Prep: A Novel (8 page)

He moved out of my line of vision and pressed the gun to my earlobe again. The green spot remained in the air where his face had been; it expanded outward, seething. I closed my eyes.

Afterward, I could hear, but I couldn’t see anything. I felt as if I were lying beside a railroad track and the wheels of a train were spinning next to my ears. The whole world was skidding past, everything that had ever happened flipping in circles, and I was responsible. “You know her?” said a gravelly voice, and another voice said, “I don’t know her name, but she’s in my class.”

“She on something?” said the gravelly voice. “What’s she on? Why aren’t you two in school?”

“We have the day off. Do you have a washcloth?”

“Sink’s in back.”

“If you get it, I’ll stay with her.”

I felt the wetness against my forehead before I felt my own body. Then I could see them, but I was being pulled between the spinning green world and the static world of their faces in front of me. “She’s coming out of it,” said the second voice. “Hey.
Hey.
What’s your name?”

I blinked. I tried to say
Lee,
but the noise that came out was more of a prolonged croak.

“You fainted.” It was Cross Sugarman—he was the person talking to me. “Are you diabetic?”

I couldn’t answer.

He turned and said to the ponytailed man, the one with the gravelly voice, “Do you have any candy or soda?”

“This ain’t a 7-Eleven.”

“Yeah, I realize that.” Cross looked back at me. “Are you diabetic?”

I swallowed. “No.”

“Do you want us to call an ambulance?”

“No.”

“Have you ever fainted before?”

“I don’t know.” My words emerged slowly. The spinning green world was gone entirely. I felt exhausted.

“What’s your name?”

“Lee.”

“And you go to Ault, right?”

I nodded.

“Me, too,” he said. “My name is Cross.”

It struck me, even at that moment, as modest of him to introduce himself. Of course I knew his name.

I tried to sit up—I’d been lying on the floor—and Cross leaned over and stuck his hands beneath my armpits.

“Easy,” he said. He turned to the man. “You don’t have any soda?”

“Restaurants are that way.” The guy jerked his head toward the entrance of the store.

When I was upright, Cross peered at my face. “What day is it?” he said.

“Surprise holiday,” I said.

He smiled. “Go like this.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. When I mimicked the gesture, a string of saliva clung to my knuckles. “We’ll find you something to eat,” he said.

We walked slowly toward the entrance of the store.

“Wait,” I said. “I didn’t pay.”

“I wouldn’t sweat it.”

When we had stepped back into the bright humming light of the mall, he said, “Man, what a prick.” After about a minute, he nudged me. “Here.”

We turned into the diner, and a waitress led us to a booth where we sat facing each other. The reality of Cross before me was jarring: his tallness, his pale skin and cropped brown hair, his blue eyes, which seemed to contain both intelligence and boredom. I would not have imagined that Dede and I had similar taste, but Cross Sugarman was the best-looking boy I had ever sat so close to. And this fact was both thrilling and mortifying. It was as if I had, as in a dream, plucked him from his own world, the world of lacrosse games and sailboats and girls with long blond hair wearing sundresses, and pulled him into mine: a grimy restaurant in a depressed mall, on a rainy day. “Sorry,” I said. “For—I mean—I don’t know—”

“It’s no big deal.”

“But you’re being so nice to me.”

He looked away and made a kind of grumbling sigh, and I knew immediately that I had said the wrong thing.

When he looked back, he said, “This has or hasn’t happened to you before?”

“Once it did, a few years ago. After a soccer game when I was in sixth grade.”

“My sister faints,” he said.

The idea of Cross having a sister was intriguing. I wondered if she thought he was cute, or if she felt lucky to live in the same house he did.

“She fainted on a plane coming back from California. The flight attendants asked if she wanted the pilot to land the plane, but she told them no. I thought she should have told them yes.”

“Yikes,” I said. There was something in the mildness of Cross’s tone and expressions that made me unsure how to react to the things he said. Normally, you could tell just by observing people when you were supposed to nod, or laugh, or frown in sympathy. But Cross’s expressions were all so muted that I’d have thought he was hardly paying attention to what we were talking about. It was his eyes that made me know this wasn’t true—they were watchful, but not the way I imagined my own were; his was a disinterested, unself-conscious watchfulness.

The waitress appeared, and Cross ordered a vanilla milkshake. I opened the menu, and the quantity of words was overwhelming. I closed it. “I’ll have a vanilla milkshake, too,” I said. After the waitress left, I said, “I wonder if it’s bad for me to have dairy right now.”

Cross shrugged. “You’ll be okay.” There was something in his shrug I envied—an ability to prevent misfortune by choosing not to anticipate it.

I looked down at the table and then back at him. “You don’t have to stay here,” I said. “You probably were planning to go to a movie, right? And I’ll be fine. Not that I don’t appreciate—” The only thing I could think of to say was
you taking care of me,
and that seemed even worse than
you’re being so nice to me.
Lamely, I said, “But you really can go.”

“What about my shake?”

“Oh, I can pay for it. Especially after you helped me.”

“What if I want my shake?”

“Well, you can stay if you want to. I’m not telling you to leave. I just thought—”

“Relax,” he said. Then he said, “Lee.”

In this moment, I understood for the first time in my life what it was to feel attracted to someone. Not to think they were funny or to enjoy their company, or even to find one thing about them cute, like their dimples, or their hands, but to feel that physical pull toward them. I just wanted to close my eyes and have my body against Cross’s.

“Are you a freshman?” Cross said.

I nodded.

“Me, too,” he said.

He seemed so much older, I thought, as old as a man—eighteen, maybe, or twenty.

“I think I’ve seen you before. Do you live in McCormick’s?”

“No, Broussard’s.” I didn’t ask what dorm he lived in because I knew. There were fewer than seventy-five people in our class, and I knew everyone’s name, even the people I’d never talked to.

“I have Madame Broussard for French,” he said. “She’s kind of strict.”

“Do you know Amy Dennaker?”

He nodded.

“Well, Amy does these imitations of Madame. She’ll be like—” I paused. I had to do the accent; it wouldn’t be funny without the accent. “Like, ‘There is foie gras on my bidet!’ Or, she’s invented this poodle that Madame keeps, named Ooh La La. So she’ll say, ‘Ooh La La, if you do not stop barking, I shall send you to the guillotine!’ ”

I looked at Cross; he appeared unimpressed.

“I guess you have to be there,” I said. But it almost didn’t matter that he hadn’t laughed, because I had said something entirely unnecessary, I had told a story. For a moment, I had shrugged off my flattened Ault personality. “Where are you from?” I asked.

“The city.”

“Boston?”

“New York.”

“How did you end up at Ault?” Something was definitely different; apparently, I was to be the one carrying the conversation, and this was not even an unfamiliar dynamic. Back in South Bend, both in class and at home with my family, I had been curious and noisy and opinionated. I had talked like a normal person, more than a normal person.

“It was either here or Overfield,” Cross said. “The teachers here seemed more laid-back. It’s all old men in bow ties at Overfield.”

“So you always knew you would go to boarding school?”

“Pretty much.”

“I guess that’s how it is for people from the East Coast,” I said. “It’s different where I’m from.”

“Where’s that?”

“Indiana.”

“Oh, yeah? You’re a Hoosier?” He might have been making fun—I wasn’t sure. “You like basketball?”

“I don’t really follow sports,” I said. “No offense.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well, since you’re a big athlete. Aren’t you?” As I said it, I realized I was revealing the lie of our introduction in the store; I had already known who he was.

“I’m into sports,” he said slowly.

“That’s all I meant.”

“You think that makes me a meathead?”

“That’s not—”

“It’s okay.” He held up his hands, palms toward me. They were huge. “I think we understand each other.”

“I never said that you’re a meathead.”

“I do use silverware,” he said. “At least in public.”

My heart was beating faster. This was a kind of teasing I didn’t like, when boys mocked you in a way that assumed you could not, just as easily, mock them back; they took for granted their own wit, and your squeamishness and passivity.

“I’m literate, too,” he said. “I read the newspaper.”

“Congratulations,” I said. “How about the bathroom? Have you gotten the hang of indoor plumbing?”

We regarded each other. My face was hot.

“I know it can be tricky,” I continued. “But it makes living in a communal environment a lot nicer for everyone.”

Both of us were silent. Then he said, “Well, well, well,” and it was in such a strange voice—the voice, perhaps, of a high-spirited Southern grandmother—that I knew if he was making fun of me, he was also making fun of himself. His goofiness made me forgive him; it was un-Aultlike. “Indiana, huh?” he said. “What’s Indiana like?”

“There’s a lot of land. You don’t feel crowded. And people are friendly. I know that’s a stereotype about the Midwest, but it’s true.”

“So why did you leave?”

I looked at him quickly, but he seemed only curious this time, not sarcastic. “I don’t know,” I said. Then I said, “I thought my life would be more interesting if I went to Ault.”

“Is it?”

“I guess so. It’s definitely different.” Since arriving at Ault six months before, I hadn’t actually considered this question. In fact, my life at Ault
was
more interesting than my life at home had been. I was less happy and my life was more interesting. Perhaps that was not the worst trade-off in the world.

“My life is better here,” Cross said. “I went to an all-boys’ school in New York, so that completely sucked.”

I laughed. “You like going to school with girls?”

“Sure.”

Then, because I didn’t want him to think I was implying that he liked going to school with
me,
I said, “You go out with Sophie Thruler, don’t you?”

“Jesus,” he said. “What are you, a spy?”

“But you do, right?”

“Is it the KGB or the FBI that you work for? Just tell me that.”

“It’s the KGB. They’re really, really interested in your love life.”

“Sorry, but you’ll have to tell your apparatchik that you have no news.”

“Why not? I know you’re going out with her.”

“We hang out sometimes.”

“Is it true love? Do you want to marry her?”

He shook his head. “You’re crazy,” he said, but I could tell that there was something about me he didn’t mind.

The waitress set our milkshakes on the table. They came with long spoons, in tall glasses that narrowed at the bottom. Seeing how big they were, I thought that it might take us hours to drink them; perhaps we’d have to stay at the table for the whole afternoon, talking and talking. When I took the first sip, it was frothy and sweet, and I wondered why I never drank milkshakes in my usual life.

“I’m not going to marry Sophie,” Cross said. “And I could tell you why, but then I’d have to kill you.”

“I don’t mean you should get married now,” I said. “But in the future. Reverend Orch could do the ceremony.”

“Sophie and I are never getting married in a million years,” Cross said. He set his spoon on the table, lifted the glass, and tilted it back, and as I watched the milkshake tumble into his mouth, I felt that affection you feel for boys when you see one of the ways they’re different from you that’s not a bad way. When he set the glass back on the table, less than a third remained—obviously, he did not share my impulse to make our milkshakes last as long as possible—and a white mustache hung over his upper lip. I felt a quick rise of panic; for Cross to look foolish in front of me seemed a reversal of the world’s natural order. But then he wiped his mouth. Of course he was not the kind of person who unknowingly sat there with food on his face. “Here’s one reason,” he said. “Sophie smokes.”

What I thought immediately was,
But that’s against school rules.
I bit my tongue.

“Also, when it rains, she won’t go outside because of her hair. She thinks it gets frizzed or something.”

“What if she has class?”

“If she has to, she’ll go out. But she doesn’t like to.” Cross tipped back his glass again and swallowed the rest of his milkshake. “But she can be cool. You know what’s cool about her? Actually, never mind.”

“Oh, come on.”

“You’ll probably be offended.”

“Now you definitely have to tell me.”

“It’s something most girls don’t like.”

“I won’t be offended.”

“She loves giving blow jobs.”

I blinked at him.

“I knew I shouldn’t have told you,” Cross said.

“No.” I looked down. “It’s okay.” In my mind, I had a flash of Sophie kneeling before Cross while he sat on the mattress of a lower bunk, both of them naked. The image seemed so grown-up, and so foreign. Everything I didn’t understand and wasn’t part of at Ault rose up and loomed over me, like buildings in a city; I felt myself shrink back into a small, hunched figure, walking against the wind. When I looked up again, I knew that my ability to talk to him unguardedly was gone. Who was I to be having a conversation, to be joking, with Cross Sugarman?

“I didn’t—” he began, and too loudly, I said, “No, no. It’s fine.”

We watched each other for several more seconds. “So what about you?” he said. “Do you have a boyfriend?”