At roll call, I could feel an extra sense of anticipation, a chatty exuberance. At the desks around mine, no one was studying, as people usually were before and during the announcements; everyone was talking and there were loud, frequent bursts of laughter from every direction. Aspeth Montgomery, the blond, mean girl for whom Dede functioned as an acolyte, was sitting on the lap of Darden Pittard, who was our class’s cool black guy; Darden was good at basketball and from the Bronx and wore a gold chain and rugbies that pulled across his muscular back and broad shoulders. (The other black guy in our class, who wasn’t cool, was Kevin Brown-Kevin was a skinny chess whiz who wore glasses, whose parents were both professors at a university in St. Louis.) I saw Darden make fish lips at Aspeth, as if to kiss her, and then I saw her take his face in her hand, her thumb on one cheek and her index finger on the other, and pretend to scold him, and as I watched, I thought that probably, almost definitely, today was surprise holiday. How could it not be?
Henry Thorpe had to ring the bell three times before people were quiet enough for roll call to start. The first announcement, from Mrs. Van der Hoef, was that anyone going on the Greece trip in June needed to make sure their parents had sent in the five-hundred-dollar deposit. Then a junior boy whose name I didn’t know said he’d left his math notebook in the library and if you saw it, please give it to him. The third person to go was Dean Fletcher, who ambled up to the platform where the prefects’ desk was, which Henry and Gates stood behind. After Little’s expulsion, my interest in Gates had waned almost completely. Not because of anything Gates herself did but, I think, because I associated Gates with Little and with all my discomfort surrounding that situation. Gates soon seemed like someone a friend of mine, rather than I myself, had once been preoccupied by. I still felt a flicker of interest when I saw her, but only a flicker.
“A couple things,” Dean Fletcher said. “First off, breakfast ends at exactly five to eight. I’ve been getting reports of you guys complaining to the dining hall staff ’cause you overslept but you still want your pancakes.” People laughed, mostly because everyone liked Dean Fletcher. “When the staff tells you they’ve stopped serving, it means you better hustle to chapel. Got that? Next thing is, the mail room is a pigsty. Your mothers would be ashamed of you.” He reached into a cardboard box set on the prefects’ desk; I had not previously noticed it. “Exhibit A,” he said, and my heart rate increased, but all he held up was a rumpled New York Times. “Papers go in the recycling bins.” The next thing he held up was a pair of earmuffs. “Anyone want to claim these? Nope? Then I get to keep ’em for myself.” He clamped them on his head, and then I knew for sure. “Or-” he said, and he looked around the big room at all of us waiting. He smiled. “How about this?” All I saw before the room erupted was a flash of hunter green fabric. Everyone around me was screaming. Girls hugged, and boys slapped each other on the back.
I did not scream or hug anyone. In fact, as the noise gained momentum, I felt its opposite, a draining of excitement. But not a draining of tension-my body was still stiff and alert, and the impulse I had, strangely, was to weep. Not because I was sad but because I was not happy, and yet, like my classmates, I’d experienced an emotional surge, I too felt the need for expression. This phenomenon-being gripped by an overwhelming wave of feeling that was clearly not the feeling of the people around me-had also happened at a pep rally: It made me uncomfortable, because I didn’t want anyone to notice that I wasn’t jumping up and down or cheering, and it also thrilled me, because it made the world seem full of possibilities that could make my heart pound. I think, looking back, that this was the single best thing about Ault, the sense of possibility. We lived together so closely, but because it was a place of decorum and restraint and because on top of that we were teenagers, we hid so much. And then, in dorms and classes and on teams and at formal dinner and in adviser groups, we got shuffled and thrust together and shuffled again, and there was always the chance that you might find out one of the pieces of hidden information. This was why I felt excited when life was different from normal, when things happened-snow and fire drills and the times we had chapel at night, evensong, when the sky outside the stained glass windows was black. Depending on circumstances, a wild fact could be revealed to you, or you could fall desperately in love. In my whole life, Ault was the place with the greatest density of people to fall in love with.
Gates rang the bell to tell people to settle down. Dean Fletcher stuck two fingers in his mouth and wolf-whistled. “Okay, guys,” he said and made a gesture meant to calm us, patting the air with his palms. “Enough. Listen up. We’ll be sending a bus to Boston at ten o’clock, and another bus to the Westmoor mall at noon. Sign up in my office if you want to go. I know I don’t need to remind anyone that while you’re away, all school rules are in effect.” This was what teachers always said before you left campus.
When roll call was over, students surged out of the room, toward Dean Fletcher’s office or else outside, toward the dorms. I headed to the mail room, which was in the basement, and saw through my mailbox window that nothing was in there. I wasn’t sure what to do with myself. My focus up to this point had been avoiding the biology test, and now that I had, I was at a loss. The problem was, I didn’t have anyone to go with to Boston or the mall; I still didn’t have any friends. Surprisingly, this was not a fact that greatly affected my day-to-day life, at least not logistically. At meals, the sections of the dining hall were unofficially divided by grade, and within your grade-it was strangely democratic-you could sit at any table with an empty seat; formal dinner was even better because then there was assigned seating. In chapel you could also sit anywhere. And the rest of the time, wandering the halls between classes, changing in the locker room for practice, you could inconspicuously be by yourself, walking a few feet behind other people, or standing on the periphery.
It was more when things slowed down, during the parts when you were supposed to have fun, that my lack of friends felt obvious-on Saturday nights, when there were dances I didn’t go to, and during visitation, which was the hour each night when boys and girls were allowed in each other’s dorm rooms. I spent those times hiding. Most of the other girls propped open their doors for visitation, but we kept ours shut; Sin-Jun didn’t seem to care and Dede went down the hall to Aspeth’s room.
But on certain occasions, I could not conceal my friendlessness. When we’d taken a field trip to Plimoth Plantation, I’d had to ride on the bus next to Danny Black, a day student whose nose was always running because of allergies; when I asked if I could sit with him, he said in his snot-laden voice, “Fine, but I want the aisle,” then stood while I slipped in. There was also the Saturday when the freshman prefects organized an ice-skating party in the hockey rink, and I went because I didn’t yet understand that just because it was nighttime, just because this had been billed as a party, it didn’t mean I’d find it any easier to talk to people. On the ice, the girls were gliding around in jeans and pink or gray wool sweaters, and the boys were trying to knock each other over. Behind the plastic barrier, those of us who didn’t know how to skate or didn’t own skates stood by the bleachers. Just standing there in the frosty air, not skating, I felt like my feet were frozen lumps, and you could see people’s breath when they spoke. Intermittently, I tried making conversation with Rufina Sanchez, who’d been recruited to Ault from a public school in San Diego and who was so pretty that I’d have been intimidated to talk to her if she were white, but really my attention was on the skaters. Watching them, I felt that familiar combination of misery and exhilaration. After about fifteen minutes, Rufina said to Maria Oldego, who was heavy and from Albuquerque, “This is boring. Let’s get out of here.” Boring? I thought incredulously. When Rufina and Maria left, so did the other kids on our side of the rink, and I was alone; then I had to leave, too.