I was one of the last to leave the classroom and when I got into the hall, Darden and Aspeth and Dede were walking a few feet in front of me. I slowed down, letting the space between us widen. They all laughed as they disappeared into the stairwell, and I waited for the door to shut all the way behind them before I opened it again.
I was standing in front of the stove in my pajamas, heating up chicken noodle soup, when Tullis Haskell appeared in the common room. It was a little after nine on Saturday night, and everyone else in the dorm-just about everyone else on campus, in fact-was at the first dance of the school year. While Martha had been getting dressed, fastening her bracelet, applying lip gloss, I’d sat at my desk talking to her. The fact that she hadn’t tried to convince me to go had made me feel a tiny drop of disappointment but mostly a great flood of relief, a sense that finally at Ault I’d made a friend who understood me. After Martha had left, I’d listened as the sounds of the dorm-running water and radios and other girls’ voices-became quieter, then stopped entirely. Then I’d changed into the bottoms of my pale blue cotton pajamas and an old T-shirt, gone downstairs to the common room, flicked on the TV, and dumped the contents of the soup can into a pan. It wasn’t bad to spend a Saturday night by myself. Really, it was all a matter of expectations, and in my second year at Ault, I knew not to expect much. As a freshman, I had at times believed that if my sadness were intense enough, it would magnetically draw a handsome boy to my room to comfort me, and that had served as an incentive, when alone, to lie around and weep. But nothing had ever come of my exertions, and I’d finally realized that time passed faster if you were doing something, like watching TV or reading a magazine. Besides, my nebulous wish for a boy had narrowed to a specific wish for Cross Sugarman, and he would be at the dance, and if I writhed and wailed and chanted his name, he’d still be at the dance.
I was stirring the broth when I heard a male voice say, “Hey there,” and when I turned, Tullis was standing in the entrance to the common room.
“Hi,” I said. Tullis was a senior who, at the talent show the previous winter, had played “Fire and Rain” on the guitar. Sitting in the audience (I had attended the talent show because I could observe it passively, watching other people act enthusiastic without having, as at a dance or a pep rally, to muster any enthusiasm of my own), I had experienced an evolution of powerful feelings toward this boy-Tullis-whom I had never previously noticed. First, he set a stool onstage, disappeared, and reemerged carrying his guitar, which hung from a blue and yellow strap. As he crossed the stage, a guy called out, “Serenade me, Haskell,” and Tullis didn’t react at all. (His face was serious and slightly vulnerable, as if he had recently awakened from a nap; he had thoughtful features and a ponytail, unusual for an Ault boy, that was about six inches long.) Watching him onstage, I wondered if he was liked or disliked by his classmates, and, as I wondered, I felt the affinity for him that I felt for all undeserving outcasts-not for the flat-out definitively awkward or ugly kids (of whom, at Ault, there were few) but for the people who, it seemed to me, could have been either popular or unpopular and who ended up-by choice? Could choice have played a role?-on the periphery. Tullis sat down and strummed the guitar a few times and, without saying anything, began to play. I recognized the song before he started singing, and the feeling of affinity I’d had swelled into something else, something further from sympathy and closer to affection. He understood sadness, clearly, because who could choose to perform “Fire and Rain” without understanding sadness? I tried to decide if he was cute, and as he kept playing, I thought, Maybe he is, and a little later, I thought, He definitely is. By the second verse, I was picturing how something might happen between us, how someday soon we’d pass in the mail room and I’d shyly compliment him on his performance (a performance that was, as I imagined this scenario, less than half-finished), and he’d shyly thank me, and we’d start to talk and soon, inevitably, we’d be a couple. It would just happen, and then we’d always have each other and the rest of Ault would seem distant: We’d sit together in chapel and make out in the music wing at night and I’d go to his family’s house for Thanksgiving-I had a dim idea that he was from Maine-and following the late afternoon meal, we’d go for a walk on a rocky beach overlooking the water, I’d be wearing his dead grandfather’s hunting jacket, and we’d hold hands as he told me for the first time that he loved me. Onstage, Tullis kept his eyes downcast, and when he got to the line, “Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground,” he looked up solemnly and I could feel a shift in the audience. I glanced first to one side and then to the other, and I saw that all the girls in my row, and in the other rows that I could see, were rapt. I began to panic. If we were both loners, that was one thing, but if there was a whole herd of girls vying for his attention, it was hopeless. What overture could I make that would distinguish me without seeming freakish? I couldn’t; it was impossible. The song ended, and when the auditorium erupted, the pitch of the eruption was distinctly feminine. Tullis stood and bowed his head once, and then, as the cheering continued, waved and walked offstage. In front of me, Evie Landers turned to Katherine Pound and said, “I never realized that Tullis is hot.” No! I thought. No! Then, abruptly, I thought, Fine. Fine, Tullis. Go out with another girl instead of with me. I could take care of you, I could make you happy, but if you don’t believe that, then I can’t convince you. At curfew that night, people were still talking about him, and someone said, “Isabel is so lucky,” and I remembered suddenly, just as I’d remembered that Tullis was from Maine, that Tullis was going out with a short, pretty girl named Isabel Burten. By then, though only a few hours had passed, my own welling of emotions seemed ridiculous. It was as if I’d seen a stranger in an airport and embraced him, mistaking him for a relative-Tullis was no one I ever could have loved or been loved back by; for God’s sake, we’d never even talked! And oddly enough, early the next week, I did pass him in the mail room, at a time when it was quiet, when I could have said something about his performance without feeling self-conscious, but instead I said, and I felt, nothing at all.
Seeing him in the common room seven months later, I also felt nothing, or almost nothing-I did wish that I were wearing a bra. And I was glad that I was making chicken noodle soup, which was innocuous. I had the idea that the more meaty or spicy a food was, the more incriminating to a girl-a steak-and-cheese hoagie with onions, for instance, which I could but never would have purchased from Raymond’s House of Pizza on Sunday afternoon when someone in the dorm organized an order, would be downright mortifying.
“Do you know how to cut hair?” Tullis asked.
“What?”
“Hair,” Tullis said. He held his index and middle fingers sideways and moved them in front of his body, making them open and close.
I stared at him. I had imagined that he would ask me to try to find someone upstairs and, though I was pretty sure the dorm was empty, I’d been prepared to go and check, just to be polite. “Your hair?” I asked. “Or someone else’s?”
“Mine. I’m just kind of”-he shrugged, then reached back and pulled once on his ponytail-“sick of it.”
I considered my experience: In kindergarten, I had cut a doll’s hair and found it deeply satisfying to do so, even though the doll had looked terrible and my mother had been displeased. Also, at the age of nine, when my mother had refused to let the woman at Easy Cuts give me layers on the grounds that they were too grown-up, I had, upon arriving home, snuck into the bathroom and given them to myself. This also had not looked particularly attractive. But to cut Tullis’s hair-the weirdness of the situation appealed to me. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll cut your hair.”