“Most of you guys, though, you’re not too bad,” Dave continued. “Lynn used to work at the school, too.”
“Really?” I said. “When did you-?” I’d turned around to look at her, and I saw that she, like Kaley, was asleep.
Dave glanced back, too. “She’s worn out,” he said. “It’s hard for her with Kaley. But, yeah, Lynn’s the one who got me the job. Put in a good word for me. I’ll probably work there another year or two, at least till I graduate.”
“Wait, are you in high school or college?”
“Oh, man, that’s insulting. That’s brutal.”
“Does that mean college?”
“I look like I’m fifteen, huh?”
“No.” It required effort to say what I said next, because it was acknowledging something I was uncomfortable acknowledging (I have been looking at you, I have been paying attention, you also are a specific person to me); it made me complicit. “You don’t look fifteen,” I said softly.
“How old do I look?”
I hesitated. “Twenty?”
“Twenty-one. But yeah, I’m at East Rock State, over in Rivertown.”
I nodded as if I’d heard of it.
“I’m thinking of doing a business major so I can keep my options open. And then probably College of Fairfield. That’s what I’m thinking.”
“For graduate school?”
“For my B.A. I get my associate’s at East Rock, then I transfer the credits.”
“Okay, of course.” It was not that I was unfamiliar with community college-that’s what my cousins attended-more that I wasn’t accustomed to it in the context of Ault.
“Where are you gonna go?” he said. “Harvard?”
“Yeah, right.”
“I bet you’re smart. Get all As.”
“I’ll probably go somewhere like-” I stopped. When Martha or I thought we’d done badly on a test, we’d say, I might as well just apply right now to UMass, but invoking UMass as a last resort would, clearly, be a bad idea. “-to dog school,” I said brightly.
“What?” Dave looked across the seat at me.
“Like obedience school,” I said.
“You have a dog?”
“No, no, I’m the dog.”
He looked at me again, and it was a look I always remembered, long after that night and after I’d left Ault. He was confused and was registering a new piece of information and this was what it was: that I was a girl who would, even in jest, utter the sentence, I’m the dog. It was a good lesson for me. It was a while before I stopped insulting myself so promiscuously, and I never stopped completely, but still-it was a good lesson.
In that moment, all he said was, “You’re the dog, huh?”
And then, because I knew I’d made a mistake and wanted us to leave the place where I’d made it, I said, “I wouldn’t say this if your sister was awake, but I don’t think it’s hot air coming out of the vents.”
He stuck one palm up. “That’s not hot?”
“Feel one of these.”
With his left hand still on the steering wheel, he leaned over; when he held his hand in front of the vent in my corner, his arm crossed over my lap, and his head was only a few inches from mine. I easily could have touched his hair.
He said, “Shit,” and sat upright again. (I had not worried, as he’d leaned over, that the car would swerve; he seemed utterly competent, not high-strung enough to have an accident. Or if he did, he’d be calm afterward, he wouldn’t be either angry or panicked.) As he twisted the knobs, he said, “At least I know whose side you’re on. Protecting me from Lynn, huh?”
“I guess so.”
“You’re probably real cold. Are you cold?”
“I’m okay.”
“You want to-” He hesitated for a fraction of a second, then nodded his head toward the seat between us. “You can wear my gloves there.”
“Oh-” My impulse, as always, was to politely decline, but he picked one up and passed it to me. It was huge and puffy and made of nylon, a glove to chop wood in during a snowstorm. I put it on.
“See,” Dave said. “It’s warm, right?”
But the weird intimacy of wearing his glove was constricting me. I could barely talk, certainly I couldn’t talk about the fact that I was wearing his glove, and I couldn’t bring myself to put on the other one.
“They’re waterproof,” he said, and, in my desperation to change the subject, I blurted out, “Do you think it’s strange for people to go to boarding school?”
“I guess it depends,” he said. “Leaving home when you’re that young-I could barely dress myself when I started high school.”
“Some of the guys in my class can still barely dress themselves,” I said, but when Dave laughed-he laughed hard-I thought of my classmates, most of whom dressed themselves just fine, most of whose wardrobes, in fact, I had memorized for no other reason than that I saw all of them all the time. At Ault, I always felt like I didn’t really know the boys in my class, but thinking of them from inside Dave Bardo’s car, they seemed as familiar as my brothers.
We’d passed through town and were descending the hill just before campus; through the windshield, I saw the dark outline of the chapel’s bell tower. It seemed like we ought to discuss which entrance he’d use and where he’d let me off, but I felt reluctant to raise the subject, just as I’d been reluctant to talk about wearing his glove; it would call too much attention to exactly what was going on.
He turned in to the south gate and made a right into the dining hall parking lot. He even pulled into a parking space before saying, “Oh, wait, where’s the dorm? I’ll take you to the dorm.”
“This is fine,” I said. “Thanks so much.” I was already holding the door handle.
“You sure?”
“I’m positive. Thanks.” I got out of the car. “Bye. Thank you.”
He smiled. “You’re very polite.”
It would be disingenuous to pretend that it was only as I walked across campus, only after it was too late to turn back, that I realized I was still wearing his glove.
Mrs. Morino approached me as roll call was ending and said, “I’m so sorry about the other night.” I already knew from Mrs. Elwyn, my own dorm head, that they hadn’t forgotten me-Mrs. Morino had gotten the impression from Clara that I, too, wanted to stay overnight, so she hadn’t returned to the hospital until after eleven.
“It’s all right,” I said. “How’s Sin-Jun?”
“Much more like her old self. I’m actually hoping you’ll go this afternoon and help her dad bring her back to the infirmary.”
Who would watch her to make sure she didn’t try again? I wondered. A nurse?
“We don’t know if she’ll stay at Ault,” Mrs. Morino said. “Mr. Byden and her parents and I are talking with her, but in the meantime, it would be great if you could swing by her room and pack a bag for her so she has some things.”
“Wouldn’t Clara know what stuff she’d want?”
Mrs. Morino sighed. “I take it that you don’t know Clara and Sin-Jun aren’t getting along.”
This did not particularly surprise me. Freshman year, when Clara also had lived in Broussard’s, I’d tried to steer clear of her from the beginning. And it hadn’t been because she was someone who obviously would never be popular, or at least it hadn’t been only because of that; it also had been because she irritated me. She was pale, with dark blond chin-length hair, a middle part, and heavy bangs. She was big, especially in the breasts and thighs, and she favored tapered, bleached jeans and long dumpy skirts. In her demeanor, there was something spacey and innocent, something slow and not discontented, and it was these qualities that I found so irritating. But I doubted most people agreed; she was the type about whom most people would say, She wouldn’t hurt a fly. My real frustration with Clara, I think, was that it seemed like she should be insecure but wasn’t.
At curfew, if you ended up sitting next to her, she’d start talking as if you’d been carrying on a conversation before and had been interrupted or as if you’d just asked her a question. She’d do this with anyone-me, Aspeth, Amy Dennaker, even Madame Broussard. The defining aspect of Clara’s stories was that she did not provide context and that you did not, for fear of encouraging her, ask for it. She might, for instance, recount some incident from class: “I didn’t even know the quiz was today. I said to Shelly, ‘Did he tell us there would be a quiz?’ and she said no. And in the beginning of the year, I clearly remember him saying, ‘I don’t give pop quizzes…’ ” As she continued, I’d be thinking, Shelly? Who’s Shelly? Does anyone named Shelly go to Ault?