The Children

by Ann Leary

  I washed my hands and Sally launched into an account of her night. She had been with some old friends. The town of Harwich is boring. The Pale Horse Tavern is the only place to go at night. I dried my hands and reached for the phone that Sally was holding. She had taken so long with her story that Laurel’s password screen was up.

  “Laurel, I can’t get in. You need to put in your code,” I said. Most people will just tell you their password when this happens. Laurel asked for the phone back. I walked over to the fridge as she punched in a few numbers. Then she handed it to me.

  I typed in our Wi-Fi password, and as I did, I said it out loud. “Banjoguy three three.”

  “Oh, I think you told me two three,” said Laurel.

  “No,” I said, laughing. “I’m sorry, I said two threes. Three three.”

  We all had a little chuckle at the misunderstanding and Laurel sat back at the table to do her e-mailing. While I heated up some butter in a skillet, Sally casually wrote the numbers 7595 on a paper towel and handed it to me. It was Laurel’s code. I stuffed it into my pocket. Sally and I have always done this. We love to spy on guests. We have since we were little girls. It was unlikely we would ever go into Laurel’s phone. We just liked knowing that we could.

  “We’ve never been to Perry’s town house,” Sally said when Laurel had finished her e-mailing and I was putting toast on the plates. “Well, we saw it in Architectural Digest, didn’t we, Charlotte?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It looks really beautiful.”

  “It’s nice,” Laurel said, “but this house is much more comfortable. I was afraid to sit down on their upholstery, to tell you the truth. I can’t believe they have those two adorable children and there’s not a thing out of place in that house.”

  “The children each have their own servants, so I think it’s easy,” Sally said.

  “They’re nannies, Sal,” I said.

  “I’ve heard so much about this place and all of you that I couldn’t wait to meet you.”

  “I wish Spin would get in here. These eggs are going to get cold. Should we just start without him?” I asked, putting the plates on the table.

  Joan had come back into the kitchen, freshly showered, wearing shorts and a T-shirt—her gardening clothes.

  “Just toast for me,” she said. “I only ever have toast for breakfast. Sometimes a banana.”

  “What’d Spin tell you about us?” Sally asked, poking at her eggs with her fork.

  “Well, not a whole lot. Not half as much as that old hunchback guy at the filling station I stopped at yesterday.”

  “Hunchback guy?” Sally asked, amused. Laurel was talking about old Anson Bergstrom. He did have a bit of a hunched-up posture; we just hadn’t really thought about it before.

  “That’s old Anson. Yes, he’s like a little old lady with all the town gossip,” Sally said.

  “I’m sure he’s very nice. I just got a weird feeling. I tried to pump my gas, and he came running out and practically wrestled the hose out of my hand. ‘This here’s a full-service shop,’ he said. ‘If you wanna pump it yourself, you’re gonna wanna go on up to Route 209. People who wanna get their gas a little cheaper go on up there, but yer gonna hafta pump it yerself.’”

  She did an uncanny impersonation of Anson Bergstrom.

  “And he kept trying to give me directions everywhere. I told him I have GPS, that I just wanted the name of a place to eat. ‘Now, what yer gonna wanna do is turn right out the driveway and then go, oh, I don’t know, maybe about half a mile, then you’ll come to a stop sign. Then after, oh, I dunno, another quarter mile…’”

  “Yeah, well, Anson’s an old family friend. He was just trying to be nice,” Sally said, sounding less amused. I shared Sally’s defensiveness. Yes, Anson Bergstrom is a weird guy. But he’s our weird guy. Laurel needed to shut it.

  “I guess that’s how he knew I was Spin’s fiancée,” Laurel said. “Oh, by the way, Spin owes you thirty-five dollars, Joan.”

  Joan had her back to us. She was standing at the counter, slathering her toast with jam. She paused for a moment when she heard what Laurel had said. When she turned and carried her plate to the table, I noticed there was a little hitch in her step, a slight limp, as if she had strained something.

  “Thirty-five dollars?” she said, smiling at Laurel. “Whatever for?”

  “My credit card was blocked. It happens all the time when I travel—security fraud protection or something. I have to remember to call the bank, tell them my card’s not stolen. I didn’t have any cash at the station, so the guy said that you have a house account and I should put Spin’s gas on your account and then he can just pay you back.”

  “Oh,” Joan said. She forced another little smile at Laurel. “That’ll be fine.”

  “Spin doesn’t have an account there,” Laurel said. “I asked, but the guy said he always pays cash.”

  We heard Everett’s truck drive off, and a moment later, Spin pushed open the screen door.

  “Philip, toast with your eggs?” Laurel asked.

  Joan, Sally, and I looked at one another. Philip?

  Philip is Spin’s real name. We had just never heard anybody use it. He was supposed to be named George, but his mom, Marissa, scrawled the name Philip on his birth certificate a few moments after he was born. She casually informed her errant husband of the name change when he held his son the following day. Whit always hated the name Philip. It had been the name of a very unattractive and awkward classmate from his boarding-school days. Marissa knew that, and he took her insistence upon the new name as a parting blow.

  Now Spin was sitting at the table, devouring his breakfast. “I have dorm duty tonight and again on Thursday. We still have a few international students on campus.”

  “You couldn’t get somebody to take your place? Laurel just got here,” Sally said.

  “No. I swapped with somebody the other night so I could go to the airport. I have to do tonight. All the kids’ll be gone by the end of the week. Then I’m free.”

  Laurel said, “I had no idea that teaching at a boarding school is almost like going to one. So many rules, and so little time to yourself.”

  “You’ll get used to it,” Spin said. “Hey, did I tell you guys that Laurel applied for the job in the English Department that’s opening up? I’m pretty sure you have it, Laurel-lee.”

  “Really?” Laurel said, excited by the news. “How do you know?”

  “I’ve got a few friends in the dean’s office,” Spin said.

  “It’s such a beautiful campus,” said Laurel. “I knew a few kids from Sun Valley who went to Holden, and of course I’ve read about it over the years. I always wanted to go to boarding school when I was a kid, but by the time I was old enough, I was on the ski team and training during the school year. I suppose you and Charlotte must have been day students, living here, so close,” Laurel said to Sally.

  “No,” Sally said. “We went to public school. Harwich High.”

  “Have you had a chance to see the whole campus?” I asked Laurel. I didn’t want Sally to get started, but she ignored me.

  “Yup, Harwich High,” Sally continued. “What a dump. When we went there, they couldn’t even get certified by the state. Has that place finally been accredited, or what, Joan?”

  “Sally, it most certainly was accredited. It was … well, I believe, there was something to do with the old gym. Anyway, Harwich is an excellent school,” Joan said. “It was just listed as one of the top twenty public schools in the entire state, as a matter of fact.”

  I was clearing the plates and repeated my question to Laurel about whether she had seen the entire Holden campus.

  “Not really. It was almost dark when we got there last night,” she replied.

  “I’ll show you around now,” Spin told Laurel. “You’ll love it.”

  FIVE

  It seems that Holden students and faculty either love it or hate it; there’s really no middle ground. Spin loves it. He started spendin
g summers there when he was very small, attending soccer and tennis camps, hanging out with the kids who lived on campus. He boarded there during his high school years, went off to college, and then moved back upon graduation. He teaches science. He’s the varsity hockey coach, and he gives private music instruction: piano and guitar. Like most of the faculty, Spin lives in an apartment attached to one of the dorms.

  By today’s standards, Holden is a traditional prep school, but in its early years, it was a rather progressive institution. The school’s founder, William Fenwick Holden, was an outspoken abolitionist, and the first two African-American boys ever to enroll at a private boarding school were admitted to Holden in the 1880s. W.F. paid their way himself. Holden Academy was a place where the freethinking sons and nephews of our country’s great industrialists went to learn, and where a number of well-known writers, artists, designers, and architects went as young boys. Of course, some Holden students went on to become bankers and lawyers, but compared to, say, Exeter or Groton, Holden placed as strong an emphasis on the arts as it did on the more practical academic applications of science, history, and mathematics. Many of the boys went on to study painting at the Hudson School, for example, or sculpting in Paris. Like Whit, they were funded by enormous trusts set up by their fathers. And like Whit, they probably referred to their ancestors as “robber barons.”

  When we were teenagers, Sally and I liked to ride our bikes to Holden Academy at night. We felt a sort of entitlement to the place, based on our family connections. Whit and his brother Aaron had attended Holden, as did their father and grandfather before them. When they were old enough, Perry and Spin also boarded, but our grandfather had retired as headmaster when we were little. Joan couldn’t afford the tuition, and Whit, while generous in spirit, didn’t believe he should pay for the education of another man’s children.

  “I think you’re lucky,” he confided to Sally and me as we headed off to meet the school bus one day. I was just starting my freshman year of high school. Sally was a sophomore. “I always wanted to ride a bus and go to a public school.”

  “I know,” Sally had said to Whit. “We are lucky.”

  Ten minutes later, when the bus stopped at the intersection in front of the Holden campus, we saw three girls leaving the school’s dining hall. One of the girls said something to her friends, and we watched as they all collapsed into one another, suddenly sodden-legged and seizing, one of them apparently suffocating with mirth. We had met some of Perry’s friends from Holden—sometimes he brought them to the lake for the weekend—and these girls were cut from the same cloth. They were “lame,” according to Sally. I agreed. They all wore skirts and navy blazers. There was something ridiculously optimistic about the way their ponytails were set, something predictable about the athletic, slightly masculine cut of their thighs.

  “Ugh,” said Sally. “Look how stupid they all are. Wait a minute—who’s this now?”

  A tousle-haired, suntanned boy was jogging toward the girls, and Sally practically sat on my lap to get a better look at him. We were both craning our heads for a last glimpse of the boy before the bus turned the corner.

  “I hate preppies,” Sally said.

  “Me, too,” I said.

  “I think it would be fun to meet some of them, though,” Sally added.

  “Me, too.”

  It was that Friday night that we first pedaled over to the campus on our bikes.

  Our mother and Whit didn’t know what we were up to, but eventually they found out, and Whit always expressed a certain pride in our escapades.

  “For over a hundred and fifty years,” he’d announce to dinner guests, years later, “Holden students have found ways to sneak off campus to find mischief. Sally and Charlotte Maynard turned this tradition on its head by sneaking onto campus.”

  He didn’t know all the details. He didn’t know that Sally engaged in a series of affairs at Holden, not just with various members of the hockey and football teams but, one year, with a thirty-five-year-old history teacher named Ed Harriman. He didn’t know that I snuck into the library at night and looked at the old yearbooks. Or that I’d go into the dean’s office to read the students’ transcripts and disciplinary reports. Sometimes I’d wander into the nurse’s office to read the medical histories of the students. Some of these kids had serious issues: A girl I knew from grammar school was now anorexic; another was a cutter. One of the boys had been caught selling cocaine. For some reason, these reports gave me satisfaction.

  It was Everett who discovered our nocturnal education at Holden. I was riding my bicycle up Town Hill Road one autumn evening and he was returning from the Pale Horse. It was late, probably close to midnight. That road is dark—there are no streetlights on any of the Harwich roads—and it’s a long, steep climb. I saw Everett’s pickup drive past. He had glanced out his window to see what kind of nut would be out riding at that time of night. I think he was pretty surprised to see that it was me.

  Everett was at UConn and hadn’t paid much attention to Sally and me in the past year or so. But he recognized me that night, even though I had my hood pulled up over my head. He pulled over and stopped his truck. I gave him a little smile.

  “Hey, Everett,” I said.

  “What’re you doing out so late?”

  “I was with Sally. We were … visiting a friend.”

  “Where’s Sally?”

  “Why?”

  “You said you were with her.”

  “She’s still at our friend’s.”

  “You’re gonna get hit by a car. You need to put a reflector on the back of your bike. I almost didn’t see you.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’ll give you a ride.”

  “Okay, thanks,” I said. He lifted my bike into the bed of the pickup and we started off.

  “Does Joan know you’re out?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “What about Whit?”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “They’re asleep.”

  “Have you been drinking or something?”

  I shook my head and tried not to smile. I was feeling shy suddenly, and embarrassed. I glanced at him a few times as he drove. When he turned onto East Shore Road, I realized I was sad that the ride was almost over.

  “Where were you?” I blurted out.

  “The tavern.”

  “I was at Holden,” I said.

  “Doing what?”

  “Sally and I have a few friends there.”

  “I thought they locked up all the dorms after ten.”

  “They do, but the doors have keypads. Sally and I know all the codes.”

  “You know all the combinations to the dorms?”

  “We know all the combinations to every building on campus.”

  “You do not.”

  “The science building. The dean’s office. All the buildings. I can prove it. I just proved it to a kid who lives in the senior boys’ dorm. I got him a copy of his transcript. He’s giving me a hundred dollars to alter it before it goes out to colleges.”

  “Why would you want to stick your neck out like that? For some entitled Holden brat?”

  “I don’t know. It’s fun.”

  “You know you could get arrested?”

  “For what?”

  “Trespassing, for one. Stealing.”

  “Who would catch us?”

  “My uncle Russ, he’s head of security. I’m tempted to tell him what you girls are up to. You’re too young to be hanging around there.”

  “We’re in high school. We’re the same age as the kids who go there.”

  “But you don’t go there.”

  “My mom grew up at Holden, you know.”

  “So?”

  “The athletic building is named after Whit’s grandfather.”

  “So?”

  “So Sally and I like to go and swim in it sometimes. You know, with friends.”

  Actually, Sally was the only one who ever swam there.

  “Boyfrien
ds?”

  I sank into my seat and shrugged. Sally was the only one with boyfriends.

  “I just like it there,” I said finally.

  “You don’t belong there. Be careful,” he said, and then he pulled the truck over. We were still almost a quarter of a mile from Lakeside. My heart was racing.

  “I thought you were driving me home.” I wanted Everett to kiss me.

  “You can get out here. I’m not gonna risk Whit seeing me drop you off.”

  “He wouldn’t care.” But Everett had already jumped out and was unloading my bike.

  I got back on my bike and gave him a little wave as I rode past.

  “I think he’d care,” Everett called out. He drove slowly behind me until I turned into our driveway.

  So it was our shared secret that united us at first. From then on, when Everett worked around the place with his dad, I noticed him. Sometimes I’d be sitting on the porch doing homework. Sometimes, if it was a weekend, I was out fishing on the dock, or rigging the sailboat with Spin. I always called out to him now to say hello, and he’d mumble something in reply.

  He caught me leaving Holden again, a few months later. This time, I had just pedaled out of the main gate when he drove past. He pulled over and I rode eagerly up to his window.

  “Hey,” I said, staring off down the road. It was cold that night and the words floated from my lips in little white puffs.

  “Hey,” he said. “Well, get in.”

  After I climbed inside the truck, he turned to me and said, “Do you know there are maniacs driving around the countryside looking for girls like you?”

  I had been blowing on my hands to warm them. I didn’t know what to say, so I just shrugged.

  “I’m not kidding.”

  “Well, then, I’m glad you stopped. I don’t want to be attacked by a maniac.”

  Everett started driving. “I should tell Whit. I should tell Whit what you’re up to, before something bad happens.”

  We drove on in silence. His truck was old and had one of those bench seats in front. He turned on the radio, then dropped his hand onto the seat next to me. It was dark. I never would have had the courage if it wasn’t so late and so dark, but I moved my hand over on the seat and touched his hand with my pinkie. I barely grazed it. I just wanted to touch him. He drove on. I moved my hand just a little bit closer, just so it rested against his.