Prep

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  But not the last night of senior week, the first night‑the night at the club in Back Bay: When Martha told me she was leaving, I didn’t yet understand that Cross and Horton were together, and I wanted to stay.

  “But I only have one key to my aunt’s,” Martha said. “How will you get in?”

  “I’ll figure something out,” I said.

  “I got a room at the Hilton, and you can crash there,” Dede said.

  “Thanks,” I said, and Martha looked at me incredulously. “I’ll call you in the morning,” I told her.

  I ended up sleeping in my skirt and blouse, sharing a bed with Dan Ponce and Jenny Carter; Jenny slept between Dan and me, and Dede and Sohini Khurana slept in the other bed. We turned off the light at quarter of four, and I woke at seven‑thirty and left immediately. I didn’t feel as bad as it seemed like I ought to, I couldn’t not stand up or walk, and so I thought maybe the alcohol hadn’t really affected me after all.

  I boarded the T at Copley and rode to Park Street

  , where I knew I had to change to the Red Line to get to Martha’s aunt’s house. But Park Street confused me‑while at Ault, I’d ridden the T only a handful of times‑and I went down a set of stairs, then up again. The upper level was crowded and very green, and everyone around me was rushing. Not the Green Line‑that was what I’d just gotten off of. I went back downstairs, to where it was red and a little calmer but not actually quiet. I was standing there in my clothes from the night before, clogs and a long skirt and a short‑sleeved blouse, and as I gazed down at the track, it moved a little, then moved again in another place. Mice, I realized, or maybe small rats‑they were skittering all over the track, almost but not quite blending in with the chunky gravel.

  I remembered it was Monday. And rush hour‑that was why the station was so crowded. Around me on the platform, people passed by, or stopped in a spot to wait: a black man in a blue shirt and a black pin‑striped suit; a white teenager with headphones on, wearing a tank top and jeans that were too big for him; two women in their forties, both with long ponytails, both wearing nurse’s uniforms. There was a woman with a bob and bangs in a silk skirt and matching jacket, a guy in paint‑speckled overalls. All these people! There were so many of them! A black grandmother holding the hand of a boy who looked about six, three more white guys in business suits, a pregnant woman in a T‑shirt. What had they been doing for the last four years? Their lives had nothing at all to do with Ault.

  It’s true that I was hung over for the first time, and still naÏve enough not to understand what a hangover was. But these people, making their way through the morning, all their meetings and errands and obligations. And this was only here, in this station at this moment. The world was so big! The sharpness of that knowledge went away almost as soon as I’d boarded the T, but it has returned over the years, and even now sometimes‑I am older, and my life is very different‑I can feel again how amazed I was that morning.