“I don’t know about this,” Cross said. “You’re putting an awful lot of trust in Lee, and, Lee, what are your credentials?”

I was bent over, and I turned my head to look up at him. The expression on his face was lighthearted. For several seconds, I said nothing, and I felt him meet and absorb my own expression, his smile straightening, and I felt that an understanding passed between us-I am not no one, I am not nothing, I do not exist as a backboard for you to bounce your jokes off of–but how can you ever be certain? Maybe he just thought I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Lee has cut a ton of people’s hair,” Aspeth said. “She was the one who cut Tullis’s.”

“No shit.” Cross had moved around so he was standing in front of Aspeth again.

Aspeth lifted her head, probably subconsciously, to make eye contact with him. I could have pressed her head back down, but I didn’t. I was ceding to her; in fact, I felt a perverse desire to aid their union. I almost didn’t mind the way Aspeth was pretending she and I were aligned, us against Cross, girls against boy. “And Tullis’s haircut was awesome,” she was saying. “So there.”

“So there? Geez, Aspeth, you should really consider becoming a lawyer. Is nanny-nanny-boo-boo next?”

There was something repellant about watching Cross flirt; it felt overly personal, like seeing him pick food from his teeth.

“Stick your head in doo-doo,” Aspeth said, and they both laughed, and then she said, “Isn’t that how it goes? Nanny-nanny-boo-boo, stick your head in doo-doo.” This time, 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! The trick, of course, would be to remember this at roll call when I saw them from far away, seeming coolly impenetrable.

“Aspeth,” I said. They were still laughing, and I tried to come up with a different topic. “Do you think Ms. Moray will wear those boots tomorrow?”

“You have Ms. Marinade, too?” Cross said.

“Lee and Ms. Moray hate each other,” Aspeth said. “They’ve had major battles.”

Was this true?

“Were you part of the pimp thing?” Cross asked.

“No, but they’ve clashed other times,” Aspeth said.

“Lee, I didn’t know you were so”-Cross paused, and we made eye contact, and I thought that depending on what he said next, this might be a flash of the other Cross, the one I’d thought I liked-“angry,” he said. It hadn’t been a flash.

“I’m not.” I probably sounded angry in this moment, but I didn’t care.

“Marinade was never a first-draft pick, though, right?” Cross said.

“Shut up,” Aspeth said.

“I thought everyone knew.”

“Will you seriously shut up?” Then Aspeth seemed to reconsider something-apparently, me-because she said, “Okay, Lee, you can’t tell this to anyone, but Ms. Moray was a last-minute addition to the faculty. I guess they’d hired this other woman to be the English intern, and she was super-smart, she went to Yale, she was black and everything so they were psyched for that, and then at the last minute, in August, her fiancé, who lives in London, got testicular cancer and she went to be with him. They were totally scrambling to find a replacement, and here’s Ms. Moray, who, big coincidence, wants to teach but has no job lined up for the fall. So they hire her and, like, two days later she drives out from South Dakota.”

None of us spoke-I had even stopped cutting Aspeth’s hair-and then Cross said, “Cancer o’ the balls. Ouch.”

“How do you know?” I asked Aspeth.

“Renny told me.” Renny Osgood was the woodworking teacher, a guy in his early thirties who’d graduated from Ault and then, alone among Ault faculty, not gone on to get a college degree. His handsomeness was commented on with regularity in the student paper, and he was rumored to have had an affair with a senior girl a few years back, though no one ever knew the girl’s name; in any case, he did have “friendships” with certain current students, and Aspeth was one of them. “She’s out of her league here,” Aspeth said. “Not only as a teacher, but with coaching, too-you can tell she’s a decent athlete, but she has no experience with field hockey. She doesn’t even know the names for plays.”

Of course Ms. Moray had no experience with field hockey-barely anyone played it in the Midwest. I had a sudden vision of her, back in September, finding out she’d been hired at Ault and packing up all her belongings in a hurry and heading East. I pictured her driving alone, changing radio stations when they turned staticky, staying at night in a motel where she could stand in the door of her room and see an endless field of soybeans interrupted only by a pro-life billboard or a water tower. From Iowa (not South Dakota) she’d probably taken I-80 to Cleveland, then picked up 90-that was the route my father and I had gone when he drove me to Ault to start my freshman year.

“She got lucky,” Aspeth said. “She’s a shitty teacher, but Ault was in a bind.”

But she hadn’t been a shitty teacher when she’d been hired. She’d never taught before. And who was Aspeth to decide she was shitty now? She was still inexperienced. Rarely did I wish I were not party to a piece of gossip, but it struck me that I really hadn’t needed to know that Ms. Moray had been Ault’s second choice.

“Okay,” I said to Aspeth. “You’re all finished.”

Aspeth stood and ran her fingers back through her hair, one hand on each side of her head. I was slightly disappointed to realize how tidy I’d been-though the floor beneath the chair was littered with hair, virtually none of it had been scattered on Aspeth’s shirt. She turned to Cross. “How do I look?”

“Ugly,” he said.

Aspeth stuck out her tongue at him, yet even then she was not remotely ugly. She looked at her watch. “Fuck,” she said. “Dinner is only open for fifteen minutes.”

She walked toward the stairwell, and Cross followed her. I couldn’t tell if I was also supposed to follow. Plus, there was the matter of cleaning up.

“Hey, Aspeth,” I called.

She said “What?” without turning around.

“There’s a lot of hair still on the floor.”

She glanced over one shoulder. “There’s not that much.”

There was so much you could have made a wig from it. “Do you guys at least want to put the chair back?” I said.

“Oh, yeah.” Cross walked back and hoisted the chair onto his shoulder again, and this time, the motion seemed charmless.

“Thanks a zillion, Lee,” Aspeth said, and they both disappeared.

I looked from the hair on the floor to the stairs. It may have been Aspeth’s hair, but it was still pretty gross just to leave it there. In the end, I went back up to the common room, borrowed a broom and dustpan, swept it up, dumped it in the trash-as I did so, I had a fantasy of transporting it across campus and dumping it instead in Aspeth’s bed, but this probably was a disciplinary offense and even if it wasn’t, it was highly Audrey Flahertyish-and then returned the broom to the dorm closet. The common room had emptied out, and there were a few french fries stuck forlornly to the table in front of the couches. I considered eating them-after all, I had missed dinner-but that would be pretty Audrey Flahertyish, too. Martha had been right, I thought as I walked back to my dorm. And this was it, the last time: I was retiring from cutting hair.

The assignment for Song of Myself was to write about something that mattered to us, to take a stand, and in the days before the assignment was due, I couldn’t think of anything. “The death penalty,” Martha suggested on the way to formal dinner.

“Would I be for or against it?”

“Lee!”

“I’m assuming against.”

“You’d be against it because it discriminates against minorities and poor people. The overwhelming majority of people who get the death penalty are uneducated black men. Plus, a lot of people sent to death row have turned out to be innocent.” Martha knew this sort of thing both because her father was a lawyer and because she was a generally more serious and better-informed person than I was. The information floating around in my own brain concerned, for instance, of the name of a famous actor’s pet Shih Tzu (Petunia), or why a model had recently been shipped to rehab (for anorexia, with additional rumors that she’d been snorting coke).