Both these nominations were predictable: Aspeth was the queen of our class, and Gillian Hathaway was the actual elected leader, having served as sophomore and junior prefect. There was something unobtrusively competent about Gillian in all ways: She was good at sports, especially field hockey and ice hockey; she was blandly attractive; she was intelligent enough; and most notably, she never, in class or at a meal or in a game, seemed nervous or uncomfortable. For my first few years at Ault, all of these qualities had impressed me, and then recently, just the month before, I had ended up at a lunch table with Gillian and her boyfriend, Luke Brown. It was seventh period, late for lunch, and I didn’t get to the dining hall until two o’clock. They were the only juniors there, which made me worry that they’d scheduled a romantic rendezvous on which I was intruding. But their conversation suggested otherwise: First they talked for twenty minutes straight about golden retrievers versus labs-not about specific dogs, beloved pets from their childhood, but about the breeds: which was smarter and why it was they both suffered from hip dysplasia. (I had no idea what hip dysplasia was and didn’t ask.) This discussion segued into one on skiing and whether you could feel the difference between real and man-made snow, and then one on how even though the snow tires on Luke’s brother’s jeep had different treads, he’d never had a problem with them. Besides the fact that I had nothing to contribute to any of these subjects, I couldn’t speak because I was in a state of shock. Were they always so boring? How could you talk this way to a person you’d been going out with for a year? Didn’t they want to discuss people, or things they were worried about, or the tiny events that had occurred since they’d last seen each other? Perhaps Gillian always seemed comfortable, I thought, because she was not particularly interested in the world, because she did not question her place in it. This possibility made me dislike her slightly, a feeling that was amplified a few days later at dinner when people were discussing the recent scandal over Massachusetts’s governor having employed an illegal alien as a nanny. I heard Gillian say, with a laugh, “At this point, does anyone expect the liberals not to be total hypocrites?” She was oblivious to the possibility that perhaps not everyone present shared her views, and I thought, You’re sixteen. How can you already be a Republican? Maybe the only reason I was already a Democrat was that one of my earliest memories was of my father heckling the TV during Reagan’s inauguration, but still-I did not like Gillian Hathaway. And now, now that she was Martha’s opponent for prefect, maybe I even hated her.

“So Aspeth, Gillian, and Martha,” I said. “That’s it for the girls? Only three?”

“The meeting was kind of rushed,” Nick said. “You want to know the guys?”

“Yeah.”

“Me.”

“Are you serious?”

“Thanks, Lee. That’s flattering.”

“No, I just-I couldn’t tell if you were kidding.”

“Hey, John,” Nick said. “Was I nominated for senior prefect?”

John Brindley, sitting across the table, looked up. “Chafee, there’s no way I’m voting for you.”

They both laughed, and Nick said, “I don’t need your vote because I have Lee’s. She says she wants to be my campaign manager, too. Isn’t that right, Lee?” He elbowed me obviously, so John could see (at Ault, of course, there was no such thing as a campaign manager). Had we found ourselves alone, Nick would never have elbowed me, he’d never have touched me at all. Sometimes I felt flattered by this kind of teasing-it was, after all, a form of attention-and sometimes I resented the way that boys included me as a prop in their exchanges with one another: the magician’s assistant who climbed into the box, got sliced in half, and had to beam at the audience while, above her, the magician joked and gestured extravagantly.

“What other guys were nominated?” I asked.

“Let’s see.” Nick counted off on the fingers of his right hand. “Pittard, Cutty, Sug, Smith, and Devoux.”

These nominations, like those for Aspeth and Gillian, were unsurprising. They were all bank boys, except for Darden Pittard, but he was our junior prefect, Gillian’s male counterpart. He and Cross-Sug-were the likeliest to win. Certainly my own vote would go to one of them, either to Darden because I genuinely respected him, or to Cross because of my crush. What was certain was that I wouldn’t vote for Nick Chafee.

After crew practice, Martha lifted weights, and when she got back to the dorm late that afternoon, it was almost time to leave for formal dinner. I was seated on the futon, reading, and Martha’s back was to me as she inspected her closet for clothes to change into. “Did I send out my short-sleeved blouse to be laundered?” she asked.

“Which one?”

“The blue one.”

“I’m wearing it.”

Martha turned.

“I can take it off,” I said.

“That’s okay.” She had turned back to the closet, and she pulled out a pink T-shirt with pink ribbon trimming the neck and sleeves.

I stood. “Really, Martha, I can change.” Remarkably, though I wore her clothes all the time, this had never happened before. And I could have offered her something of mine, but she didn’t wear my clothes, which was not a fact we discussed.

“Don’t be ridiculous.” She stuck her head through the pink shirt, pulled it down, then raised one arm and sniffed her armpit. “Fresh as a mountain breeze.” She took a skirt, white with green and darker pink swirls, out of the closet and held it waist-high in front of her, still clipped to the hanger. “This goes, right? So I want you to finish telling me what Dean Fletcher-oh, wow. Lee, this is adorable!”

She had noticed it, finally-the paper crown I’d made using her computer paper and her tape and my own markers. I’d drawn huge jewels in purple and green and red, and yellow lines around the base and the triangular tips, and in black I’d written, Martha Porter, Senior Prefect and Queen of the World.

She set the crown on her head. “Does it suit me?”

“Perfectly. You should wear it to dinner.” In fact, I’d have been horrified if she wore it to dinner. It would be just what people would expect, evidence of our dorky-girls’ glee at Martha’s fluke nomination. “This is so exciting,” I said.

“Well, it’s nice that I was nominated, but I won’t win.”

“You might.” Perhaps I should have been more vehement, but really, she probably wouldn’t get it, and I didn’t like acting fake with Martha. Acting fake with everyone else was okay only as long as you had one person with whom you were real.

“I’m predicting Gillian,” she said. “Too many people don’t like Aspeth.”

“What if it’s you and Cross, and you have to have lots of late-night meetings and hang out together all the time?”

Martha laughed. “I’m not the one who’s in love with Cross. But did you know he was the person who nominated me? Weird, huh?”

Unlike Cross and me, Cross and Martha had a few classes together, and sometimes Martha told me things about him: Devin knocked over Cross’s Bunsen burner in Chemistry today and the table caught on fire. Or, Cross is going up to see his brother at Bowdoin for long weekend. But I wasn’t under the impression they had much direct interaction.

“And Conchita seconded the nomination,” Martha added. This actually wasn’t that weird-Conchita and I had rarely spoken since freshman year, but she and Martha had remained friendly.

“Maybe Cross likes you,” I said in a voice that I hoped would not reveal how horrifying I found this prospect.

“Please.” Martha grinned. “We need to go to dinner,” she said. She removed the crown and set it back on her desk. “Someday you’ll meet a guy who loves you so much and you’ll be like, why did I waste my whole time in high school mooning over that self-centered dork?”