“Okay.” She turned her wrist to look at her watch, then set the exam back on the desk. “You’re not turning it in like this.”
“I’m not?”
“Jesus Christ, Lee, what’s wrong with you? Do you not understand what’s at stake here? First of all, sit up.”
Obediently, I sat.
“Wipe your mouth,” she said. When I did, crumbs came away on my hand.
She picked up the exam again. “Come over here,” she said, and when I was standing in front of her, she pointed to the desk chair. When I was seated, she set the exam in front of me, open to the second page. “You know some of this, right? Here, where it asks you to write the equation-you know how to do that, don’t you?”
I blinked.
“It’s like, you see that directrix y equals two-Lee?”
I looked up at her.
“What’s going on?” she said.
“I can’t do these.” My voice was a little flat but not wobbly, definitely not tearful.
“But you did the first problem.”
“Look at it, Martha. That’s not precalculus. It’s algebra.”
“So you’re giving up? You’re just going to turn in all these pages blank?”
“There’s no point in doing more.”
“What about partial credit?”
“I don’t think you understand,” I said. “I don’t know how to answer these problems. I could write stuff, but it would be gobbledygook.”
“I don’t believe this.”
Based on her tone, I wasn’t sure if she literally didn’t believe it or if she just meant that she was disgusted.
“Move over,” she said, and I had never heard her sound more irritated.
I shifted so I was sitting on only half the chair, and she sat on the other half. She picked up a piece of loose-leaf paper set on top of my dictionary, saw that it had writing on one side, and turned it over. (The writing was a list of vocabulary words for Spanish, a study sheet I was planning to use, but I didn’t dare protest.)
“Give me your calculator,” she said.
She started with the second problem, writing out the equation in pencil on the loose-leaf paper. Briefly, I thought that she could not be doing what she appeared to be doing. But she was. It soon became clear-she definitely was.
“I’m not sure this is a good-” I began, and she said, “Don’t talk to me. We have less than half an hour.”
When she’d gone on to the third problem, she said, “Start copying. And get me more paper.”
I opened the desk drawer-because of the way we were sitting, we both had to lean back-and pulled out a spiral notebook. After I’d passed it to her, I said, “But won’t it look suspicious if too many are right?”
“You’ll get a C or a C minus. There’s no way I can finish the whole thing, and anyway, I’m putting in some mistakes.”
After that, we didn’t speak. There was only the sound of our pencils, and once, after she’d messed up on something, Martha saying “Fuck” before she started erasing. She was the one who kept checking her watch, and it was less than five of noon when she said, “You need to take it over.” She’d gotten to the top of the sixth page.
I stood, clutching the exam, and when I reached the door, I couldn’t help glancing back. “Martha-”
“Just go,” she said, and she was looking at the wall in front of my desk. “Turn it in.”
When I returned to the dorm, Martha had gone to lunch, and she stayed away from the room for the rest of the afternoon, until after dinner. When she finally came back, I stood as she entered and said, “Martha, thank you so much.”
She held up her hand and shook her head. “I can’t, Lee. I’m sorry, but I just can’t.”
I was quiet. “Okay, then,” I said, “well, it’s really great that you’re senior prefect. I’m so proud to have such an accomplished roommate.” The oddest part was that by that point in the day, it was true. The morning, when I’d bolted from roll call, seemed like months ago; by the afternoon, the idea of Martha as senior prefect had already become ordinary.
“Thanks.” Martha seemed extremely tired. For the last several hours, during her absence, I’d had visions of her celebrating her victory, possibly with Cross-turning cartwheels, or being sprinkled with confetti. These possibilities now seemed highly unlikely.
“You don’t seem that excited,” I said.
“It’s kind of been a long day.”
We looked at each other. It was very hard not to thank her again, or to apologize.
“I think you’ll be a really good prefect,” I said. “You’ll be fair.”
Then Martha’s face crumpled, and she started crying. She lifted one hand to her eyebrows as if she were shielding her face from the sun, except that her head was bent toward the floor.
“Martha?”
She shook her head.
I crossed the room and set my palm on her back. What could I say, what else could I do? We just had to wait it out, to let more time elapse from the moment of Martha writing the answers to my exam. Because, I could see, that’s what this day was to her-not the day she’d been elected senior prefect but the day she’d cheated. And I don’t even think it was the fact that she had so much to lose, though she did: If we were caught, she wouldn’t be senior prefect, of course, but that would be because she’d be expelled; we both would. And how titillating it would seem, given that Martha was also a member of the disciplinary committee. But fear of the consequences, I was fairly sure, wasn’t the reason she was crying.
It turned out Martha had won the election, as they say, by a landslide. It had been close with the guy nominees but not close at all among the girls. I didn’t know what this meant-that Martha was cool after all? That coolness had turned out to matter less than I’d believed? After we graduated, the letters of her name were carved into the marble in the dining hall, then painted gold.
I’m also not sure what it means that I felt no guilt at all toward Ault as an institution, or toward anyone specific-not Ms. Prosek, certainly not Dean Fletcher-except for Martha herself. The next day on the way out of chapel, someone tapped my shoulder. When I turned, Ms. Prosek whispered, with an enormous smile on her face, “Seventy-two.” I just nodded, feigning neither surprise nor pleasure. I could feel in that moment how she would forgive me, how now that I’d passed, things between us could go back to the way they’d been before. But what was the point, after the precariousness of our bond had been revealed? It was one thing for a person who didn’t really know me to act distant, but it was quite another for someone to get to know me and then to back away. And besides, I wasn’t sure I still respected her. It seemed like she could have stood up for me more forcefully, or talked to me more directly, but she had acted in the Ault way, all avoidance and decorum. And maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised-after all, during those afternoons at her apartment, I, not Ms. Prosek, had been the outspoken one. The next fall, I requested a sixty-two-year-old physics teacher named Mr. Tithrow as my adviser.
Aubrey-poor Aubrey with his priggish, infinite patience-continued to tutor me through Calculus, and my math grade never dropped below a C senior year. Also that year, Aubrey did not grow. He did grow later-after I was in college, when I was a sophomore and he was a senior at Ault, I received a copy of the alumni quarterly that included a photograph of him with other members of the lacrosse team, and he looked to be at least six feet. He was handsome, though his features contained no trace of their earlier delicacy; it was as if a man had burst from inside his boyish self, complete with stubble.
His handsomeness seemed to me ironic because of something else, something that happened the day I graduated from Ault. After the graduation ceremony, all the faculty and then, adjacent to them, all the seniors lined up on the circle. And then all the other grades got in an opposite line, like two teams shaking hands after a game, except with twenty times as many people. In this way, every senior said good-bye to every non-senior, no matter how well or not well you’d known each other; after the juniors had passed by the seniors, the faculty went, too. The whole process took several hours, and there was much hugging and crying. When Aubrey got to me, I wrapped my arms around him-I was still considerably larger than he was-and thanked him profusely; the bizarre fact of finally graduating had made me hyper. He nodded solemnly, said, “I’ll miss meeting with you, Lee,” and, passing me a sealed envelope, added, “Read this later.” Because I wasn’t curious about what it said, and because I was distracted, I didn’t read it for several days. What it was was a card-another card-with a black cap and gown on the cover, and the words Congratulations, graduate! inside. Underneath, Aubrey had written I would like to express that I have very strong feelings of love for you. I do not expect anything to happen and you don’t have to write back, but I wanted to say it. Good luck with your life. You are extremely attractive. It was the nicest card I ever got, and I never responded. For a while, I meant to, only I had no idea what words a girl whom a boy had an unrequited crush on would use in a letter to that boy. But I kept the card; I have it still.