And I, without any anticipation at all, had been nominated.
My mind wheeled. My teachers—Ms. Conklin in English, Ms. Clunie in French, Ms. Zia in math—did they really think I was bright? Was I really doing well? I knew my grades were good, but whose weren’t? We were all accomplished. We’d gotten the small-fish-in-a-big-pond lecture a dozen times as we’d tried to acclimate to this new school. There was nothing special about me.
Outside Chapel, my friends clustered around me with congratulations. Caroline hugged me. Sam gave me a fake Groucho: “I bet you think you’re pretty shmaaht.” Brooke said, “Wow, man!” They were genuinely proud, and their kindness gave me space to savor this honor. I walked the path to the Schoolhouse in the heart of their banter.
Ducking among bodies between classes, working my way upstream to French, at the end of a long Schoolhouse hall, I bumped into someone. “Sorry,” I said, and tried to go around, but the someone moved left to counter me.
I looked up. Khaki pants, blue jacket, rabbit smile half-open on his face: it was Shep. Library Shep. Well, Not-Library Shep. Whatever had happened with Shyla and her blue lingerie, I didn’t know. I hadn’t bothered to keep track.
“Hey,” he said, looking down at me. “Congratulations.”
“Oh. Thanks.”
“I’ve been meaning to tell you.”
It had been only about an hour, but I didn’t point this out.
“It’s pretty cool,” he said.
“Yeah. I’m surprised.”
“Well, I’m not,” said Shep. “You’re like a Doogie Howser, aren’t you? Are you even fifteen?”
“Last week.”
“Happy birthday.”
“Yeah, thanks.”
The second bell was about to ring; our bodies were tense with the anticipation of it. The halls had emptied. His smile opened up, and I thought, Gosh.
“Well, cool,” he said.
I nodded. Had there ever been a day this cool?
“Hey,” said Shep. “See you around.”
“Yeah. See you.”
Then he was in the common room on the way to lunch.
“What’s up?” he said. I raised a hand. He’d been waiting for me, and now that I was there, he drifted off with his friends and I with mine. We fell into line with our trays.
“What was that?” asked Caroline.
“Um, Shep.”
“I know who he is.”
I hadn’t told them about the whole blue bra thing. I wasn’t sure whom I was protecting, but it had never seemed germane. “He’s being really nice to me about the Ferguson nomination,” I said.
“Yeah, I’m sure that’s what it’s about,” said Brooke, behind us.
I turned. “Why? What?”
“Just saying.”
“Come on, Lace,” said Caroline.
I had gone from invisible to obviously appealing in one morning? “Come on, what?”
“He’s not seeing anyone,” reported Brooke.
“He will be soon,” said Sam.
“What? What?” I felt panicky. This mix of excitement and concern was entirely new.
“Oh, come off it,” said Brooke. “That boy wants you.”
“I think he’s cute,” offered Maddy.
Sam said, “Totally.”
I looked for him as we ate, but he was in Lower with his friends, and today we were eating in Middle, as we were supposed to do. My friends got in line at the salad bar. The dance instructor was there, as usual, watching his dancers make their choices. My friends weren’t dancers, but they brought back plates piled with iceberg and watery cherry tomatoes.
I choked down half of my PB&J. I had no appetite. How wonderful that was, to have no appetite: for once, not to feel I needed something I did not have. Why eat at all? Why ruin this beautiful run of fortune with consumption? I sat. I waited. I didn’t dare to smile.
Spring break spanned almost the entire month of March. My parents took my brother and me skiing in Vail. This was a triumphant and sentimental return for my father. As a boy in the 1950s, Dad had piled with his brothers into the back of the family station wagon for the drive from St. Louis to Colorado in the first years of the big ski resorts. Dad told us about the car full of sleeping bags and comic books, how happy his father had been on skis. My grandfather called the mountains God’s country. When we arrived in Vail some forty years later and checked into the time share Dad had found, he stepped out on the balcony and gulped mountain air, holding his face toward the sky. I quit the little apartment and found my friend Linley, one of the Kittredge girls, whose family had a house a stone’s throw from the gondola.
I didn’t really understand why my parents gaped when I described drifting down from her door to the back of the lift line. At school, Linley seemed a lot like me, I thought, with one brother and a dog and similar tastes in music, and I’d imagined our circumstances comparable. I was just privileged enough to assume that my family was about as well-off as other kids’ families, except of course for the flagrant consumers, like my city friends with their Chanel suits, or the son of the scion in his limousine. Everyone knew about them and everyone rolled their eyes. I did not understand that wealth was shifty and could be shy. Off campus, the small grandiosities I observed among my friends in the dorms bloomed into full occupation of their impossible lives. Linley put her skis on at her own back door, stepped off into the snow, and floated over everything in her path, her blond braid barely lifting off the back of her parka. I was terrible, tripping and shivering behind her, but I’d been
