Prep: A Novel (57 page)

“That’s not what I said.”

“You might as well have.” (I did wonder, was it possible that there’d be nothing left to miss? Finished with Ault as an institution, finished with Cross, finished with Martha.)

“I think you told the reporter what you meant to tell her,” Martha said.

“Martha, were you brainwashed by being prefect? When did you decide that it should be against the law to criticize Ault?”

“Exactly. That’s my point. You had criticisms, and you expressed them.”

“So now I should deal with the consequences?”

She did not reply for a long time. Then, at last, she said, “Yeah, kind of.”

“Then what are you doing here? Why are you warning me about the chapel talk when it’s exactly what I deserve?”

“You’re my best friend, Lee. I can disagree with your choices and still care about you.”

Well, aren’t you complex?
I thought. I didn’t say it; instead, I pulled my knees toward my chest, folded my arms across the top of them, and set my head facedown on my arms.

“Are you crying?” she asked.

“No.”

Martha touched my shoulder. “Forget what I’m saying. I’m just—I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“It’s what you think,” I said.

“Yeah, but who cares what I think?”

I raised my head and looked at her.

“I don’t want you to remember it like this,” she said. “Just because it’s the end, I mean—the end isn’t the same as the most important.”

I said nothing.

“What you should remember is stuff like—okay, how about this? That Saturday morning in the spring when we got up really early and rode bikes into town and ate breakfast at that diner next to the gas station. And the eggs were kind of undercooked, but they were really good.”

“It was your birthday,” I said. “That’s why we went.”

“That’s right. I forgot that part.”

“You were sixteen,” I said. Again, in the quiet, we could hear the saw.

“That morning,” Martha said, “that was what our lives were like at Ault.”

The humiliating part is that I went to look for him a second time. Or a third time, if you counted going to his dorm room in the middle of the night and finding only Devin. I had never been to his room before that week, and then I went twice in four days. It was early evening, before dinner, and I walked through the common room and down the hall. I nearly collided with Mario Balmaceda, who was coming out of the bathroom and looked at me with a confused expression, and I did not stop to apologize or explain myself. At the end of the hall, I knocked on the door—the poster of the basketball player was still up—and then without waiting I opened it. No one was in the room. It was still light outside, and shadowy inside, and I could hear the tick of an alarm clock sitting on a white plastic crate next to one of the beds.

In my imagination, he’d been reading in bed and he’d sat up when I entered and I’d crawled onto his lap and wrapped my legs and arms around him. And at first I’d be weeping and he’d stroke my hair, he’d murmur to me, but of course it would quickly turn sexual. And it would be urgent—we’d clutch and bite, we’d want it the exact same amount. Maybe I’d give him a blow job, on my knees on their dirty rug, and I’d be wearing a shirt on top and nothing on the bottom, and he’d wind his legs around me and dig his heels against my ass; because of me, he’d be in agony.

Except that he wasn’t there, and that looking at his room, the unfamiliar objects—I didn’t even know which bed was his—I realized how absurd it was to have assumed, or just to have hoped, that he’d be in the same mood I was, waiting for me. Quickly, the shift was occurring from disappointment at his absence to terror that he’d appear before I got out. I would seem—this would be the word he’d use, or other people would—
psycho.
That is, as annoying as a girl who cried, but also aggressive.

He wasn’t waiting for me, he wasn’t looking for me. It would have been a lie to say the only reason I wanted to see him was to smooth over the earlier ugliness, but that was one of the reasons, and had it been so far-fetched to think he might want the same? Now I think it
was
far-fetched, that my impulse was feminine, and that the masculine response (maybe I just mean the more detached response) was to realize that our final interaction had been overblown and unfortunate but that we each understood well enough where the other stood. Another exchange would be reiteration, not clarification.

I shut the door and hurried down the hall. Back in Elwyn’s, it took a few minutes for my heartbeat to settle. But then it did, and I realized all at once that nothing had actually happened. It felt like I was recovering, but from what? I was by myself, the fan in the window was whirring, the floor was cluttered with half-empty boxes. “It’s over,” I said. “Everything with Cross is finished.” If I said it out loud, maybe I would finally stop being so hopeful.

The person giving the chapel talk always sat to the left of the chaplain, and the next morning, that seat was occupied by Conchita Maxwell. I cannot say I was completely surprised. As she climbed the steps to the pulpit, I saw that she was wearing a black linen skirt and a white blouse; she had long ago stopped dressing eccentrically and had grown out her hair. She cleared her throat and said into the microphone, “The article that appeared in last Sunday’s
New York Times
has left many people in the Ault community feeling angry, hurt, and misrepresented. I am one of those people. As a Mexican American, I took special exception to the article. In no way did it reflect the experience I have had for the last four years, in this place I have come to call my home.” Listening to her, at first I felt hostile, but eventually, I felt sad and then not even that—more just a distance from the whole situation. Hearing the talk, which relied heavily on rhetoric and was not particularly well written, reminded me of reading someone else’s history term paper about a subject I was not interested in, and, not even on purpose, I found myself tuning out. What I thought of was Conchita and me as freshmen, of teaching her to ride a bike behind the infirmary. How long ago that seemed, how far I felt from her now; I couldn’t remember talking to her even once during our senior year. And, with graduation, we were about to be cut loose from each other completely—the distance between us would be physical and definitive, and perhaps we’d never speak again. It seemed an impossible thought—so often did we all come together at Ault that I had begun to believe life contained reckonings rather than just fade-outs—and yet I also saw then that as more and more years passed, the time Conchita and I had known each other, the time I had known any of my classmates, would feel decreasingly significant; eventually, it would be only a backdrop to our real lives. At some cocktail party years into the future, in an incarnation of myself I could not yet fathom, I would, while rummaging for an anecdote, come up with one about a girl I’d known at boarding school whose mother took us out for lunch one day while the family bodyguard sat at the next table. In the telling, I would feel no pinch of longing or regret; I would feel nothing true, nothing at all, in fact, except the wish that my companions find me amusing.

When Conchita had finished, there was the customary moment of silence—you never applauded after a chapel talk—and then we stood to sing the hymn. It was the last all-school chapel service of the year; another service would be held graduation morning, but only for seniors and parents. Always before breaks, including summer vacation, the hymn we sang was “God Be with You till We Meet Again,” and this was what we sang that day. We sang all four verses—at Ault, we always sang all the verses of all the hymns—and when we got to the third one, to the lines that went “When life’s perils thick confound you/ Put His arms unfailing round you,” tears welled up in my eyes.
Not again,
I thought, but after a moment I happened to glance around and then I understood that Conchita’s talk had little to do with what most people were feeling in this moment and that, in at least one sense, I was not alone; the chapel was filled with crying seniors.

Then there was graduation, which was anticlimactic in the way of any ceremony. My family stayed at the Raymond TraveLodge, the same place my parents had stayed in the fall of my junior year, and the first thing they told me when we met in the school parking lot on Saturday night before walking over to Mr. Byden’s house for dinner was that right after they’d checked in, Tim had taken such a huge shit that he’d clogged the toilet and they’d had to switch rooms because it was overflowing. “He’s six!” Joseph was shouting. “How can a six-year-old take a dump that size?” Tim, meanwhile, was blushing and smiling as if he had accomplished something great that modesty prevented him from acknowledging directly. At first, my father ignored me, but everything was so hectic that ignoring me was impractical; he downgraded his anger to talking to me curtly. On Sunday, at the graduation itself, Mr. Byden shook my hand in an entirely neutral way (Joseph told me our father had threatened to confront Mr. Byden and somehow I’d known he wouldn’t). My parents and brothers sat with Martha’s parents and brother at the ceremony—at last, my mother’s wish to meet Mr. and Mrs. Porter was realized—and my family left that afternoon, the trunk of the car weighted down with all the possessions I’d accumulated in the last four years.

For graduation, Tim gave me a pair of socks with watermelons on them (“He chose them himself,” my mother whispered), Joseph gave me a mix tape, and my parents gave me a hundred dollars in cash, which I spent helping buy gas for the people from whom I got rides during senior week—Dede a few times, and Norie Cleehan and Martha’s boyfriend Colby. The last party was in Keene, New Hampshire, and Colby drove down from Burlington to get us and then kept driving south to drop me off at Logan Airport before they returned together to Vermont. Hugging them both—I had never hugged Colby, and I never saw him again after that—and pulling the suitcases from the trunk and checking that I hadn’t left my plane ticket wedged in the back seat, I felt desperate for them to leave and for it all to be done with; I just wanted to be alone. And then they drove away, and I was. I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and both the airport terminal and then the airplane itself were frigidly air-conditioned. Flying to South Bend, I was freezing, and exhausted from drinking a lot and sleeping not that much over the course of the last week, from saying good-bye to so many people, from the friendliness—in the end, only a few classmates had been conspicuously unfriendly to me that week. After the plane landed and I walked through the terminal and collected my luggage and went out to the curb, where my mother and Tim were waiting, the air was a hot thick blast, and Ault was absolutely behind me. I had no reason to ever go back, no real reason—from now on, it was all optional.

Of course, I did go back, for both my fifth and tenth reunions. Do you want to know how everyone turned out? They turned out like this: Dede is a lawyer in New York, and I get the idea, though she’s grown more modest with age, that she’s very successful. The summer after we were sophomores in college, I received a card in the mail with a Scarsdale return address. On the front of the card was a picture of Dede in an over-the-top college coed outfit—a pleated skirt, an argyle sweater-vest over a button-down shirt, wire-framed glasses, and a stack of books in her arms—and under the picture, it said,
The problem with a Know It All
. . . and inside, when you opened the card, it said . . .
is that she thinks she Nose everything.
Below that, it said,
Yes, I have finally done it! My nose job was completed at 4:37 p.m. on June 19. Fewer pounds, fewer ounces. The most welcome arrival of my life!
After that, I always liked Dede, I liked her unequivocally, as I never had at Ault. I see her now when I go to New York, we have dinner and talk about men. She makes me laugh, and I don’t know if it’s that she’s funnier or if I just wasn’t willing to see, at Ault, how funny she was.

Like Dede, Aspeth Montgomery lives in New York, and she owns an interior design boutique, which always disappoints me a little to think about—it just seems so insignificant. I was right about Darden (he’s also a lawyer), who became an Ault trustee at the age of twenty-eight. Sin-Jun, of course, lives with her girlfriend in Seattle and is a neurobiologist. Amy Dennaker, whom I never lived with after freshman year in Broussard’s, is a conservative pundit; I don’t usually watch those Sunday morning political shows, but sometimes when I do, if I’m in a hotel, I see her arguing in a business suit, and she always seems to be enjoying herself. I heard that Ms. Prosek and her cute husband got divorced a few years after I graduated. I hope that it was she who left him, or at least that it was mutual; basically, I just don’t want him to have left her. She no longer teaches at Ault, and I’m not sure where she’s gone. Meanwhile, Rufina Sanchez and Nick Chafee are married; they married two years after she graduated from Dartmouth and he graduated from Duke. In equal measures, this sounds suffocating to me—high school sweethearts and all that—and I envy it; I think it must be nice to end up with someone who knows what you were like when you were a teenager.

I haven’t seen Cross since we graduated because during our fifth reunion, he was living in Hong Kong, working for an American brokerage firm, and then he was planning to come to our tenth reunion—he lives in Boston now—but his wife went into labor the night before. Recently, Martha and her husband, who also live in Boston, met Cross and his wife for dinner, and Martha called me afterward and left a message saying, “He keeps golf clubs in his trunk. I’m not sure why I’m telling you this, but it seems like the kind of thing you’d appreciate.” I know what Cross looks like now, because there was a picture from his wedding in
The Ault Quarterly.
He’s balding, and he has a handsome face, but it’s handsome in a different way. Because I knew it was him in the photo, I could discern his earlier features, but if we’d passed on the street, I’m not certain I’d have recognized him. His wife’s name is Elizabeth Fairfield-Sugarman.