Prep: A Novel (2 page)

“I’m from Indiana,” I said.

“See, you must be way cooler than I was because at least Indiana is closer to the East Coast than Idaho.”

“But people here have been to Idaho. They ski there.” I knew this because Dede Schwartz, one of my two roommates, kept on her desk a framed picture of her family standing on a snowy slope, wearing sunglasses and holding poles. When I’d asked her where it was taken, she’d said Sun Valley, and when I’d looked up Sun Valley in my atlas, I’d learned it was in Idaho.

“True,” Gates said. “But I’m not from the mountains. Anyway, the important thing to remember about Ault is why you applied in the first place. It was for the academics, right? I don’t know where you were before, but Ault beats the hell out of the public high school in my town. As for the politics here, what can you do? There’s a lot of posturing, but it’s all kind of meaningless.”

I wasn’t certain what she meant by
posturing
—it made me think of a row of girls in long white nightgowns, standing up very straight and balancing hardcover books on their heads.

Gates looked at her watch, a man’s sports watch with black plastic straps. “Listen,” she said. “I better get going. I have Greek second period. What’s your next class?”

“Algebra. But I left my backpack in Ancient History.”

“Just grab it when the bell rings. Don’t worry about talking to Van der Hoef. You can sort things out with her later, after you’ve both cooled off.”

She stood, and I stood, too. We started walking back toward the schoolhouse—it seemed I was not returning to South Bend after all, at least not today. We passed the roll call room, which during the school day functioned as the study hall. I wondered if any of the students were looking out the window, watching me walk with Gates Medkowski.

It was nighttime, after curfew, when Dede made the discovery. She had just finished laying out her clothes for the next morning. Every night, she set them on the floor in the shape of an actual person: shoes, then pants or else tights and a skirt, then shirt, then sweater or jacket on top of the shirt. Our room was not large—though three of us shared it, I’d heard that in other years it had been used as a double—and Dede made no concession to this fact. For me and our other roommate, Sin-Jun Kim, the arrangement of Dede’s clothes necessitated as much stepping around as if a real body were on the floor. But we had not objected during the first few days of school and now Dede’s pattern was established.

The night of Dede’s discovery, our room was quiet except for the low sound of her stereo and the clicking open and shut of her dresser drawers. Sin-Jun was reading at her desk, and I was in bed already. I always climbed into bed when I got sick of studying—I wasn’t sure what else to do—and lay there under the sheets, facing the wall, my eyes shut. If someone came by to see Dede, they’d enter the room speaking in a normal voice, then see me and whisper, “Oh, sorry,” or else, “Whoops,” and I would feel strangely flattered. I sometimes pretended I was in my bed in South Bend and that the sounds of the dorm were the sounds of my family—the flushing toilet was my brother Joseph, the laughter in the hallway was my mother talking on the telephone to her sister.

Since our meeting the previous week, I’d often found myself thinking of Gates Medkowski. Before roll call, I watched her, and a few times, she’d looked right at me. When we made eye contact, she smiled or said, “Hey, Lee,” before turning away, and I usually blushed, feeling caught. I didn’t necessarily want to talk to her again because I would probably be awkward, but I wanted to know things about her. I was considering whether or not Gates had a boyfriend when Dede exclaimed, “What the fuck!”

Neither Sin-Jun nor I said anything.

“Okay, I had forty dollars in my top drawer this morning, and it is
not
there right now,” Dede said. “One of you guys didn’t take it, did you?”

“Of course not.” I rolled over. “Did you check your pockets?”

“It was definitely in my drawer. Someone stole money from me. I can’t believe it.”

“Is not in drawer?” Sin-Jun said. Sin-Jun was from Korea and I was still unable to gauge exactly how much English she understood. Like me, Sin-Jun had no friends, and also like me, she was generally ignored by Dede. Sometimes the two of us walked together to the dining hall, which was preferable to walking alone.

Though Dede took pains to separate herself from Sin-Jun and me, leaving earlier than we did for morning chapel or for meals, she herself was not exactly cool. At my junior high she would have been royalty, but here she was, apparently, neither rich enough nor pretty enough to be truly popular. Even I recognized that if you compared Dede to the best-looking girls at Ault, her nose was a bit round, her calves a bit stocky, her hair a bit, well, brown. She was a follower, literally a follower—I often saw her scurrying behind two or three other girls. The strenuousness of her efforts made me feel embarrassed for her.

“I already told you it’s not in my drawer,” Dede said. “You didn’t borrow it, did you, Sin-Jun? Like take it and plan on paying me back later? It’s okay if you did.” This was a notably kind remark on Dede’s part.

But Sin-Jun shook her head. “No borrow,” she said.

Dede exhaled disgustedly. “Great,” she said. “There’s a thief in the dorm.”

“Maybe someone else borrowed the money,” I said. “Ask Aspeth.” Aspeth Montgomery was the girl Dede followed most enthusiastically. She lived down the hall, and I assumed Dede considered it a stroke of singular misfortune that she had been assigned to live with Sin-Jun and me instead of with Aspeth.

“Aspeth would never borrow money without asking,” Dede said. “I need to tell Madame what’s happened.”

This was the moment when I actually believed that the money had been stolen, or at least I believed that Dede believed it. The next night at curfew, after calling out our names and checking them off the dorm list, Madame Broussard said, “It is with great displeasure that I must tell you there has been a theft.” Madame—our dorm head, the head of the French department, and a native of Paris—peered around the room through her cat’s-eye glasses, which were either (I wasn’t sure which) outdated or retro-hip. She was in her early forties, and she also wore stockings with seams, tan leather high heels with an ankle strap fastened by one leather-covered button, and skirts and blouses that emphasized her small waist and not-small backside. “I will not say how much money it was, nor will I say from whom it was taken,” she continued. “If you know anything about this incident, I request that you step forward. I remind you that stealing is a major disciplinary violation and as such is punishable by expulsion.”

“How much money was it?” asked Amy Dennaker. Amy was a junior with a hoarse voice, curly red hair, and broad shoulders, and she scared me. I had spoken to her only once, when I was waiting in the common room to use the pay phone and she walked in, opened the refrigerator, and said, “Whose Diet Cokes are these?” I had said, “I don’t know,” and Amy had taken one and walked up the stairs. Maybe, I thought, she was the thief.

“The amount of money is not pertinent,” Madame said. “I am telling you of the incident only so you may take precautions.”

“What, you mean like locking our doors?” Amy said and people laughed. None of the doors had locks on them.

“I urge you not to keep large sums of money in your rooms,” Madame said. “If you have ten or fifteen dollars, that is enough.” She was right about this—you didn’t need cash at Ault. Money was everywhere on campus, but it was usually invisible. You caught a glimpse of it sometimes in things that were shiny, like the hood of the headmaster’s Mercedes, or the gold dome of the schoolhouse, or a girl’s long, straight blond hair. But nobody carried wallets. When you had to pay for a notebook or a pair of sweatpants at the campus store, you wrote your student ID number on a form and, later on, your parents got the bill. “If you see any unfamiliar persons in the dorm,” Madame continued, “you may report it to me. Are there other announcements?”

Dede’s friend Aspeth raised her hand. “I just want to say that whoever is leaving pubic hair in the bathroom sink, could you please clean it up? It’s really gross.”

Aspeth made this announcement every few days. It was true there were often short wiry black hairs in one of the sinks, but, clearly, Aspeth’s complaints were achieving nothing. It seemed like maybe she just liked to make them because they established her firmly in opposition to pubic hair.

“If that is it,” Madame said, “then curfew is complete.” Everyone rose from the couches and chairs and the floor to shake her hand, which was by then a ritual I had become used to.

“If we started a vigilante group, would the student activities committee give us funding?” Amy asked in a loud voice.

“I do not know,” Madame said wearily.

“Don’t worry,” Amy said. “We’d be peaceful vigilantes.” I had seen Amy in action before—she did imitations of Madame that consisted of clutching her chest and crying out something like
Zut alors! Someone has sat upon my croissant!
—but I was still surprised by her joking. In chapel, the headmaster and the chaplain spoke of citizenship and integrity and the price we had to pay for the privileges we enjoyed. At Ault, it wasn’t just that we weren’t supposed to be bad or unethical; we weren’t even supposed to be ordinary, and stealing was worse than ordinary. It was unseemly, lacking subtlety, revealing a wish for things you did not already have.

Climbing the stairs to the second floor, I wondered if it was possible that
I
was the thief. What if I had opened Dede’s drawer in my sleep? Or what if I had amnesia, or schizophrenia, and couldn’t even account for my own behavior? I didn’t think I had stolen the money, yet it also did not seem impossible.

“We’ll get to the bottom of this
tout de suite,
” I heard Amy say as I reached the top step, and then someone else, someone standing much closer to me, said, “That bitch is crazy.”

I turned. Little Washington was on the steps behind me. I made a noncommittal noise, to acknowledge her comment, though I wasn’t even sure if she meant Amy or Madame.

“The mouth on her,” Little added, and then I knew she was referring to Amy.

“Amy likes to kid around,” I said. I wouldn’t have minded sharing a moment with Little at Amy’s expense, but I feared doing so in the hallway, where we could be overheard.

“She ain’t funny,” Little said.

I wanted to agree—less because I actually did agree than because I’d recently been considering trying to become friends with Little. I had first noticed her one night when we returned from formal dinner at the same time; just inside the common room, she said to no one in particular, “I gotta get these shoes off because my dogs are
barking.
” Little was from Pittsburgh, the only black girl in the dorm, and I’d heard that she was the daughter of a doctor and a lawyer. She was a star in cross-country and was supposed to be even better at basketball. As a sophomore, she lived in a single, which normally carried a stigma—a single implied you didn’t have any friends close enough to share a room with—but Little’s blackness made her exist outside of Ault’s social strata. Not automatically, though, not in a negative way. More like, it gave her the choice of opting out without seeming like a loser.

“The stealing is weird, huh?” I said.

Little made a dismissive noise. “I bet she’s glad it happened. Now she gets to be the center of attention.”

“Who?”

“What do you mean who? Your roommate.”

“You know it was Dede’s money? I guess there aren’t any secrets in the dorm.”

Little was quiet for a few seconds. “There aren’t any secrets in the whole school,” she said.

I felt a flip of uneasiness in my stomach; I hoped she wasn’t right. We were standing outside her room, and it crossed my mind that she might invite me in.

“Do you like it here?” I asked. This was the problem with me—I didn’t know how to talk to people without asking them questions. Some people seemed to find me peculiar and some people were so happy to discuss themselves that they didn’t even notice, but either way, it made conversation draining. While the other person’s mouth moved, I’d try to think of the next thing to ask.

“There’s good parts about the school,” Little said. “But I’m telling you that everyone’s in each other’s business.”

“I like your name,” I said. “Is it your real name?”

“You can find that out yourself,” Little said. “Prove my theory.”

“Okay,” I said. “And then I’ll report back to you.”

She didn’t object; it was like permission to talk to her again, something to look forward to. Though, apparently, she would not be inviting me in—she had opened her door and was about to step inside.

“Don’t forget to hide your money,” I said.

“Yeah, really.” She shook her head. “Folks are messed up.”

All of this was still in the beginning of the year, the beginning of my time at Ault, when I was exhausted all the time by both my vigilance and my wish to be inconspicuous. At soccer practice, I worried that I would miss the ball, when we boarded the bus for games at other schools, I worried that I would take a seat by someone who didn’t want to sit next to me, in class I worried I would say a wrong or foolish thing. I worried that I took too much food at meals, or that I did not disdain the food you were supposed to disdain—Tater Tots, key lime pie—and at night, I worried that Dede or Sin-Jun would hear me snore. I always worried someone would notice me, and then when no one did, I felt lonely.

Ault had been my idea. I’d researched boarding schools at the public library and written away for catalogs myself. Their glossy pages showed photographs of teenagers in wool sweaters singing hymns in the chapel, gripping lacrosse sticks, intently regarding a math equation written across the chalkboard. I had traded away my family for this glossiness. I’d pretended it was about academics, but it never had been. Marvin Thompson High School, the school I would have attended in South Bend, had hallways of pale green linoleum and grimy lockers and stringy-haired boys who wrote the names of heavy metal bands across the backs of their denim jackets in black marker. But boarding school boys, at least the ones in the catalogs who held lacrosse sticks and grinned over their mouth guards, were so handsome. And they had to be smart, too, by virtue of the fact that they attended boarding school. I imagined that if I left South Bend, I would meet a melancholy, athletic boy who liked to read as much as I did and on overcast Sundays we would take walks together wearing wool sweaters.