Prep

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  In the dining room, Conchita cried out, “Mama!” and hurled herself into the arms of a woman who was both very pretty and very fat. Mrs. Maxwell kissed Conchita all over her cheeks and chin, and then they both were crying and speaking to each other in Spanish and turning to us to apologize for crying. Mrs. Maxwell was seated and did not rise to greet us, though she did extend her arm. It was tan, and many gold bracelets hung from her wrist. “I am delighted to meet my daughter’s friends,” she said. When Conchita introduced me, Mrs. Maxwell said, “Ah, the Bob Dylan fan.” She wore loose pale green silk pants and a shirt of the same fabric, with a plain neck and wide sleeves; even from several feet away, I could smell her perfume. Her skin was smooth and brown, darker than Conchita’s, and her dark hair was pulled into a loose bun.

  “Thank you for having us to lunch,” Martha said, and I said, “Yeah, it’s really nice of you.”

  In the whole dining room, only a few tables besides ours were occupied; near us, a beefy man sat by himself. A waiter brought us menus, tall leather rectangles with the descriptions of the food written in calligraphy. Only one of the entrées was under twenty dollars and it was grilled vegetables. It was oddly liberating to realize I had only fifteen dollars in my pocket‑I wouldn’t be paying, I wouldn’t even try, because I couldn’t. The bottom of the menu featured the date, and when I realized they must have printed a new menu daily, the idea seemed remarkable. I had suspected before, and the whole day only reinforced the suspicion, that money could make your life nice, that you could want it not for reasons of greed but for reasons of comfort, because it allowed you to send for your daughter and her friends in a limousine, to eat food that tasted good in a pretty setting, to be heavy and still wear nice clothes. One of my mother’s friends was about as fat as Mrs. Maxwell, but she wore sweatpants and flowered smocks.

  Mrs. Maxwell said, “I would like each of you to tell me your life story. Lee, you will go first.”

  I laughed. But then I did it‑I started with my mother going into labor in a swimming pool, told about how in kindergarten I’d insisted on wearing the same pair of brown rubber cowboy boots for the entire year, how I’d had an imaginary friend named Pig, what ages I’d been when my brothers were born. I got all the way up to Ault. They asked questions, but not cornering questions, and then our appetizers came‑we’d all ordered appetizers, it had seemed to be expected‑and then Martha told her story: how she’d thought she was dying when she lost her first tooth, how she’d won the spelling bee in second grade, all the snow days she’d had growing up in Vermont. The main courses arrived, and mine was roast chicken with mashed potatoes and cranberry relish; it felt like Thanksgiving.

  We had dessert, too, all of us ordering different tortes and mousses and sticking our forks and spoons into each other’s food. Conchita’s mother was talking about things at home, people they knew, a wedding she and Conchita’s father had attended the previous weekend. “And here is a funny story for you, mi hija, ” she said. “We have hired a new worker to help Miguel in the garden, and his name is Burro.”

  “That’s his nickname or his real name?” Conchita said, and I caught Martha’s eye. A new worker to help Miguel in the garden? we repeated to each other.

  We all had coffee, even me, though I never drank coffee at school, and then we kept talking, and another hour had passed, and it was the time we’d arranged for the limo driver to retrieve Martha and me; Conchita would stay overnight at the hotel with her mother. We stood and hugged Mrs. Maxwell before we left. Smashed against her enormous breasts, inhaling her perfume, I felt a kind of love for her; how lucky I was to have stumbled into this world.

  In the limousine, as soon as the driver shut our door, Martha and I turned to each other. “Isn’t Mrs. Maxwell cool?” Martha said.

  “It’s like she actually really wanted to know about our lives.”

  “I’m so full right now. The lime mousse was incredible.”

  “And that chocolate thing‑if I’d eaten another bite, I’d have had to unbutton my pants.”

  “How about the bodyguard?” Martha said. “That was wild.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That guy at the next table. With the earpiece.”

  I hadn’t noticed an earpiece, but it was true that the man had stayed as long as we had; I’d imagined that he’d stayed because he was entertained by our conversation. “Why does Conchita’s mom need a bodyguard?” I asked.

  “I don’t know if she needs a bodyguard, but she definitely has one. Do you not know who the Maxwells are?”

  I shook my head.

  “Conchita’s dad is the CEO of Tanico.”

  There was a Tanico station three blocks from my parents’ house in South Bend‑long before we’d met, apparently, a piece of Conchita’s life had touched a piece of mine.

  “There’s tons of stories about the Maxwells,” Martha said. “Starting with, I guess her parents’ marriage was a big scandal. Her mom had been the cleaning lady in her dad’s office. That’s how they met.”

  “No way.”

  “Yep. He was married at the time to another woman. Conchita’s mom was, like, nineteen, and she’d just emigrated from Mexico and hardly spoke English. This was big news back in the early seventies‑when I mentioned Conchita to my parents the first time, they were like, ‘Not the daughter of Ernie Maxwell?’ ”

  “Why? What’s her dad like?”

  “There was a profile of him recently in Fortune. It used to be in the library until someone took it. But, apparently, his nickname is the Oil King. He comes from this family that’s been in the business for a while and they’d already made a lot of money, but he’s supposed to be ruthless and really successful. He’s really old, too. In the pictures in the magazine, he looks at least seventy, and he’s short and bald. He and Conchita actually look alike. Plus, he was wearing orange leg warmers.”

  “Really?”

  Martha laughed. “No, Lee. He was wearing a suit.”

  “I’ve never heard Conchita talk about any of this.”

  “She says stuff sometimes, but she plays it down. I think that’s why she came to Ault, to try to fit in. But it hasn’t been exactly like she imagined.”

  Again, I felt the impatience with Conchita I’d felt when I’d seen the limousine. She could fit in if she wanted to.

  “She misses her mom a lot,” Martha was saying. “No one here coddles her, which is probably the reason for all her hypochondria.”

  “She’s a hypochondriac?”

  “Well, she definitely doesn’t have insomnia‑my room is right next to hers, and she snores like a trucker. I’m not saying she lies, though. Her reality is different from other people’s, but that’s why I get a kick out of her.”

  “If she doesn’t have health problems, how come they let her have the phone and the big room and all that stuff?”

  “Lee,” Martha said. “Come on.” She held out one hand and rubbed her thumb up and down against the other fingers. “Ault is probably salivating at the thought of all the science wings and art studios the Maxwells can build.”

  At the time, it surprised me how openly Martha referred to the Maxwells’ money, and later, when I went to Martha’s family’s house in Vermont the first time, I could see that they, too, clearly were wealthy. But there were different kinds of rich, I eventually realized. There was normal rich, dignified rich, which you didn’t talk about, and then there was extreme, comical, unsubtle rich‑like having your dorm room professionally decorated, or riding a limousine into Boston to meet your mother‑and that was permissible to discuss.

  “Would you ever room with Conchita?” I asked.

  Martha made a grimace‑not a disgusted grimace, but a guilty one. “She’s mentioned it to me, but it’s kind of hard to imagine.”

  I glanced out the window; there was a taxi in the lane beside us. When I looked back at Martha, I said, “This might sound really weird, but can you imagine us rooming together?”

  “Oh my God! I’ve bee
n thinking that the whole day.” Martha was grinning, and so was I, and it was only partly because I wouldn’t have to room with Conchita after all. It was also because I knew right away, there in the limo that the Maxwells were paying for: From then on, as long as I was at Ault, I would never be alone. Martha and I would get along, our friendship would last. I felt certainty and relief. Years later, I heard a minister at a wedding describe marriage as cutting sorrow in half and doubling joy, and what I thought of was not the guy I was seeing then, nor even of some perfect, imaginary husband I might meet later; I thought immediately of Martha.

  That night, back on campus, I passed Edmundo in the courtyard outside our dorms with his roommate Philip. “Hi, Edmundo,” I said. “Hi, Philip.” I tried to sound confident and in control‑I didn’t want them pulling some trick like Matt Relman and his roommate Jasdip Chowdhury had, where Jasdip had shut his eyes while Matt killed Laura Bice.

  “Hi,” Edmundo said, once again barely making eye contact.

  His shyness emboldened me. “It’s a nice night, isn’t it?” I said.

  “I don’t have you anymore,” he said. “I got killed a few days ago.”

  “By who?” My pulse was racing. I’d been walking around obliviously, when I could have been eliminated‑when my chances of getting to Cross could have been eliminated‑at any moment by a person who wasn’t Edmundo.

  “I can’t tell you,” Edmundo said, and if he had smiled at all, I’d have believed I could charm it out of him (weren’t shy, awkward boys just waiting to be cajoled by high‑spirited girls?), but his tone and expression were serious. In fact, it didn’t seem like he particularly wanted to be talking to me at all. And I could feel from Philip a similar lack of interest, an impatience even. Was my status so low that even true and official nerds eschewed my company?

  “Why can’t you tell me?” I said.

  “Because.” Edmundo shrugged.

  The three of us stood there, me looking between them, neither of them looking at me. Philip’s skin was truly horrible, covered, especially on his chin, by both scabs and white‑capped pustules. If my skin were like that, I thought, I would be afraid to leave the dorm. I felt myself soften toward him, even though he didn’t like me, and toward Edmundo, for being something good in Philip’s life of hideous acne.

  “Fine,” I said. “Never mind.”

  I had already opened the door to Broussard’s when Edmundo called back to me, blurring his words so that I couldn’t understand them until the whole sentence was finished. What he said was, “You worry too much.”

  Conchita and I met for a bike lesson on Sunday evening, after she got back from Boston. When the lesson was over, I walked with her toward her dorm, wheeling Sin‑Jun’s bike beside me. Martha had said she thought it was okay to wait awhile, at least until Conchita brought up the subject herself, to reveal our decision, but hiding the news made me anxious. We were passing the library when I said, “I want to tell you something. It’s not that big a deal, but Martha and I are rooming together next year.”

  Conchita stopped walking, and I saw that she had burst into tears. I touched her shoulder. “Don’t cry.”

  She raised both her elbows to the level of her face, as if to create a barrier between us. A few guys were approaching from the opposite direction. “Let’s go over there.” I pointed to a circular marble bench just beyond the library‑the bench had been given by the class of 1956, contained a statue of a cherub in its center, and was never, to my knowledge, used by anyone.

  “Come here.” I patted the marble next to me. “I’m sorry, Conchita,” I said. “I really am. But you need to calm down.”

  “What about us rooming together?” Her face was a slimy red raisin.

  “Us meaning you and Martha or you and me?”

  “You and me.”

  “I consider you a really good friend. I just think it’s hard to share a small space.”

  “You and Martha will share a small space.”

  “Yeah, but‑you have so much stuff.”

  “That’s because of my mom’s decorator. I don’t even like most of it.”

  “Also, Martha and I have a lot in common. We get along.”

  “You had never even talked to Martha before I introduced you.”

  “We talked sometimes. In Latin.” I should have ceded the point, but I felt filled with the righteousness of what was, technically, the truth.

  “When did you guys decide this?”

  “Yesterday. Plus, Conchita, you have insomnia.”

  “You decided it on the ride back to school? Did you ask her or did she ask you?”

  “It was mutual. We came to a decision.”

  Conchita had been sounding firmer. But when she spoke again, her voice trembled‑I think it trembled with hope. “It could be all three of us,” she said. “We could get a triple.”

  I could have said yes. Martha, I knew, preferred a double, but I was pretty sure I could talk her into a triple. “That wouldn’t work,” I said. “Groups of three always fight.”

  “We didn’t fight in Boston.”

  “That was just one day. But, Conchita, this doesn’t change anything. I still want us to hang out. We became friends this year without living in the same dorm.”

  “We’re not friends.” With a lavender tissue she’d pulled from a pocket, she wiped her nose but did not blow it. Snot remained behind, smeared around her nostrils.

  “Of course we’re friends.” I had never imagined we’d arrive at this moment, with me trying to convince her. “You’re overreacting. By tomorrow, you won’t even care about this. Let me walk you back to your dorm.” I stood and looked down at her scrawny heaving shoulders; in the fading evening light, I noticed for the first time that the laces of her running shoes were yellow‑and‑orange striped. “Conchita, I don’t know what you want me to do.”

  “Leave me alone.”

  The chapel bells rang once; it was eight‑thirty. People who say leave me alone never mean it, and this was something that I knew. “Fine,” I said. “If that’s what you want.”

  When I’d killed McGrath, he’d told me his target was Alexander Héverd, a sophomore. Alexander was from Paris, he was (I’d heard) a druggie, and he was handsome in a graceful but not feminine way. He was medium height and quite thin, with narrow hips, and when he wore jeans‑on the nights when we didn’t have formal dinner‑instead of wearing running shoes, as most Ault boys did, he wore tan leather shoes that you might have thought were dorky, or even orthopedic (they had a thick rubber sole), except that the fact that Alexander Héverd was wearing them meant they had to be, in some way, whether or not it was visible to you, deeply cool. I had never spoken to him, but I’d once been behind him going through the food line in the kitchen, and his voice, which was only faintly accented, had seemed utterly assured and possibly condescending. But maybe I’d only thought that because he was French.

  The problem was that even though McGrath had told me I was inheriting Alexander as a target, McGrath hadn’t given me the piece of paper verifying this, nor had he given me the stickers. I still had stickers‑in fact, I had several sheets of them‑but it felt important to have the paper with Alexander’s name on it. Though no one, including Devin, had made me prove I had them, I wanted proof for myself. Because what if McGrath had gotten mixed up and really I was supposed to kill Alex Ellison, who was a senior?

  By Monday, McGrath still hadn’t dropped off the piece of paper. True, I’d been away from campus most of Saturday, but all day Sunday, at chapel and then at lunch afterward‑Sunday lunch was supposed to be the nicest and was therefore usually the worst, often including bloody lamb‑and then in the dorm, he could have found me. Finally, on Monday evening at formal dinner, I approached him again, at the site of our last terrible interaction, and he smacked his head and told me he’d leave it off later that night, definitely, he wouldn’t forget. Which, actually, he didn’t. I killed Alexander the next day by following him out of roll call. His target was Riley Haddix, al
so a sophomore. Standing there while Alexander tried to find his stickers (within a matter of seconds, it seemed too late to tell him I didn’t need them, it seemed like he might think I’d already wasted his time) made me feel chunky and American and overheated.

  But I had to keep playing, because how else would I get to Cross? And it was, with every passing day, less clear to me how many people were left, how close I was, and how much time remained for either of us. As far as I could tell, no one had made an attempt on my life since Edmundo had told me he’d been killed. But even if the person who had killed him wasn’t trying to kill me, that assassin’s assassin would, or that assassin’s assassin’s assassin. Especially because the remaining pool of players‑maybe there were fifteen of us left, or maybe fifty‑had to be mostly self‑selecting. So I looked over my shoulder when I was walking, I tried never to be out in the open by myself. But what I felt more strongly than the possibility of my own death was the possibility of Cross’s. Maybe he’d decide the game was no longer cool. He’d get tired of it. Normally, when I saw him around campus, I liked to watch him but keep my distance. But now I edged closer, sitting at the table next to his at breakfast and again at lunch, waiting to overhear a scrap of conversation about the game. I even left lunch just behind him (if he were paying attention, he might well have thought he was my target already), and finally I got what I’d been waiting for. He was fifteen feet in front of me, talking to John Brindley and Devin Billinger, and he said something that I missed the beginning of but caught at the end: “‑unless it’s someone who tries to get me in the shower.” All three boys laughed. “If he comes for me in the shower,” Cross said, “then it’s like, okay, man, if it’s worth that much to you.”

  Bingo, I thought. Cross was still alive.