Gina Marquez, a boisterous junior, cried, “Hear, hear!” and started clapping, and almost everyone else clapped, too. My face was burning, and tremors of anxiety shot through my chest. I glanced at Martha, who was not applauding and not smiling. But she also was not looking at me, her eyes were not wide with sympathy. Martha was the kind of person who would never leave her underwear around, whereas I was the kind of person who thought I wouldn’t but actually would. The fire drill, Martha’s posture seemed to say, was no excuse.
“Was it a G-string?” Gina called, and Mrs. Elwyn said, “Settle down, ladies.”
It wasn’t a G-string. The underwear were white with moons and stars; the moons were blue slivers, and the stars were small and yellow.
I had decided well ahead of time that I wouldn’t, on the eve of Valentine’s Day, stay up late and go digging through the bucket of flowers. I’d just go to sleep and in the morning, whatever would be there would be there. After all, it was especially unseemly for a senior to show eagerness.
I had sent pink carnations to Martha, Sin-Jun, and, in the end, also to Cross. I couldn’t take the risk of sending him a white carnation or a rose, but I also couldn’t bear to send him nothing. On the card, I wrote, Cross, Happy Valentine’s Day! Love, Lee. Surely this would release the pressure of my longing a little.
And then at three o’clock in the morning, I awakened for the fourth time, amidst swirling repetitive dreams about the flowers-that he had sent me none, that he had sent me some but I had not been able to find water to put them in, that he had sent a dozen roses to Aspeth and each of them had been grotesquely huge, an eight-foot bouquet. I went to the bathroom and when I was washing my hands afterward, looking at myself in the mirror above the sinks, I knew what I would do, what I’d been planning to do all along.
The common room was light-its lights, like the hall lights, always stayed on through the night-but silent. There were two plastic buckets, and the sight of them made my heart lurch; how unsettling it was for the question I had wondered about for so long to actually be answered. My fingers trembled as I approached, and I looked around the common room, just to make sure no one was lurking. When I was standing with the buckets in front of me, I reached for one flower, then another and another. I was handling them gently at first, planning to leave no evidence of my search, but soon I was shoving through them, pushing aside the ones with someone else’s name on the front of the note. Which had been, so far, all of them. By the time I found the first with my name, my search had taken on the quality of a binge. And that note was only from Martha-the note was around a rose-but I didn’t bother to open it because I recognized her handwriting. In the whole rest of the first bucket, there was nothing for me.
I moved on to the next one, which contained about half as many flowers; this time, I checked the roses first. And then I saw one with my name, the letters all in caps, in blue ink, and I felt a crazed glee, a balloon of exhilaration. I was ripping it open, and it was taking way too long-it must have taken less than a single second-and I was thrilled and hot and shaking with gratitude, thinking Finally, finally, finally, and these feelings spilled over into the point of recognizing that the flower was not from Cross but from Aubrey-from Aubrey? Aubrey?–and so at the same time, the traces of my earlier happiness were making me think, Maybe Cross is my boyfriend now, maybe I convinced him over the last few months, it took a while but he saw that I had good in me, while, because I had realized the truth-it was like line sprints in basketball, how on the last one down the length of the court you were going so fast that you couldn’t stop immediately even though the drill was over-I also was thinking, Why the fuck would Aubrey send me a rose? But he was only a sophomore, and a boy, and probably didn’t understand the way the flower exchange worked. The card said, You have made a lot of progress in math. Good job! From, Aubrey.
My own delight, born and killed off in front of no one, was humiliating; it was humiliating that I was someone who cared so much about things so small. And this disappointment was a good check, but still, after digging through the remaining flowers, I managed to be disappointed again to find that Cross had sent me nothing. No one had besides Martha and Aubrey-not even Sin-Jun. As with a binge, I had the wish then to undo what had just happened. Even if the results were the same and I’d still receive only two flowers, why couldn’t I get up in the morning like a normal person, remember that it was Valentine’s Day as I was passing through the common room on the way to breakfast, calmly pull out my flowers, put them in a vase back in my room, and forget about the whole thing?
It turned out to be worse than I thought. I discovered in the morning that Martha had gotten seven flowers-certainly in the past, before she’d become prefect, she’d never gotten more than four-and one was from Cross. She put all of ours in the same vase, and we didn’t discuss them at all, except that she said to me, “Your note was funny.” But she didn’t ask if Cross had sent me a flower, or tell me he’d sent one to her. The way I found out was by looking through her notes myself, when she was out of the room. The flower he’d given her was a pink carnation, as all of hers were. But still. It wasn’t that Cross hadn’t sent flowers; it was that he hadn’t sent flowers to me.
The next thing that happened-this was near the end of February-was that Cross hurt his ankle. After Valentine’s Day had passed without comment, except that he’d said when he came over the next time, “Thanks for the flower,” a period of eight days went by without his visiting. When I saw him in the dining hall on the eighth night, I passed within three feet of him and stared straight ahead. I don’t know if I was trying to show him that I cared or that I didn’t, but either way, it worked; he awakened me in the night and we went to Hillary’s room and said nothing, either of us, about his absence. I didn’t have the feeling it had anything to do with the carnation I’d sent; the carnation, it turned out, hadn’t seemed to have much significance one way or the other.
I wondered if the balance between us was shifting. Not that things had ever really been balanced-I was in love with him, and he was unreadable to me-but that imbalance had had its own patterns, and also its own clarity.
I’d been having the sense lately that I ought to pull back a little. I skipped three of his basketball games in a row, and that was why I wasn’t there the day he tore his ankle ligament. They were playing Armony, whose center was six six. Cross went up for a layup, got fouled-Armony’s center blocked his shot-and came down on his ankle. He ended up having to go to the hospital, where they wrapped his ankle and put him on crutches; obviously, with less than three weeks left until spring break, he was out for the season.
I found out all of this hours later, when I pieced together the sequence of events from the conversation at dinner and from Martha, who’d been apprised of the incident by Mr. Byden because they’d decided to delay a disciplinary committee meeting scheduled for that night. Listening to my classmates at dinner, I felt an initial spike of fear that he’d been seriously hurt. When I realized he hadn’t, what I felt was a sense of territoriality-didn’t the misfortune belong to me, too? “Is he back from the hospital?” I asked. It was the first thing I had said, and only the two people sitting closest to me turned. One of them was Dede and the other was John Brindley, who’d also been in the taxi that time freshman year.
“I’m pretty sure he’s back in the dorm by now,” John said. “Are you gonna go by?”
I was uncertain at first that he was even talking to me. Given my link to Cross, it was a perfectly reasonable question. But given that that link was invisible, the question was bizarre. Why on earth would I go by Cross Sugarman’s room? We hardly knew each other.