Prep, Page 3

  “Your dancing was really good,” I said.

  She rolled her eyes. “It’s always fun to see people make fools of themselves.”

  “Oh, no, you weren’t making a fool of yourself. Not at all. Everyone loved it.”

  She smiled, and I understood that she had already known everyone loved it. But she hadn’t been asking for a compliment, as I myself was whenever I said something self‑effacing. It was more like‑this dawned on me as I looked at her‑she was pretending to be regular. Even though she was special, she was pretending to be like the rest of us.

  “Thanks,” she said. “That’s nice of you, Lee.”

  In the evening, a giddy energy swirled in the courtyard and inside the dorm itself. Boys from the nearby dorms appeared in our common room‑boys weren’t allowed upstairs except during visitation‑and summoned certain girls. Aspeth, I was not surprised to see, was a popular choice, and Dede often trotted downstairs along with her. They brought purses and nail polish and bras that they fastened, amid lots of shouts and laughter, right over the boys’ T‑shirts. I was doing laundry, and as I traipsed between the basement and the second floor of the dorm, I observed the progress of the festivities. The thought of a boy wearing my bra over his T‑shirt was horrifying‑the empty cups sagging, the fabric straining, or, even worse, not straining, around his rib cage, the fact that when he removed it he’d be able to see the exact size and might leave it on the floor of his room, stepping on it as he climbed into bed. But perhaps my horror stemmed from the fact that, as I was fast realizing, I did not own particularly pretty bras. Mine were beige cotton with a beige bow between the cups; my mother and I had bought them over the summer at JCPenney. These other bras that emerged were satin or lace, black or red or leopard‑spotted, bras of the sort that I had thought only adult women wore.

  After the dorm cleared out‑even Sin‑Jun went to the dance with a mascara mustache‑I studied Spanish vocabulary words for a while, then went downstairs to the common room to read the old yearbooks that lined one shelf. I loved the yearbooks; they were like an atlas for the school. The ones in our common room went back as far as 1973, and in the past few weeks, I’d nearly worked my way to the present. Over the years, the format hadn’t changed: candid shots in the front, then clubs, sports teams, dorms, entire classes. For, say, that year’s tenth grade, there was a general write‑up of the notable events that had occurred between September and June and a little joke about every person: “Can you imagine Lindsay without her curling iron?” Then came the best part, the seniors, each of them with their own page. In addition to the standard expressions of gratitude to family members, teachers, and friends, and the sometimes‑nostalgic, sometimes‑literary, sometimes‑incomprehensible quotations, they were filled with pictures. Many of the boys’ pictures were action shots from games; many of the girls’ showed them with their arms around each other, sitting on a bed or standing on a beach. Girls also had a fondness for including photos from childhood.

  You could figure out, if you had the inclination and the time, who in a given year was friends with whom and who had dated whom, and who had been popular, or athletic, or weird and fringy. The graduated students began to feel like distant cousins‑I learned their nicknames, their sports of choice, which sweater or hairstyle they’d worn on repeated occasions.

  In the three most recent yearbooks, I found several photos of Gates. She played field hockey, basketball, and lacrosse, and she’d lived her freshman and sophomore years in Elwyn’s dorm and her junior year in Jackson’s. Her sophomore year, the little joke about her was, “The crystal ball predicts that Henry and Gates will buy a house with a white picket fence and have twelve kids.” The only Henry at Ault was Henry Thorpe, who I knew was currently going out with a prissy‑seeming sophomore named Molly. I wondered if Henry and Gates had really dated and, if so, whether any tension of either the good or bad sort lingered between them. When they danced together at roll call, it had not seemed like it.

  It was at the end of the yearbook from Gates’s junior year, which was the newest one, that I came across the picture. The final section, after the seniors’ pages, contained photos of graduation: the senior girls in white dresses, the boys in white pants and navy blazers and boaters. There were pictures of them sitting in rows at the ceremony, a picture of the graduation speaker (a Supreme Court justice), pictures of the seniors hugging each other. Among these‑I was not looking for her here and might easily have missed it‑was one of Gates by herself. It showed her from the waist up, in a white short‑sleeved button‑down. She wore a cowboy hat, and her glinting hair fell out from under the brim and spilled over her shoulders. The picture would have been in profile, but it appeared that the photographer, whoever it was, had called her name just before snapping the shutter and she’d turned her head. She might have been simultaneously laughing and protesting, saying something like, Oh, come on! But saying it to a person she liked very much.

  I stared at the picture for so long that when I looked up again, I was surprised to see the nubbly orange couches and cream‑colored walls of the common room. I had forgotten myself, and I had forgotten Ault, at least the real, three‑dimensional version in which I, too, was a presence. It was a little after ten. I decided to check in early with Madame and go to bed, and I put the yearbooks away.

  In the upstairs bathroom, Little stood before one of the sinks in a pink bathrobe, rubbing oil through her hair.

  “Hey,” I said. “How was the dance?”

  She made a face. “I wouldn’t go to no drag dance.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why didn’t you go?”

  I smiled, and then she smiled, too.

  “See?” she said. “But your roommate sure was excited about it. If I lived with that girl, I’d have slapped her by now.”

  “She’s not that bad.”

  “Uh‑huh.”

  “You play varsity basketball, right?” I said.

  “Yep.”

  “So you’re on the team with Gates Medkowski, right?”

  “Sure am.”

  “What’s Gates like? I’m just wondering because she’s the first girl ever to be a senior prefect, isn’t she? I know that’s a pretty big deal.”

  “She’s about like everyone else here.”

  “Really? She seems different.”

  Little set the bottle of oil on the counter and leaned in close to the mirror, peering at her skin. Then she said, “She’s rich. That’s what Gates is. Her family has a whole lot of money.” She stepped back and made a face in the mirror, sucking in her cheeks and arching her eyebrows. It was the kind of thing I’d have done alone but never in front of another person. But I kind of liked the fact that Little’s attention to me was sporadic; it made me feel less inhibited.

  “I thought Gates was from a farm,” I said.

  “A farm that’s half the state of Idaho. Her people grow potatoes. Bet you didn’t think such a nasty little vegetable could be worth so much.”

  “Is Gates good at basketball?”

  “Not as good as me.” In the mirror, Little grinned. “You ever find out about my name?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “I’m conducting an investigation, but all my leads have been dead ends.”

  “Yeah, right. I’ll tell you why. It’s because I’m a twin.”

  “For real?”

  “Yep. I’m the baby, so you can guess my sister’s name.” She was quiet, and I realized I really was supposed to guess.

  “This might be too obvious, but is it Big?”

  “Got it on the first try,” Little said. “Give the girl a prize. I’m bigger than Big now, but these things stick.”

  “That’s really cool,” I said. “Where does Big go to school?”

  “At home. Pittsburgh. You ever been to Pittsburgh?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s different from here, I’ll tell you that much.”

  “You must miss Big.” Knowing Little had a twin, even a twin who was far away,
made me wonder if she didn’t need a friend.

  “You got any sisters?” Little asked.

  “Just brothers.”

  “Yeah, I got a brother, too. I got three brothers. But that’s not the same.” She stuck her bottle of oil into her bucket‑on the first night in the dorm, Madame Broussard had given us all buckets for our toiletries‑and turned toward me. “You’re not bad,” she said. “Most people here, they’re not real. But you’re real.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Thanks.”

  When she was gone‑on the way out, she said, “G’nighty”‑I pulled my toothbrush and toothpaste from my own bucket. When I stuck my toothbrush under the faucet, I noticed that in the sink next to mine, the one where Little had been standing, there was a sprinkling of short, coarse black hairs. So they were head hairs, Little’s head hairs. With a paper towel from the dispenser, I wiped them away.

  The next theft was a hundred‑dollar bill Aspeth’s grandmother had sent for her birthday. It had been in her wallet, which had been on top of her desk. We found out on Sunday, the night after the drag dance. I learned the amount and the owner of the money not from anything Madame Broussard said at curfew‑again, she was stony‑faced and discreet‑but from Dede, who was outraged.

  “It’s like my friends and I are targets,” Dede said when we were back in our room. “We’re being discriminated against.” She leaned over and set a red cashmere sweater on the floor, on top of black pants. When she was upright again, she wrinkled her nose. “Something stinks in here.”

  I sniffed the air, but I was pretending. She was right‑it did stink. It had stunk for several days, and at first I’d thought I was imagining the fishy odor, but it had become more pronounced. When Dede and Sin‑Jun were out of the room, I’d smelled my armpits and between my legs, then my sheets, then my dirty laundry. The fishiness hadn’t increased in any of these places, but it hadn’t decreased either. “It does smell kind of weird,” I said.

  “Hey, Sin‑Jun,” Dede said. “Take a whiff. It smells bad, right?”

  “Take a whiff?”

  “Smell the air,” I said. I mimed inhaling deeply. “Our room smells funny,” I said. “Not so good.”

  “Ahh,” Sin‑Jun said. She turned back to the papers on her desk.

  Dede rolled her eyes at me.

  “Maybe it’s coming from the bathroom,” I said. This seemed unlikely.

  Dede opened the door to our room and stepped into the hallway. Then she walked back in. “No, it’s this room,” she said. “It’s definitely this room. What food do you guys have in here?”

  “Only that.” I gestured toward the shelf above my desk, where I kept a jar of peanut butter and a box of saltines.

  “What about you, Sin‑Jun?” Dede said.

  Before Sin‑Jun could respond, I said, “Why are you assuming it’s us? It might be you.”

  “I’m not the one keeping an entire grocery store in here,” Dede said, and it was true that Sin‑Jun had several packages and containers beneath her bed and in her desk and closet.

  “But you don’t know that it’s food,” I said. “Maybe it’s your shoes.” I picked up my bucket.

  “What are you doing?” Dede said.

  “Getting ready for bed.”

  “You’re not going to help me look?” Dede’s mouth hung open in surprise, or maybe indignation, and I had a strange temptation to stick something in it‑the bristle‑free end of my toothbrush, or my own finger.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  As I left the room, before the door shut, I heard her say, “Yeah, I can tell.”

  It became December. (I have been at Ault seventy‑eight days. ) Once, Little and I spent a Saturday night, while everyone else was out, playing Boggle in the common room as Sin‑Jun looked on. Another time, just Little and I watched a crime show on TV, and she made popcorn that burned, but we ate it anyway. (“I’m still kind of hungry,” I said afterward, and Little said, “Hungry? My stomach and my back are touching.”) There were two more thefts, which Madame announced at curfew. I wasn’t sure whose money it had been, but it hadn’t been any of Dede’s friends’. The smell in our room intensified; it became a stench, and I worried that even if it wasn’t emanating from me, I carried it on my clothes and skin. Sometimes in class or even outside, leaving chapel, I’d get a flash of it. When people came by the room, Dede made embarrassed jokes or flat‑out apologies.

  The week before Christmas vacation, I was walking through the mail room during the morning break when I saw Jimmy Hardigan, a senior, slam his fist against the wall. Then I saw Mary Gibbons and Charlotte Chan, also seniors, hugging. Charlotte was crying. Usually, the mail room was noisy at morning break, but now it was quiet. I wondered if someone had died‑not a teacher or a student, but a member of the administrative staff perhaps.

  I approached the wall of gold, windowed mailboxes. You knew you had mail because you saw it in profile, leaning diagonally against the wall of your box, and years later, after I was gone from Ault, I dreamed sometimes that I saw that skinny shadow.

  My mailbox was empty. I glanced to my right and saw Jamie Lorison from Ancient History. I could hear his heavy breathing. “Jamie, why is it so quiet?” I asked.

  “The seniors just heard back from Harvard, the ones who applied early. But everybody’s striking out this year.”

  “No one at all has gotten in?” Long ago, before Ault had taken girls, the boys would go to the headmaster’s house the day before graduation and on a slip of paper they’d each write Harvard, Yale, or Princeton; the school they wrote was the one they’d attend.

  “Only two so far,” Jamie said. “Nevin Lunse and Gates Medkowski. The rest got deferred.”

  I felt a swelling in my chest, a rise of breath. I scanned the mail room, hoping to congratulate Gates, but she wasn’t there.

  I finally spotted her in the dining hall that night. It was regular dinner, not formal dinner where you had to dress up and sit at assigned tables. As I set my plate in the dirty‑dishes carousel, I saw her in the food line. My heart pounded. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, swallowed, and walked toward her.

  I was less than ten feet away when, from the opposite direction, Henry Thorpe appeared. “Lay it here, Medkowski,” he said.

  Gates turned.

  “That’s right,” Henry said. He was holding up one hand. “Gimme five, you rock star.”

  Gates slapped her palm against his. “Thanks, man.”

  “How do you feel?” he asked.

  Gates grinned. “Goddamn lucky.”

  “Forget luck. Everyone knew you’d get in.”

  The casualness of their interaction made me understand I could not approach her, not in such a public setting. Even in complimenting Gates, my own neediness would rear up. I decided to make her a card instead, and then I could stick it in her mailbox, or leave it off at her room.

  Back in the dorm, switching between blue and red markers for each letter, I wrote CONGRATULATIONS, GATES! Then I wrote Good luck at Harvard! With a purple marker, I drew stars. The sheet of paper still looked a little bare, so I added vines in green, weaving them around the words. Then I had to sign my name. I wanted to write Love, Lee. But what if she thought that was weird? My name alone seemed curt, and Sincerely or Yours truly seemed formal and dorky. I held the blue marker above the paper, hesitating, then signed it Love, Lee. I’d leave it in her dorm, in an envelope outside her door. That way, she’d likely be alone when she found it.

  The next night was formal dinner, and most people showered in the gym after sports practice, then went straight to the dining hall. I saw that if I hurried, I’d have time to return to my room, get the card, and drop it off; I didn’t like to get to formal dinner too early anyway, because then you stood around.

  Just before I reached the courtyard, I broke into a jog. It was getting dark so early that no one would see me and wonder why, in a skirt and navy flats, I was running. Broussard’s was quiet. I skipped up the stairs to the second floor. When I opened
the door to the room, Dede slammed shut a drawer and whirled around, and then I realized‑I was preoccupied enough that I’d never have realized this otherwise, and I noticed it only because of the frantic quality of the gesture‑that she was not standing in front of her own dresser; she was in front of Sin‑Jun’s.

  “This isn’t what you think,” she said.

  I stepped backward, and she stepped forward.

  “I’m just trying to figure out where the smell is coming from,” she said. “It has to be Sin‑Jun. Because it’s not us, right?”

  “If you think it’s her, you should have asked if you could look through her things.”

  “I don’t want to offend her.” Dede’s tone was impatient. “Lee, obviously I’m not the thief if I was the first one who was stolen from.”

  We regarded each other.

  “Oh, come on,” she said. “You think I would steal from myself?”

  I continued to back out of the room.

  “Are you going to tell Madame?” she said. “There’s nothing to tell. I’m not lying, Lee. Don’t you trust me?”

  I still said nothing, and she lunged toward me, gripping my upper arms. My heart jumped. Standing so close to her, I could smell her perfume, I could see the tiny hairs that were growing back in her eyebrows. If only I’d known before this moment that she plucked her eyebrows, I thought, I could have gotten her to teach me how. Then I thought, no, we’d never been that kind of roommates.

  “Let go of me,” I said.

  “What are you planning to do?” Though I could tell she was trying to sound firm, her voice was uneven. “Are you going to say something?”

  “I don’t know.” I tried to shrug away from her, but her grasp was tight.

  “What do you want me to do to prove I’m telling the truth?”

  “Let go,” I said again.

  Finally, she withdrew her hands. “I’ll tell Madame myself I was looking in Sin‑Jun’s dresser,” she said. “Then will you believe me?”

  I let the door shut without answering her.

  I hadn’t yet left the dorm when I realized I’d forgotten Gates’s card. I decided to skip dinner‑I could hide out in the common room phone booth until I knew Dede had gone to the dining hall, then sneak back upstairs. Also, this way I’d have time to decide what to do about having caught her.