“Why would Lee go see Sug?” Dede said, and John looked between the two of us. What have you heard? I longed to ask. If he’d been a jerk, a guy who liked to make innuendos, surely he’d have revealed more. But John was nice, and it was possible that the question was just arbitrary.
“No reason,” he said, and I said, trying to sound low-key, “I might go by.” I felt Dede staring at me and did not meet her gaze.
And then there occurred a period after dinner when I was planning to go. John’s question had given me permission-after all, he was the one who’d thought up the idea of my visiting. At eight fifty-five, because visitation started at nine, I brushed my teeth and sprayed on perfume and then I looked at myself in the mirror and sat down at my desk. How could I go to Cross’s dorm? Who knew who’d be there-presumably Devin would-or what if Cross was just hanging out in the common room, maybe he’d ordered pizza and was watching TV and the other guys sitting around wouldn’t understand why I was there, and there was a good chance that neither would Cross. So either he’d be not outright rude but aloof, or else he’d be polite, he’d try to make me feel comfortable, and his trying would be the worst part-the effort of it all. And what were the chances of his being a little woozy but clearly glad to see me, of scooting over and then, when I sat next to him on the couch, resting his arm around my shoulders, of neither of us needing to explain anything except that I’d ask how his ankle was? The chances were infinitesimal. I bent over in the chair and leaned my forehead against the heels of my palms. To long for him like this-it was excruciating. And it was excruciating that he was always so close by. For the whole year, it had been like this, the proximity of our dorms, the knowledge that I literally could, in less than a minute, get up and walk out of the room and find him and touch him, but that really I couldn’t do this at all-it made me crazy. No crush is worse than a boarding school crush; college is bigger and more diluted, and in the office, at least you get a break from each other at night.
It was unbearable to know that to act would be to mess things up, to know that my own impulses were untrustworthy. I just wanted it to be the middle of the night and for him to come over (certainly, on crutches, he would not be coming over for some time) and to lie on me and for me to stop wanting everything I wanted when he wasn’t around. When I think of Cross now, a big part of what I remember is that sense of waiting, of relying on chance. I couldn’t go to his room-it was decided. And that meant that in order to convey to him my concern about his injury, I would have to run into him in the hall when few or no other students were around, and when I did, I’d have to quickly intuit his mood to find out if adjustments were to be made so that we could keep seeing each other.
I realize now: I ceded all the decisions to him. But that wasn’t how it felt! At the time, it seemed so clear that the decisions belonged to him. Rules existed; they were unnamed and intractable.
I went to the play with Martha, and when Cross came onstage-the play was Hamlet and after he’d had to quit basketball, he’d been assigned the part of Fortinbras, which previously Mrs. Komaroff, the drama teacher, had simply cut-everyone laughed. We weren’t really supposed to see him as Fortinbras; the point was that it was Cross Sugarman on crutches, in an ancient mink coat. He had, at that point, not been to my room for nine days.
The roles of Hamlet and Ophelia were played by Jesse Middlestadt and Melodie Ryan. Jesse was a senior from Cambridge, thin and flush-cheeked and jumpy. He was someone girls liked without having crushes on him-I was always glad when I ended up at his table in the dining hall because he talked a lot and he was entertaining-and someone that I was surprised guys seemed to like, too. Melodie was a junior with long curly blond hair, a widow’s peak, and big blue eyes. I knew she was considered very attractive, and what I always thought of when I saw her was how as a freshman she’d gone out with a senior named Chris Pryce and how, according to rumor, the two of them had had anal sex. It was never clear to me whether they’d done so once, or repeatedly; either way, whenever she came onstage, I’d think, But doesn’t it hurt? I kept wondering if she’d wanted it, too, or if she’d just been accommodating Chris.
In the scene before Ophelia drowns herself, Melodie and Jesse kissed, and I felt jealous of them, of how, because of their parts in the play, they’d had to become comfortable kissing so publicly, how during the weeks of rehearsal they’d had that kiss to count on. Every day, they’d known they would touch another person, and it didn’t depend on anything external; it didn’t matter what they did or didn’t do.
I should have signed up for drama, I thought, but for that also, it had become too late.
The same day that I got rejected from Brown and accepted by Mount Holyoke and the University of Michigan (at that point, I’d already been accepted by Beloit, rejected by Tufts, and had a rejection yet to come from Wesleyan), I ran into Cross outside Dean Fletcher’s classroom. The last period of the day had just ended, and both of us were alone.
“Hey,” he said. “Congratulations on Michigan.”
I couldn’t imagine how he knew.
“You think you’ll go?”
“Probably.” I definitely would and the reason I would, which I’d discuss with no one except Mrs. Stanchak and my parents, was that tuition would be a lot cheaper than at a private college, plus they were offering partial financial aid. Mount Holyoke was closer to Boston, but it wasn’t that close, and by then I knew without having to say it to myself or to anyone else-it was all ending. The parts of Ault that didn’t have to do with Cross were ending and the parts that did, and if I wasn’t a girl he talked to in front of other people, I certainly wasn’t a girl he’d travel across the state for, or host in his dorm at Harvard. All of which made a conversation about college seem, between the two of us, utterly irrelevant. Hours before, when I’d opened the three letters, I’d cared a great deal-I’d cried, of course, over Brown, before growing bored with my own tears-but with Cross in front of me, it just seemed far away. It was March, and we attended Ault, and our lives after this were as distant as a bazaar in Morocco.
I gestured toward his crutches. “Are you in pain?”
He said, “Not really,” in a way that made me think the opposite had to be true. His tone was upbeat; I couldn’t imagine Cross complaining bitterly about anything that truly bothered him, and, honestly, I had difficulty imagining what would bother him, though surely there were things that did. For the first time, it occurred to me that maybe it had been rude, maybe I’d been somehow neglectful, not to get in touch with him right after his injury. I had a flashing memory-why hadn’t I thought about this before?-of how nice he’d been when I’d fainted at the mall our freshman year.
“I’m sorry this happened,” I said.
“I don’t blame you.”
“No, but I mean-”
“I know what you mean. I’m joking.”
Looking up at him, I wanted, once again, to say how much I loved him. How could I want to say it even in daylight? From outside, there was the sound of a boy yelling something, and then another boy yelling back. It was three in the afternoon, that lull after classes and before practice. I cannot say that I was surprised when he cocked his head toward Dean Fletcher’s classroom. “You want to go in there?”
My pulse quickened, and I could feel the heaviness in my belly that was both excitement and anxiety. Very quietly, I said, “Sure.”
The door to the classroom wasn’t all the way shut, and he pushed it open with the tip of his right crutch, then shut it again, still using the crutch, from the other side. It was a gray day, and gray light came through the windows; Cross did not turn on the overhead lights. It was a classroom with a long rectangular table, and he pulled two chairs out from the table, facing each other, and after he’d sat in one, I thought the other one was for me; then I saw that he meant it to be for his foot. I hovered to one side, waiting to be directed, and I hated my own giggling passivity. Did he say what he said next because he knew I wanted to be told what to do, or had he decided already, before we entered the classroom?