Prep: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

coming from the bathroom,” I said. This seemed unlikely.
    Dede opened the door to our room and stepped into the hallway. Then she walked back in. “No, it’s this room,” she said. “It’s definitely this room. What food do you guys have in here?”
    “Only that.” I gestured toward the shelf above my desk, where I kept a jar of peanut butter and a box of saltines.
    “What about you, Sin-Jun?” Dede said.
    Before Sin-Jun could respond, I said, “Why are you assuming it’s us? It might be you.”
    “I’m not the one keeping an entire grocery store in here,” Dede said, and it was true that Sin-Jun had several packages and containers beneath her bed and in her desk and closet.
    “But you don’t know that it’s food,” I said. “Maybe it’s your shoes.” I picked up my bucket.
    “What are you doing?” Dede said.
    “Getting ready for bed.”
    “You’re not going to help me look?” Dede’s mouth hung open in surprise, or maybe indignation, and I had a strange temptation to stick something in it—the bristle-free end of my toothbrush, or my own finger.
    “Sorry,” I said.
    As I left the room, before the door shut, I heard her say, “Yeah, I can tell.”
             
    It became December. (
I have been at Ault seventy-eight days.
) Once, Little and I spent a Saturday night, while everyone else was out, playing Boggle in the common room as Sin-Jun looked on. Another time, just Little and I watched a crime show on TV, and she made popcorn that burned, but we ate it anyway. (“I’m still kind of hungry,” I said afterward, and Little said, “Hungry? My stomach and my back are touching.”) There were two more thefts, which Madame announced at curfew. I wasn’t sure whose money it had been, but it hadn’t been any of Dede’s friends’. The smell in our room intensified; it became a stench, and I worried that even if it wasn’t emanating from me, I carried it on my clothes and skin. Sometimes in class or even outside, leaving chapel, I’d get a flash of it. When people came by the room, Dede made embarrassed jokes or flat-out apologies.
    The week before Christmas vacation, I was walking through the mail room during the morning break when I saw Jimmy Hardigan, a senior, slam his fist against the wall. Then I saw Mary Gibbons and Charlotte Chan, also seniors, hugging. Charlotte was crying. Usually, the mail room was noisy at morning break, but now it was quiet. I wondered if someone had died—not a teacher or a student, but a member of the administrative staff perhaps.
    I approached the wall of gold, windowed mailboxes. You knew you had mail because you saw it in profile, leaning diagonally against the wall of your box, and years later, after I was gone from Ault, I dreamed sometimes that I saw that skinny shadow.
    My mailbox was empty. I glanced to my right and saw Jamie Lorison from Ancient History. I could hear his heavy breathing. “Jamie, why is it so quiet?” I asked.
    “The seniors just heard back from Harvard, the ones who applied early. But everybody’s striking out this year.”
    “No one at all has gotten in?” Long ago, before Ault had taken girls, the boys would go to the headmaster’s house the day before graduation and on a slip of paper they’d each write
Harvard, Yale,
or
Princeton;
the school they wrote was the one they’d attend.
    “Only two so far,” Jamie said. “Nevin Lunse and Gates Medkowski. The rest got deferred.”
    I felt a swelling in my chest, a rise of breath. I scanned the mail room, hoping to congratulate Gates, but she wasn’t there.
    I finally spotted her in the dining hall that night. It was regular dinner, not formal dinner where you had to dress up and sit at assigned tables. As I set my plate in the dirty-dishes carousel, I saw her in the food line. My heart pounded. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, swallowed, and walked toward her.
    I was less than ten feet away when, from the opposite direction, Henry Thorpe appeared. “Lay it