"Prep"

[fiefoe]

Some plot highlights: the Assassin game, choosing roommates, Lee's talent for cutting hair, the fraught parents' weekend.  The denouement isn't pretty, but it feels inevitable: 'You will think that Your feelings about the school are complicated, but you still will possess the sweet conviction that it was the place that wronged you and not the other way around.'

<Lee spent much mental energy judging herself and others:>

• And now I knew myself to be generous with encouragement only when I either did not want the thing the other person sought or did not believe the person would really get it.
• Because yes, I was someone who would be rude to a stranger, especially a male stranger who approached me in a public place; but I would never be rude to a member of the Ault staff.
• Presumably, I'd always be aware of lives like these without living one; I couldn't confuse familiarity with entitlement.
• But there were two of them and only one of me and you could not act irreverent alone, not really. Plus, while I could pass, their ethnicity made their status as outsiders definitive.
• ... they said it in unison - things said in unison, like winks, made my skin crawl - and I had to fight the urge to bolt from the basement. They were losers! They were bigger dorks than I was!
• Though normally I thought pride of any sort was distasteful, this was okay because cutting hair was a neutral act, nothing to brag about.
  
• I was a girl who would, even in jest, utter the sentence, I'm the dog. It was a good lesson for me. It was a while before I stopped insulting myself so promiscuously, and I never stopped completely, but still - it was a good lesson.
  

<Other realizations:>

• They showed that the best things in the world to be were young and strong and fast.
• And then I realized that here, in sports, it was okay to show that something mattered to you. Maybe because it didn't actually matter, it was okay to invest yourself - investing yourself was almost ironic - but then you really had invested yourself and you really did care yet it was still okay.
• You socialized, you interacted. And the things you said, the walk from chapel to the schoolhouse, your backpack, tests, these were a bridge running above the rushing water of what you actually felt. The goal was: learn to ignore what's down below. Fine if you met someone else who was the same as you, but you had to realize that nothing another another person could do would make you feel better about any of it.
• If you knew where your happiness came from, it gave you patience.

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