fiefoe

The school:

... they ate bagels in the dining hall, carried hooks through the hallways, wore clothes other than the ones I'd memorized. They belonged to the real, physical world; previously, it had seemed as if they belonged to me.
This beauty gave a tinge of nobility and glamour to even the most pedestrian kind of homesickness.
Ault on long weekend wasn't really Ault... There was nothing that would surprise or entertain you over the next few days. (I used to fear, and I wasn't completely wrong, that this was what the rest of the world was like.) ...At Ault, caring about everything was draining, but it was also exhilarating.
Ault had taught me everything I needed to know about attracting and alienating people, what the exact measurements ought to be of confidence and self- deprecation, humor, disclosure, inquisitiveness; even, finally, of enthusiasm.
This desperate aversion to seeming like you wanted anything, or worse, to going after it, stayed with me for years after I left Ault.

Lee's social anxiety there almost qualifies her for split personality:

It felt good to be unpleasant; I was relieved to find I still had an aptitude for it, underneath my Ault-induced meekness and sentimentality.
... because I had said something entirely unnecessary, I had told a story. For a moment, I had shrugged off my flattened Ault personality.
This was the problem with me - I didn't know how to talk to people without asking them questions... it made conversation draining. While the other person's mouth moved, I'd try to think of the next thing to ask.
Logistical questions were, in my opinion, the best questions of all; they were the most innocuous.
I believed then that if you had a good encounter with a person, it was best not to see them again for as long as possible lest you taint the previous interaction. ... And there were rules to the anxiety, practically mathematical in their consistency: The less well you knew the person, the greater the pressure the second time around to be special or charming, if that's what you thought you'd been the first time; mostly it was about reinforcement. Also: The shorter the time that elapsed from your first encounter to your second, the greater the pressure;
Sometimes speaking is so hard! It's like standing still, then sprinting.

"Prep"