to me, hooking up
was
being a couple. Apparently, I had persuaded Martha that the Low Note was right, and it hadn’t been hard to do.

“You need to talk to Cross,” Martha said. “You’re allowed to ask him stuff, Lee. And, at this point, what is there to lose?”

But the next day was Friday and it seemed to me inappropriate to corner Cross on a weekend. Because (yes, I was nuts, and I also think there’s a decent chance I’d operate on this logic again, given the opportunity) what if he and Melodie had something planned and I interrupted it? Or just ruined his mood before a romantic evening? I hated the idea of being a pain in the ass, the kind of girl who always wanted to
talk.
Talking to him was, of course, exactly what I wanted to do, but not in a cornering way, not tediously.

On top of that, it wasn’t just any weekend—it was the weekend Angie Varizi’s article was supposed to run in the
Times.
She had warned me that it might be bumped at the last minute, depending on breaking news, but if everything proceeded normally, it would appear on Sunday.

Looking back on this period, I feel both a retroactive dread and a sense of protectiveness for myself as I was then, for how distraught I felt about Cross, how earnestly sad at the prospect of graduating from Ault. I feel the way you do watching a movie in which a teenage girl is in the house alone at night, in a storm, and the electricity goes out, or a movie in which a young couple share a romantic dinner and emerge from the restaurant into a snowstorm that seems to them beautiful, then climb into their car to drive home along curving roads. The same way you want to yell,
Get out of the house! Stop the car!
what I want to say to the younger me is,
Just go. If you leave now, your memory of Ault will be unspoiled. You will think that your feelings about the school are complicated, but you still will possess the sweet conviction that it was the place that wronged you and not the other way around.

Over the course of the weekend, I kept forgetting and remembering the article. On Sunday, Martha and I awakened around eight, a little early, but it wasn’t because of that. Walking to the dining hall, we were discussing what shoes we’d wear for our graduation ceremony, which was a week away. At Ault, you wore not a cap and gown but a white dress, and the boys wore khaki pants and navy blazers and straw boaters. Then we started talking about how the year before, Annice Roule had tripped on the stairs leading up to the stage when she went to collect her diploma.

The usual handful of students was in the dining hall, but the weird thing was, they were all sitting at the same table. The freshmen and sophomores and juniors had joined the seniors Martha and I always sat with—Jonathan Trenga and Russell Woo, Doug Miles, Jamie Lorison, Jenny and Sally. The other weird thing was that no one was speaking. All their heads were ducked, and I realized that they were reading.

“Are they reading
my
article?” I asked Martha, and then, from ten feet away, I could see that they were—two or three of them were clustered around each copy of the paper. “Holy shit,” I heard Jim Pintane, who was a junior, say. When we reached the table, some of them looked up, and then all of them looked up. For a long moment, no one spoke.

Finally, in a cold voice, Doug Miles said, “It’s the infamous Lee Fiora.”

Everyone at the table was still staring at me.

“I must admit,” said Jonathan, “I didn’t know you had such strong opinions.” His tone was harder to gauge—not unfriendly, but not friendly, either.

“What does it say?” I asked slowly, and when no one answered, Martha said, “This is ridiculous.” She grabbed one of the newspaper sections. “Come on,” she said.

As I followed her to another table, Doug called, “Hey, Lee.”

I turned around.

“Didn’t anyone ever tell you that you don’t piss in your own pool?”

We sat at another table, side by side, without getting our food. My heart hammered, and my fingers were trembling. The section Martha had taken was open to the second page of the article, not the page where it started. Martha flipped backward. The article started on the front page, I saw—the front page of the front section. The headline was
BOARDING SCHOOLS CLAIM TO CHANGE, STUDENTS TELL DIFFERENT STORY.
Below that, in smaller letters, it said
WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE WHITE, MIDDLE-CLASS—AND AN OUTSIDER
. A large photograph featured, oddly enough, the nonwhite Pittard brothers sitting on a couch in a dorm common room. Darden was demonstrating something with his hands and his brother Eli, who was a freshman, was laughing. But the first paragraph was not about the Pittards; it was about me:

Among the cliques in Lee Fiora’s senior class at Ault School in Raymond, Massachusetts, is a group of male friends known as the “Bank Boys”—so named, as Miss Fiora explained, “because all their dads work for banks. Not really all of them do, but that’s what it seems like.”

The clique’s appellation is one of the few references, however oblique, that Ault students make to money. In general, at this school, whose small classes, pristine grounds, and state-of-the-art facilities come with a $22,000 price tag, and at other elite schools across the Northeast, the subject is taboo. Thus is created an environment which, according to Miss Fiora, defers to the rich and shortchanges everyone else—including Miss Fiora herself. “Of course I feel left out,” Miss Fiora, who receives a financial aid package which covers approximately three quarters of her tuition, recently told a visitor to Ault. “I’m a nobody from Indiana.” Miss Fiora is white; for nonwhite students, particularly African Americans and Hispanics, she feels that the difficulties of life at Ault are only compounded.

It went on and on. Angie Varizi had me expounding on race (presumably because no one else, no one who wasn’t white, had been willing to), saying I suspected that Ault regretted the decision to give me a scholarship, telling the anecdote about the girls buying clothes to hide their alcohol. She had me giving a rundown on how to spot scholarship students based on their possessions and their behavior. And, of course, she had me sharing the story of the house in Florida. Throughout the article, my own comments were juxtaposed with hearty endorsements of the school from Mr. Byden, Dean Fletcher, a sophomore named Ginny Chu, Darden Pittard, and recent graduates. Another student who was not named said about me, “She’s not the most popular person in our grade. Not everyone thrives in a place like this.”

I read the article, in its entirety, only once, and it was that time in the dining hall. Sometimes as I read, I murmured, “Oh my God,” and Martha patted me. By the end of the article, her hand was set on my arm.

The mess I had made (had I been the one who’d made this mess?) was so awful that it was hard to absorb or quantify. The person I was as of this moment, the person the article made me, was the precise opposite of the person I had, for the last four years, tried to be. It was the worst possible mistake I could have made.

“Okay,” Martha said. “We have a week left and then we’re out of here forever. So you’ll just live your life like normal. Let other people freak out, and, yes, they will. But it’s not your problem.”

“I’m going back to the room.”

“Listen to me,” she said. “We’re getting breakfast.”

In the kitchen, we picked up trays, filled our glasses with milk and juice, received plates of steaming pancakes. I felt dizzy with regret. I had been an idiot, I thought. Why on earth had I told Angie Varizi my secrets, what good had I imagined would come from it? This was how it always was with me—I wasn’t able to tell that something was happening (that I was, for Angie’s benefit, digging my own grave) while it was happening. Every single thing about the article was humiliating. Being on scholarship was bad, being unhappy was worse, and admitting to either one was worst of all. I had been indiscreet. That’s what it was. How much better it would have been to fuck up in a normal, preppy way—to get caught the week before graduation smoking pot, or skinny-dipping at midnight in the gym pool. To make politically charged complaints to a
New York Times
reporter, on the other hand, was just tacky.

When we carried our trays out to the dining room, we passed three freshmen, girls whose names I didn’t even know, and where normally I’d have looked right past them, I couldn’t keep from making eye contact. I wanted to be able to tell from their expressions whether they’d read the article yet, but their faces were blank. What I felt in that moment looking at them was what I continued to feel until graduation—the suspicion, but not the certainty, that other people were scorning me, the sense that their scorn was not unjustified, and also the knowledge that maybe they were not thinking of me at all.

I realized already that this would be, in the context of Ault, a very big deal. Yet at the same time, to most students, it was someone else’s big deal. Only to me was it personal. Maybe when kids went home over the summer, people would say to them:
Is your school really that snobby? Was that girl as unhappy as she seemed?
But it would be a topic of conversation; it wouldn’t be their life.

I went to bed before dinner Sunday night—I just didn’t want to be conscious anymore—and at one-fifteen, when I’d already awakened eight or nine times and couldn’t stand it any longer, I rose, changed into a T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants and left the dorm while Martha snored softly. It had rained that day, and the courtyard was dark and shiny. I could have gone through the basement, which was Cross’s usual route, but I was wholly unafraid of getting caught; I have always believed that extreme circumstances protect you from ordinary dangers, and while I recognize my belief as illogical, I have not yet been proven wrong.

At first, the common room of Cross’s dorm appeared empty. But when the door shut behind me, a head rose from the couch in front of the television. It was Monty Harr, a freshman. The sound to the TV was off, and Monty’s face looked gray.

“Where’s Cross’s room?” I asked.

He blinked at me.

“Cross Sugarman,” I said. “Which room is his?”

“At the end of the hall on the left,” Monty finally said. He was rubbing his eyes as I walked away.

There was a poster of a basketball player on the door, a guy in a green uniform leaping through the air with a blurry crowd behind him. I knocked, and when no one responded, I turned the knob and opened it. The light was on inside, and someone was sitting at a desk. At first, because I was looking for Cross, I thought it was him, but the person looked up and I saw it was Cross’s roommate, Devin. Over the last four years, Devin had gone from skinny to almost fat and he had blond hair, dark eyebrows, and a pug nose.

My bravado, or whatever had propelled me across the courtyard, dwindled. “Hi,” I said in a quiet voice. I looked around the room; both the beds were unmade, and the only light came from a desk lamp and a lava lamp set on the windowsill. No one was there besides Devin.

A grin had spread across his face. “It’s the woman of the hour.”

“Devin, please.” I tried to remember if we had spoken to each other since I’d assassinated him in ninth grade. Not much, but still—weren’t we both people? Might not my palpable desperation elicit sympathy from him just this once?

“Please what?” he said. “I have no idea where he is, if that’s what you’re asking. Anyway, isn’t it kind of late for a young girl to be out by herself?”

“I know what time it is.”

“After that article today, I’d be careful about giving Byden a reason to toss me out.”

“You don’t get kicked out for breaking visitation the first time,” I said.

“Forgive me.” Devin smirked. “I didn’t realize you’ve never broken visitation before.”

“Fuck you,” I said, and maybe my mistake was being the one to make things definitively ugly.

“I’m tempted to say fuck you, too, but I think my roommate’s got that taken care of.”

I turned to leave, and Devin said, “A quick question.”

I paused (of course I did) in the threshold.

“Are you fish or cheese?”

I didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about.

“You have to be one,” he said. “So which is it?”

Still, I simply looked at him.

“For the list. You know, we’re keeping a list, we’re checking it twice.” He was actually singing, and it occurred to me for the first time that perhaps he was drunk or stoned. He opened his desk drawer, saying as he did, “You’re one of our missing seniors. Your roommate, too, as a matter of fact, so it’d be great to kill two birds with one stone tonight.” From the drawer, he’d removed a rumpled school catalog. He opened it, flipped to the back, and passed it to me. This was where the class lists were, and in the spaces between people’s last names and the place they were from—between, for instance,
Deirdre Danielle Schwartz
and
Scarsdale, New York
—it said, in capital letters, written with a red marker:
FISH.
They didn’t all say
FISH;
some said
CHEESE.
And they weren’t all written with red marker—some were in black or blue ballpoint pen. Also, they weren’t next to everyone’s names; they were next to some girls’, and no boys’. I glanced several times between the catalog and Devin; I wasn’t sure what I was reading, but I wasn’t uninterested. Aspeth, I saw, was
CHEESE;
Horton Kinnelly was also
CHEESE;
Hillary Tompkins was
FISH.

Finally—not because he wanted to give me the gift of an explanation, I think, but just because he was frustrated by my lack of understanding—Devin said, “It’s what you taste like. All girls are one or the other. Get it?”

A question formed inside me, but before I asked it aloud, the answer formed itself, too:
No, not when you kiss them. Not then.
Knowing what the list represented, it seemed like I ought to throw the catalog across the room. But the problem was, I was still curious. The list was so—it was so weirdly attentive. It was something I myself might have kept, in a parallel universe. “How long have you been working on this?” I asked.