Prep: A Novel by Curtis Sittenfeld Page A

new emptiness. Little herself was gone—her parents had come to get her and, just like that, her room was cleared out—and so was the suspense of who was stealing, or when it would happen next. Around two in the morning, I was having such bad stomach pains that I went into the bathroom, sat on the floor by the toilet, and stuck my finger down my throat. Nothing emerged, but I gagged a few times, then leaned over the bowl, considering the toilet from this angle—the calm water, the curving porcelain. I had been there for about twenty minutes when Dede pushed open the unlocked stall door. “Could you leave me alone?” I said, and she said, “You did the right thing. You didn’t have a choice.”
    In the common room, Dede said, “Surprise holiday is an Ault tradition. Once a year, classes get called off to give us a break.”
    I thought of my C in biology and wasn’t sure I deserved a break.
    “When you see the green jacket at roll call, that’s when you know,” Dede continued. “Mr. Byden might be making an announcement and he’ll take off his jacket, and the green jacket will be on underneath, or someone will jump out from under the prefects’ desk wearing it. Something like that.”
    “So we don’t have our test?”
    “I guess not. At least until Friday.”
    “Then we don’t need to study.”
    “Well.” Dede bit her lip. “We probably should just to be safe.”
    “I’m tired,” I said.
    “If we study now, we won’t have to tomorrow.”
    I looked at her—she was so responsible. It was as if I were seeing a version of myself from a year before, the version who had convinced my parents to let me go to Ault, against their better judgment, by saying it would be a first-rate educational experience. Now I was a different person, someone unlike Dede. She could study because she approached her life straightforwardly. But I was living my life sideways. I did not act on what I wanted, I did not say the things I thought, and being so stifled and clamped all the time left me exhausted; no matter what I was doing, I was always imagining something else. Grades felt peripheral, but the real problem was, everything felt peripheral.
    “I’m going to bed,” I said. I left Dede in the common room, peering at her biology notes.
             
    At breakfast, Hunter Jergenson recapped a dream she’d had involving space aliens, which prompted Tab Kinkead to ask if maybe it hadn’t been a dream after all but an abduction, and then Andrea Sheldy-Smith, who was Hunter’s roommate, told a long story about how she had accidentally used Hunter’s toothbrush, and Tab said to her, “So basically you guys have made out?” I was constantly amazed at the ridiculous topics raised by other people, especially by other girls, and I was equally amazed by the enthusiastic responses their ridiculousness elicited. Of course, maybe being ridiculous was the point—the way they didn’t give off the painful feeling that something was at stake.
    No one at the table brought up surprise holiday, and I felt a growing suspicion that either Amy had been wrong or—this possibility had occurred to me in the middle of the night—she had duped us. At chapel, Mr. Byden spoke about the importance of humility, and I scrutinized his expression for a sign that there would be no classes. He did not give one. Generally, I liked chapel: the rickety straw seats, the dim light, the impossibly high arched ceilings, the sound of the organ when we sang hymns, and the wall in back where the names of Ault boys who had died in wars were carved into the stone. But today I was restless.
    At roll call, I could feel an extra sense of anticipation, a chatty exuberance. At the desks around mine, no one was studying, as people usually were before and during the announcements; everyone was talking and there were loud, frequent bursts of laughter from every direction. Aspeth Montgomery, the blond, mean girl for whom Dede functioned as an acolyte, was sitting on