As we walked, Conchita sneezed three times in a row. I considered saying Bless you to her, then didn’t.
She pulled a tissue from the pocket of her shorts and blew her nose loudly. “Allergies,” she said. It was early April then, just after spring break, a perfect afternoon of cobalt sky and bright sun. “You name it, I’m allergic to it.”
I didn’t try to name anything.
“Grass,” Conchita said. “Pollen, chlorine, mushrooms.”
“Mushrooms?”
“If I eat one, I break out in hives for up to a week.”
“That sucks,” I said, and I could hear in my own voice not a meanness, exactly, but a lack of deference.
We positioned ourselves ten yards apart. Conchita set the ball, a rubbery white globe like the egg of some exotic creature, in the webbing of her stick and thrust the stick forward. The ball landed in the grass several feet to my left. “Don’t say you weren’t warned,” she said.
I scooped up the ball and propelled it back; it landed even farther from her than her shot had from me.
“I take it you’re a Dylan fan,” Conchita said.
“Huh?”
“Your shirt.”
I looked down. I was wearing an old T-shirt of my father’s, pale blue with the words The Times They Are A-Changin’ across the front in white letters. I had no idea where he’d gotten it, but he’d worn it to jog in, and when I’d left for Ault I’d taken it with me; it was very soft and, for a few weeks, it had smelled like home.
“You realize that’s one of his most famous songs, right?” Conchita said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Right.” At Ault, there was so much I didn’t know. Most of it had to do with money (what a debutante was, how you pronounced Greenwich, Connecticut) or with sex (that a pearl necklace wasn’t always a piece of jewelry), but sometimes it had to do with more general information about clothing, or food, or geography. Once at breakfast when people were discussing a hotel I’d never heard of, someone said, “It’s on the corner of Forty-seventh and Lex,” and not only did the names of the streets mean nothing to me, but I wasn’t even certain for several minutes what city they were talking about. What I had learned since September was how to downplay my lack of knowledge. If I seemed ignorant, I hoped that I also seemed disinterested.
“I’m sure you’ve heard the song,” Conchita said, and she began to sing. “Come gather round people wherever you roam, and admit that the waters around you have grown and… I can’t remember the next part… something something something… if your time to you is worth saving.” To my surprise, she had a pretty voice, high and clear and unself-conscious.
“That does sound kind of familiar,” I said. It didn’t sound familiar at all.
“It’s sad to see what’s happened to Dylan, because he had such a powerful message back in the sixties,” Conchita said. “It wasn’t just music to make out to.”
Why, I wondered, would music to make out to be a bad thing?
“I have most of his stuff,” Conchita said. “If you want to, you can come by my room and listen.”
“Oh,” I said. Then, because I didn’t want to either accept or decline the invitation, I said, “Here,” as I flung the ball. It went far beyond her, and I added, “Sorry.”
She scurried after the ball, then sent it back. “We probably won’t have to go to the away games. I’ve heard that when it’s a big team, sometimes Ms. Barrett lets the people who aren’t that good stay on campus. No offense, of course.”
“I haven’t heard that,” I said.
“Maybe it’s just wishful thinking. But I could really use the time.”
To do what? I thought. I knew Conchita didn’t have a boyfriend-only about twelve people in our class of seventy-five ever dated, and they always went out with each other-and I didn’t think Conchita had many friends, either. The only person I could remember seeing her with was Martha Porter, a red-haired girl from my Latin class on whose last test the teacher had written across the top-I’d seen this because Martha and I sat side by side-Saluto, Martha! Another marvelous performance! On the same test, I had received a C minus and a note that read Lee, I am concerned. Please talk to me after class.
“Lacrosse was originally played by the Huron Indians,” Conchita said. “Did you know that?”
“Yes.”
“Really? You knew that already?”
The fib had slipped out spontaneously; when pressed, I found it difficult to lie on purpose. “Actually,” I said, “no.”
“It dates back to the 1400s. Makes you wonder how it became the favorite game of East Coast prep schools. You’re from Indiana, aren’t you?”
I wasn’t sure how she knew where I was from. In fact, I knew that she was from Texas, but I knew this only because, in addition to reading old yearbooks, I regularly perused the current school catalog, where everyone’s full names and hometowns were printed in the back: Aspeth Meriweather Montgomery, Greenwich, Connecticut. Cross Algeron Sugarman, New York, New York. Conchita Rosalinda Maxwell, Fort Worth, Texas. Or, for me, Lee Fiora, South Bend, Indiana. I did not have, among other things, a middle name.
“I bet people don’t play lacrosse in Indiana,” Conchita said. “But some of these girls”-she nodded toward our teammates-“have been playing since first grade.”
“Things are different on the East Coast.” I tried to sound noncommittal.
“That’s an understatement.” Conchita laughed. “When I got here, I thought I’d landed on another planet. One night the dining hall was serving Mexican food, and I was real excited, and then I show up and the salsa is, like, ketchup with onions in it.”
I actually remembered this night-not because of how the food had tasted, but because I had spilled that very salsa on my shirt and sat for the rest of dinner with a red stain just below my collarbone.
“My mom is Mexican,” Conchita said. “I’m spoiled by her cooking.”
This actually did interest me. “Is your dad Mexican, too?” I asked.
“No, he’s American. They met through work after my mom immigrated. And I have two half-sisters, but they’re way older. They’re, like, adults.”
For the first time, I caught the ball in my webbing.
“Nice job,” Conchita said. “So do you like it here?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“What do you like about it?”
“I think that’s a really weird question,” I said. “Do you not like it or something?”
Conchita appeared unruffled by my rudeness. “Hmm.” She set the tip of her stick against the grass, like a cane. “I can’t tell if we’ve decided to be honest. At first, I thought you and I were going to. I’d gotten the impression you weren’t the same as everyone else, but now I’m thinking I might’ve been wrong.” She seemed perhaps a little sad but still not angry, not at all-she was a lot slyer than I’d given her credit for.
“Since we’ve never met,” I said, “I don’t know how you could have any impression of me.”
“Please, Lee. You’re not going to act like we don’t all have ideas about each other, are you?”
The remark shocked me. Certainly, I had ideas about other people, but Conchita was the first person I’d encountered who seemed to have ideas about me. Besides, in spite of my zest for gathering information about other students, I would never have revealed what I’d learned to the people whom it concerned; I knew enough to know that if, say, over dinner you said to some guy you’d never spoken to before, Yeah, you have a sister who went to Ault, too, right? Alice? Who graduated in 1983? it would only creep him out. Not that I personally felt creeped out by Conchita’s research; mostly I felt curious. “Fine,” I said. “What are your ideas about me?”
She could have gamed me in this moment in the way that I was gaming her, but she didn’t. “I have a hard time believing you like it here,” she said. “That’s the first thing.” She hoisted her stick into the air again and shot the ball forward, and it thunked against the ground midway between us. “You’re always walking around with your head down. Or at roll call, you just study and don’t talk to people.”