For no particular reason, my back hurt, and I also was thirsty; I definitely wasn’t in the mood to work on an essay. I shut the file and folder and put the screen to sleep; after dinner, possibly, I’d feel more inspired.
The only other seniors in the dining hall were Edmundo Saldana and Sin-Jun, and they were sitting at a table with a couple of juniors-three black boys (there were four black boys in the whole junior class) and Nicky Gary, a pale girl with strawberry blond hair who was rumored to be a born-again Christian, but the weirdest part was that her parents weren’t even born-again; just she was, on her own. The boys were Niro Williams, Derek Miles, and Patrick Shaley. At other tables, there were slightly larger representations of sophomores and freshmen, and at a fourth table were the few teachers on campus for the weekend.
What surprised me as I looked around, what I had forgotten since freshman year, was how Ault on long weekend wasn’t really Ault-it wasn’t full and hurried, there weren’t people I felt fascinated by and felt self-conscious in front of. Instead, it was cleared-out buildings. There was nothing that would surprise or entertain you over the next few days. (I used to fear, and I wasn’t completely wrong, that this was what the rest of the world was like. Hardly ever did it matter if you brushed your hair before driving to the grocery store, rarely did you work in an office where you cared what more than two or three people thought of you. At Ault, caring about everything was draining, but it was also exhilarating.)
When I sat down, Niro and Patrick were talking animatedly about a video game, and no one else was talking about anything. Sin-Jun and I spoke briefly-she also was working on applications and had just decided to apply early to Stanford-but our conversation petered out quickly, and a few minutes later, before I was finished eating, she stood to leave. Sitting there with Edmundo and Nicky and the junior boys, I thought that I definitely should have gone to Burlington with Martha. I felt an old, unpleasant sensation of not mattering to anyone present, and it seemed difficult to believe the feeling could return so abruptly, though I couldn’t have said where it was returning from. And then I realized how much my idea of myself had changed. Probably it had changed slowly, starting with Martha becoming my friend in the spring of ninth grade, and perhaps it hadn’t changed again significantly until the previous May when she got elected prefect and I became the prefect’s roommate. And it had shifted once more over the last few weeks, after I first kissed Cross. I felt-not cool, it was hard to imagine I’d ever feel cool, but I felt like a person I myself would have been intrigued by as a freshman or sophomore. Meaning, maybe, that a current freshman or sophomore could be intrigued by me. Except that I had never seen any evidence for such a possibility, and furthermore, intriguing people didn’t stay at school for long weekend; at the very least, they went to Boston.
And then there was the fact that no one knew Cross and I were fooling around. Or officially they didn’t, but I also became aware in this moment how much I’d been counting on the secret getting out, because at Ault, secrets always did. Cross’s roommate Devin had to know, or maybe a girl in my dorm had been walking down the hall to the bathroom at just the moment, around quarter of five in the morning, when Cross was leaving. (Cross had to be the one who leaked the information; I couldn’t.) It wasn’t that I’d been disingenuous when I’d asked Cross not to discuss what was happening. It was just that I’d assumed people would learn of the basic facts without explicit discussion.
The possibility existed that Niro and Patrick and Edmundo didn’t care, of course, but it seemed likelier they didn’t know. Because surely if they knew, they’d somehow show it, surely they would at least look at me for a beat longer when I sat down. After the first time Cross had come over, it had felt so uncertain, and I had imagined that if people caught wind of it, all they’d think was, Her? But it was lasting, it had become something Cross was choosing rather than something arbitrary. And this knowledge did not change the way I acted, but certainly it affected the place in the social order where I saw myself; now my regular behavior felt gracious and charming. I could have let Cross’s interest in me go to my head, but look-I was as humble as ever. I didn’t suddenly sit next to Aspeth Montgomery in chapel, or expect to be invited to Greenwich with her.
“Can you pass the ketchup?” Derek Miles asked.
I blinked at him.
“It’s right there,” he said.
I handed him the bottle. He had no idea. It definitely wasn’t schoolwide news, so the only remaining question was whether it was news at any level-senior news, news among Cross’s circle of friends. Did Aspeth Montgomery know? If she didn’t, nobody did. And, no, I thought, she didn’t. She didn’t because if she did, she’d tell Dede, and if Dede knew, she’d confront me; she wouldn’t be able to stop herself.
When I walked back to the dorm, the only light was the one I’d left on in my room. I slept twelve hours that night and did the same for the next two nights, waiting for Cross to come back. On Sunday, Mrs. Parnasset drove a van to the Westmoor mall and left us there for the afternoon. Sin-Jun and I went to a movie about a suburban family whose young son died, and everything about the movie reminded me of Cross, or, more accurately, made me think of him and then keep thinking of things about him that had nothing to do with the movie at all. Sunday dinner was cold cuts; the temperature that night fell below freezing for the first time since the previous winter. Then it was Monday again; Cross, and everyone else, returned to school.
We had sex a few days later because it was inevitable, because now that he was back on campus, I wanted everything and all of him, because I loved him, because I was afraid of losing him, because it felt good or at least because everything up to that point had felt good and it was what came next. The reality, of course, was that the pain made me clutch his arms just below the elbows and arch my head until the crown of it was pressed against the mattress. I was surprised he didn’t offer to stop, but maybe it was good because if he had, I’d have accepted the offer, and I’d just have been postponing the pain. He had brought a condom, and afterward, he went into the bathroom and got wet paper towels to wipe the blood off my thighs. The paper towels were warm, and I thought how at the sinks in Elwyn’s, the hot water always took so long to come out and how he must have waited for it.
Both of us were sweaty and then, as we lay there, clammy; Hillary’s sleeping bag was plaid cotton, not one of those nylon ones that’s supposed to wick away moisture. But our clamminess didn’t really matter, or my belly against his hip-things that I might once have been self-conscious about, I no longer was. At least in the dark, there wasn’t much I felt like I was hiding from him anymore. It was as if for my entire time at Ault up to this moment I’d been in a frenzy, a storm of worry, and now it was all finished and I felt only a profound calm; it was hard to believe the sensation would not be permanent. Actual sex wasn’t as different from more casual fooling around as I’d imagined, but it wasn’t exactly the same, either-afterward, you felt like something had finished instead of just tapering off. And now with every reference in magazines or movies or conversations, I could nod, or at least, when listening to other people, I wouldn’t have to avert my eyes lest they look into them and see that I didn’t really understand. I could disagree, even if I never did so aloud.
He stroked my hair, and there was nothing I wanted to say or wanted him to say; there was nothing I wanted except for this. The soreness made me unsure how soon I’d be able to have sex again, but it wasn’t a bad soreness. It was like after hiking, because of a thing you were glad to have done. Two days later, I picked up my first packet of birth control pills from the infirmary, which made me feel so unlike myself that I would not have been surprised, when I looked in the mirror, to see a forty-year-old divorced mother of two, a cowgirl, an aerobics instructor on a cruise ship in the Caribbean. The real part was being in bed with Cross.