“The weird part with Fletcher‑” I paused.
“What?” Martha said.
“He said, ‘You know that you’re an important part of the Ault community,’ or some bullshit like that and then he was like, ‘But we have some very serious concerns. If you aren’t able to pull up your grade, maybe it’s time to rethink whether Ault is the best place for you.’ ” As I said it, my voice cracked.
“Oh, Lee,” Martha said.
I swallowed. We were passing the chapel, still forty yards from the dining hall. Salad bar, I thought. Napkin. Ice cube. When I swallowed again, I knew I wouldn’t cry.
“They have no grounds for spring‑cleaning you,” Martha said.
“Oh, no,” I said. “Fletcher never mentioned spring‑cleaning.”
Martha turned and, feeling her gaze, I turned, too. “Think about it,” she said. “That’s what he meant, even if he didn’t use those words.”
This time, I didn’t feel the shakiness that came before tears; what I felt was a shock in my chest.
“I wasn’t the one who was there,” Martha said. “But I promise you, no teacher ever says, ‘We’re considering spring‑cleaning you.’ That’s just what students say.”
I thought suddenly of all the people who had been spring‑cleaned since I’d been at Ault. My freshman year, it had been Alfie Howards, a fellow freshman who was always disheveled‑papers spilled out of his backpack, his shirt fell out of his pants, his nose ran, and he arrived everywhere late. When other students were moving from breakfast to chapel in the morning, he’d be making his way toward the dining hall, headed against the sea of bodies. He probably shouldn’t have been at Ault to begin with‑he shouldn’t have been living without his parents‑but he was a fourth‑generation legacy; for that reason alone, in spite of everything else, I was surprised when he was spring‑cleaned. Also sharing Alfie’s fate my freshman year had been Maisie Vilayphonh, a half‑Finnish, half‑Laotian junior whose parents were rumored to be spies. Maisie, I heard, had been at one boarding school or another since the age of seven; she spoke six languages; she once ordered a thousand‑dollar foot‑massaging machine from a catalog, left the machine in the common room after using it twice, forgot about it until the leftover water grew scum, then dumped the whole thing in the trash. This wasn’t the reason she was spring‑cleaned. The rumor about that was that the school knew she was doing cocaine but they just never caught her at it, though her dorm head, Mrs. Morino, would drop by Maisie’s room at random hours, wondering if Maisie had seen the Morino family cat, or wanting to make sure that Maisie knew there’d be evensong instead of morning chapel on Sunday.
That, actually, was the defining factor of spring‑cleaning, what distinguished it from run‑of‑the‑mill expulsion‑that it happened not during the spring, as the name suggested, but over the summer, after the school year had finished. And it wasn’t necessarily for one big reason‑they never did catch Maisie snorting up‑but more for an accumulation of smaller ones.
After my sophomore year, two people had been spring‑cleaned: a freshman named Lenora Aiko, a girl from Hawaii who supposedly slept all day and stayed up all night, talking on the pay phone (and jumping in front of the booth whenever someone else tried to use it, insisting that she was waiting on a call), or else watching infomercials and preparing steak in the common‑room toaster oven; and another girl, one of my classmates, though I’d hardly known her, a day student named Kara Johnson. Kara was pretty in an angular, even feral way, pale and skinny and smelling like cigarette smoke, always wearing black eyeliner and black jeans, though jeans of any color were forbidden in the schoolhouse. (Once I heard a teacher tell her to go to the dorm and change, and she said that she couldn’t because she was a day student. The teacher told her to call her parents and have one of them bring her different pants, and she said she couldn’t do that, either, because both her parents worked.) Kara and I were in the same Spanish class, and she was never prepared, had never done the translations or the reading, but would sometimes make stabbing attempts at proving otherwise. (I, on the other hand, always did my homework, even for math. It was just that I often did it badly.) A few times, I saw Kara outside the library just before curfew, presumably waiting to be picked up by one of her parents, and a junior or senior guy would be talking to her and you knew, you could tell just by their posture, that the guy cared a lot more about the exchange than Kara did. She seemed like someone who had a complicated life, who was often hung over or fighting with a boy or telling a lie, and, primarily because she was sexy, these circumstances contained a degree of glamour. But one of the nights I saw her waiting outside the library, she was by herself, and it was cold, and though it was not raining, there was something in her huddled form that reminded me of the times before our dog King was hit by a car that my mother and I would give him a bath‑he was a Scottish terrier‑and how with his fur plastered down King would look half his former size, he’d be shivering, and the sight of him like this was unbearably sad; the only reason that I helped my mother wash him was that I didn’t want her to have to experience the sadness by herself. I don’t think anyone really cared that Kara got spring‑cleaned. She hadn’t been friends with any girls, and though guys had chased her when she was in front of them, she didn’t seem like someone they’d give much thought to in her absence.
In every yearbook, there was a page with the heading “Lost But Not Forgotten,” which featured photos of the students who would have, but hadn’t, graduated that year. The picture of Alfie‑I saw this as a college freshman, when my Ault yearbook arrived that fall in the mail‑showed him as a fourteen‑year‑old, the age he’d been when he’d left Ault; it was as if, unlike the rest of us, he’d never gotten older. The picture of Kara was slightly blurry and showed her turning, so three quarters of her face was visible‑her almond‑shaped eyes, her narrow foxlike chin and unsmiling mouth. There were four other people on the page: Little Washington, George Rimas, and Jack Moorey, who left, respectively, in April of our sophomore year and November of our senior year after being caught drinking, twice (for offenses related to alcohol, cigarettes, pot, and pharmaceuticals, as well as for breaking visitation‑that is, for minor violations‑you got two chances; for harder drugs, for cheating, and for lying, which were major violations, you got only one); and Adler Stiles, who had not returned after winter break of our junior year. People like Adler, the ones who left of their own volition, were enigmatic to me; I almost admired them. No matter how unhappy I was there, Ault was never a place I could turn my back on.
Martha and I had reached the dining hall, and the entrance was mobbed. The possibility that I could be spring‑cleaned‑that I could have anything, even that, in common with Alfie Howards or Maisie Vilayphonh or Kara Johnson‑was utterly foreign. It was an idea I found impossible to absorb here, among so many people; I needed to think about it alone.
“I’m not trying to freak you out,” Martha was saying. “But if that’s what Fletcher meant, you should know.”
“Yeah, of course.”
“But they can’t treat you like you’re a bad seed,” she said. “Because you’re so not.”
We’d crossed the threshold of the dining room, and it was time to split up and find our assigned tables. Martha was looking at me.
“Divide and conquer,” I said, because one of us always said this just before formal dinner. And it worked. Martha smiled, and I smiled, too, so our moods would seem the same. But I don’t think I fooled her. And already, that thing was happening where the scene before me pulled back, or maybe I was the one who shrank from it. It all became both huge and distant, something occurring far away‑a blur of nicely dressed students making their way to tables covered by white cloths and silver serving plates with silver lids. Maybe several months from now, when I was enrolled at Marvin Thompson High School in South Bend, I’d be sitting on my bed one evening, doing homework, and this was the image I’d remember, the precise moment when I first knew I’d lost my place at Ault.
r /> At the library, on my way to meet Aubrey, I saw Dede through the glass door of the periodicals room. Her head was bent to look at a magazine, and I wasn’t planning to stop, but then she looked up. Hey, she mouthed, and I waved. I made the mistake of holding her gaze, and she held up one finger, mouthed, Hold on, set the magazine on a table, and pushed open the door.
“Isn’t it crazy about Martha? I was completely shocked.” Her voice was upbeat and perfectly friendly.
“It’s not that shocking,” I said. “Martha would be a good prefect.”
“Well, sure, she’s ‘responsible.’ ” Dede made air quotes, implying I had no idea what‑that actually Martha wasn’t responsible? That being responsible was hardly a qualification? “But it’s not like she has a chance,” Dede continued.
When Martha herself had said almost the same thing a few hours earlier, it had seemed only like the dreary truth; hearing Dede, the prediction sounded slanderous.
“You have no idea who’ll win,” I said.
Dede smiled a little tiny smile, and I felt like slapping her. Our antagonism had always contained a certain sisterly intimacy; once, during freshman year, when we’d been standing face‑to‑face arguing, Dede had reached out and actually pulled my hair, and the sheer immaturity of the gesture had made me burst out laughing. She’d said, almost shyly, “What? What?” but she’d started laughing, too, and then we hadn’t been able to continue fighting. Dede and I were each other’s opposites, I sometimes thought, and therefore uncomfortably similar‑she faked enthusiasm, and I faked indifference; she glommed on to people like Aspeth Montgomery and Cross Sugarman, and I made a point of not speaking to them from one semester to the next.
“I’m sure you think Aspeth has it all wrapped up,” I said. “But, frankly, I’ll be surprised if she wins.” Don’t use the word bitch, I thought‑that would be going too far. “She’s just‑” I paused. “Basically, she’s a bitch.”
“Excuse me?” Dede said. “Am I in the twilight zone?”
“I didn’t say I think she’s a bitch,” I said. “Let’s not get into semantics.” When I was at Ault, I thought that chalking up a disagreement to semantics sounded very smart. “Dede, I’m not trying to be rude, but your Aspeth worship is getting kind of embarrassing.”
She glared at me. “You know what you are?” I could tell she was digging deep, searching for a particularly biting insult. “You’re exactly the same as you were when we were freshmen.”
Aubrey was waiting in the study room where we usually met; through a window, I could see him chewing on a plastic pen with his head tilted toward the ceiling. He wasn’t doing anything weird, but his posture was so clearly that of a person who believed himself to be alone that I felt embarrassed on his behalf. I knocked on the window before opening the door.
Aubrey removed the pen from his mouth and sat upright. “Lee,” he said, and he nodded once. At all times, Aubrey comported himself with absolute seriousness. This might have been the way he was raised, or it might have been compensation for the fact that, at the age of fourteen, he was five feet tall and perhaps ninety pounds. He had puffy brown hair and a tiny ski‑jump nose across which lay a sprinkling of tiny freckles. He also had tiny hands and, on his ring fingers, peaked fingernails. Whenever I watched Aubrey write out equations, I’d wonder, when boys had their growth spurts, did they always grow proportionally, or was there a chance some part of the body‑for instance, the hands‑didn’t get the message and stayed as they were, vestiges of the smaller self? I was quite sure that Aubrey was smarter than I was, not just in math but in everything, and that he would eventually become, say, a stockbroker, and make enormous quantities of money.
After I’d sat in the chair next to him, while I was pulling out my notebook, math textbook, and calculator, I said, “How’s it going, Aubrey?”
“I’m well, thank you. I’d like to see your homework for tomorrow.”
I slid the notebook toward him‑in pencil, I’d written, Page 408, chapter review, all problems.
Aubrey opened my textbook and read silently, nodding to himself. Then he turned to me. “Do you understand what they’re asking for in the first one?”
I scanned the problem. “Kind of.”
“Why don’t you start, and I’ll help if you run into trouble.”
I continued to look at page 408, or at least to face in the direction of page 408. That I was bad at math was not a secret‑from the time I’d arrived at Ault, I’d been a year behind my classmates. Most freshmen took Geometry; I and four other students took remedial Algebra. And this year, in Precalculus, I was the only junior in a class of sophomores. But still, no one, Aubrey included, seemed to have realized just how tenuous my grasp on math was. And Precalculus had been the worst year yet‑it was not an exaggeration to say that I understood virtually none of what we’d studied since late September. I had spaced out during the first week or two of classes and never recovered. Yes, the situation was largely my own fault, but the problem was, everything built on everything else; from two weeks into the semester, it had been too late. The pages of my textbook were like a map of Russia with all the towns and cities written in Cyrillic. It was not that I didn’t believe they made sense, just that I personally had no inkling of what they meant.
“Lee?” Aubrey said.
“Yeah, I’m not sure. I’m not exactly positive where I start here.” I looked up and then out the window in front of us. It was dark, so I was looking at my own reflection; if it had been light, I’d have had a clear view of the entrance to the infirmary. One Sunday afternoon in the winter, I’d watched Aspeth Montgomery approach the infirmary, hesitate before the door, then turn around without entering. This reversal had consumed me for the rest of my session with Aubrey.
“The conic has its focus at the origin, right? And it has to satisfy these conditions.” Aubrey pointed to where the textbook said, parabola, directrix y = 2. “So what do you want to do?”
A silence unfolded, and kept unfolding.
“You want to figure out what y is, right?” Aubrey said.
“Yeah.”
“Like this‑does that make sense?”
“Yeah.” I nodded. “Definitely.”
“And then you plug this in here.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Why don’t you try the next one?”
For a while, I was looking at the problem, I really was. But then I found myself thinking about Gillian Hathaway, and about whether she and her boyfriend Luke said I love you to each other. How did you even know if you loved another person? Was it a hunch, like a good smell that you couldn’t identify for sure, or did a time come when you had evidence? Was it like walking through a house and once you’d crossed a certain threshold, that was love and you would never turn back? Maybe you’d go into other rooms, you’d fight or even break up, but you’d always be on the other side of love, after and not before it. My interest in couples felt anthropological‑even liking Cross, even wanting to hear from Martha that she could imagine me dating him, I myself could not imagine us together. Not as a daily presence in each other’s lives, two people who had conversations and made out and sat next to each other in chapel. When I thought of Sin‑Jun and Clara‑and I did so often‑what was hardest to wrap my head around was how they’d been a couple while living in the same room. How had they known when to fool around and when to just sit at their desks doing homework? Hadn’t it been either too intense, too tiring to always be around the person you wanted to impress, or else too familiar? Maybe in such close quarters you gave up hope of impressing them and sat there picking your earwax and not caring if you looked cute. But didn’t you lose something there, too? If that was what people meant by intimacy, it didn’t hold much appeal for me‑it seemed like you’d be fighting each other for oxygen.
Aloud, I said, “Do you think Gillian is pretty?”
“Lee, please concentrate,” Aubrey said.
“Gillian Hathaway,” I said. “Not Gillian Carson.”
&nbs
p; “She’s fine. If I were you, I’d start by isolating x on this one. And what information are they giving you about x ?” But Aubrey was blushing, a hot shade of pink that blossomed in his face and spread down his neck.
“Really pretty or just medium pretty?” I said.
He turned to me. “I’m not doing your homework for you.”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
“And if you don’t grasp these concepts, you’re not going to pass the final exam.”
“Actually, it’s better than that,” I said. “If I don’t pass the exam, I’ll be spring‑cleaned.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s when they kick you out but they wait‑”
“I know what spring‑cleaning is,” he interrupted. I was slightly impressed‑I hadn’t known until after I came back for the beginning of sophomore year and Alfie and Maisie were gone. “Who told you this?” Aubrey said.
“Fletcher called me into his office today.”
“That’s terrible.”
“It wouldn’t be your fault.”
“I know,” Aubrey said with such certainty that I wanted to rescind the exoneration. “What are you planning to do?” he asked.
I squinted at him. I was pretty sure he didn’t have much respect for me, but it still seemed like a shitty question. “Well, the school near my parents’ house is called Marvin Thompson.”
“No,” he said. “Lee.” He extended his small hand toward my arm, but then it just hovered there; I think he was afraid to touch me. He withdrew his hand and said, “I meant, what do you want to do about the exam? How do you want to prepare?”
“I’m not sure that it matters how I prepare,” I said. “I mean, being realistic about it.” This felt like a confession of sorts. “Do you think I can pass?” I asked.
He remained quiet for several seconds and finally said, “If you’re willing to work very hard.”