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Chapters 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Thieves”
Content Warning: Prep contains fatphobia, suicide, and bigoted representations of race, ethnicity, and gender.
Lee Fiora comes from a working-class family, and she lives in South Bend, Indiana (Midwest America), but she attends the prestigious and expensive Ault preparatory school in New England. The prep school is a boarding school, so Lee lives there during the school year—though the school also has “day students” who don’t live on campus. Lee’s dad owns a mattress store in South Bend and can’t afford to pay the full tuition, but Lee receives a scholarship that makes it affordable.
Lee’s first semester at Ault—the fall of her freshman year—doesn’t have an auspicious start. In Ancient History class, Jamie Lorison, a freshman student, gives a presentation on Roman architects, but Lee prepared a presentation on the same subject. Though Lee was talkative throughout middle school in Indiana, she’s quiet in her Ault classes, so she gingerly explains the issue to the icy teacher, Mrs. Van der Hoef, who tells her that her topic is athletics. Lee asks to go tomorrow, but Mrs. Van der Hoef doesn’t think that’s fair to the students scheduled for tomorrow, so Lee runs back to the dorms.
Lee bumps into Gates Medkowski, who’s tall and attractive. She’s Ault’s first female prefect (a student with official duties, like doling out discipline), and she’s from Idaho. Gates tells Lee that the dorms are off-limits during class. Lee cries, and Gates comforts her.
A week later, Lee is in her dorm room during curfew with her two roommates, Sin-Jun Kim and Dede Schwartz, and Dede is missing $40. Lee didn’t take it, and Sin-Jun didn’t borrow it, so Dede declares that there’s a thief among them.
The next night, Madame Broussard, the head of Lee’s dorm and Ault’s French department, announces the theft and encourages the girls not to keep lots of cash in their room. Ault students don’t need tangible money anyway. If they need to buy something, the school can bill the parents.
During the meeting, Aspeth, an acerbic blond girl worshiped by Dede, asks the person leaving their pubic hair in the sink to clean it up, but Madame Broussard ignores her.
Amy Dennaker, a broad-shouldered junior who scares Lee, suggests creating a vigilante group. Little, the only Black person in the dorm, doesn’t like Amy’s idea. Little is from Pittsburgh, and she excels in cross-country and basketball. Little thinks Dede likes that she’s a victim of theft because it gives her attention. Lee wonders if she’s the thief. What if she stole the money without realizing it?
At Ault, classes go from Monday to Saturday, and during Saturday morning’s roll call, Henry Thorpe, the male prefect, wears a nightgown, fishnets, and heels and dances to music. Wearing a football uniform, Gates arrives and dances to the music. They’re promoting Ault’s 11th “drag extravaganza,” and Lee compliments Gates’s dancing.
In the dorm, girls give boys bras, nail polish, and purses, but the thought of another boy wearing her JCPenney bra horrifies Lee. Instead of going to the dance, she looks at old Ault yearbooks, thinks about Gates, and, in the bathroom, talks to Little Washington, who also didn’t go to the dance, about Gates. Lee thinks Gates is different from the Ault students. Little says Gates is rich like everyone else—she’s from a farm in Idaho, but the farm is about half the size of Idaho.
Little likes Lee: She’s real. After Little leaves the bathroom, Lee notices short black hairs in the sink and realizes they’re not pubic hair but hair from Little’s head. Lee cleans them up.
Another theft occurs—a $100 bill Aspeth’s grandma sent her for her birthday. Dede thinks she and her friends are marks and victims. She also notices a smell in the door room, and Dede blames Lee and then Sin-Jun.
As the holiday break approaches, the smell worsens, and the seniors who applied early to Harvard are tense. Only two early applicants from Ault got in so far: a boy and Gates. In her dorm, Lee makes Gates a card and signs it, “Love, Lee.” The next night, Lee returns to her dorm to get the card and catches Dede going through Sin-Jun’s things. Lee suspects Dede is the thief, but Dede claims she is trying to locate the smell’s source. Dede grabs Lee and asks if she’ll tell Broussard. Lee is noncommittal, and she goes to the phone booth and looks at a picture of Gates from last year’s yearbook.
Avoiding Dede, Lee talks to Little in her room and tells her what happened. Little believes it, but Lee doesn’t understand: Dede has a huge allowance—she doesn’t need to steal. Little says trying to understand people’s motivations around here only leads to headaches.
Lee doesn’t want to sleep in her room with Dede, so she sleeps in the infirmary with pamphlets about suicide, sexual assault, and sexuality. Lee wonders if she’s gay and thinks about kissing and touching Gates.
When Lee returns to her dorm, Dede shows Lee a squid she found in Sin-Jun’s closet that was smelling up their room. Dede tells Lee if she still wants to turn her in, she’ll only humiliate herself. She calls Lee a “freak,” and Sin-Jun apologizes for the squid.
During classes, Lee remembers she left the pamphlet on gay sexuality in her desk drawer. She doesn’t want the thief to find it, so she rushes back to her dorm room and discovers Little—she’s the thief. She says the students are rich, so it won’t hurt them. Lee says it’s stealing, and it’s wrong. Little says she knows Lee is on a scholarship because her comforter gives it away. Little claims she’s on a scholarship, which confuses Lee. Isn’t her dad a doctor and her mom a lawyer? Little jokes about the TV sitcom The Cosby Show (1984-92) and promises to stop and never steal from Lee.
Chapter 2 Summary: “All School Rules Are in Effect”
Lee talks to Broussard about Little, and Ault expels Little. It’s the winter of Lee’s freshman year, and Dede and Lee study for a biology test, a class where Lee is earning a C (before Ault, Lee never got lower than a B+). Leaving the phone booth, Amy tells them that tomorrow might be a surprise holiday, so no one will have to go to school.
Excitement permeates roll call. Aspeth sits on Darden Pittard’s lap. Darden plays basketball and wears rugby shirts and a gold chain. He’s Black and from the Bronx. Kevin Brown is the only other Black person in Lee’s class, but he’s not as “cool” as Darden. Kevin wears glasses and plays chess. His parents are university professors in St. Louis.
To start roll call, Dean Fletcher warns the students not to complain if they miss breakfast, which ends at 7:55. He also admonishes the students for making a mess in the mailroom. He holds up a crumpled New York Times and then pulls a piece of hunter-green fabric. The students scream and hug. There’s a surprise holiday: They can take a bus to Boston or to a mall.
Lee isn’t happy about the surprise. She doesn’t have friends, so she has no one to accompany her to Boston or the mall. At an ice-skating party, she tried making friends with Rufina Sanchez (a girl from a San Diego public school), and she tried to connect with Sin-Jun, but she’s friends with Clara O’Hallahan, a bigger-bodied, “annoying” girl.
In her dorm room, Lee hears Aspeth and Dede speculating on how Cross Sugarman will spend the holiday. He’s the coolest guy in Lee’s class and, according to Low Notes—the coded, gossipy part of the student newspaper, The Ault Voice (AV)—he’s dating a junior named Sophie. Dede has a crush on him, though Lee doesn’t think Dede has a chance because she’s Jewish and not very attractive.
After Dede makes fun of Lee for planning to stay on campus, Lee declares she’s going to the mall to get her ears pierced. The mall isn’t glamorous, and Lee gets her ear pierced at a motorcycle store. The piercing gun frightens Lee, and she faints, but Cross, who was in the store, revives her and takes her to a diner in the mall for milkshakes.
Cross likes sports, but he’s not an illiterate barbarian: He can read and use indoor plumbing. Lee brings up Sophie Turner, and Cross calls Lee a spy. Cross and Sophie won’t marry because she smokes, but Cross thinks she’s cool because she likes to provide him with oral sex. Cross invites Lee to go to the movies with his two friends, and she agrees. He puts dollar bills on the table for his milkshake, and Lee puts down $10. She could’ve taken the singles or got change, but she didn’t want to seem stingy.
Cross doesn’t pay for her ticket, and Lee doesn’t like the mobster movie. Afterward, the group goes to the arcade and jokes about Lee’s pinball talents. They eat pepperoni pizza and miss the bus, so Cross calls a taxi. Cross’s and Lee’s bodies touch in the backseat, and Lee feels electric. After dropping the boys off at their dorms, the driver drops off Lee. The fare is a scary $48.80, but the driver tells Lee that her “boyfriend” (Cross) already paid.
Chapters 1-2 Analysis
Lee says, “I think that everything, or at least the part of everything that happened to me, started with the Roman architecture mix-up” (8). She establishes herself as the narrator, and her voice is quirky and voluble. She tells her story with a stream-of-consciousness style, mimicking the flow of her thoughts, which can be funny, blunt, or insensitive. They regularly have a few twists and turns. In the book’s first sentence, Lee turns “everything” into “part of everything.” She edits and revises her perception and position.
Curtis Sittenfeld juxtaposes (places side by side) Lee’s loquacious interior voice with an insecure and painfully shy voice in the external world of Ault. The sharp difference between the two creates drama and tension and may make the reader wish Lee could stop worrying about what others think of her and just say her vibrant thoughts aloud.
One of the book’s main themes is Identity Construction, and, at Ault, Lee isn’t sure how to act or who to be. Lee states, “I’d spoken in classes only when I was called on [...]. Back in my junior high in South Bend, Indiana, many classes had felt like one-on-one discussions between the teacher and me” (12). In Indiana, Lee never got a grade lower than a B+, but she gets a C in biology. At the prestigious prep school, Lee turns into someone else. She is unmoored in this new place, far from home and surrounded mostly by wealthy classmates, and the reader senses that Identity Construction for Lee will involve sifting through her old life and her new one to discover who—and how—she wants to be at Ault and in the world that awaits after school.
Sittenfeld creates a harsh atmosphere for Ault. Mrs. Van der Hoef is “the dragon lady” (15) and doesn’t show Lee sympathy when she mixes up the assignments. The thefts further the inimical atmosphere, as does the mystery smell and Aspeth’s catty request about pubic hair. Ault isn’t an uplifting place. There are mean girls—a term popularized by the movie Mean Girls (2004) based on Rosalind Wiseman’s book Queen Bees and Wannabes (2002), where she analyzes the odious dynamics that can develop in groups of girls at school. Lee refers to Aspeth as “the blond mean girl,” but Lee calls Clara “a chubby, annoying girl” (66) and describes Dede as not “the kind of Jewish you could hide” (68). Lee, too, can be insensitive, and her antisemitic quip foreshadows her realization in the final chapter that Cross is Jewish.
The thefts bring in the theme of Money and Visibility. Lee states, “[Y]ou didn’t need cash at Ault. Money was everywhere on campus, but it was usually invisible” (21). Wealth isn’t walking around with bundles of tangible money: It’s inconspicuous. The students don’t need wallets when they have to buy something because the school bills their parents. For Lee, money is conspicuous. At the diner with Cross, she scolds herself for not asking for change or taking Cross’s singles. She notes that Cross doesn’t pay for her movie ticket, and, in the taxi, she’s “horrified to see that the meter read 48.80” (94). Though Lee isn’t poor—her dad is a small-business owner—she’s not rich, and her lack of wealth makes money a visible concern in her mind. However, in keeping with Ault’s norms, she hides her financial worries.
As Little steals from the students, she furthers the motif of mean girls. She tells Lee, “Their families are loaded, They don’t need the money” (53). Lee doesn’t think Little needs the money either. She asks Little, “[I]sn’t your dad a doctor and your mom a lawyer?” (54), and the question might make the reader wonder if Lee is a reliable narrator. Earlier, Lee hears Little is “the daughter of a doctor and a lawyer” (23), but Little doesn’t confirm or deny this. Maybe Lee isn’t intentionally misleading the reader, but in the snarky, calculating world of Ault, misinformation is common.
Little is a Black student, and she connects to the motif of diversity. The idea is complex and leads to questions without decisive answers. Is Little automatically marginalized and victimized? Conversely, is reducing Little to her race a form of fetishization? The reader can see skin color and accept how it impacts a person’s behavior. At the same time, Little is a person, and people, regardless of race, shouldn’t steal from one another. It’s as if the toxic atmosphere of Ault prods almost everyone to act harmfully, and Little isn’t different from everyone else. Then again, why does Little get caught and expelled for stealing while Lee gets away with cheating on her math final? The motif of diversity provides no convenient conclusions.
Not everyone at Ault is mean or insidious. Gates comforts Lee, and Lee develops a crush on her and imagines a sexual relationship. Lee isn’t a lesbian, and the image of her and Gates kissing and touching strikes her as “absurd” (49), but in the story, sex regularly symbolizes validation. Hypothetical sex with Gates connects Lee to a prominent Ault student, which would prove that she belongs at Ault. Sex symbolizes membership in the community. At the diner, when Cross says Sophie “loves giving blow jobs” (83), Lee doesn’t know how to react—reinforcing the gap between her and Ault.
Ault symbolizes a closed world, but away from Ault and the mean girls, Lee has a relatively pleasant time at the mall with Cross and his friends. Throughout the story, Lee presents gender as sharply binary—Girls versus Boys, another key theme—but Lee subverts the concrete labels by flourishing with the boys. She jokes with Cross about his admiration for sports and playfully praises her pinball prowess.
Using imagery, Lee shows the reader the tender, physical moment between her and Cross in the taxi. The reader can see her strong feelings for him and that he might like her back, and the romantic portrait foreshadows their rocky relationship.
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