Hey, Isaac. Your roommate told Nihal and me last night what the deal is. We haven’t told the guys. You don’t have to reply to this or anything, but if you want to talk about it, I’m here. Hope your dad’s feeling okay and he gets better soon.
I reread it a few times. Would this help at all? Was it too emotional? Too girly?
I gave my head a hard shake, disgusted. How selfish was I, worrying about whether my phrasing in a text was too feminine, when on the other end, Isaac was sitting in some hospital by his post-op father? I knew what it felt like to sit in that seat: lonely.
Besides, Marcus was plenty compassionate. Nihal was plenty kind. Kindness had no gender, had no race or age or category. It didn’t matter if this made me sound like myself—I’d built a thick enough wall for it to withstand a few blows, and Isaac could use some sympathy. I couldn’t offer much, but I could be genuine for once in my damned life.
I tapped Send, put my phone down, and walked out of the greenroom.
On the way to the backstage door, a low, serious voice stopped me. I caught a glimpse between the dangling curtains at the side of the stage—everyone had come and gone, except one tall figure facing another down. Connor was nearly as tall as his father, but Dr. Caskey wielded those few extra inches of height like a weapon. After a second’s debate, I ducked out of sight and listened.
“—still remember what it was like to be here,” said Dr. Caskey’s clear, tuneful voice. “I know what it’s like, the real Kensington. Fooling around with girls in the cathedral. Getting drunk on Dom Pérignon in the woods. Going out after dark without the housemaster noticing . . . and you know, when I was in the group, we had real rituals, real tradition, none of that watered-down Kumbaya trash they have people doing now. I had a brush with death on the night of my initiation. Still got a scar or two.” He said it as if it were his proudest achievement, and I wondered what the Minuets’ old initiation might have been. What could they get away with out in the woods? Branding, maybe, like I’d heard about college frats? One of those get-blindfolded-and-lost-in-the-wilderness scenarios?
Dr. Caskey loosed a long, deep sigh. “So, I understand.”
“Yes, sir.”
A pause. “But you need to understand something,” he went on, his voice getting soft and dangerous. “You know what I’m thinking when Mr. Yu tells me I might want to talk to you, because, well, do I know your performance this semester hasn’t quite been up to your usual standard? I’m thinking I shouldn’t have to babysit you and your grades for you to perform. And I’m thinking, maybe I need to get worried about December, because maybe you’re not getting into Princeton without that tour.”
Connor was quiet.
“The rituals, and breaking the rules,” Dr. Caskey said, “it only means anything if you’re a winner. I mean—” He laughed. “It’s the difference between those guys on Wall Street doing cocaine and a coke addict, get it? The difference is control. If you’re going to mess around, pick fights, fine. Don’t tell me about it, but it’s fine. Kind of character-building, at the end of the day. But the first thing you’re going to do is be the best, or the rest is wasted time. Hear me?”
“Yes, sir.”
Dr. Caskey’s voice lost its last shred of humor. “You’re not going to embarrass me again?” he said, colder than sea ice. “Because if you don’t get results here, and I get wind from anyone else that you’ve been fucking around this semester, I am not going to be happy.”
“You don’t need to worry.” Connor spoke with utter neutrality. Without seeing his face, I knew the disconnected expression that would be locked into place over his steely eyes and thin mouth. I understood suddenly where and why he’d adopted it: here, a foot in front of his father, for survival’s sake.
“Good.” The sound of a hand on a shoulder. “Eyes on the prize. Now put that table up and let’s go.”
I slipped noiselessly out the backstage door, feeling like nothing of what I’d just heard could be real.
“Okay, we’re good,” Erik said, putting down his phone. “Victoria says she can get a ride to the airport with, I don’t know, Ariana something. So we have a car.”
I issued a sigh of relief. It caught in my throat as Jon Cox turned toward me. “All right, buddy,” he said. “Are you up to drive?”
Four hours there, and four hours back. For eight hours, I’d have to make sure the speedometer never even nudged the speed limit. I couldn’t risk getting pulled over. It wasn’t just driving someone under twenty that would get me busted—the cop would get curious why I didn’t match the girl on my license.
But with Isaac gone, what was the other option?
I looked around for a sympathetic face, but the guys all looked expectant. I hedged. “Just, we don’t drive in this weather in California, so . . .”
“The roads are going to be salted,” Jon Cox said quickly.
“Well,” Mama said, “not the whole way. Up in the mountains, it gets pretty snowy. You really think—”
Jon Cox hushed him and looked back at me. I understood the pleading look in his eye—we needed to get out of this place. Too many angry words hung around the Nest, cluttering our corners, perching on our rafters, peering down at us. They needed time to drift away.
But as far as my parents knew, my semester was a total non-event. All I needed was one missed speed limit sign, one cop having a bad day, or one patch of black ice, and everything was done. Nobody in my life would trust me again.
A voice came from behind Jon Cox. “I’ll do it,” Trav said.
I turned with all the other guys. “What?”
“I thought you couldn’t drive,” Mama said.
Trav pursed his lips. “I can. I just . . . don’t.” He crossed his arms. “But it’s better than Julian getting arrested. I-I can do it.”
More than anything, he sounded like he was talking himself into it. Unease flashed across my thoughts. Isaac had mentioned Trav’s anxiety. How bad was it around driving? Should I jump in? Tell him not to worry about it, not to push himself if he didn’t feel comfortable?
But Jon Cox was already saying, “Thanks, man. So we’re set.”
“We’re set,” Trav said, sounding more confident.
Under my skin, excitement and guilt grated against each other, shooting sparks.
It was early afternoon, the white sun slipping down from its peak, when Trav said, “Music off. We’re here.”
I punched the power button and leaned forward, peering out the windshield. The view made a welcome break from the phone in my lap. I kept checking it, wondering if Isaac would reply to my message. I didn’t really expect an answer, but I hoped, a little, if only for the human contact. I’d spent the car ride in crushing silence, with Erik in the backseat watching the entire Bourne trilogy on his phone, while to my left, Trav operated the wheel with the acute focus of a brain surgeon mid-procedure.
My mind kept circling back to Connor Caskey’s conversation with his father. Dr. Caskey had fit so many terrible sentences into such a short period of time that it was like he’d been trying to horrify me specifically. For weeks, Nihal’s frustration had mounted as their secret grew heavier, but I hadn’t understood before yesterday how much of a disaster it would be for Connor if word got out.
The seatbelt locked tight against my chest as Trav braked too quickly. In the back, Erik made an irritated noise. We crunched onto the spread of snow before Jon Cox’s mountain house, a three-story confection of honey-colored beams. It stood in the Adirondacks at the bottom of a sweeping slope, stands of powdered pines peeking over its snow-dusted roof. Panels of windows high on the front face of the house gazed down on a frozen river, which pooled in the crease of the valley. Crisp, untouched snow stood all around in thick drifts and layers.
Trav had barely put Victoria’s Lexus into park before Jon Cox came vaulting across the hood with a whoop. His jean-clad ass wiped off the thin crust of snow that had accumulated over the four-hour drive. Trav went rigid in the driver’s seat. Jon Cox squeak
ed off, making the car bounce, and landed with a crunch on the iced-over gravel.
“Watch it,” Erik said, scrambling out of the backseat. “If there’s one scratch on this thing when we get back, Victoria’s gonna murder me.”
I slid out and shut the passenger door behind me. “Rest in peace.”
“What took you so long?” Jon Cox asked, loping after me as I headed to the trunk. “We’ve been here for, like, fifteen minutes.”
I glanced over my shoulder. Trav still sat in the driver’s seat, extracting the keys with the slowness of your average sloth. “Trav drives with one hand on the horn, if that tells you anything.”
“Jesus,” Jon Cox said.
“I know.” I hoisted my fraying suitcase out of the trunk. “But whatever,” I said, yanking Jon Cox’s hat down over his eyes with my other hand. “We got here alive, didn’t we?”
“Being alive is important,” Mama boomed, walking up with a huge duffel slung diagonally across his back. “C’mon, let’s get inside. It’s freezing.”
Once Trav had locked the car, backing away from it as if it might explode, we all trudged up the side steps, two flights of damp, rickety wood, to a sliding-glass door.
“Honey, I’m hoo-ooome,” Jon Cox sang, as he flung the glass door wide. Hearing Jon Cox sing always came with a bit of a shock—he had an operatic baritone, solemn and controlled, like a fifty-year-old’s.
The seven of us trailed into a gleaming kitchen. I tried not to stare and failed spectacularly. A sheen of dust softened marble countertops. Slim windows hugged the pine-beam ceiling. A beaten copper ventilator rose above four shining burners, facing a row of polished cabinets, and the refrigerator looked big enough for about half a dozen people to fit inside, if they got creative.
“Dibs on the master bed,” Mama called, kicking off his shoes. He slid in his socks over the hardwood toward the darkened great room. We trailed after him, and when he hit the lights, my mouth drooped open. Cherry columns propped up a ceiling twenty feet high. Tasseled rugs lay beneath long sofas and chairs whose dark leather was faded under translucent dustcovers. Beneath the dappled stone chimney, the wide fireplace’s iron grate was swept clean.
As the other guys went for the steps to the second floor, I looked down at my beat-up suitcase and felt minuscule. On some level, I felt like I should’ve been seething with envy, but this place was so far removed from everything I’d ever lived that I couldn’t even feel jealous. All I had was a numbing awe: that real families had houses like this, that one of the Sharps had spent his whole childhood in rooms where even the color of the treated floorboards screamed money.
Nihal stopped next to me. “He’s an investment banker,” he said quietly. “Jon Cox’s dad.”
“Got it. Forget theater. Investment banking is my new plan.”
Nihal chuckled. “If you want to never see your kids, go for it.” He followed the others upstairs.
I mulled over the words, chewing on the inside of my cheek. The subtext wasn’t subtle: the huge house Jon’s family didn’t even live in, his beautiful car, everything—it couldn’t substitute for an absent father. I felt like I’d heard this story a thousand times.
Still, I would’ve taken this option any day. Back in San Francisco, I hadn’t exactly been drowning in family time either. Dad worked night shifts as a gas-station cashier, leaving for work before I got home from school and not getting back until I was already asleep. I had years of memories of myself—nine, ten, eleven years old—walking around the back of our apartment building, digging the spare key out of a gravel-filled flowerpot, and letting myself in after school. Mom came home from her part-time job around six, in time to cook up beans or powdery mashed potatoes.
The older I got, the less I saw of her, too. She took more hours. I took care of myself. Rich kids with millionaire dads weren’t the only ones raising themselves.
I never felt like a poor-little-poor-girl, though, some tragic character out of a story—it was mundane. Everything in my life was sketched in the same bland shade of disrepair. Clothes, apartment, furniture: fray and decay. Bulk tins and stained utensils. So normal to me.
Looking around this mansion of a mountain home, I wondered—did Jon Cox think this was normal, too?
“Hey,” said a voice. I startled. Jon had come up from behind me.
“Hi,” I said. After a second, I waved around. “This place is . . .”
Jon Cox shook his head. “Yeah, don’t . . . I don’t know. It is what it is.”
He looked embarrassed. I wanted to cringe, or say, Don’t be embarrassed that your life is a fantasy. But I stayed quiet, my thoughts chasing each other’s tails. After all, if he’d looked smug or satisfied, I would’ve thought, arrogant. Maybe there was no right answer to being born filthy rich, like there was no right answer to being born dirt poor. Maybe everyone was just looking for reasons to think everyone else was ungrateful.
It was so stupid, too, because what were we supposed to do about the Very Wealthy Elephant in the Room, me or Jon Cox? We still had people telling us when to turn out our lights. We still had to ask permission to use the bathroom. Yeah, this boy drove around all ostentatious in his flashy car, with his Ray-Ban sunglasses and his Brooks Brothers jackets, looking like a grade-A assclown. But he’d also bought us that fancy whiskey that night in the field. He was always buying people food, giving rides, self-consciously generous with his time and money. Now we were all here together, living under his roof. Did all that equal out to my vacuum-silence when it came to my family’s situation?
I wanted to talk about it all, but I didn’t know what to say, or whether it would do any good, anyway. Did anyone else even want to talk about it? Why was it such a slippery subject, wriggling its way out of everyone’s grasp?
Maybe I’d figure it out in ten years, or maybe when I was my parents’ age, when I knew what it felt like to lose jobs, skip meals for my kid, scrape the barrel so hard the splinters tore up my fingertips. Maybe then I’d know how to talk about money without feeling like, somehow, the whole thing was imaginary—something human beings had pulled out of thin air without an instruction manual for how to do it all right.
In the uncomfortable silence, Jon Cox took off his glasses, which had fogged up around the edges, and wiped them on his knit sweater. “Do you want to check out the attic?” he said. “It’s, um, it has a view . . .”
“Lead on,” I said, taking the handle of my suitcase.
The attic had its pros and cons. Pro: the king-size bed and the huge circular window that overlooked the frozen river. Con: over the bed, on the bare wooden walls, hung a giant deer head that looked so freshly dead I expected it to blink. Strong pro: I had the room to myself, so setting an alarm in the middle of the night to shower wouldn’t be conspicuous. Strong con: The bathroom was down the stairs and two hallways, past the rooms where four of the guys would be sleeping. More sneaking than I’d hoped for.
I’ll make it work, I told myself, leaving my suitcase by the bed. I jogged downstairs. In the great room, Trav and Mama were lifting a coffee table, clearing the center of the room. From the kitchen, the scent of sizzling hot dogs flavored the air, flooding my mouth with saliva.
Trav set down his end of the table. “Lunch,” he called, “then choreo.”
“I can’t dance,” Marcus said beside me. “At all.”
“Everyone can dance,” I said.
Half an hour later, Marcus was doing his very best to prove me wrong. Mama demonstrated for about the fifth time how to turn over the left shoulder. Marcus spun the wrong way for the fifth time, looking green.
“Here,” I said, stepping in. “Right foot over left, okay?”
“I’m the worst,” Marcus mumbled.
“No, you’re not. You just gotta learn it. Then it’s done.”
“How do you know how to do pivots and stuff?”
“Theater. I’ve taken a dance class every year since I’ve been here.” I didn’t want to tell him that this hardly qualified as act
ual choreography. Mama had referred to it as “choralography,” which sounded about right. A lot of walking on-rhythm into different formations, dramatic lifting of arms, and quick shoulder movements. Nothing that would interrupt our breath support.
I settled for saying, “You can get this. It’ll look so simple by the end, you won’t even remember how you had trouble with it.”
Marcus planted his right foot over his left and spun so enthusiastically, he wheeled off-balance into Nihal, who let out an undignified splutter.
Mama sighed, coming to a halt beside me with his hands in his pockets. For a moment, we watched the others practicing the steps. “I wanted to stick in some hip-hop,” Mama muttered, “but Trav vetoed it.”
“Put it in anyway,” I muttered back. “Make him do it.”
We exchanged grins, watching Trav. He moved like a robot that hadn’t been greased for a couple decades.
We worked straight through the afternoon. This was tough for Marcus, but tougher for me. While he could gripe about his lack of coordination, I couldn’t say a word about my issue: a vicious set of period cramps that—over the hours—escalated slowly from “mild abdominal discomfort” to “my entire uterus is getting extracted with a spoon and sacrificed over a violet flame to the unholy uterine gods who are placated by naught but pain.” I escaped a few times to knock back Advil like a seven-year-old popping Skittles.
By the time we finished choreographing the first two songs, the sunset was glowering, and sweat made my T-shirt cling to the small of my back. We collapsed before the fireplace, slices of gooey instant pizza making our fingers drip with grease, and ate until the spread of windows that flanked the chimney held a grayish dusk.
Jon Cox went about building a fire in the hearth, striking a long, thick match that hissed as it flared. When the fire was popping merrily up the chimney, Mama slid a video game into a thin black console and a dim logo glowed into life on the screen above the mantel. I settled back into the sofa as Trav navigated through a hellish horror game, complete with oozing monsters lurching out of the dark.
Noteworthy Page 20
