Prep

Lee’s a senior, and while Martha visits her cousin at Dartmouth—she might apply early there—Cross knocks on her door. He and Lee lie down in her bed, and he takes his shirt off. He jokes about Martha telling Lee classified prefect information. Lee claims Martha tells her nothing, and she scolds Cross for not speaking to her for four years. Cross corrects her: less than three years. They kiss, and Lee thinks about how all boys want sex, but until now, no boy has tried to do anything with her. Cross “fingers” her, and Lee feels great. He leaves at around 4am. When Lee wakes up, she can’t believe she’s the same girl.

Due to the math drama with Ms. Porsek, Lee has a new adviser, Mrs. Stanchak. Lee wants to attend a prestigious school like Brown, and Ms. Porsek informs her that there are more than eight good schools. She names schools that aren’t in the Ivy League (and that aren’t considered Ivy-worthy), and Lee cries, though the tears have more to do with Cross than her college prospects. Mrs. Stanchak reminds Lee about the federal financial aid form deadlines, and the honest talk about money gives Lee a surreal feeling.

For missing Sunday chapel, Dean Fletcher sentences Lee to table wipes (pre-dinner cleanup). Cross has prefect duty and jokes that Lee just wants an excuse to speak to him. He checks Lee’s name off the list and lets her go. Lee wants to be like the girl in Dylan’s love song “Girl from the North Country” (1963), but Martha doesn’t see Lee as Cross’s girlfriend, which upsets Lee.

At around 1am on a Saturday, Cross returns, and Martha is there, but she leaves. Cross wonders if Martha is mad, but Lee doesn’t care. Lee tells Cross not to tell people about them and to act normal when they see each other—no flowers.

Later, Martha tells Lee she doesn’t want Cross coming to their room. They’re breaking visitation rules, and Martha says they should meet in the day student room—it has a bed, and the day student, Hillary, doesn’t use it much. Lee agrees, and the best friends make up.

Cross arrives a third time, and, as promised, Lee leads him out of her and Martha’s room and into the day room. Lee loves being with Cross but recognizes the inevitable sadness when Cross leaves. After three weeks, Cross brings up sex. Lee isn’t sure about it, and she doesn’t know why. She can’t believe the moment’s real. She suggests doing other things and gives him oral sex, and she feels a connection with all the girls who’ve performed oral sex on boys they liked. Cross praises the “blow job,” and acing a math test couldn’t make Lee feel prouder.

After a long weekend, Lee and Cross have sex in Hillary’s sleeping bag in the day room. Lee feels sore, but it’s a pleasant soreness, like the kind she gets after hiking. Two days later, Lee gets birth control, and when she looks in the mirror, she feels like she could see anyone—a cowgirl, a divorced mom, an aerobics instructor on a cruise ship.

Cross gets into Harvard, and Lee goes to Cross’s basketball games and believes sports expose the truth about life: People get ranked on value and skill, and that determines their position. What matters is strength and quickness.

Lee goes home for the holidays. At the airport, she thinks her clothes, backpack, and posture mark her as a part of Ault. She eats ice cream and reads magazines alone until she meets up with Ault kids, and they talk about a movie with a woman wearing only cowboy boots and a cowboy hat. Lee thinks it’s easier to understand boys than girls. With boys, it’s about trying. With girls, it’s receiving or not receiving.

At home in South Bend, Indiana, Lee suspects her mom can tell she’s had sex, Lee’s mom speaks to her about condoms, and Lee remembers her dad roaring that oral sex is sex. Lee goes with her dad to pick up her brother, Joseph, at a roller rink birthday party, and they fight over who gets to sit in the front seat. For New Year’s Eve, Lee stays home with her littlest brother, Tim, and they watch movies and eat pizza.

In early February, Lee and Cross are in the day room, and the fire alarm goes off. Cross runs out quickly, offending Lee. Two nights later, Hillary complains about finding unclean underwear in her room. One girl wonders if it’s a G-string, but it is Lee’s white underwear with moon and stars.

On Valentine’s Day at Ault, the Ault Social Committee (ASC) runs a flower exchange where students can send each other flowers and notes for money. Lee sends flowers to Martha, Sin-Jun, and, after much deliberation, Cross. Lee gets flowers from Martha and Aubrey, and Martha gets seven flowers—one is from Cross.

Cross hurts his ankle playing basketball, and, after further deliberation, Lee chooses not to visit him, but she sees him play Fortinbras (a minor part) in William Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet (ca. 1599-1601). Lee gets into the University of Michigan and a college near Boston, but she’ll probably choose the former. It’s cheaper, and if Cross won’t talk to her at Ault, why would he travel across Massachusetts to see her at Mount Holyoke?

Lee runs into Cross outside Dean Fletcher’s classroom, and Cross congratulates her on Michigan. They go into Fletcher’s empty room, and he asks for oral sex. Lee complies, and he ejaculates on her sweater. He hugs her, and she cries. After spring break, Cross visits Lee again. They have sex, and then he leaves.

Headmaster Byden speaks with Lee, and in his office, she sees a portrait of Jonas Ault, the captain of a whale-hunting ship who started the school to memorialize a daughter who died of scarlet fever. Byden wants Lee to talk to a New York Times reporter who’s writing an article about Ault. He asks her to convey her Ault pride, and Lee agrees.

The reporter is a young woman, Angela Varizi, and Lee tells her how the media influenced her idea of boarding schools. She mentions her poor grades and a group of boys, “the bank boys,” whose dads all seem to work for banks. Varizi tells Lee she’s from a working-class family, and Lee opens up more. She says a girl called Ms. Moray “LMC” (lower-middle-class), and she remembers another girl buying over $100 worth of clothes to wrap around alcohol so they could sneak it into dorms.

Lee says scholarship students don’t have flowery bedspreads, but she got her parents to get one for her birthday during freshman year. She says Black and Latinx people tend to receive scholarships, while Asians and people from India don’t need them. Varizi asks why more white students don’t get financial aid. Lee says: White students don’t contribute to diversity. Lee admits to feeling left out.

Martha goes to a dance and witnesses Aspeth and Cross dancing together, but Low Notes cryptically says Cross is dating Melodie Ryan (she played Ophelia in Hamlet). Lee goes to Cross’s dorm room, but only Devin is there. He teases her about the article, and she cusses him. He asks her if she’s “fish or cheese” (372), and Devin explains the sexual meaning of the list and that Cross is managing it. Lee calls him an “asshole.”

The Times publishes the article, and Lee’s bleak representation of Ault subjects her to scorn. Her parents call her, and they’re upset. She lied to them. She told them she loved it at Ault, but in the Times’ story, she’s miserable. They threaten to skip her graduation, and her dad asks her to stop worshiping “bullshit”—wealth.

While Cross practices basketball in the gym, Lee confronts him. He says Devin is “full of shit” and claims Lee was the one who wanted to conceal their relationship. Lee argues Cross wouldn’t have been her boyfriend anyway, and Cross admits she’s right. Lee cries, and Cross tells her there were good parts to their affair, but she was too “businesslike” about it.

Cross isn’t surprised by what she said in the article, but he thinks she should have said it in The AV or in a “chapel talk.” She just gave outsiders more reasons to hate prep schools. Cross tells her wanting to spend time alone doesn’t make a person weird, and maybe she magnifies the differences between her and others. Devin says antisemitic things, but Cross doesn’t make a big deal out of it. Lee realizes Cross is Jewish.

Ault students continue to spite Lee, but Mrs. Stanchak calls her brave, and Darden sympathizes with her. He discerned Varizi’s agenda, but, as a Black person in a white world, he’s learned how to be careful. The school has Conchita Maxwell give a chapel talk to rebuke Lee’s representation of Ault.

Lee goes to look for Cross multiple times but doesn’t find him. Her parents arrive for graduation, and Tim clogs the toilet, so they have to switch hotel rooms. Lee graduates and goes to the University of Michigan but doesn’t like it. She gets a job, goes to graduate school, and gets another job. She returns to Ault for reunions but gets sad whenever she thinks about Ault.

Dede becomes a lawyer in New York, Aspeth owns an interior design boutique in New York, Darden is an Ault trustee, Sin-Jun is a neurobiologist and has a girlfriend, Clara married a man who oversees his family’s coal mines, Cross works for an American brokerage firm in Hong Kong, Rufina marries Nick, and Martha becomes a classics professor.

Lee remembers the first night of senior week. They’re at a Boston club, and Martha leaves, so Dede, who tells Lee that she is always angry and sad, lets her stay in her hotel room. The next morning, out in Boston, Lee thinks about how the world is such a large place.