Prep

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  I think now that it would have been better if Dave had known I was on scholarship; he might have understood, as opposed to agreed with, why I acted as I did. (Aspeth Montgomery could have gone out with him and gotten away with it, it could have been ironic. But my parents’ car was barely nicer than his Chevy Nova.) Of course, I didn’t imagine then that I could have had a real relationship with any guy. I thought that by virtue of being me I was disqualified.

  None of which justifies how I acted. I was wrong, I screwed up‑how else can I say it? But there was plenty I learned from Dave. Later, after all that happened between Cross Sugarman and me, I even saw Dave as practice for Cross, as preparation. He made me ready, as Conchita had once made me ready for a friendship with Martha; there are people we treat wrong, and later, we’re prepared to treat other people right. Perhaps this sounds mercenary, but I feel grateful for these trial relationships, and I would like to think it all evens out‑surely, unknowingly, I have served as practice for other people.

  Or maybe I’m off base and Dave was nothing so reductive or symbolic as a path to Cross. Maybe Dave was just himself, and it was all supposed to turn out differently. If his sister hadn’t needed the car that Sunday, and if we’d gone ahead on our date as planned‑maybe it all hinged on that. I had envisioned the ways our dinner might go wrong, but what if, just as in the ether of my imagination there exists our awful date, our good date exists as well? We meet behind the dining hall. He’s wearing a wool sweater, he’s relaxed, we talk easily. He does the considerate things, like holding the door as we enter the restaurant, but none of the things that might freak me out: He’s not wearing too much cologne, he doesn’t slip on ice in the parking lot, he doesn’t try using his own fork to feed me dessert. Even though it’s not a fancy restaurant, there are candles on the table. The light flickers. The food is good. Neither of us is too talkative or too quiet, and maybe a few times we even laugh, and it’s real laughter. I am thinking the whole night that what matters most is if we kiss at the end; I don’t realize that what really matters is that I have entered this world, that I’ll come to understand much earlier (much earlier, that is, in this imaginary life than in my real life) what dating is‑not necessarily the biggest deal. Not obsession or nothing, love or disinterest. There is middle ground. In the winter, especially, sometimes it’s just nice to dress up a little and go out into the night with another person.

  7. Spring‑cleaning

  JUNIOR SPRING

  M artha was nominated to be senior prefect at a class meeting held during morning break in late May of our junior year, but I wasn’t there because I’d been summoned to Dean Fletcher’s office to discuss the fact that I was flunking math. I actually ran into Martha just after the first bell signaling the end of morning break had sounded‑we were in the third‑floor hall, she on her way to Art History and I on my way to Spanish‑and she said, “What did Fletcher say?”

  I shook my head. “I’ll tell you later.”

  “Was it that bad?”

  “No,” I said.

  Martha looked at me.

  “It was kind of bad,” I said.

  “You’re supposed to meet with Aubrey tonight, right?” Aubrey was my math tutor and‑humiliatingly, in light of the fact that we were juniors‑a freshman.

  I nodded.

  “Make him explain polar equations to you again. He needs to be clearer.”

  “Martha, it’s not Aubrey’s fault that I’m failing.”

  The second bell, the bell that meant You should now be in your seat, with your notebook open and your pen poised, went off. Martha winced. “I want to talk about this more,” she said. “But try not to worry too much.”

  I nodded.

  “Seriously,” she said. “I know you can pass.”

  I continued nodding.

  “Say something.”

  “Like what?”

  She laughed. “Okay, that counts. I better go.” Then she was hurrying down the hall to Art History. When I pushed open the door to the Spanish classroom, the heaviness of the door and my own dread felt like the same thing.

  But Martha hadn’t mentioned the nomination. And, in fact, I first heard about it from Nick Chafee, who said at lunch, “What do you think of your roommate?”

  “In general?” I asked.

  Nick looked at me like I’d said something extremely peculiar, which I didn’t think I had. “No,” he said. “For being nominated.”

  “Nominated for what? You don’t mean Martha was nominated to be senior prefect?”

  “No, she was.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Dude,” he said. “Calm down.” This was something I hated being told, especially by a boy. My voice might rise half an octave, I thought of telling him, but there’s no need to take cover‑I will not leap from my chair to embrace you, I will not even shriek with delight. Though, if ever I were going to shriek with delight, this would be the moment.

  Because being senior prefect, even being nominated for it, was not a small thing. Each grade had two prefects, a boy and a girl. (The school had had to make it both‑it was a rule that started the spring before my freshman year‑because when each grade had only one prefect, it was always a boy.) In addition to running roll call in the morning, the senior prefects led the disciplinary committee, and after graduation their names were engraved on white marble panels that hung in the dining hall, and the letters were painted gold. To me, the panels were the best part; they were also, as it happened, what had intrigued my own parents when I’d shown them Ault’s dining hall the year before. Another bonus was that the senior prefects always got into Harvard. Two years earlier, when Driscoll Hopkins’s early application had been deferred, everyone had been shocked, but then she’d been accepted during regular admission.

  Martha’s nomination shouldn’t have been a surprise‑she was smart and dependable and nice to everyone, plus she’d served as a class representative to the disciplinary committee since the beginning of junior year‑but, in fact, it was astonishing. Because the thing was, Martha wasn’t cool. She was exactly the kind of girl who got overlooked, not rewarded, by Ault. And being a prefect was Ault’s biggest reward, a stamp of approval that would set you up, it seemed, for the rest of your life. (Your name would be on the wall of the dining hall forever. In gold. ) Partly, being senior prefect was so desirable because, as with class prefectships for the earlier grades, you could not seek it out. You weren’t allowed to simply run for election. Instead, you had to be nominated, but it would be tacky and transparent to have your close friends nominate you, so basically that meant you had to wait for a nomination to fall from the sky, and then to be seconded. And once you got nominated, you never gave a speech or put up posters. In fact, the word campaigning was used as an accusation, not unlike ass‑kissing. This desperate aversion to seeming like you wanted anything, or worse, to going after it, stayed with me for years after I left Ault. When I graduated from college, my father told me he was concerned that I didn’t express enough enthusiasm in job interviews, and the comment shocked me. Enthusiasm was a thing you were supposed to show? But wasn’t it a little disgusting, didn’t it seem the same as greed and neediness? Of course you wanted the job, I thought, and the interviewer should know that because why else would you have shown up in his office?

  “Who are the other nominees?” I asked Nick.

  “Aspeth,” he said. “And Gillian, of course.”

  Both these nominations were predictable: Aspeth was the queen of our class, and Gillian Hathaway was the actual elected leader, having served as sophomore and junior prefect. There was something unobtrusively competent about Gillian in all ways: She was good at sports, especially field hockey and ice hockey; she was blandly attractive; she was intelligent enough; and most notably, she never, in class or at a meal or in a game, seemed nervous or uncomfortable. For my first few years at Ault, all of these qualities had impressed me, and then recently, just the month before, I had ended up at a lunch table with Gillian and h
er boyfriend, Luke Brown. It was seventh period, late for lunch, and I didn’t get to the dining hall until two o’clock. They were the only juniors there, which made me worry that they’d scheduled a romantic rendezvous on which I was intruding. But their conversation suggested otherwise: First they talked for twenty minutes straight about golden retrievers versus labs‑not about specific dogs, beloved pets from their childhood, but about the breeds: which was smarter and why it was they both suffered from hip dysplasia. (I had no idea what hip dysplasia was and didn’t ask.) This discussion segued into one on skiing and whether you could feel the difference between real and man‑made snow, and then one on how even though the snow tires on Luke’s brother’s jeep had different treads, he’d never had a problem with them. Besides the fact that I had nothing to contribute to any of these subjects, I couldn’t speak because I was in a state of shock. Were they always so boring? How could you talk this way to a person you’d been going out with for a year? Didn’t they want to discuss people, or things they were worried about, or the tiny events that had occurred since they’d last seen each other? Perhaps Gillian always seemed comfortable, I thought, because she was not particularly interested in the world, because she did not question her place in it. This possibility made me dislike her slightly, a feeling that was amplified a few days later at dinner when people were discussing the recent scandal over Massachusetts’s governor having employed an illegal alien as a nanny. I heard Gillian say, with a laugh, “At this point, does anyone expect the liberals not to be total hypocrites?” She was oblivious to the possibility that perhaps not everyone present shared her views, and I thought, You’re sixteen. How can you already be a Republican? Maybe the only reason I was already a Democrat was that one of my earliest memories was of my father heckling the TV during Reagan’s inauguration, but still‑I did not like Gillian Hathaway. And now, now that she was Martha’s opponent for prefect, maybe I even hated her.

  “So Aspeth, Gillian, and Martha,” I said. “That’s it for the girls? Only three?”

  “The meeting was kind of rushed,” Nick said. “You want to know the guys?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Me.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Thanks, Lee. That’s flattering.”

  “No, I just‑I couldn’t tell if you were kidding.”

  “Hey, John,” Nick said. “Was I nominated for senior prefect?”

  John Brindley, sitting across the table, looked up. “Chafee, there’s no way I’m voting for you.”

  They both laughed, and Nick said, “I don’t need your vote because I have Lee’s. She says she wants to be my campaign manager, too. Isn’t that right, Lee?” He elbowed me obviously, so John could see (at Ault, of course, there was no such thing as a campaign manager). Had we found ourselves alone, Nick would never have elbowed me, he’d never have touched me at all. Sometimes I felt flattered by this kind of teasing‑it was, after all, a form of attention‑and sometimes I resented the way that boys included me as a prop in their exchanges with one another: the magician’s assistant who climbed into the box, got sliced in half, and had to beam at the audience while, above her, the magician joked and gestured extravagantly.

  “What other guys were nominated?” I asked.

  “Let’s see.” Nick counted off on the fingers of his right hand. “Pittard, Cutty, Sug, Smith, and Devoux.”

  These nominations, like those for Aspeth and Gillian, were unsurprising. They were all bank boys, except for Darden Pittard, but he was our junior prefect, Gillian’s male counterpart. He and Cross‑Sug‑were the likeliest to win. Certainly my own vote would go to one of them, either to Darden because I genuinely respected him, or to Cross because of my crush. What was certain was that I wouldn’t vote for Nick Chafee.

  After crew practice, Martha lifted weights, and when she got back to the dorm late that afternoon, it was almost time to leave for formal dinner. I was seated on the futon, reading, and Martha’s back was to me as she inspected her closet for clothes to change into. “Did I send out my short‑sleeved blouse to be laundered?” she asked.

  “Which one?”

  “The blue one.”

  “I’m wearing it.”

  Martha turned.

  “I can take it off,” I said.

  “That’s okay.” She had turned back to the closet, and she pulled out a pink T‑shirt with pink ribbon trimming the neck and sleeves.

  I stood. “Really, Martha, I can change.” Remarkably, though I wore her clothes all the time, this had never happened before. And I could have offered her something of mine, but she didn’t wear my clothes, which was not a fact we discussed.

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” She stuck her head through the pink shirt, pulled it down, then raised one arm and sniffed her armpit. “Fresh as a mountain breeze.” She took a skirt, white with green and darker pink swirls, out of the closet and held it waist‑high in front of her, still clipped to the hanger. “This goes, right? So I want you to finish telling me what Dean Fletcher‑oh, wow. Lee, this is adorable!”

  She had noticed it, finally‑the paper crown I’d made using her computer paper and her tape and my own markers. I’d drawn huge jewels in purple and green and red, and yellow lines around the base and the triangular tips, and in black I’d written, Martha Porter, Senior Prefect and Queen of the World.

  She set the crown on her head. “Does it suit me?”

  “Perfectly. You should wear it to dinner.” In fact, I’d have been horrified if she wore it to dinner. It would be just what people would expect, evidence of our dorky‑girls’ glee at Martha’s fluke nomination. “This is so exciting,” I said.

  “Well, it’s nice that I was nominated, but I won’t win.”

  “You might.” Perhaps I should have been more vehement, but really, she probably wouldn’t get it, and I didn’t like acting fake with Martha. Acting fake with everyone else was okay only as long as you had one person with whom you were real.

  “I’m predicting Gillian,” she said. “Too many people don’t like Aspeth.”

  “What if it’s you and Cross, and you have to have lots of late‑night meetings and hang out together all the time?”

  Martha laughed. “I’m not the one who’s in love with Cross. But did you know he was the person who nominated me? Weird, huh?”

  Unlike Cross and me, Cross and Martha had a few classes together, and sometimes Martha told me things about him: Devin knocked over Cross’s Bunsen burner in Chemistry today and the table caught on fire. Or, Cross is going up to see his brother at Bowdoin for long weekend. But I wasn’t under the impression they had much direct interaction.

  “And Conchita seconded the nomination,” Martha added. This actually wasn’t that weird‑Conchita and I had rarely spoken since freshman year, but she and Martha had remained friendly.

  “Maybe Cross likes you,” I said in a voice that I hoped would not reveal how horrifying I found this prospect.

  “Please.” Martha grinned. “We need to go to dinner,” she said. She removed the crown and set it back on her desk. “Someday you’ll meet a guy who loves you so much and you’ll be like, why did I waste my whole time in high school mooning over that self‑centered dork?”

  “Okay, first of all,” I said, and I could feel myself warming up for the conversation. Talking like this was sustenance for my feelings, it made Cross exist in my life even though we never spoke. “First of all, why do you think he’s self‑centered, and second, if I’m going to think I wasted my time, does that mean he’ll never like me back?”

  Outside, other students were also walking toward the dining hall, wet‑haired, the girls wearing pastel blouses and flowered skirts and espadrilles, the boys in white or pale blue shirts and ties and blazers and khaki shorts. At Ault, evening was always the best time.

  “He’s just cocky,” Martha said. “He knows he’s good‑looking, he knows he’s good at sports, he knows girls like him. But so what? Big deal.”

  “I don’t think he’s cocky,�
�� I said. “I really don’t.”

  “Well, he’s sure not insecure. And what was the other question? Oh, yeah, do I think you and Purple Monkey will ever find love together?” Purple Monkey was what we called Cross whenever we were discussing him outside of our room. “Let me look into my crystal ball.” Martha held her hands in front of her as if clutching something round. “Lee, you guys don’t talk. If you want something to happen, you should try talking to him.”

  “But I don’t think he wants to talk to me,” I said. “I doubt he feels a major void in his life.” The buoyancy was gone from the conversation, the sense of possibility that came from speaking hypothetically. I could feel myself sinking. And Martha did not contradict what I’d said.

  Instead, she said, “You still have to tell me about the meeting with Fletcher. And don’t change the subject this time.”

  Now that math had been introduced, I plummeted completely. We were only walking to dinner and even though it was a warm May night, even though the sun out beyond the athletic fields had turned the sky pink and orange, there would, when we got to the dining hall, be liver for dinner, I’d be assigned to a table of sophomore boys who would not bother to conceal their debate about whether Aspeth Montgomery was wearing a bra, Martha would not be elected senior prefect, Cross would never want me to be his girlfriend; things like weather or certain songs could make me forget it sometimes, but I was always still myself. “Fletcher said Ms. Prosek told him my average right now is a fifty‑eight,” I said. “And he asked if my parents talked to me after they got the letter at midterm. I told him they told me to study.”

  In fact, what my father had said was, “With a grade like that, I hope you’re not actually going to class.” When I explained that I had not missed a single day the entire year, he said, “What then, you’re smoking dope beforehand?” After that, my mother forced him off the phone, got on herself, and said, “But, Lee, remember when Mrs. Ramirez told us you were the best math student she’d ever had?” Which was something I did remember, but, as I pointed out to my mother, that had been in fourth grade.