Prep Curtis Sittenfeld Quotes

I always worried someone would notice me, and then when no one did, I felt lonely.

Anyone who's really interested in anything spends time alone.

There are people we treat wrong and later we're prepared to treat other people right. Perhaps this sounds mercenary, but I feel grateful for these trial relationships, and I would like to think it all evens out - surely, unknowingly, I have served as practice for other people.

... nothing broke my heart like the slow death of a shared joke that had once seemed genuinely funny.

I wanted my life to start - but in those rare moments when it seemed like something might actually change, panic shot through me.

Before and after... I heard a thousand times that a boy, or a man, can't make you happy, that you have to be happy on your own before you can be happy with another person. All I can say is, I wish it were true.

The big occurrences in life, the serious ones, have for me always been nearly impossible to recognize because they never feel big or serious. In the moment, you have to pee, your arm itches, or what people are saying strikes you as melodramatic or sentimental, and it's hard not to smirk. You have a sense of what this type of situation should be like - for one thing, all-consuming - and this isn't it. But then you look back, and it was that; it did happen.

... it struck me as so hard to believe I was really getting what I wanted; it was always easier to feel the lack of something than the thing itself.

I have always found the times when another person recognizes you to be strangely sad; I suspect the pathos of these moments is their rareness, the way they contrast with most daily encounters. That reminder that it can be different, that you need not go through your life unknown but that you probably still will--that is the part that's almost unbearable.

If you knew where your happiness came from, it gave you patience. You realized that a lot of the time, you were just waiting out a situation, and that took the pressure off; you no longer looked to every interaction to actually do something for you.

There are people we treat wrong and later, we're prepared to treat other people right.

Later on, when I tried to imagine how I might have ruined things, that would occur to me - that I'd so rarely resisted, that I hadn't made it hard enough for him. Maybe it was like gathering your strength and hurling your body against a door you believe to be locked, and then the door opens easily - it wasn't locked at all - and you're standing looking into the room, trying to remember what it was you thought you wanted.

The interest I felt in certain guys then confused me, because it wasn't romantic, but I wasn't sure what else it might be. But now I know: I wanted to take up people's time making jokes, to tease the dean in front of the entire school, to call him by a nickname. What I wanted was to be a cocky high-school boy, so fucking sure of my place in the world.

And this is how I know that it's all just words, words, words - that fundamentally, they make no difference... Our relationship, for as long as things were good, and in that moment when they could have been good again, was about the irrelevance of words. You feel what you feel, you act as you act, who in the history of the world has ever been convinced by a well-reasoned argument?

At that time in my life, no conclusion was a bad conclusion. Something ended, and you stopped wishing and worrying. You could consider your mistakes, and you might be embarrassed by them, but the box was sealed, the door was shut, you were no longer immersed in the confusing middle.

I actually liked the disolation of winter; it was the season when it was okay to be unhappy. If I were to ever kill myself, I thought it would be in the summer.

..and I thought how liking a boy was just the same as believing you wanted to know a secret - everything was better when you were denied and could feel tormented by curiousity or loneliness. But the moment of something happening was treacherous. It was just so tiring to have to worry about whether your face was peeling, or to have to laugh at stories that weren’t funny.

She opened her mouth but did not immediately speak, and I felt, simultaneously, the impulse to coax the words from her and the impulse to suppress them. I always thought I wanted to know a secret, or I wanted an event to unfold – I wanted my life to start – but in those rare moments when it seemed like something might actually change, panic shot through me.

Ordinarily, of course, I thought it best to remain inconspicuous, but the gesture had a certain irresistable theatricaility, and an inevitablility. Sometimes you can feel the pull of what other people want from you, and you sacrifice yourself, you risk seeming odd or sunsavory, to keep them entertained.

But I never thought of who he wasn't, I never had to explain or defend him to myself, I didn't even care what we talked about.

This possibility was not flattering to me; it was terrifying. There were other things a guy could think I was, and he wouldn't be entirely wrong - nice, or loyal, or maybe interesting. Not that I was always any of those thing, but in certain situations, it was conceivable. But to be seen as pretty was to be fundamentally misunderstood. First of all, I wasn't pretty, and on top of that I didn't take care of myself like a pretty girl did; I wasn't even one of the unpretty girls who passes as pretty through effort and association. If a guy believed my value to lie in my looks, it meant either that he'd somehow been mislead and would eventually be disappointed, or that he had very low standards.

She nodded, jotting something in her notebook. You’re writing that down? Has the interview started?” Lee, whenever you’re talking to a reporter, you’re being interviewed.

I decided that I wanted to say to Sin-Jun, I like your skirt. But sometimes speaking is so hard! It's like standing still, then sprinting. I kept rehearsing the sentence in my head, examining it for flaws.

You don't make waves unless there's a reason, and it better be good. Because once you do, that's it. You're a trouble make, and they never think of you any other way.

Once I had asked, ‘But are you a Democrat or a Republican?” and Jonathan said, “I’m socially progressive but fiscally conservative,” and Doug Miles, a football player who also came to Sunday breakfast but only ever read the sports section and ignored everyone, lifted his head and said, “Is that like being bisexual?” Which I actually thought was funny, even though I was pretty sure Doug was a jerk.

We all stood and gathered our backpacks and I looked at the floor around my chair to make sure I hadn’t dropped anything. I was terrified of unwittingly leaving behind a scrap of paper on which were written all my private desires and humiliations. The fact that no such scrap of paper existed, that I did not even keep a diary or write letters except bland, earnest, falsely cheerful ones to my family (We lost to St. Francis in soccer, but I think we’ll win our game this Saturday; we are working on self-portraits in art class, and the hardest part for me is the nose) never decreased my fear.

After I’d told her – the mall, the taxi, Cross stroking my hair – she said, ‘Did he kiss you?’ ‘John and Martin totally would have seen that,’ I said, and as I felt myself implying the circumstances had prevented our kissing, I thought maybe this was why you told stories to other people – for how their possibilities enlarged in the retelling.

I bet things would be easier for you if you either realized you're not that weird or decided that being weird isn't bad.

I think adults forget just how much faith teenagers can have in them, just how willing to believe that adults, by virtue of being adults, know absolute truths, or that absolute truths are even knowable.

By the time we met up again, she'd be able to hand her reaction to me as a tidy package: a single square of lasagna in a sealed Tupperware container as opposed to a squalid kitchen with tomato sauce splattered on the counters. And I wouldn't have to be there while she got it in order.

But I was living my life sideway. 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.

Sports contained the truth, I decided, the unspoken truth (how quickly we damn ourselves when we start to talk, how small and inglorious we always sound), and it seemed hard to believe that I had never understood this before. They rewarded effortlessness and unself-consciousness; they confirmed that yes, there are rankings of skill and value and that everyone knows what they are (seeing those guys who were subbed with two seconds left before the end of a quarter, I’d think how girls’ coaches were never that heartless); they showed that the best things in the world to be were young and strong and fast. To play a great game of high school basketball-it was something I myself had never done, but I could tell-made you know what it was to be alive. How much in an adult life can compare to that? Granted, there are margaritas, or there’s no homework, but there are also puffy white bagels under neon lights in the conference room, there’s waiting for the plumber, making small talk with your boring neighbor.

… era greu sa-mi imaginez ca m-as fi putut simti vreodata ca o tipa “misto”, dar ma simteam ca o persoana de care eu insami as fi fost intrigata in primii mei ani acolo.

Profii de aici le-au vazut pe toate. Noi ne percepem ca individualitati distincte, dar in ochii lor nu suntem decat o masa de nevoi adolescentine.” – Gates Medkowski

I couldn’t tell them about Cross, I thought. I couldn’t tell them because Dede liked him and because she wouldn’t believe or understand it, and I couldn’t tell them because I myself was unsure what there was to believe or understand. It wasn’t like he’d kissed me, or made any declarations. What could I claim? For years and years, I felt this way, not just about Cross but about other guys – if they didn’t kiss you, it didn’t mean anything. Their interest in you had been so negligible as, perhaps, to have all been in your head.

In the end, there was always your regular life, and no one could deal with it but you.

Dintre toate locurile prin care am fost in toata viata mea, Ault a fost spatial cu cea mai mare densitate de oameni de care ma puteam indragosti.

And the reason I'm telling you all this is that I want you to know no one in my life has ever made me feel worse about myself than you.

I knew all this, I understood the rules, but still, nothing broke my heart like the slow death of a shared joke that had once seemed genuinely funny.

It was one thingfor a person who didn't really know me to act distant, but it was quite another for someone to get to know me and then back away.

… eram prea tanara atunci sa-mi dau seama cum simple considerente geografice sau temporale puteau sa separe oamenii. Acestea sunt motivele pentru care n-ar fi trebuit sa ma intreb ce m-am intrebat mai apoi, in timp ce ma uitam la reflexiile noastre sparte in oglinda – daca exista oare ceva, chiar si ghinionul, care san e tina legate una de cealalta in toti anii care aveau sa urmeze.

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.

Puteam continua sa fiu vechea Lee, cea buna si incompetenta, Lee cea draguta si plina de fisuri, un Labrador flocos si auriu, care nu poate sta departe de nicio balta si se tot intoarce acasa cu blana uda si mirosind neplacut.

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?

In camine, unii dintre elevi se apucasera deja sa impacheteze, lucru pe care eu il uram – vedeam peretii goi si suprafetele lipsite de obiecte ca pe niste aluzii rauvoitoare la cat de efemer era totul in jur, cat de iluzorie era senzatia pe care o avem ca ne apartine vreodata ceva.

Cu ani mai tarziu, la o nunta, l-am auzit pe preot descriind casnicia ca pe o frangere in doua a tristetii si o dublare a bucuriei, si nu mi-a trecut prin minte nici tipul cu care eram atunci si nici vreun sot perfect, imaginar, din viitorul meu; in schimb, m-am gandit imediat la Matha.

After all, these were not topics you could discuss with someone else; what was there to say to another person about how it felt? You could concoct things you wanted but in certain moments the light shifted or time slowed – on Sundays in particular, time slowed, and occasionally on Saturday afternoons, if you didn’t have a game – and you saw that it was all really nothing. It was just endlessness and what you got or didn’t get would hardly make a difference, and then what was there? The loathsomely familiar room where you lived, your horrible face and body, and the rebuke of other people, how they were unbothered, how you would seem, if you tried to explain, kind of weird and kind of boring and not even original. Why did their lives proceed so easily? Why was it that you needed to convince them and they needed to be convinced and not the other way around? Not, of course, that you would actually succeed if you tried.

The fact that I had no opinion on, for instance, relations between the U.S. And China did nit mean I didn't feel things.

It was one thing for a person who didn't really know me to act distant, but it was quite another for someone to get to know me and then to back away.

But sometimes speaking is so hard! It's like standing still, then sprinting.

I cried because I knew for certain that I was leaving home, and abruptly, I did not know if it was such a good idea- I realized that I, like my parents, had never believed I'd actually go.

Of course, now I wonder where I had gotten the idea that for you to participate in a gathering, the other people had to really, really want you to be there and that anything short of rabid enthusiasm on their part meant you'd be a nuisance. Where had I gotten the idea that being a nuisance was that big a deal? Sometimes now I think of all the opportunities I didn't take - to get a manicure in town, to watch television in another dorm, to go outside for a snowball fight - and of how refusal became a habit for me, and then I felt it would be conspicuous if I ever did join in.

When I was in junior high, I used to think I would turn out to be one of the guys, and boys would say, 'Oh, you're so great,' but they wouldn't date me. I thought I wasn't pretty enough. But then I got to Ault and first of all, I'm not really friends with any guys. And then, with you this year, I thought, if Cross will keep hooking up with me, maybe I'm okay after all. But time passed and I never became your girlfriend. And so then I thought, not only was I wrong, but my life turned out to be the opposite of what I expected. Meaning, it wasn't my appearance--that's not the bad thing about me. It's my personality. But how do I know which part? I have no idea. I've tried to think about if it's one thing in isolation or everything together, or what can I do to fix it, or how can I convince you. Then I thought, maybe it is my looks, maybe I was right before. And I never figured it out. Obviously, I didn't. But I've spent a lot of time this year trying. And the reason I'm telling you all this is that I want you to know no one in my life has ever made me feel worse about myself than you.

It was more when things slowed down, during the parts when you were supposed to have fun, that my lack of friends felt obvious- on Saturday nights, when there dances I didn't go to, and during visitation... I spent those times hiding. Most of the other girls propped open their doors for visitation, but we kept ours shut.

The boarding school memoir or novel is an enduring literary subgenre, from 1950s classics such as The Catcher in the Rye to Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep. Doust’s recognisably Australian contribution to the genre draws on his own experiences in a West Australian boarding school in this clever, polished, detail-rich debut novel. From the opening pages, the reader is wholly transported into the head of Jack Muir, a sensitive, sharp-eyed boy from small-town WA who is constantly measured (unfavourably) against his goldenboy brother. The distinctive, masterfully inhabited adolescent narrator recalls the narrator in darkly funny coming-of-age memoir Hoi Polloi (Craig Sherborne)—as does the juxtaposition of stark naivety and carefully mined knowingness.’ — Bookseller+Publisher

This anxiety meant that I spent a lot of time hiding, usually in my room, after any pleasant exchange with another person. And there were rules to the anxiety, practically mathematical in their consistency: The less well you knew the person, the greater the pressure the second time around to be special or charming, if that’s what you thought you’d been the first time; mostly it was about reinforcement. Also: The shorter the time that elapsed from your first encounter to your second, the greater the pressure; hence the lecture-to-library agony. And finally: The better the original interaction, the greater the pressure. Often, my anxiety would set in prior to the end of the interaction—I’d just want it to be over while we all still liked each other, before things turned.

People recognized you or they didn’t, and it was unrelated to knowing you. Knowing you could just be your name or the street you lived on, your father’s job. Recognizing you was understanding you had thoughts in your head, finding the same things funny or excruciating, remembering what you’d said months or even years after you’d said

I have always found the times when another person recognizes you to be strangely sad; I suspect the pathos of these moments is their rareness, the way they contrast with most daily encounters. That reminder that it can be different, that you need not go through your life unknown but that you probably still will -- that is the part that's almost unbearable.

After I checked my suitcase, I walked through the terminal crying. When you go to boarding school, you're always leaving your family, not once but over and over and over, and it's not like it is when you're in college because you're older then and you're sort of supposed to be gone from them. I cried because of how guilty I felt, and because of how indulgent my guilt was. Standing in a store that sold bottled water and birthday cards and T-shirts that said Indiana in ornate writing, less than twenty minutes away from my father's house, I missed them so much I was tempted to call my mother and ask her to come wait with me for the plane; she'd have done it. But then she'd know what she'd probably only suspected--how messed up I really was, how much I'd been misleading them for the last four years. It would be much better once I got on the plane, better still back on campus. But while I was in their city, it just seemed like such a mistake that I had ever left home, such an error in judgement on all our parts.

It was late May, and as the weather got nicer, seniors were outside on the circle constantly, an even bigger group--after lunch and during free periods and on the weekends--and more than once, as I walked by and pretended not to look at the clock of them, I could make out Aspeth shouting, "I do not!" Or another time: "That's so gross!" Why didn't I ever join them? I wanted to, but there would be that one unbearable moment after I approached when I stood on the fringes of the group, and they would shade their eyes and look up and wonder why I was there. There was something I would have to say, there was a place in the grass I would have to sit, a posture I would have to sit in. For other people, these decisions seemed effortkess, not decisions at all; for me, they had never stopped being decisions.

... and when I dated to glance at him, he was looking at me in a way that was both predatory and gender (I do not think it's an exaggeration to say that my life since then had been spent in pursuit of that look, and that I have yet to find it a second time in just that balance; perhaps it doesn't, after high school, exist in that balance) and it was because whatever he was about to do was exactly what I wanted while also scaring the he'll out of me that I folded my arms and said, "I'll have to take this all under advisemeng." I knew immediately that I'd sounded sarcastic, and I did nothing to correct the impression. I guess that I had meant to sound that way, because this was the most terrifying thing in the world: that he knew me--he did know me, after all--and that knowing each other, we were going to kiss.

... and when I dared to glance at him, he was looking at me in a way that was both predatory and tender (I do not think it's an exaggeration to say that my life since then had been spent in pursuit of that look, and that I have yet to find it a second time in just that balance; perhaps it doesn't, after high school, exist in that balance) and it was because whatever he was about to do was exactly what I wanted while also scaring the hell out of me that I folded my arms and said, "I'll have to take this all under advisement." I knew immediately that I'd sounded sarcastic, and I did nothing to correct the impression. I guess that I had meant to sound that way, because this was the most terrifying thing in the world: that he knew me--he did know me, after all--and that knowing each other, we were going to kiss.

Whatever. She had an agenda. She wanted me to be an angry black guy. She had us all pigeonholed before we set foot in Fletcher's classroom." "But you're not angry." I glanced at him. "Are you?" "No more than most people." "So why--why did I fall for Angie's act when you didn't?" "Because you're white." I looked at him to see if he was joking: he gave no indication either way. "Black people who live in a white world learn to be careful," he said. "You learn not to make waves." The only time I had ever heard anyone, including Darden himself, discuss his face was the time sophomore year in Ms. Moray's class when he and Dede and Aspect had gotten in trouble for their Uncle Tom skit. "Or let me put it this way. You don't make waves unless there's a reason, and it better be good. Because once you do, that's it. You're a troublemaker, and they never think of you any other way.

And two, because there was another thing I was mad at Martha for, it had been simmering for the last few days of perhaps for the last few months, and in the same moment, there in the library, I understood exactly what this murky resentment toward her was, and I understood that I would never be able to express it. I resented her for having said, back in October, that she didn't think Cross would be my boyfriend. She had made it true! If she'd said she could picture it, it didn't mean it would have happened. But by saying she couldn't, she'd pretty much sealed that it wouldn't. Had she not understood how literally I took her, how much I trusted her advice? She had discouraged me from being hopeful, and how can you ever forgive a person for that? And how could I ever tell her any of this? It would be too ugly. For me to have messed up, to have done a thing that required her forgiveness, was not atypical. For her to be the one at fault would unbalance our friendship. I would not try to explain anything, and who knew if I could have explained it anyway? The mistake I had made was so public and obvious, and the one she'd made was private and subjective; I was its only witness. NO, I would not tell her anything; I would be good old incompetent Lee, lovably flawed Lee, a golden retriever who just can't stay out of the creek and keeps returning to the house with wet, smelly fur. "So you think I betrayed the wchool?" I said, and I could tell I sounded cranky, but cranky was ( Martha would never know this) something we could recover from--cranky was a car cry from what I actually felt.

And two, because there was another thing I was mad at Martha for, it had been simmering for the last few days or perhaps for the last few months, and in the same moment, there in the library, I understood exactly what this murky resentment toward her was, and I understood that I would never be able to express it. I resented her for having said, back in October, that she didn't think Cross would be my boyfriend. She had made it true! If she'd said she could picture it, it didn't mean it would have happened. But by saying she couldn't, she'd pretty much sealed that it wouldn't. Had she not understood how literally I took her, how much I trusted her advice? She had discouraged me from being hopeful, and how can you ever forgive a person for that? And how could I ever tell her any of this? It would be too ugly. For me to have messed up, to have done a thing that required her forgiveness, was not atypical. For her to be the one at fault would unbalance our friendship. I would not try to explain anything, and who knew if I could have explained it anyway? The mistake I had made was so public and obvious, and the one she'd made was private and subjective; I was its only witness. No, I would not tell her anything; I would be good old incompetent Lee, lovably flawed Lee, a golden retriever who just can't stay out of the creek and keeps returning to the house with wet, smelly fur. "So you think I betrayed the school?" I said, and I could tell I sounded cranky, but cranky was (Martha would never know this) something we could recover from--cranky was a far cry from what I actually felt.

I could not imagined us together. Not as a daily presence in each other's lives, two people who had conversations and made out and sat next to each other in chapel. When I thought of Sin-Jun and Clara--and I did so often--what was hardest to wrap my head around was how they'd been a couple while living in the same room. How had they known when to fool around and when to just sit at their desks when doing homework? Hadn't it been either too intense, too tiring to always be around the person you wanted to impress, or else too familiar? Maybe in such close quarters you have up hope of impressing them and eat there picking your earwax and not caring if you looked cute. But didn't you lose something thrre, too? If that was what people meant by intimacy, it didn't hold much appeal for me--it seemed like you'd be fighting each other for oxygen.

But then, outside Mrs. Stanchak's window, I saw Tig Oltman and Diana Trueblood walking with their hockey sticks to gym, and I remembered how it was probably unwise to confide in anyone at Ault besides Martha. There wasn't anything in particular about Gig and Diana that reminded me of this fact, nothing about them I especially didn't trust, it was just that--they existed. They wouldn't literally be able to hear but if you had a moment of vulnerability at Ault, someone always found out. Once a thing left your head, you lost your privacy.

As I headed around the circle,the air smelled like burning leaves and the campus was shot with that Amber light you see only in the fall, and I felt, as I often did at Ault, both as if I were undeserving and as if the beauty around me was not really mine.

There were other kids at Ault I had a feeling about, kids who came from poorer families than I did and would probably grow up to make a lot more than I would--they'd be surgeons, or investment bankers. But making a lot of money didn't seem like something I'd be able to control; I'd gotten as far as Ault, but I wasn't sure I'd get any further. I wasn't smart or disciplined the way those kids were, I wasn't driven. Presumably, I'd always be aware of lives like these without living one; I couldn't confuse familiarity with entitlement.

Really, we did not share a vocabulary that would allow for such a conversation; it was far too late to tell her anything.

now I wonder where I had gotten the idea that for you to participate in a gathering, the other people had to really, really want you to be there and that anything short of rabid enthusiasm on their part meant you’d be a nuisance.

... and, not even on purpose, I found myself tuning out. What I thought of was Conchita and me as freshmen, if teaching her to ride a bike behind the infirmary. How long ago that seemed, how far I felt from her now; I couldn't remember talking to her even once during our senior year. And, with graduation, we were about to cut loose from each other completely--the distance between us would be physical and definitive, and perhaps we'd never speak again. It seemed an impossible thought--so often find we all come together at Ault that I had begun to believe life contained reckonings rather than just fade-outs--and yet I also saw then that as more and more years passed, the time Conchita and I had known each other, the time I had known any of my classmates, would feel decreasingly significant; eventually, it would be only a backdrop to our real lives. At some cocktail party years into the future, in an incarnation of myself I could not yet fathom, I woukd, while rummaging for an anecdote, come up with one about a girl I'd known at boarding school whose mother took us out for lunch one day while the family bodyguard sat at the next table. In the telling, I would feel no pinch of longing or regret; I would feel nothing true, nothing at all, in fact, except the wish that my companions find me amusing.

... but when Martha left, I stayed. I thought that because I was drunk, maybe everything would be different, that as the night waned, Cross would eventually come to me. But instead, when the DJ played "Stairway to Heaven" as the last song of the night, Cross slow-danced with Horton Kinnelly and then the song ended and they stood side by side, still close together, Cross rubbing his hand over Norton's back. It all felt both casual and random--in the last four minutes they seemed to have become a couple. And though they had not interacted for the entire night, I understood suddenly that just as I'd been eyeing Cross over the last several hours, he'd been eyeing Horton, or maybe it had been for much longer than that. He too had been saving something for the end, but the difference between Cross and me was that he made choices, he exerted control, his agenda succeeded. Mine didnt. I waited for him, and he didn't look at me. And that was what the rest of senior week was like, though it surprised me less each time, at each party, and by the end of the week, Cross and Horton weren't even waiting until it was late and they were drunk--you'd see them entwined in the hammock at John Brindley's house in the afternoon, or in the kitchen at Emily Phillip's house, Cross sitting on a bar stool and Horton perched on his lap.

This was the problem with me - I didn't know how to talk to people without asking them questions. Some people seemed to find me peculiar and some people were so happy to discuss themselves that they didn't even notice, but either way, it made conversation draining. While the other person's mouth moved, I'd try to think of the next thing to ask.

...though as secrets went, this wasn't great. The kind I preferred were about specific people.

And the things you said, the walk from chapel to the schoolhouse, your backpack, tests, these were a bridge running above the rushing water of what you actually felt. The goal was: learn to ignore what's down below. Fine if you met someone else who was the same as you, but you had to realize that nothing another person could do would make you feel better about any of it.

My real frustration with Clara, I think, was that it seemed like she should be insecure but wasn't.

Dude," he said, "Calm down." This was something I hated being told, especially by a boy. My voice might rise half an octave, I thought of telling him, but there's no need to take cover - I will not leap from my chair to embrace you, I will not even shriek with delight.

Where had I gotten the idea that being a nuissance was that big a deal?

Anyway, the important thing to remember about Ault is why you applied in the first place. It was for the academics, right? I don't know where you were before, but Ault beats the hell out of the public high school in my town. As for the politics here, what can you do? There's a lot of posturing, but it's all kind of meaningless.

Either Ault was a lot harder than my junior high had been, or I was getting dumber- I suspected both. If I wasn't literally getting dumber, I knew at least that I'd lost the glow that surrounds you when the teachers think you're one of the smart, responsible ones, that glow that shines brighter every time you raise your hand in class to say the perfect thing, or you run out of room in a blue book during an exam and have to ask for a second one.

Then I thought of how my life at Ault was a series of interactions and avoidance of interactions in which I pretended not to mind that I was almost always by myself. I could not last for long this way, certainly not for the next three years; I'd been at Ault only seven months, and already, my loneliness felt physically exhausting.

As for the care packages from my own mother, I’d learned to wait until I got back to the dorm to open them. Once she had sent three shiny pink cartons of maxi pads, accompanied by a note that said, in its entirety, Kroger was having a sale. Miss you. Love, Mom.)

At that point, listening to them, I wasn’t thinking much about Assassin. What the announcement left me with mostly—I couldn’t have articulated it then, and I might not have believed it if someone else had suggested it—was the sense that I wanted to be Adam Rabinovitz. The interest I felt in certain guys then confused me, because it wasn’t romantic, but I wasn’t sure what else it might be. But now I know: I wanted to take up people’s time making jokes, to tease the dean in front of the entire school, to call him by a nickname. What I wanted was to be a cocky high-school boy, so fucking sure of my place in the world.

There were two entirely discrete feelings I had at this moment. The first was a disbelieving glee that I was really about to kill McGrath Mills. When you are accustomed to denial and failure, as maybe I was or maybe I only believed myself to be, success can feel disorienting, it can give you pause. Sometimes I found myself narrating such success, at least in my own head, in order to convince myself of its reality. And not just with major triumphs (of course whether I’d ever experienced a major triumph, apart from getting into Ault in the first place, was debatable) but with tiny ones, with anything I’d been waiting for and anticipating: I am now eating pizza, I am now getting out of the car. (And later: I am kissing this boy, he is lying on top of me.) I did this because it struck me as so hard to believe I was really getting what I wanted; it was always easier to feel the lack of the thing than the thing itself.

My assumption that she was a scholarship student was, I realized, offensive; it was embarrassing. (It was embarrassing and yet—and yet now, knowing I’d been wrong, I was free to room with her. I could give in, it would be okay. Thinking this felt the way peeing in your pants does when you’re five or six: a complicated relief, one best ignored in the present moment.)

Years later, I heard a minister at a wedding describe marriage as cutting sorrow in half and doubling joy, and what I thought of was not the guy I was seeing then, nor even of some perfect, imaginary husband I might meet later; I thought immediately of Martha.

I wanted to stay, I think, because the way these boys were, their bluntness, their pleasure in physical acts like wrestling and burping, the way everything was too noisy and disorderly to ever feel awkward—this all seemed perhaps preferable to, truer and more lively than, the way that girls were.

Maria wasn’t nearly as pretty, and she was heavier, though she, too, wore tight clothes. Also, she wasn’t deferential toward Rufina, she didn’t talk less in groups, and that was something about her that had always impressed me.

Out the window, the trees were bare and scrawny-looking, and the road was lined with dirty snow from the week before. I actually liked the desolation of winter; it was the season when it was okay to be unhappy.

I decided that I wanted to say to Sin-Jun, I like your skirt. But sometimes speaking is so hard! It’s like standing still, then sprinting. I kept rehearsing the sentence in my head, examining it for flaws.

What about tomorrow? Tomorrow’s Saturday, isn’t it?” “I’m pretty sure I have some school stuff.” Already, I was thinking too much. I was thinking that Saturday was loaded in a way Friday wasn’t—we had Saturday classes, so Friday was still a school night, but Saturday was pure weekend. If I went out with Dave on a Saturday night, I was pretty sure we’d be going on a date. “How’s Sunday?” he said. “Sunday I’m off.” What I needed to do was just be calm. I needed to come up with the next words to say, to concentrate only on the immediate task in front of me and not give in to the sense that this moment was a monstrous pulsating flower, a purple and green geometrical blossom like you might see in a kaleidoscope. “Sunday is okay,” I said. “I’ll meet you here.” “In the parking lot?” “It’s kind of hard to find my dorm,” I said. “And they’re weird about letting guys inside.” “Gotcha. What about seven o’clock. Is seven good?” I nodded. “These are gonna be the best mashed potatoes of your life. Poems have been written about these mashed potatoes.” By you? I wanted to teasingly ask him. But I couldn’t because my anxiety was exploding, the flower was swirling outward infinitely.

Of course, now I wonder where I had gotten the idea that for you to participate in a gathering, the other people had to really, really want you to be there and that anything short of rabid enthusiasm on their part meant you’d be a nuisance. Where had I gotten the idea that being a nuisance was that big a deal? Sometimes now I think of all the opportunities I didn’t take—to get a manicure in town, to watch television in another dorm, to go outside for a snowball fight—and of how refusal became a habit for me, and then I felt it would be conspicuous if I ever did join in. Once when I was a sophomore, I was at a lunch table when Dede was organizing a group of people to go to a restaurant before the spring formal. She went around the table, pointing at each of us and counting, and when she got to me, she said, “Okay, not you because you never go to the dances.” And that was true, but I’d have gone to a restaurant, I’d have put on a dress and ridden the charter bus and sat with my classmates at a big round table in a big room with an oversized red cloth napkin on my lap, I’d have drunk Sprite through a straw, have eaten warm rolls and roast beef and dessert; all of that would have been manageable. But in the moment of Dede bypassing me, how could I have explained this?

Back on campus, I’d have to navigate the chaos of the locker room (because I hadn’t played in the game, it would seem unnecessary to shower, but I wouldn’t want to be observed not showering) and then the separate chaos of dinner, and then there would be the empty time to fill in the dorm before bed.

In her demeanor, there was something spacey and innocent, something slow and not discontented, and it was these qualities that I found so irritating. But I doubted most people agreed; she was the type about whom most people would say, She wouldn’t hurt a fly. My real frustration with Clara, I think, was that it seemed like she should be insecure but wasn’t.

For the last two years, the weather had been similarly ideal for parents’ weekend, which was unsurprising; Ault often seemed to me like a person who always got what he wanted.

Ouch,” Rufina said. Maria poked Rufina again, and Rufina said, “Quit it or I’m reporting you for roommate abuse.” Then she laughed loudly, with her mouth open. The intensity of the laugh so exceeded the exchange that had prompted it that I realized that Rufina must be happy. I had never thought of her as happy before, and I wasn’t sure when it had happened, whether her mood was temporary or permanent.

There were other kids at Ault I had a feeling about, kids who came from poorer families than I did and would probably grow up to make a lot more than I would—they’d be surgeons, or investment bankers. But making a lot of money didn’t seem like something I’d be able to control; I’d gotten as far as Ault, but I wasn’t sure I’d get any further. I wasn’t smart or disciplined the way those kids were, I wasn’t driven. Presumably, I’d always be aware of lives like these without living one; I couldn’t confuse familiarity with entitlement.

In some ways, boys were easier to read than other girls—with boys, it was pursuit and lust, it was effort. With so many girls, it just seemed to be about receiving, or not receiving, rather than trying. It was saying yes or no, but not please, not come on, just this once.

I hated them because they thought I was the same as they were, because if they were right, it would mean I’d failed myself, and because if they were wrong, it would mean I had betrayed them.