I read the article, in its entirety, only once, and it was that time in the dining hall. Sometimes as I read, I murmured, “Oh my God,” and Martha patted me. By the end of the article, her hand was set on my arm.
The mess I had made (had I been the one who’d made this mess?) was so awful that it was hard to absorb or quantify. The person I was as of this moment, the person the article made me, was the precise opposite of the person I had, for the last four years, tried to be. It was the worst possible mistake I could have made.
“Okay,” Martha said. “We have a week left and then we’re out of here forever. So you’ll just live your life like normal. Let other people freak out, and, yes, they will. But it’s not your problem.”
“I’m going back to the room.”
“Listen to me,” she said. “We’re getting breakfast.”
In the kitchen, we picked up trays, filled our glasses with milk and juice, received plates of steaming pancakes. I felt dizzy with regret. I had been an idiot, I thought. Why on earth had I told Angie Varizi my secrets, what good had I imagined would come from it? This was how it always was with me-I wasn’t able to tell that something was happening (that I was, for Angie’s benefit, digging my own grave) while it was happening. Every single thing about the article was humiliating. Being on scholarship was bad, being unhappy was worse, and admitting to either one was worst of all. I had been indiscreet. That’s what it was. How much better it would have been to fuck up in a normal, preppy way-to get caught the week before graduation smoking pot, or skinny-dipping at midnight in the gym pool. To make politically charged complaints to a New York Times reporter, on the other hand, was just tacky.
When we carried our trays out to the dining room, we passed three freshmen, girls whose names I didn’t even know, and where normally I’d have looked right past them, I couldn’t keep from making eye contact. I wanted to be able to tell from their expressions whether they’d read the article yet, but their faces were blank. What I felt in that moment looking at them was what I continued to feel until graduation-the suspicion, but not the certainty, that other people were scorning me, the sense that their scorn was not unjustified, and also the knowledge that maybe they were not thinking of me at all.
I realized already that this would be, in the context of Ault, a very big deal. Yet at the same time, to most students, it was someone else’s big deal. Only to me was it personal. Maybe when kids went home over the summer, people would say to them: Is your school really that snobby? Was that girl as unhappy as she seemed? But it would be a topic of conversation; it wouldn’t be their life.
I went to bed before dinner Sunday night-I just didn’t want to be conscious anymore-and at one-fifteen, when I’d already awakened eight or nine times and couldn’t stand it any longer, I rose, changed into a T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants and left the dorm while Martha snored softly. It had rained that day, and the courtyard was dark and shiny. I could have gone through the basement, which was Cross’s usual route, but I was wholly unafraid of getting caught; I have always believed that extreme circumstances protect you from ordinary dangers, and while I recognize my belief as illogical, I have not yet been proven wrong.
At first, the common room of Cross’s dorm appeared empty. But when the door shut behind me, a head rose from the couch in front of the television. It was Monty Harr, a freshman. The sound to the TV was off, and Monty’s face looked gray.
“Where’s Cross’s room?” I asked.
He blinked at me.
“Cross Sugarman,” I said. “Which room is his?”
“At the end of the hall on the left,” Monty finally said. He was rubbing his eyes as I walked away.
There was a poster of a basketball player on the door, a guy in a green uniform leaping through the air with a blurry crowd behind him. I knocked, and when no one responded, I turned the knob and opened it. The light was on inside, and someone was sitting at a desk. At first, because I was looking for Cross, I thought it was him, but the person looked up and I saw it was Cross’s roommate, Devin. Over the last four years, Devin had gone from skinny to almost fat and he had blond hair, dark eyebrows, and a pug nose.
My bravado, or whatever had propelled me across the courtyard, dwindled. “Hi,” I said in a quiet voice. I looked around the room; both the beds were unmade, and the only light came from a desk lamp and a lava lamp set on the windowsill. No one was there besides Devin.
A grin had spread across his face. “It’s the woman of the hour.”
“Devin, please.” I tried to remember if we had spoken to each other since I’d assassinated him in ninth grade. Not much, but still-weren’t we both people? Might not my palpable desperation elicit sympathy from him just this once?
“Please what?” he said. “I have no idea where he is, if that’s what you’re asking. Anyway, isn’t it kind of late for a young girl to be out by herself?”
“I know what time it is.”
“After that article today, I’d be careful about giving Byden a reason to toss me out.”
“You don’t get kicked out for breaking visitation the first time,” I said.
“Forgive me.” Devin smirked. “I didn’t realize you’ve never broken visitation before.”
“Fuck you,” I said, and maybe my mistake was being the one to make things definitively ugly.
“I’m tempted to say fuck you, too, but I think my roommate’s got that taken care of.”
I turned to leave, and Devin said, “A quick question.”
I paused (of course I did) in the threshold.
“Are you fish or cheese?”
I didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about.
“You have to be one,” he said. “So which is it?”
Still, I simply looked at him.
“For the list. You know, we’re keeping a list, we’re checking it twice.” He was actually singing, and it occurred to me for the first time that perhaps he was drunk or stoned. He opened his desk drawer, saying as he did, “You’re one of our missing seniors. Your roommate, too, as a matter of fact, so it’d be great to kill two birds with one stone tonight.” From the drawer, he’d removed a rumpled school catalog. He opened it, flipped to the back, and passed it to me. This was where the class lists were, and in the spaces between people’s last names and the place they were from-between, for instance, Deirdre Danielle Schwartz and Scarsdale, New York–it said, in capital letters, written with a red marker: FISH. They didn’t all say FISH; some said CHEESE. And they weren’t all written with red marker-some were in black or blue ballpoint pen. Also, they weren’t next to everyone’s names; they were next to some girls’, and no boys’. I glanced several times between the catalog and Devin; I wasn’t sure what I was reading, but I wasn’t uninterested. Aspeth, I saw, was CHEESE; Horton Kinnelly was also CHEESE; Hillary Tompkins was FISH.
Finally-not because he wanted to give me the gift of an explanation, I think, but just because he was frustrated by my lack of understanding-Devin said, “It’s what you taste like. All girls are one or the other. Get it?”
A question formed inside me, but before I asked it aloud, the answer formed itself, too: No, not when you kiss them. Not then. Knowing what the list represented, it seemed like I ought to throw the catalog across the room. But the problem was, I was still curious. The list was so-it was so weirdly attentive. It was something I myself might have kept, in a parallel universe. “How long have you been working on this?” I asked.