Free Prep: A Novel by Curtis Sittenfeld Page A

her?” said a gravelly voice, and another voice said, “I don’t know her name, but she’s in my class.”
    “She on something?” said the gravelly voice. “What’s she on? Why aren’t you two in school?”
    “We have the day off. Do you have a washcloth?”
    “Sink’s in back.”
    “If you get it, I’ll stay with her.”
    I felt the wetness against my forehead before I felt my own body. Then I could see them, but I was being pulled between the spinning green world and the static world of their faces in front of me. “She’s coming out of it,” said the second voice. “Hey.
Hey.
What’s your name?”
    I blinked. I tried to say
Lee,
but the noise that came out was more of a prolonged croak.
    “You fainted.” It was Cross Sugarman—he was the person talking to me. “Are you diabetic?”
    I couldn’t answer.
    He turned and said to the ponytailed man, the one with the gravelly voice, “Do you have any candy or soda?”
    “This ain’t a 7-Eleven.”
    “Yeah, I realize that.” Cross looked back at me. “Are you diabetic?”
    I swallowed. “No.”
    “Do you want us to call an ambulance?”
    “No.”
    “Have you ever fainted before?”
    “I don’t know.” My words emerged slowly. The spinning green world was gone entirely. I felt exhausted.
    “What’s your name?”
    “Lee.”
    “And you go to Ault, right?”
    I nodded.
    “Me, too,” he said. “My name is Cross.”
    It struck me, even at that moment, as modest of him to introduce himself. Of course I knew his name.
    I tried to sit up—I’d been lying on the floor—and Cross leaned over and stuck his hands beneath my armpits.
    “Easy,” he said. He turned to the man. “You don’t have any soda?”
    “Restaurants are that way.” The guy jerked his head toward the entrance of the store.
    When I was upright, Cross peered at my face. “What day is it?” he said.
    “Surprise holiday,” I said.
    He smiled. “Go like this.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. When I mimicked the gesture, a string of saliva clung to my knuckles. “We’ll find you something to eat,” he said.
    We walked slowly toward the entrance of the store.
    “Wait,” I said. “I didn’t pay.”
    “I wouldn’t sweat it.”
    When we had stepped back into the bright humming light of the mall, he said, “Man, what a prick.” After about a minute, he nudged me. “Here.”
    We turned into the diner, and a waitress led us to a booth where we sat facing each other. The reality of Cross before me was jarring: his tallness, his pale skin and cropped brown hair, his blue eyes, which seemed to contain both intelligence and boredom. I would not have imagined that Dede and I had similar taste, but Cross Sugarman was the best-looking boy I had ever sat so close to. And this fact was both thrilling and mortifying. It was as if I had, as in a dream, plucked him from his own world, the world of lacrosse games and sailboats and girls with long blond hair wearing sundresses, and pulled him into mine: a grimy restaurant in a depressed mall, on a rainy day. “Sorry,” I said. “For—I mean—I don’t know—”
    “It’s no big deal.”
    “But you’re being so nice to me.”
    He looked away and made a kind of grumbling sigh, and I knew immediately that I had said the wrong thing.
    When he looked back, he said, “This has or hasn’t happened to you before?”
    “Once it did, a few years ago. After a soccer game when I was in sixth grade.”
    “My sister faints,” he said.
    The idea of Cross having a sister was intriguing. I wondered if she thought he was cute, or if she felt lucky to live in the same house he did.
    “She fainted on a plane coming back from California. The flight attendants asked if she wanted the pilot to land the plane, but she told them no. I thought she should have told them yes.”
    “Yikes,” I said. There was something in the mildness of Cross’s tone and expressions that made me unsure how to react to the things he said.