“The stealing is weird, huh?” I said.
Little made a dismissive noise. “I bet she’s glad it happened. Now she gets to be the center of attention.”
“Who?”
“What do you mean who? Your roommate.”
“You know it was Dede’s money? I guess there aren’t any secrets in the dorm.”
Little was quiet for a few seconds. “There aren’t any secrets in the whole school,” she said.
I felt a flip of uneasiness in my stomach; I hoped she wasn’t right. We were standing outside her room, and it crossed my mind that she might invite me in.
“Do you like it here?” I asked. This was the problem with me-I didn’t know how to talk to people without asking them questions. Some people seemed to find me peculiar and some people were so happy to discuss themselves that they didn’t even notice, but either way, it made conversation draining. While the other person’s mouth moved, I’d try to think of the next thing to ask.
“There’s good parts about the school,” Little said. “But I’m telling you that everyone’s in each other’s business.”
“I like your name,” I said. “Is it your real name?”
“You can find that out yourself,” Little said. “Prove my theory.”
“Okay,” I said. “And then I’ll report back to you.”
She didn’t object; it was like permission to talk to her again, something to look forward to. Though, apparently, she would not be inviting me in-she had opened her door and was about to step inside.
“Don’t forget to hide your money,” I said.
“Yeah, really.” She shook her head. “Folks are messed up.”
All of this was still in the beginning of the year, the beginning of my time at Ault, when I was exhausted all the time by both my vigilance and my wish to be inconspicuous. At soccer practice, I worried that I would miss the ball, when we boarded the bus for games at other schools, I worried that I would take a seat by someone who didn’t want to sit next to me, in class I worried I would say a wrong or foolish thing. I worried that I took too much food at meals, or that I did not disdain the food you were supposed to disdain-Tater Tots, key lime pie-and at night, I worried that Dede or Sin-Jun would hear me snore. I always worried someone would notice me, and then when no one did, I felt lonely.
Ault had been my idea. I’d researched boarding schools at the public library and written away for catalogs myself. Their glossy pages showed photographs of teenagers in wool sweaters singing hymns in the chapel, gripping lacrosse sticks, intently regarding a math equation written across the chalkboard. I had traded away my family for this glossiness. I’d pretended it was about academics, but it never had been. Marvin Thompson High School, the school I would have attended in South Bend, had hallways of pale green linoleum and grimy lockers and stringy-haired boys who wrote the names of heavy metal bands across the backs of their denim jackets in black marker. But boarding school boys, at least the ones in the catalogs who held lacrosse sticks and grinned over their mouth guards, were so handsome. And they had to be smart, too, by virtue of the fact that they attended boarding school. I imagined that if I left South Bend, I would meet a melancholy, athletic boy who liked to read as much as I did and on overcast Sundays we would take walks together wearing wool sweaters.
During the application process, my parents were mystified. The only person my family knew who had gone to boarding school was the son of one of the insurance agents in the office where my mother was a bookkeeper, and this kid’s boarding school had been a fenced-in mountaintop in Colorado, a place for screwups. My parents suspected, in a way that was only honest, not unsupportive, that I would never be accepted to the places I’d applied; besides, they saw my interest in boarding school as comparable to other short-lived hobbies, like knitting (in sixth grade, I’d completed one third of a hat). When I got in, they explained how proud they were, and how sorry that they wouldn’t be able to pay for it. The day a letter arrived from Ault offering me the Eloise Fielding Foster scholarship, which would cover more than three quarters of my tuition, I cried because I knew for certain that I was leaving home, and abruptly, I did not know if it was such a good idea-I realized that I, like my parents, had never believed I’d actually go.
In mid-September, weeks after school had started in South Bend for my brothers and my former classmates, my father drove me from Indiana to Massachusetts. When we turned in the wrought-iron gates of the campus, I recognized the buildings from photographs-eight brick structures plus a Gothic chapel surrounding a circle of grass which I already knew was fifty yards in diameter and which I also knew you were not supposed to walk on. Everywhere there were cars with the trunks open, kids greeting each other, fathers carrying boxes. I was wearing a long dress with peach and lavender flowers and a lace collar, and I noticed immediately that most of the students had on faded T-shirts and loose khaki shorts and flip-flops. I realized then how much work Ault would be for me.
After we found my dorm, my father started talking to Dede’s father, who said, “South Bend, eh? I take it you teach at Notre Dame?” and my father cheerfully said, “No, sir, I’m in the mattress business.” I was embarrassed that my father called Dede’s father sir, embarrassed by his job, embarrassed by our rusty white Datsun. I wanted my father gone from campus as soon as possible, so I could try to miss him.
In the mornings, when I stood under the shower, I would think, I have been at Ault for twenty-four hours. I have been at Ault for three days. I have been at Ault for a month. I talked to myself as I imagined my mother would talk to me if she actually thought boarding school was a good idea: You’re doing great. I’m proud of you, LeeLee. Sometimes I would cry while I washed my hair, but this was the thing, this was always the thing about Ault-in some ways, my fantasies about it had not been wrong. The campus really was beautifuclass="underline" the low, distant, fuzzy mountains that turned blue in the evenings, the perfectly rectangular fields, the Gothic cathedral (it was only Yankee modesty that made them call it a chapel) with its stained glass windows. This beauty gave a tinge of nobility and glamour to even the most pedestrian kind of homesickness.
Several times, I recognized a student from a photograph in the catalog. It was disorienting, the way I imagined it might be to see a celebrity on the streets of New York or Los Angeles. These people moved and breathed, they ate bagels in the dining hall, carried books through the hallways, wore clothes other than the ones I’d memorized. They belonged to the real, physical world; previously, it had seemed as if they belonged to me.
In big letters across the top, the signs said, Drag yourself out of the dorm!!! In smaller letters, they said, Where? The dining hall! When? This Saturday! Why? To dance! The paper was red and featured a copied photograph of Mr. Byden, the headmaster, wearing a dress.
“It’s a drag dance,” I heard Dede explain to Sin-Jun one night. “You go in drag.”
“In drag,” Sin-Jun said.
“Girls dress as boys, and boys dress as girls,” I said.
“Ohhh,” Sin-Jun said. “Very good!”
“I’m borrowing a tie from Devin,” Dede said. “And a baseball cap.”
Good for you, I thought.
“Dev is so funny,” she said. Sometimes, just because I was there and because, unlike Sin-Jun, I was fluent in English, Dede told me things about her life. “Who are you borrowing clothes from?” she asked.
“I haven’t decided.” I wasn’t borrowing clothes from anyone because I wasn’t going. I could hardly talk to my classmates, and I definitely couldn’t dance. I had tried it once at a cousin’s wedding and I had not been able to stop thinking, Is this the part where I throw my arms in the air?