“Are you mad at me because I made you look bad in front of Mr. Byden?” I asked, and as I said it, the idea occurred to me for the first time. “Are you the one who told him to have The New York Times interview me?”
Martha said nothing and then she said, “I don’t think anyone is to blame. It’s the way the situation played out. I made a choice to suggest you, he made a choice to have you do it, you made a choice to tell the woman what you told her.”
It was so terrible I almost couldn’t think about it-that Martha had imagined she was giving me a present. She had wanted to be nice, to provide me with the chance to stand out that I’d never been able to provide for myself. I felt guilt bordering on nausea, but I also felt angry, angrier than before. One, because she should have told me-possibly I’d still have said what I said, but I’d have understood that I was meant to praise the school. And two, because there was another thing I was mad at Martha for, it had been simmering for the last few days or perhaps for the last few months, and in the same moment, there in the library, I understood exactly what this murky resentment toward her was, and I understood that I would never be able to express it. I resented her for having said, back in October, that she didn’t think Cross would be my boyfriend. She had made it true! If she’d said she could picture it, it didn’t mean it would have happened. But by saying she couldn’t, she’d pretty much sealed that it wouldn’t. Had she not understood how literally I took her, how much I trusted her advice? She had discouraged me from being hopeful, and how can you ever forgive a person for that? And how could I ever tell her any of this? It would be too ugly. For me to have messed up, to have done a thing that required her forgiveness, was not atypical. For her to be the one at fault would unbalance our friendship. I would not try to explain anything, and who knew if I could have explained it anyway? The mistake I had made was so public and obvious, and the one she’d made was private and subjective; I was its only witness. No, I would not tell her anything; I would be good old incompetent Lee, lovably flawed Lee, a golden retriever who just can’t stay out of the creek and keeps returning to the house with wet, smelly fur.
“So you think I betrayed the school?” I said, and I could tell I sounded cranky, but cranky was (Martha would never know this) something we could recover from-cranky was a far cry from what I actually felt.
“That’s not what I said.”
“You might as well have.” (I did wonder, was it possible that there’d be nothing left to miss? Finished with Ault as an institution, finished with Cross, finished with Martha.)
“I think you told the reporter what you meant to tell her,” Martha said.
“Martha, were you brainwashed by being prefect? When did you decide that it should be against the law to criticize Ault?”
“Exactly. That’s my point. You had criticisms, and you expressed them.”
“So now I should deal with the consequences?”
She did not reply for a long time. Then, at last, she said, “Yeah, kind of.”
“Then what are you doing here? Why are you warning me about the chapel talk when it’s exactly what I deserve?”
“You’re my best friend, Lee. I can disagree with your choices and still care about you.”
Well, aren’t you complex? I thought. I didn’t say it; instead, I pulled my knees toward my chest, folded my arms across the top of them, and set my head facedown on my arms.
“Are you crying?” she asked.
“No.”
Martha touched my shoulder. “Forget what I’m saying. I’m just-I don’t know what I’m talking about.”
“It’s what you think,” I said.
“Yeah, but who cares what I think?”
I raised my head and looked at her.
“I don’t want you to remember it like this,” she said. “Just because it’s the end, I mean-the end isn’t the same as the most important.”
I said nothing.
“What you should remember is stuff like-okay, how about this? That Saturday morning in the spring when we got up really early and rode bikes into town and ate breakfast at that diner next to the gas station. And the eggs were kind of undercooked, but they were really good.”
“It was your birthday,” I said. “That’s why we went.”
“That’s right. I forgot that part.”
“You were sixteen,” I said. Again, in the quiet, we could hear the saw.
“That morning,” Martha said, “that was what our lives were like at Ault.”
The humiliating part is that I went to look for him a second time. Or a third time, if you counted going to his dorm room in the middle of the night and finding only Devin. I had never been to his room before that week, and then I went twice in four days. It was early evening, before dinner, and I walked through the common room and down the hall. I nearly collided with Mario Balmaceda, who was coming out of the bathroom and looked at me with a confused expression, and I did not stop to apologize or explain myself. At the end of the hall, I knocked on the door-the poster of the basketball player was still up-and then without waiting I opened it. No one was in the room. It was still light outside, and shadowy inside, and I could hear the tick of an alarm clock sitting on a white plastic crate next to one of the beds.
In my imagination, he’d been reading in bed and he’d sat up when I entered and I’d crawled onto his lap and wrapped my legs and arms around him. And at first I’d be weeping and he’d stroke my hair, he’d murmur to me, but of course it would quickly turn sexual. And it would be urgent-we’d clutch and bite, we’d want it the exact same amount. Maybe I’d give him a blow job, on my knees on their dirty rug, and I’d be wearing a shirt on top and nothing on the bottom, and he’d wind his legs around me and dig his heels against my ass; because of me, he’d be in agony.
Except that he wasn’t there, and that looking at his room, the unfamiliar objects-I didn’t even know which bed was his-I realized how absurd it was to have assumed, or just to have hoped, that he’d be in the same mood I was, waiting for me. Quickly, the shift was occurring from disappointment at his absence to terror that he’d appear before I got out. I would seem-this would be the word he’d use, or other people would-psycho. That is, as annoying as a girl who cried, but also aggressive.
He wasn’t waiting for me, he wasn’t looking for me. It would have been a lie to say the only reason I wanted to see him was to smooth over the earlier ugliness, but that was one of the reasons, and had it been so far-fetched to think he might want the same? Now I think it was far-fetched, that my impulse was feminine, and that the masculine response (maybe I just mean the more detached response) was to realize that our final interaction had been overblown and unfortunate but that we each understood well enough where the other stood. Another exchange would be reiteration, not clarification.
I shut the door and hurried down the hall. Back in Elwyn’s, it took a few minutes for my heartbeat to settle. But then it did, and I realized all at once that nothing had actually happened. It felt like I was recovering, but from what? I was by myself, the fan in the window was whirring, the floor was cluttered with half-empty boxes. “It’s over,” I said. “Everything with Cross is finished.” If I said it out loud, maybe I would finally stop being so hopeful.
The person giving the chapel talk always sat to the left of the chaplain, and the next morning, that seat was occupied by Conchita Maxwell. I cannot say I was completely surprised. As she climbed the steps to the pulpit, I saw that she was wearing a black linen skirt and a white blouse; she had long ago stopped dressing eccentrically and had grown out her hair. She cleared her throat and said into the microphone, “The article that appeared in last Sunday’s New York Times has left many people in the Ault community feeling angry, hurt, and misrepresented. I am one of those people. As a Mexican American, I took special exception to the article. In no way did it reflect the experience I have had for the last four years, in this place I have come to call my home.” Listening to her, at first I felt hostile, but eventually, I felt sad and then not even that-more just a distance from the whole situation. Hearing the talk, which relied heavily on rhetoric and was not particularly well written, reminded me of reading someone else’s history term paper about a subject I was not interested in, and, not even on purpose, I found myself tuning out. What I thought of was Conchita and me as freshmen, of teaching her to ride a bike behind the infirmary. How long ago that seemed, how far I felt from her now; I couldn’t remember talking to her even once during our senior year. And, with graduation, we were about to be cut loose from each other completely-the distance between us would be physical and definitive, and perhaps we’d never speak again. It seemed an impossible thought-so often did we all come together at Ault that I had begun to believe life contained reckonings rather than just fade-outs-and yet I also saw then that as more and more years passed, the time Conchita and I had known each other, the time I had known any of my classmates, would feel decreasingly significant; eventually, it would be only a backdrop to our real lives. At some cocktail party years into the future, in an incarnation of myself I could not yet fathom, I would, while rummaging for an anecdote, come up with one about a girl I’d known at boarding school whose mother took us out for lunch one day while the family bodyguard sat at the next table. In the telling, I would feel no pinch of longing or regret; I would feel nothing true, nothing at all, in fact, except the wish that my companions find me amusing.