On Thanksgiving itself, Martha’s cousins came over, and Ellie, who was eight and inexplicably fond of me, squatted behind me on the couch, braiding my hair. When that got boring, she took grapes from the cheese platter and tried to persuade me to open my mouth so she could throw them in, and I actually did a few times, when the adults and Martha and Martha’s brother weren’t looking; I liked Ellie because she reminded me of my own brothers. Mr. Porter carved the turkey wearing an apron that said Kiss the cook, though as far as I could tell, Mrs. Porter and her sister had been the ones to prepare everything. Then we all ate too much; after dessert, I started eating mashed potatoes again and, uncharacteristically, so did Martha.
It was a good Thanksgiving; I felt lucky to know Martha’s family, to be Martha’s roommate. But under all of it, still, all the time, I thought of Cross.
Martha’s acceptance from Dartmouth came on December fourteenth and I made her a sign and when people congratulated her, she acted much the way she had when she’d been elected prefect: slightly embarrassed, as if what they had just said instead of congratulations was that they’d seen her taking out the trash that morning in her bathrobe. The next day Cross got into Harvard, and when he came over two nights after that, his reaction to his college acceptance was detached politeness. When I congratulated him and he said “Thanks”-that, in fact, was all he said-I felt how I was not a person with whom he’d discuss something as ordinary and personal as college. What kind of roommates he’d end up with, what he’d major in, whether he’d have a shot at playing basketball there-it was likelier that he’d talk to Martha than to me about such topics. The things he did tell me were self-contained and anecdotal: that as a three-year-old, he’d flunked the entrance exam at a private school because he said that an elephant had five legs (he’d thought the trunk counted); that when he was eleven, he’d gone trick-or-treating in his building in New York and a woman on the fourth floor had answered the door in a black teddy and high heels (she hadn’t even had any candy, so she’d given him and his friend an open bag of Oreos). These stories made me feel protective and adoring and also far away from him.
Ault’s service of lessons and carols was the night before Christmas vacation started, and Cross and Martha were two of the three Wise Men. The senior prefects always played the Wise Men, and then a third senior, an outstanding senior, was selected to join them; to no one’s surprise, this year it was Darden Pittard. When everyone stood to sing “We Three Kings” the three of them walked down the aisle of chapel wearing robes and crowns, bearing their gifts (Martha had been assigned the frankincense). Later that night, when Cross and I were lying in Hillary Tompkins’s bed, I said to him, “You looked handsome in your crown.” This was not the sort of thing I usually said, but we wouldn’t see each other for two weeks, and I was pretty sure I could get away with it. We had already had sex twice that night, and there was between us that air of extra generosity and affection that arises when you’re about to be apart. “I bet you didn’t know I’m an actor, too,” I said. “In fourth grade, my class put on this play about Christopher Columbus coming to America, and I was the star.”
“You were Queen Isabella?”
“No!” I punched his shoulder. “I was Columbus.”
“Really?”
“Why is that so hard to believe? I was good. I wore pantaloons.”
“I’m sure you were good,” Cross said. “I just thought a boy would play Columbus.” He pressed his lips against my ear. “But your pantaloons sound very sexy.”
Later, I remembered this as our best night. Not because it was remarkable but because of its unremarkability-for all the ways it wasn’t fraught and loaded, for how we got to have sex but also, sort of, we got to be friends.
The next day classes ended at noon, and I boarded the bus to Logan in front of Mr. Byden’s house. As the bus pulled away, I looked out the window and thought, No, no, no.
At the airport, in line to check my bag, I felt more aware of myself as a prep school student than I did at any other time. My age, my clothes, the books in my backpack, probably even my posture-these all were markers, signifiers of my membership in a subculture I felt I belonged to only when I was away from it. When I was through the line, I walked to the bathroom, passing the terminal’s long wall of paned mirrors, my reflection a cubed giant wearing my clothes.
What I usually did next was get ice cream and eat it standing in front of a magazine rack, reading, and then just before my plane boarded, I’d buy one magazine-an especially fat issue, which I’d purposely not have read in the store. There’d be other Ault kids in the terminal, of course, and if we passed, we acknowledged one another, usually without speaking, but I didn’t hang out with them. As a freshman, I’d been too intimidated-a bunch of students always sat in the back of a restaurant that sold clam chowder and doughnuts, smoking and talking noisily-and now that I was older, I was still intimidated, at least by the smokers, but I also wasn’t particularly interested; I liked eating ice cream and reading magazines by myself.
But I had gotten no farther than the entrance to the ice cream shop when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned.
“When’s your flight?” It was Horton Kinnelly, Aspeth’s roommate, who was from Biloxi. “You should come back with us.” She nodded her head toward the doughnut and clam chowder restaurant. Over the entrance, I noticed for the first time that neon orange lettering spelled out the words Hot n’ Snacks.
“That’s okay,” I said before remembering myself-Horton looked at me, but we both pretended I hadn’t tried to decline the invitation-and adding, “Okay, sure. You’re just in there?”
She nodded. “Me and Caitlin and Pete Birney and some other people. Have you ever talked to Pete Birney? He’s totally cracking me up.”
“I’ll come over in a second.”
As soon as she’d walked away and I’d stepped into the ice cream shop, I realized that I wasn’t buying anything. Because then what-I’d sit there eating in front of them? Or I’d shove it down beforehand? And what did Horton want with me anyway? Over the years, my path had crossed Aspeth’s many times, but it had virtually never crossed Horton’s.
I entered Hot n’ Snacks and saw them sitting, as I’d known they’d be, in the back-not just Horton and Caitlin Fain and Pete Birney but two or three other Ault students, laughing in a haze of smoke. I approached their cluster of chairs, which surrounded two small tables pushed together. Simultaneously, everyone looked up at me. “Hey, Lee,” Horton said, and I thought she’d find a chair for me-being Horton, she was the hostess-but then she turned back to Pete. I carried a chair from another table and set it down between Suzanne Briegre, a junior girl with long straight black hair, and Ferdy Chotin, also a junior, who still had braces but was nationally ranked in tennis. They both did something more than nod and less than smile. Everyone was discussing a woman in a movie who had worn cowboy boots and a cowboy hat and nothing else. (Listening to the conversation, I thought, was that what Cross wanted, a girl in cowboy boots and a cowboy hat? Her skin would be taut and tan, and she would never be confused about the mechanics of a blow job. A nervous chant started in my head: What was he doing with me, what was he doing with me, why were we together?)
Meanwhile, I was observing my schoolmates with a kind of awe, how they had so many sets of behavior in their repertoire. On campus, they attended chapel and turned in papers; here, they lit cigarettes and acted irreverent. And it wasn’t even like all of them were cool, not definitively cool like Horton was. I knew for a fact that Caitlin planned not to have sex before marriage, but here she was, hanging out, casually violating a school rule, showing another side of herself, when I was always me. I didn’t have the impulse, just because I could get away with it, to act any differently at the airport than I did at Ault. And the only time I’d ever smoked was sophomore year at Martha’s house, when we decided to smoke one cigarette each, but Martha stubbed hers out after two puffs, proclaiming it disgusting; I’d kept going, but only for practice. I’d been practicing, I saw now, for a situation like this. But the practice had been a long time ago and incomplete and I wouldn’t take a cigarette if it was offered to me because in the daylight, in front of classmates I hardly knew, it would be almost as bad as kissing in public.