Prep: A Novel by Curtis Sittenfeld Page B

the lap of Darden Pittard, who was our class’s cool black guy; Darden was good at basketball and from the Bronx and wore a gold chain and rugbies that pulled across his muscular back and broad shoulders. (The other black guy in our class, who wasn’t cool, was Kevin Brown—Kevin was a skinny chess whiz who wore glasses, whose parents were both professors at a university in St. Louis.) I saw Darden make fish lips at Aspeth, as if to kiss her, and then I saw her take his face in her hand, her thumb on one cheek and her index finger on the other, and pretend to scold him, and as I watched, I thought that probably, almost definitely, today was surprise holiday. How could it not be?
    Henry Thorpe had to ring the bell three times before people were quiet enough for roll call to start. The first announcement, from Mrs. Van der Hoef, was that anyone going on the Greece trip in June needed to make sure their parents had sent in the five-hundred-dollar deposit. Then a junior boy whose name I didn’t know said he’d left his math notebook in the library and if you saw it, please give it to him. The third person to go was Dean Fletcher, who ambled up to the platform where the prefects’ desk was, which Henry and Gates stood behind. After Little’s expulsion, my interest in Gates had waned almost completely. Not because of anything Gates herself did but, I think, because I associated Gates with Little and with all my discomfort surrounding that situation. Gates soon seemed like someone a friend of mine, rather than I myself, had once been preoccupied by. I still felt a flicker of interest when I saw her, but only a flicker.
    “A couple things,” Dean Fletcher said. “First off, breakfast ends at exactly five to eight. I’ve been getting reports of you guys complaining to the dining hall staff ’cause you overslept but you still want your pancakes.” People laughed, mostly because everyone liked Dean Fletcher. “When the staff tells you they’ve stopped serving, it means you better hustle to chapel. Got that? Next thing is, the mail room is a pigsty. Your mothers would be ashamed of you.” He reached into a cardboard box set on the prefects’ desk; I had not previously noticed it. “Exhibit A,” he said, and my heart rate increased, but all he held up was a rumpled
New York Times.
“Papers go in the recycling bins.” The next thing he held up was a pair of earmuffs. “Anyone want to claim these? Nope? Then I get to keep ’em for myself.” He clamped them on his head, and then I knew for sure. “Or—” he said, and he looked around the big room at all of us waiting. He smiled. “How about this?” All I saw before the room erupted was a flash of hunter green fabric. Everyone around me was screaming. Girls hugged, and boys slapped each other on the back.
    I did not scream or hug anyone. In fact, as the noise gained momentum, I felt its opposite, a draining of excitement. But not a draining of tension—my body was still stiff and alert, and the impulse I had, strangely, was to weep. Not because I was sad but because I was not happy, and yet, like my classmates, I’d experienced an emotional surge, I too felt the need for expression. This phenomenon—being gripped by an overwhelming wave of feeling that was clearly not the feeling of the people around me—had also happened at a pep rally: It made me uncomfortable, because I didn’t want anyone to notice that I wasn’t jumping up and down or cheering, and it also thrilled me, because it made the world seem full of possibilities that could make my heart pound. I think, looking back, that this was the single best thing about Ault, the sense of possibility. We lived together so closely, but because it was a place of decorum and restraint and because on top of that we were teenagers, we hid so much. And then, in dorms and classes and on teams and at formal dinner and in adviser groups, we got shuffled and thrust together and shuffled again, and there was always the