In our room, I picked up my copy of the paper and held it out to her. “Look at this.”
I pointed, and her eyes moved over the page. It seemed to be taking her longer to read it than it should. Finally, she said, “Who’s M.R.?”
“Melodie Ryan. Who Cross was in Hamlet with. I’ve never heard anything about this, but they must have-I don’t know. He hasn’t been here for more than a month, Martha,” I said, and I burst into tears.
She patted my back.
“It has to be, right? But maybe it’s not because Melodie is spelled I-E and this is just with a Y. So is it?”
Martha looked distressed. “I don’t know.”
“Has he said anything to you? Is he going out with Melodie Ryan and everyone knows and I don’t? Is he going out with Aspeth?”
“If Cross has a new girlfriend, I don’t know it, either. But, Lee, before you tear yourself apart, remember how silly Low Notes are.”
“But they’re usually right.” I wiped my nose with the back of my hand. “Remember that one about Katherine Pound and Alexander Héverd, and no one believed it at first? But it was true.”
“But it can just mean Melodie and Cross hooked up,” Martha said. “Not that they’re a real couple.”
I started crying harder-to me, hooking up was being a couple. Apparently, I had persuaded Martha that the Low Note was right, and it hadn’t been hard to do.
“You need to talk to Cross,” Martha said. “You’re allowed to ask him stuff, Lee. And, at this point, what is there to lose?”
But the next day was Friday and it seemed to me inappropriate to corner Cross on a weekend. Because (yes, I was nuts, and I also think there’s a decent chance I’d operate on this logic again, given the opportunity) what if he and Melodie had something planned and I interrupted it? Or just ruined his mood before a romantic evening? I hated the idea of being a pain in the ass, the kind of girl who always wanted to talk. Talking to him was, of course, exactly what I wanted to do, but not in a cornering way, not tediously.
On top of that, it wasn’t just any weekend-it was the weekend Angie Varizi’s article was supposed to run in the Times. She had warned me that it might be bumped at the last minute, depending on breaking news, but if everything proceeded normally, it would appear on Sunday.
Looking back on this period, I feel both a retroactive dread and a sense of protectiveness for myself as I was then, for how distraught I felt about Cross, how earnestly sad at the prospect of graduating from Ault. I feel the way you do watching a movie in which a teenage girl is in the house alone at night, in a storm, and the electricity goes out, or a movie in which a young couple share a romantic dinner and emerge from the restaurant into a snowstorm that seems to them beautiful, then climb into their car to drive home along curving roads. The same way you want to yell, Get out of the house! Stop the car! what I want to say to the younger me is, Just go. If you leave now, your memory of Ault will be unspoiled. You will think that your feelings about the school are complicated, but you still will possess the sweet conviction that it was the place that wronged you and not the other way around.
Over the course of the weekend, I kept forgetting and remembering the article. On Sunday, Martha and I awakened around eight, a little early, but it wasn’t because of that. Walking to the dining hall, we were discussing what shoes we’d wear for our graduation ceremony, which was a week away. At Ault, you wore not a cap and gown but a white dress, and the boys wore khaki pants and navy blazers and straw boaters. Then we started talking about how the year before, Annice Roule had tripped on the stairs leading up to the stage when she went to collect her diploma.
The usual handful of students was in the dining hall, but the weird thing was, they were all sitting at the same table. The freshmen and sophomores and juniors had joined the seniors Martha and I always sat with-Jonathan Trenga and Russell Woo, Doug Miles, Jamie Lorison, Jenny and Sally. The other weird thing was that no one was speaking. All their heads were ducked, and I realized that they were reading.
“Are they reading my article?” I asked Martha, and then, from ten feet away, I could see that they were-two or three of them were clustered around each copy of the paper. “Holy shit,” I heard Jim Pintane, who was a junior, say. When we reached the table, some of them looked up, and then all of them looked up. For a long moment, no one spoke.
Finally, in a cold voice, Doug Miles said, “It’s the infamous Lee Fiora.”
Everyone at the table was still staring at me.
“I must admit,” said Jonathan, “I didn’t know you had such strong opinions.” His tone was harder to gauge-not unfriendly, but not friendly, either.
“What does it say?” I asked slowly, and when no one answered, Martha said, “This is ridiculous.” She grabbed one of the newspaper sections. “Come on,” she said.
As I followed her to another table, Doug called, “Hey, Lee.”
I turned around.
“Didn’t anyone ever tell you that you don’t piss in your own pool?”
We sat at another table, side by side, without getting our food. My heart hammered, and my fingers were trembling. The section Martha had taken was open to the second page of the article, not the page where it started. Martha flipped backward. The article started on the front page, I saw-the front page of the front section. The headline was BOARDING SCHOOLS CLAIM TO CHANGE, STUDENTS TELL DIFFERENT STORY. Below that, in smaller letters, it said WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE WHITE, MIDDLE-CLASS-AND AN OUTSIDER. A large photograph featured, oddly enough, the nonwhite Pittard brothers sitting on a couch in a dorm common room. Darden was demonstrating something with his hands and his brother Eli, who was a freshman, was laughing. But the first paragraph was not about the Pittards; it was about me:
Among the cliques in Lee Fiora’s senior class at Ault School in Raymond, Massachusetts, is a group of male friends known as the “Bank Boys”-so named, as Miss Fiora explained, “because all their dads work for banks. Not really all of them do, but that’s what it seems like.”
The clique’s appellation is one of the few references, however oblique, that Ault students make to money. In general, at this school, whose small classes, pristine grounds, and state-of-the-art facilities come with a $22,000 price tag, and at other elite schools across the Northeast, the subject is taboo. Thus is created an environment which, according to Miss Fiora, defers to the rich and shortchanges everyone else-including Miss Fiora herself. “Of course I feel left out,” Miss Fiora, who receives a financial aid package which covers approximately three quarters of her tuition, recently told a visitor to Ault. “I’m a nobody from Indiana.” Miss Fiora is white; for nonwhite students, particularly African Americans and Hispanics, she feels that the difficulties of life at Ault are only compounded.
It went on and on. Angie Varizi had me expounding on race (presumably because no one else, no one who wasn’t white, had been willing to), saying I suspected that Ault regretted the decision to give me a scholarship, telling the anecdote about the girls buying clothes to hide their alcohol. She had me giving a rundown on how to spot scholarship students based on their possessions and their behavior. And, of course, she had me sharing the story of the house in Florida. Throughout the article, my own comments were juxtaposed with hearty endorsements of the school from Mr. Byden, Dean Fletcher, a sophomore named Ginny Chu, Darden Pittard, and recent graduates. Another student who was not named said about me, “She’s not the most popular person in our grade. Not everyone thrives in a place like this.”