In the dorm, I climbed back in bed because the covers were protection, my own closed eyes were protection. Horizontal and cocooned, I could relax, I could even remember fragments of the night before and feel a tiny happiness again-his voice, his hand in my hair, how nothing had made him hesitate except (and then I cringed, thinking about it) when I’d said, Why? Why do you want to make me feel good? It was mainly that it needed to be dark again, I realized, the bright and unforgiving day had to pass: meals where you chewed food, computer screens, shoelaces, and all the small terrible conversations, even the ones you weren’t participating in and just had to listen to, waiting for them to be over. But in the night you could dispense with everything disagreeable or irrelevant. It was you and the other person, your warm skin, how good you could make each other feel. (Had I made Cross feel good? I could have tried harder, probably, except that I wouldn’t have been sure how.)
I was in bed when the bells rang for ten o’clock, and I still thought I would go to chapel, or at least I hadn’t decided against it, but then the bells rang for eleven o’clock, and I couldn’t pretend to be surprised. So I was skipping chapel-a first for me.
It was two in the afternoon before I got out of bed again, and that was mostly because I needed to pee. I ate a column of saltines, plucking them from their opaque wrapper, and opened my history textbook and sat on the futon, looking around the room and thinking of Cross. By five, Martha still wasn’t back, which meant I couldn’t go to dinner. In the common room, I put on water to boil, and I was standing next to the stove when Aspeth Montgomery walked through. She didn’t live in Elwyn’s, but she lived in the dorm next door, Yancey’s, and sometimes dropped by our dorm to visit another senior named Phoebe Ordway.
“Did Sug come to your room last night?” she said. I would not have been more surprised if she’d asked to borrow my sports bra.
“Did what?”
“When he said he was going to, it was like three in the morning. I was just like, first of all, have some manners. I’m sure they’re sound asleep. And besides that, Martha will freak out if you break visitation. I mean, great idea-maybe you can both get busted, and Mr. Byden can shit in his pants. Are you making ramen?”
“Cross was coming to see Martha?” I said uncertainly.
“Oh, so he didn’t? Good.” She started walking again. “Forget it then.”
Normally at this juncture in a conversation, I’d have given up, and especially with Aspeth, who made me feel awkward before I opened my mouth. But my interest was intense. “I don’t understand where you guys were at three in the morning,” I said.
“We were playing poker. A bunch of those guys came over, and Devin and Sug got smashed, of course, and Sug announces he’s going to meet with Martha. It’s like, do you think maybe you’re taking the prefect thing a little too seriously?”
But Cross had known that Martha was at Dartmouth, he’d been the one who’d brought it up. It was possible he’d forgotten and remembered only in the doorway, when he saw her empty bed. But I felt almost sure that he’d known all along. (I never asked him this. I had plenty of chances, and certainly I wanted to know, but I couldn’t ask because what I’d really have been asking was a bigger question, and I was always afraid that I already knew the answer. You only ever try to pin a person down because they are not yours, because you can’t.)
“Your water’s boiling,” Aspeth said, and by the time I’d moved the pot, she was walking up the stairs to the rooms. “Don’t get an MSG headache,” she called.
Of course Aspeth knew how to play poker-probably five girls on campus did, and it was utterly unsurprising that she was one of them. She was probably good, too, she probably beat the boys and laughed her Aspeth laugh as she took their money. And the worst part was that if I were a boy, Aspeth was the kind of pretty, bitchy, unattainable girl I myself would like; certainly I wouldn’t find a so-so girl and then stare hard inside her to see all the ways she was worthwhile.
The wrongness of what had happened between Cross and me-I could feel it now. Not a moral wrongness, but a screwup, a thing that needed explanation: a bird in the grocery store, a toilet that won’t stop running, that moment when your friend has come to pick you up and you open the door and realize it’s not your friend’s car at all; the person driving is a stranger, and now you must apologize.
My meeting with Mrs. Stanchak was the last period of the day. I had met with her before-at Ault, college counseling started in the spring of your junior year-but this was supposed to be a definitive meeting, the one at which I presented her with the list of colleges where I was applying.
When I was seated in the chair beside her desk, she opened a manila folder, pulled her glasses down on her nose-the lenses were rectangular, with blue plastic frames, and they were attached to a chain around her neck-and peered at the top piece of paper. Still looking down, she said, “How’s this year going for you, Lee? Off to a good start?”
“Pretty good.”
“How’s math?”
“I have a B minus right now.”
“No kidding?” She looked up and smiled. “That’s fantastic. You’re still meeting with Aubrey?”
I nodded.
Mrs. Stanchak was in her early sixties, married to Dr. Stanchak, who was head of the classics department. She had the kind of hair I wanted when I was her age-it was about three inches long, almost white, and fanned off her head as if she’d been riding in a convertible, though it appeared she used no gel. She was a little plump, and her face was deeply lined and tan, even in the winter. During vacations, she and Dr. Stanchak traveled to places like China or the Galápagos Islands. They’d had three sons go through Ault-the youngest had graduated at least ten years before-and in the pictures I’d seen, the sons were all fair-haired and incredibly handsome. I liked Mrs. Stanchak, in fact there was something about her I liked quite a bit, but whenever I was in her office, I thought almost continuously, even during the times I myself was speaking, of how people always said that she was who you got assigned to if Ault wasn’t planning to get behind your college application. The other counselor, Mr. Hessard, was in his forties, a tall, sardonic English teacher-Mrs. Stanchak didn’t teach any classes and worked only part-time as a counselor-and he himself had gone to Harvard, while Mrs. Stanchak had gone to the College of Charleston in South Carolina, which was not a place Ault ever sent anyone. (You knew where all the faculty had graduated from, and what degrees they’d received, because it was listed in the school catalog.) Apparently, the talk about Mr. Hessard versus Mrs. Stanchak circulated every spring, just before juniors found out which counselors they’d been assigned to, and every spring, the other teachers tried to squelch it; in history class, when Dean Fletcher heard people discussing it, he said, “Not that bullcrap again,” and Aspeth, who was in the class, said, “Fletchy, I’m shocked by your language.”
But then, when we got divided, Martha got Mr. Hessard, as did Cross, as did Jonathan Trenga, as did pretty much all the other kids in our class who seemed either smart or adored. The only remotely smart person who got Mrs. Stanchak was Sin-Jun, but I wasn’t sure Ault cared where Sin-Jun went to college just as long as she didn’t try to off herself again before graduation. The weird part of the assignments was that it actually surprised me not to get Mr. Hessard. Sure, I believed the worst of myself but-not really. I was always waiting to be proven wrong.
Mrs. Stanchak jotted something down before turning to me. “Let’s have a look at your list.”
I passed it to her, and she scanned it. She didn’t make any affirming noises as she read.