“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 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 chance that you might find out one of the pieces of hidden information. This was why I felt excited when life was different from normal, when things happened-snow and fire drills and the times we had chapel at night, evensong, when the sky outside the stained glass windows was black. Depending on circumstances, a wild fact could be revealed to you, or you could fall desperately in love. In my whole life, Ault was the place with the greatest density of people to fall in love with.
Gates rang the bell to tell people to settle down. Dean Fletcher stuck two fingers in his mouth and wolf-whistled. “Okay, guys,” he said and made a gesture meant to calm us, patting the air with his palms. “Enough. Listen up. We’ll be sending a bus to Boston at ten o’clock, and another bus to the Westmoor mall at noon. Sign up in my office if you want to go. I know I don’t need to remind anyone that while you’re away, all school rules are in effect.” This was what teachers always said before you left campus.
When roll call was over, students surged out of the room, toward Dean Fletcher’s office or else outside, toward the dorms. I headed to the mail room, which was in the basement, and saw through my mailbox window that nothing was in there. I wasn’t sure what to do with myself. My focus up to this point had been avoiding the biology test, and now that I had, I was at a loss. The problem was, I didn’t have anyone to go with to Boston or the mall; I still didn’t have any friends. Surprisingly, this was not a fact that greatly affected my day-to-day life, at least not logistically. At meals, the sections of the dining hall were unofficially divided by grade, and within your grade-it was strangely democratic-you could sit at any table with an empty seat; formal dinner was even better because then there was assigned seating. In chapel you could also sit anywhere. And the rest of the time, wandering the halls between classes, changing in the locker room for practice, you could inconspicuously be by yourself, walking a few feet behind other people, or standing on the periphery.