“Ault is, what, twenty-two thousand a year?” Angie continued. “What I’m wondering is how much of a factor the cost was for your parents when they were deciding to let you go.”

My cheeks were burning.

“Does the question make you uncomfortable?” Angie asked.

“People here don’t really-” I paused. “Money isn’t discussed.”

“Talk about the elephant in the living room!”

“But that’s why,” I said. “People have so much, so it’s like nobody needs to mention it.”

“Do you see differences between people who have it and people who don’t?”

“Not really. We never use cash for anything. For your textbooks, or if you’re taking the bus into Boston, you just fill out a card with your student number.”

“And then your parents pay the bill?”

“Yeah.”

Our eyes met. She wanted me to say something she already knew. And I didn’t yet understand that just because you can recognize what another person wants and just because that person is older and more powerful than you are, you don’t have to give it to them. “It’s a little different for me,” I said. “The thing is that I’m-I’m on scholarship.” In four years, the only people I’d ever talked about this with were Mrs. Barinsky, who worked in the admissions and financial aid office, and Mrs. Stanchak. I’d never even discussed it with Martha. Martha knew, I assumed, but not because I’d said anything. “My parents pay for my expenses,” I continued. “But they only pay, I think this year it’s four thousand in tuition.”

“Gotcha.” Angie nodded several times and again, I felt a stir of confusion. I was nearly certain she’d already known. “That’s a real tribute to you.”

“For all I know, the school regrets its decision to let me in here in the first place. I did really well in elementary school and junior high, but after I got here, I started to have academic problems.”

“Were you inadequately prepared?”

“Not exactly. It was more that I just stopped feeling like I could do it. I was so-so un-outstanding here. It wasn’t like anyone expected me to be a star.”

“I want us to grapple with the issue of financial aid a little more. I sense this isn’t your favorite topic, but stay with me. I’m wondering if you think the faculty shows favoritism toward wealthy students.”

“No, not really.”

“Not really?”

“There’s one young teacher who’s friendly with these guys in my grade who all went to the same school in New York before they came here. They’re called the bank boys, and they’re all pretty, you know-rich. The teacher gives them rides to McDonald’s, or he took them to a Patriots game one time, and people thought that was kind of weird because most of the class didn’t even know about it until after it had happened. But I don’t think the teacher is friendly with the bank boys because they’re rich. He coached most of them in soccer, and that’s how he knows them.”

“Why are they called the bank boys?”

“Because all their dads work for banks. I mean, not really all of them do, but that’s what it seems like.”

“Would that be bank and boys with big Bs or little Bs?”

I stared at her. “You’re putting this in the article? Please don’t.”

“Let’s keep talking and see what else we come up with. I’ll tell you a story. I did my undergrad at Harvard.”

I thought of having told her about my rejection from Brown and felt embarrassed.

“You said there aren’t differences between students who have money and students who don’t, but that doesn’t jibe with my own experiences,” she said. “I’m from a working-class family in New Jersey, and in college I had to take out tons of loans. And the kids at Harvard, especially the boarding school kids, had an attitude about money that I had never seen. Freshman year, my roommate bought a black wool coat with a black velvet collar. It was beautiful. I didn’t care much about clothes, but I positively coveted this coat. And a week after she bought it, she lost it. She forgot it on the T. And you know what she did?”

I shook my head.

“She went back to the store and bought another one. Just like that. But the real kicker was, I made a comment about charging things to Daddy, just teasing her, and she was enraged. And it took me a long time to figure out, okay, what she’s really doing is inflicting her discomfort with herself onto me.”

I looked out the window. Sunlight fell through the branches of a nearby beech tree.

When she spoke again, Angie’s voice was softer. “Does that story ring any bells?”

“One time, when I was a sophomore-” I said and then stopped.

“Go on. This might feel weird, Lee, but I’d argue that it’s awfully important.”

“Sophomore year, I had a teacher for English who people didn’t like very much. I was walking with other students after class one day, and one of them, this girl, said something about the teacher being LMC. She was talking about the teacher’s clothes.”

“What does LMC mean?”

“That’s what I was wondering. So later I asked my roommate, and my roommate, who would never say something like that, seemed kind of embarrassed. She said she wasn’t sure but she thought it stood for lower– middle-class.” Martha had known that was what it stood for; I could tell that she’d just felt self-conscious explaining it to me. When I’d told her why I was asking, she had said, “Aspeth is so ridiculous.”

“Unbelievable,” Angie said.

“People here aren’t obviously snobby, but their idea of what’s normal-well, another thing I remember for some reason is you can take the bus to Boston on Saturdays if you don’t have a game. And the dean gets on before you leave campus to say all school rules are in effect, and then he meets the bus when it comes back at the end of the day and randomly searches people’s bags. One time last year, the bus was about to pick us up in Boston, and I ran into some girls by Fanueil Hall. They were girls from my dorm. We were all at a clothes store, and one of the girls was taking stuff off the racks and carrying it up to the cash register without trying it on. I said to the other one, ‘Doesn’t she want to see if it fits?’ and the girl said, ‘She’s just buying stuff to wrap the alcohol in.’ She didn’t say alcohol, but that’s what she meant. It was probably a hundred dollars’ worth of clothes.”

Angie shook her head. “What kind of alcohol had she bought?”

“Probably vodka. That’s the one you can’t smell on people’s breath, right?”

“I take it you’re not a drinker yourself.”

“No.”

“Do you think being here on scholarship makes you less likely to violate school rules?”

I thought of Cross and felt a little injured-why exactly did Angie think I was less likely to violate school rules? But all I said was, “Possibly.”

“How about other scholarship kids? Do they drink or smoke?”

“I don’t really think of people as scholarship and not-scholarship.”

“You don’t know who’s receiving aid and who isn’t?”

“You know. But nobody discusses it.”

“Then how do you know?”

“You can tell by people’s rooms-whether or not they have stereos, or if the girls have flowered bedspreads, or if they have silver picture frames. Just the quality of their stuff. And their clothes-everyone orders clothes from the same catalogs, so you’ll see lots of people in an identical sweater, and you know exactly how much it cost. And things like, you can send your laundry to a service or you can do it yourself in the dorm machines. Or even some of the sports, how much the equipment costs. Ice hockey is a really expensive sport, but something like basketball isn’t that much.”

“Is it safe to assume you don’t have a flowered bedspread or silver picture frames?”

“I have a flowered bedspread.” I had asked for it for my birthday freshman year. As for silver picture frames, as for everything else-Martha was my beard.

“There’s another thing,” I said. “Probably the biggest clue about who’s getting financial aid and who isn’t is race. Nobody ever talks about it, but it’s just sort of known that people from certain minorities are almost always on scholarship.”