Prep: A Novel (4 page)

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.

The phone booth was hot and smelled like dirty socks, and my pulse was wild. I wanted to do jumping jacks just to get rid of my roiling energy. Instead, I sat on the chair inside the booth, the soles of my shoes against the seat, my knees bunched up in front of me with my arms around them.

After the thought of the picture popped into my head, it was like knowing that as you sit in the living room, cake is in the kitchen. All you have to do is fetch it.
Don’t,
I thought.
Dede will hear you moving around.
Then I thought,
But she won’t know who it is.
I peered out the phone booth’s window, which was streaked with fingerprints, slowly pushed open the door, and crept across the common room to the bookshelf. With trembling fingers, I pulled down the most recent yearbook and crept back to the booth.

The picture was exactly as I remembered it: her cowboy hat, her unruly hair, her smart, perfect face. Opening to the page it was on was like taking the first bite of cake, knowing the whole slice awaits you. If Dede would just leave, I could take the yearbook upstairs, I thought. It wasn’t like I would gaze at it endlessly. I just wanted to know it was mine, to look at when I needed to. I wanted to get in bed and turn out the lights; in the dark, I would be alone in my head, and I could have imaginary conversations where I made funny remarks and Gates laughed, but not in her being-nice-to-a-freshman way. It would be a laugh that meant she respected me and knew that I was like her.

I heard someone descend the stairs, so I waited, then went to the window, hunching down and peering over the sill. It was Dede. I lifted my blouse and stuck the yearbook in the waistband of my skirt—I seriously doubted it would be missed since I’d never seen anyone besides me look at any of them. Upstairs, I placed it on the shelf in my closet, underneath a sweater. As much as I wanted to, there was no point in going to bed, because Dede and Sin-Jun would return from dinner within the hour, flicking on lights and talking. Plus, I still needed to deliver the card.