“Since we’ve never met,” I said, “I don’t know how you could have any impression of me.”
“Please, Lee. You’re not going to act like we don’t all have ideas about each other, are you?”
The remark shocked me. Certainly, I had ideas about other people, but Conchita was the first person I’d encountered who seemed to have ideas about me. Besides, in spite of my zest for gathering information about other students, I would never have revealed what I’d learned to the people whom it concerned; I knew enough to know that if, say, over dinner you said to some guy you’d never spoken to before, Yeah, you have a sister who went to Ault, too, right? Alice? Who graduated in 1983? it would only creep him out. Not that I personally felt creeped out by Conchita’s research; mostly I felt curious. “Fine,” I said. “What are your ideas about me?”
She could have gamed me in this moment in the way that I was gaming her, but she didn’t. “I have a hard time believing you like it here,” she said. “That’s the first thing.” She hoisted her stick into the air again and shot the ball forward, and it thunked against the ground midway between us. “You’re always walking around with your head down. Or at roll call, you just study and don’t talk to people.”
Abruptly, I felt myself sink into another mood. I didn’t retrieve the ball but just stood there, with the base of my stick propped against my right hip‑not the right way, not even the right side, to hold it, I later learned‑and stared at the manufacturer’s logo painted over the aluminum.
“You seem thoughtful,” Conchita said. “And I don’t see how any thoughtful person couldn’t have some problems with this school.”
I have always found the times when another person recognizes you to be strangely sad; I suspect the pathos of these moments is their rareness, the way they contrast with most daily encounters. That reminder that it can be different, that you need not go through your life unknown but that you probably still will‑that is the part that’s almost unbearable.
“Maybe we’re alike,” Conchita said.
I looked up. I wasn’t sure I wanted to make this leap.
“I’ve always thought, I bet I could be friends with her,” Conchita said. “You know how you just get that feeling? But if I’m wrong, you can tell me.”
I thought of the day she’d worn the beret, its bright purple woolly fabric; if I had noticed it, surely other people had. Then I thought of how my life at Ault was a series of interactions and avoidance of interactions in which I pretended not to mind that I was almost always by myself. I could not last for long this way, certainly not for the next three years; I’d been at Ault only seven months, and already, my loneliness felt physically exhausting.
But then the whistle blew‑Ms. Barrett was summoning us‑and in the shifting activity, I managed not to give Conchita an answer.
Gates was running roll call alone the next morning, but near the end, Henry Thorpe came and stood on the platform. Gates moved aside, and Henry stepped in front of the desk, and even though he hadn’t said a thing, people started laughing‑he seemed to be imitating himself running roll call on another day. A lot of times students performed skits as announcements, and occasionally, if the senior class had a big test, they’d filibuster by performing lots and lots of skits, or making joke announcements; once, nearly twenty members of the senior class came up, one by one, to wish Dean Fletcher a happy birthday.
“So I guess that’s it for today,” Henry said. “I’ll just ring the bell now.” With exaggerated gestures, practically in slow motion, he reached to the left side of the desk where the button for the schoolwide bell was, but before he pressed it, a figure stepped forward from the fireplace near the front of the hall. The person was wearing a black robe with a black hood and carrying an oversized water gun, and when he aimed the gun at Henry, an arc of water shot over the heads of all the students sitting at the desks between the fireplace and the platform. The water hit Henry near the heart, soaking his shirt.
“Ach!” he cried. “I’m down! I’m down! They got me.” He grabbed his chest and staggered around the platform‑I looked at Gates, who was standing behind Henry smiling at him like an indulgent older sister‑and then Henry stepped forward and fell face‑first onto the desk, his arms hanging limply in front of him.
Students cheered wildly. Not so much around me, because I sat in front with the other freshmen, and most of my classmates didn’t seem to know any better than I did what was going on. But the farther back you got in the room, the more loudly people were yelling and clapping. The person in the cloak pulled back his hood‑it was Adam Rabinovitz, a senior‑then threw his fists in the air. He said, or this was what I thought he said, though it was hard to hear, “Victory is mine.”
I knew three things about Adam Rabinovitz, all of which intrigued me without inspiring any desire ever to speak to him. The first was a bit of lore from two years before I’d gotten to Ault. Often at roll call people made announcements about missing notebooks or lost articles of clothing‑I left a green fleece jacket in the library on Monday afternoon –and as a sophomore Adam had come up to the platform one morning, said in a completely normal voice, “Last night, Jimmy Galloway lost his virginity in the music wing, so if you find it, please return it to him,” and then stepped off the platform, while Mr. Byden glowered and students turned to each other in shock and delight. Jimmy was Adam’s roommate, a good‑looking blond guy, and I wondered, though this bit of information never got included when the story was told, who the girl had been.
The second thing I knew about Adam also had, in a way, to do with sex. In the fall, a plaster‑of‑Paris display had gone up in the art wing, a joint project by two senior girls who both wore sheer scarves around their necks and silver hoop earrings and lots of black and who probably smoked, or would start when they got to college. They were serious about their art, and that must have been why they were allowed to include in the display a variety of plaster body parts, including a breast and a penis; the breast was never identified, but after great speculation, the dominant theory on campus was that the penis belonged to Adam Rabinovitz. The third thing I knew about him, and this made the other two all the more interesting, was that supposedly he had the highest GPA in his class; at any rate, he was headed to Yale.
On the platform, Henry came back to life, and Adam joined him. “Okay, here’s the deal,” Adam said. “Assassin is starting again, and this is how we’re doing it this year. If you’re a student, we’re assuming you want to play, so if you don’t, cross your name off the class lists in the mail room by noon today. If you’re faculty, we’re assuming you don’t want to play”‑here, Dean Fletcher made his own whooping cheer, eliciting laughter‑“That means you do want to play, right, Fletchy?” Adam said. “Whoever gets Fletchy, remember: He’s really psyched for the game.”
People laughed more, and Adam continued. “So for you freshmen and freshwomen, I’ll give a rundown. The object of the game is, you kill all your classmates.” Again, there was laughter, laughter that makes this day and this game seem longer ago than it was; at the time, certain teachers and students expressed disapproval of Assassin, but they were viewed as the humorless minority.
“How you kill them is pretty simple,” Adam said. “The game starts at one p.m. tomorrow. Check your mailbox by twelve o’clock, and you’ll find a piece of paper with a name on it and a bunch of orange stickers. The name you get is your target, and that person won’t know that you have them. You have to kill them by putting a sticker on them without anyone seeing. If there’s a witness, you have to wait twenty‑four hours before making another attempt. Once your target is dead, you take over their target, and you need to get their stickers. And don’t forget that someone else is targeting you. Any questions?”
“How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?” a girl yelled.
“It depends on your tongue,” Adam said. “Is that the best you can do?”
“What’s the meaning of life?” someone else shouted.
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Mr. Byden, who was standing next to Gates, tapped Henry on the shoulder, and Henry leaned in and whispered something to Adam.
Adam nodded. “I’m receiving word from on high that we need to wrap up. So, basically, watch your back and trust no one. And if you have any questions, find me, Galloway, or Thorpe.” He stepped off the platform, and Henry followed him.
“You should have told them whoever wins gets the title grand master assassin,” I heard Henry say as they passed my desk. The next announcement had begun, but I was still watching the two of them.
“Or they get to blow you,” Adam said. “Whichever they choose.” They both snickered, and I smiled, as if the joke had been meant for me, too.
At that point, listening to them, I wasn’t thinking much about Assassin. What the announcement left me with mostly‑I couldn’t have articulated it then, and I might not have believed it if someone else had suggested it‑was the sense that I wanted to be Adam Rabinovitz. The interest I felt in certain guys then confused me, because it wasn’t romantic, but I wasn’t sure what else it might be. But now I know: I wanted to take up people’s time making jokes, to tease the dean in front of the entire school, to call him by a nickname. What I wanted was to be a cocky high‑school boy, so fucking sure of my place in the world.
I was leaving the gym after practice when I heard Conchita call my name. During the last twenty‑four hours, I had recalled with embarrassment my earlier snottiness toward her. I waited for her to catch up with me, and when she did, we began walking up the flagstone path to the circle. “Hard practice,” she said.
I had noticed that when the team jogged to the boathouse and back, Conchita was one of the stragglers‑as most of us were starting the return route, headed away from the river, she was still heading toward it, walking instead of running and breathing in through an asthma inhaler. For a split second, I’d considered stopping, but already Clara O’Hallahan was walking beside her.
“When I was down at the river, I thought about joining crew,” Conchita said. “Have you seen the coxes? They just sit there shouting orders.”
“But I heard your teammates throw you in the water when they win a race, and imagine being thrown in the Raymond River. You’d give birth to a two‑headed baby.”
Conchita laughed. “I’m not giving birth to any baby unless it’s through immaculate conception.” As if I hadn’t understood, she added, “I’m a virgin, of course.”
I willed myself not to turn and stare at her. What kind of person advertised her virginity?
“Hey, want to come back to my room and listen to Bob Dylan?” she asked. We’d reached the end of the path‑her dorm was on the west side of the circle, and mine was on the east.
“Now?” I said. It was one thing to leave the gym with Conchita because we were both headed in the same direction and another thing entirely to accompany her to her dorm, to go somewhere with her.
“It’s okay if you can’t.”
“No, I guess I could,” I said. “For a little while.”
As we climbed the staircase in Conchita’s dorm, I said, “Who are your roommates?”
“I have a single.”
“I thought you were a freshman.” Singles, in spite of their undesirability, were never assigned to freshmen.
“No, I am,” she said. “But I have insomnia, so they made an exception. Some nights I don’t sleep at all.”
“That’s horrible.” I’d never met an insomniac my own age.
“I nap when I can.”
We entered her room, and my first thought was that it had been furnished by someone who was trying to decorate for a teenage girl without ever having met one. There was something creepily professional about it, like the set of a television show: the ruffly pink curtains (typically, shades hung at the windows of dorm rooms), the pale blue throw rug spread over the standard tan carpet, the framed poster of the Eiffel Tower, the heart‑shaped mirror encased in a heart‑shaped frame of white wicker. There was a low white plastic table with a large dish of candy, a vase of fake pink and blue flowers, and white beanbags on either side. (All the whiteness did vaguely impress me because at home, my mother never bought anything white, not furniture or sheets or clothing. Every year until I was twelve, I’d asked for white patent leather shoes for Easter, and every year my mother had refused, saying, “They’d get dirty so fast it would make your head spin.”) Over Conchita’s bed, her name was spelled out in pink cursive neon; something about the neon being lit in the daytime, in an empty room, struck me as deeply depressing. On the bureau rested a stereo that was, improbably enough, also pink, but what was truly remarkable about the room, even more than the décor, was the size. It definitely wasn’t a single. It was a double with one bed in it.
“Sit anywhere,” she said, and I sat on one of the beanbags. “Are you hungry? I have some food.”
“I’m okay.”
Ignoring me, she perched on her tiptoes and reached for something on her closet shelf. When she pulled it down, I saw that it was a large basket containing‑in unopened packaging‑potato chips, sunflower seeds, macadamia nuts, chocolate chip cookies, animal crackers, and several pouches of cocoa powder. Even the arrangement of the food in the basket looked professional, and I felt, suddenly, like I was attending a slumber party to which everyone else who’d been invited had chosen not to come.
“I’ll just have some candy,” I said, gesturing toward the table. “But thanks for pulling that down.” As she hoisted it back up, I leaned forward and reached for a caramel. All the candy wrappers, I saw, were coated with a thin layer of dust.
“There’s something I have to do,” Conchita said. “Can you keep a secret?”
I perked up. “Of course.”
She lifted the dust ruffle from her bed and pulled out a telephone.
“I didn’t even know there were jacks in the rooms,” I said, though as secrets went, this wasn’t great. The kind I preferred were about specific people.
“We had it installed. Dean Fletcher and Mrs. Parnasset okayed it, but I’m not supposed to tell other students. My mom convinced them I needed it in case I have an asthma attack in the middle of the night.”
“But if you were having an asthma attack, you wouldn’t be able to use the phone.”
“I could dial 911.” Conchita paused. “The truth is that my mom is kind of overprotective. When I first got here she would try calling me on the pay phone and either it would be busy, or no one would answer and she couldn’t leave a message. Anyway, I’ll put on the music in a second. I just have to call her really fast.”
She dialed, and after a moment, she said, “Hola, Mama.” Although I was taking Spanish, I didn’t understand anything after that except possibly‑it was hard to know for sure‑my own name. I thought about how much money it must have cost to furnish this room, and then I thought about how maybe it was a cultural thing, how even though her family didn’t have a lot, they were willing to pour what they did have into objects that were tangible and conspicuous. I had recently read an article about quinceañeras, and I thought that Conchita would probably have one when she turned fifteen. And maybe I’d even be invited and‑because it would be fascinating and because it would happen far from Ault‑I’d go. I could ask my parents for the plane ticket as a combination birthday and Christmas present.
When Conchita hung up, I said, “Do you talk to your mom every day?”
“Yeah, at least once. It’s really hard for her with me gone.”
I spoke to my own mother on Sundays, when the rates were lower, and we never spoke for long because I always seemed to call when she was starting dinner or putting my brothers to bed. Sometimes after I hung up the phone‑even when other girls were waiting to use it, which was usually‑I sat in the booth for a moment doing nothing. I thought about how my parents had not wanted me to go to boarding school, how my brothers had cried the day I left, and how quickly they appeared to have adjusted to my absence. I knew they missed me, but by now they seemed to find the f
act that I didn’t live at home a lot less surprising than I did.
Conchita walked to the stereo. “As promised,” she said. “Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Mr. Bob Dylan.” As the sound of a guitar became audible, Conchita turned the volume knob clockwise. I heard a deep, soft voice crooning the song “Lay, Lady, Lay.” It wasn’t what I’d expected‑it was softer, and twangier. Most surprising of all, it did sound like make‑out music, or maybe sex music: Dylan was singing about a man with dirty clothes but clean hands, and about how a woman on a bed was the best thing the man had ever seen.
“I like it,” I said.
Conchita turned the volume down. “What?”
“I like it.”
“Oh. Me, too.” She turned it up again.
Why wait any longer for the world to begin? Dylan sang. Why wait any longer for the one you love, when he’s standing in front of you?
Out the window, the light was turning from the bright yellow of afternoon to the more muted shade of dusk. This was always the time of day I felt the saddest, when I most believed my life should be something other than what it was, and the music compounded the feeling‑I found myself wishing I could exist inside the song, lying on white sheets while a shy man in dirty clothes approached me. I could love such a man, I thought; he’d be wearing a flannel shirt, and I would pull him to me, my arms tight around his back, the warmth of his skin coming through the fabric.
Then the song ended. I didn’t want to look up, to make eye contact with Conchita; I didn’t particularly want to be in the same room with her.
“Here’s another good one,” she said. “It’s called ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues.’ ”
The word homesick gave me hope, but the song was just clever chanting. It sounded political, and I wanted another song of longing. Conchita played a few more songs, switching CDs, sometimes cutting off the songs midway. By the end, the one I still liked the best was “Lay, Lady, Lay.” As I was leaving, Conchita said, “You can borrow the album.”