Read Online Prep: A Novel by Curtis Sittenfeld - Free Book Online Page A

and exhilaration. After about fifteen minutes, Rufina said to Maria Oldego, who was heavy and from Albuquerque, “This is boring. Let’s get out of here.”
Boring?
I thought incredulously. When Rufina and Maria left, so did the other kids on our side of the rink, and I was alone; then I had to leave, too.
    I might have made my life easier by trying to attach myself to Dede, but pride prevented it. And at times, I did attach myself to Sin-Jun, but afterward I often felt depressed, like I had talked too much and, because of the language barrier, like she hadn’t understood me anyway. Besides, Sin-Jun had recently become friends with Clara O’Hallahan, a chubby, annoying girl in our dorm.
    As other students filtered into the mail room, I decided I’d stay in the dorm all day. While my classmates spent money on clothing or cassettes, I could study, I thought. Maybe I’d even do well on the biology test. I left the schoolhouse. It had begun to rain outside, and on the circle, a bunch of boys were playing football, slipping and rolling in the grass. Listening to their cries, I felt a familiar jealousy of boys. I didn’t want what they had, but I wished that I wanted what they wanted; it seemed like happiness was easier for them.
    As I approached the dorms, I could hear music. It was all the same song, I realized, though it wasn’t coming from a single source and it wasn’t all synchronized. It was the Madonna song “Holiday,” with the lines, “If we took a holiday/ Took some time to celebrate/ Just one day out of life/ It would be/ It would be so nice.” When I reached the courtyard, I saw that in dorm windows—but only the windows of girls’ dorms, I noticed, not of boys’—stereo speakers faced out, balanced against the screens, sending music into the air. I wondered how so many girls had known to do this. It seemed a kind of animal intuition, like elephants in the savanna who know, from generation to generation, the precise spot to find water.
    There were speakers in the windows of our room, Dede’s speakers; her parents had sent her a stereo the second week of school. (Dede’s mother also sent her care packages with cashmere sweaters and French chocolate that came in a box where each piece, shaped like a shell or a medallion, had its own correspondingly shaped nest; Dede gave the chocolate to Sin-Jun and me because she was always on a diet. 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.
) When I got inside, Sin-Jun wasn’t there, and Dede was in her industrious mode, hurrying between the bathroom and our room—filling her water bottle, stuffing her backpack, yelling to Aspeth. From the threshold of our room, she called down the hall, “Is Cross going?” Aspeth said something I couldn’t hear, and Dede sighed and called, “Why not?” Aspeth did not respond. After several seconds, Dede said, “Cross has been so moody lately,” and based on the lowered volume of her voice, it seemed she was speaking to me. “Going out with Sophie is bringing him down,” she added.
    Cross Sugarman was the tallest, coolest guy in our class, a white guy who was an even better basketball player than Darden Pittard. Though Cross was a freshman, he was dating a junior named Sophie, which I knew because I’d read it in Low Notes. Low Notes ran in
The Ault Voice,
the school paper; they were festively mean-spirited comments about new couples, ex-couples, and people who had recently hooked up, all written in a veiled way to escape faculty comprehension. There would be people’s initials, and then a pun on their names—for Cross and Sophie, it had been, “S.T. and C.S.: It feels SO good to Cross the grade divide.” The fact that Cross had a girlfriend had, apparently, not prevented Dede from developing an