Martha and I had reached the dining hall, and the entrance was mobbed. The possibility that I could be spring-cleaned-that I could have anything, even that, in common with Alfie Howards or Maisie Vilayphonh or Kara Johnson-was utterly foreign. It was an idea I found impossible to absorb here, among so many people; I needed to think about it alone.
“I’m not trying to freak you out,” Martha was saying. “But if that’s what Fletcher meant, you should know.”
“Yeah, of course.”
“But they can’t treat you like you’re a bad seed,” she said. “Because you’re so not.”
We’d crossed the threshold of the dining room, and it was time to split up and find our assigned tables. Martha was looking at me.
“Divide and conquer,” I said, because one of us always said this just before formal dinner. And it worked. Martha smiled, and I smiled, too, so our moods would seem the same. But I don’t think I fooled her. And already, that thing was happening where the scene before me pulled back, or maybe I was the one who shrank from it. It all became both huge and distant, something occurring far away-a blur of nicely dressed students making their way to tables covered by white cloths and silver serving plates with silver lids. Maybe several months from now, when I was enrolled at Marvin Thompson High School in South Bend, I’d be sitting on my bed one evening, doing homework, and this was the image I’d remember, the precise moment when I first knew I’d lost my place at Ault.
At the library, on my way to meet Aubrey, I saw Dede through the glass door of the periodicals room. Her head was bent to look at a magazine, and I wasn’t planning to stop, but then she looked up. Hey, she mouthed, and I waved. I made the mistake of holding her gaze, and she held up one finger, mouthed, Hold on, set the magazine on a table, and pushed open the door.
“Isn’t it crazy about Martha? I was completely shocked.” Her voice was upbeat and perfectly friendly.
“It’s not that shocking,” I said. “Martha would be a good prefect.”
“Well, sure, she’s ‘responsible.’ ” Dede made air quotes, implying I had no idea what-that actually Martha wasn’t responsible? That being responsible was hardly a qualification? “But it’s not like she has a chance,” Dede continued.
When Martha herself had said almost the same thing a few hours earlier, it had seemed only like the dreary truth; hearing Dede, the prediction sounded slanderous.
“You have no idea who’ll win,” I said.
Dede smiled a little tiny smile, and I felt like slapping her. Our antagonism had always contained a certain sisterly intimacy; once, during freshman year, when we’d been standing face-to-face arguing, Dede had reached out and actually pulled my hair, and the sheer immaturity of the gesture had made me burst out laughing. She’d said, almost shyly, “What? What?” but she’d started laughing, too, and then we hadn’t been able to continue fighting. Dede and I were each other’s opposites, I sometimes thought, and therefore uncomfortably similar-she faked enthusiasm, and I faked indifference; she glommed on to people like Aspeth Montgomery and Cross Sugarman, and I made a point of not speaking to them from one semester to the next.
“I’m sure you think Aspeth has it all wrapped up,” I said. “But, frankly, I’ll be surprised if she wins.” Don’t use the word bitch, I thought-that would be going too far. “She’s just-” I paused. “Basically, she’s a bitch.”
“Excuse me?” Dede said. “Am I in the twilight zone?”
“I didn’t say I think she’s a bitch,” I said. “Let’s not get into semantics.” When I was at Ault, I thought that chalking up a disagreement to semantics sounded very smart. “Dede, I’m not trying to be rude, but your Aspeth worship is getting kind of embarrassing.”
She glared at me. “You know what you are?” I could tell she was digging deep, searching for a particularly biting insult. “You’re exactly the same as you were when we were freshmen.”
Aubrey was waiting in the study room where we usually met; through a window, I could see him chewing on a plastic pen with his head tilted toward the ceiling. He wasn’t doing anything weird, but his posture was so clearly that of a person who believed himself to be alone that I felt embarrassed on his behalf. I knocked on the window before opening the door.
Aubrey removed the pen from his mouth and sat upright. “Lee,” he said, and he nodded once. At all times, Aubrey comported himself with absolute seriousness. This might have been the way he was raised, or it might have been compensation for the fact that, at the age of fourteen, he was five feet tall and perhaps ninety pounds. He had puffy brown hair and a tiny ski-jump nose across which lay a sprinkling of tiny freckles. He also had tiny hands and, on his ring fingers, peaked fingernails. Whenever I watched Aubrey write out equations, I’d wonder, when boys had their growth spurts, did they always grow proportionally, or was there a chance some part of the body-for instance, the hands-didn’t get the message and stayed as they were, vestiges of the smaller self? I was quite sure that Aubrey was smarter than I was, not just in math but in everything, and that he would eventually become, say, a stockbroker, and make enormous quantities of money.
After I’d sat in the chair next to him, while I was pulling out my notebook, math textbook, and calculator, I said, “How’s it going, Aubrey?”
“I’m well, thank you. I’d like to see your homework for tomorrow.”
I slid the notebook toward him-in pencil, I’d written, Page 408, chapter review, all problems.
Aubrey opened my textbook and read silently, nodding to himself. Then he turned to me. “Do you understand what they’re asking for in the first one?”
I scanned the problem. “Kind of.”
“Why don’t you start, and I’ll help if you run into trouble.”
I continued to look at page 408, or at least to face in the direction of page 408. That I was bad at math was not a secret-from the time I’d arrived at Ault, I’d been a year behind my classmates. Most freshmen took Geometry; I and four other students took remedial Algebra. And this year, in Precalculus, I was the only junior in a class of sophomores. But still, no one, Aubrey included, seemed to have realized just how tenuous my grasp on math was. And Precalculus had been the worst year yet-it was not an exaggeration to say that I understood virtually none of what we’d studied since late September. I had spaced out during the first week or two of classes and never recovered. Yes, the situation was largely my own fault, but the problem was, everything built on everything else; from two weeks into the semester, it had been too late. The pages of my textbook were like a map of Russia with all the towns and cities written in Cyrillic. It was not that I didn’t believe they made sense, just that I personally had no inkling of what they meant.
“Lee?” Aubrey said.
“Yeah, I’m not sure. I’m not exactly positive where I start here.” I looked up and then out the window in front of us. It was dark, so I was looking at my own reflection; if it had been light, I’d have had a clear view of the entrance to the infirmary. One Sunday afternoon in the winter, I’d watched Aspeth Montgomery approach the infirmary, hesitate before the door, then turn around without entering. This reversal had consumed me for the rest of my session with Aubrey.