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Suddenly, the urge to pee, which I’d been battling since we crossed into Connecticut, became insistent. With the bus station closed, my only option appeared to be a secluded space behind a commercial-sized trash container. I heard the Honda’s clunky tailpipe again while I was zipping up and cursed myself. Someone could be rooting through my bags right now, making off with my clothes and books and my beloved afghan with the red, white and blue Chevron stripes, not to mention my wallet and driver’s license and the painting I’d taken off the refrigerator, the oversize stick figures of Dad and Mom and me. I zipped and broke into a run.
A man in jeans and a black T-shirt was leaning against the Honda, smoking a cigarette and not looking in my direction, as if he’d been there forever and his being there was in no way connected with me. I stopped next to the platform, catching my breath. It startled me when he spoke, as if he might be addressing a third, unseen person.
“You know, any one of the local creeps could have come by and made off with your stuff.”
“Are you one of the local creeps?” I asked.
He dropped his cigarette, grinding it beneath the toe of a scuffed Doc Marten. “I am the local creep.”
I laughed despite myself.
“Actually, the city of Scofield has hired me to enforce its public urination laws, which is a common problem with our—” he hesitated, looking at me pointedly “—vagrant population.”
Conscious of my unwashed hands, I jammed them into the pockets of my jeans. “Guilty,” I confessed, blushing bright red.
He grinned. “So. Not from around here?”
I shook my head. “Kansas.”
“That’s what I thought. Well, not Kansas, specifically, but I knew you were from somewhere in the Midwest.”
“I have that Midwest look about me, do I?”
He gave me an appreciative up-and-down glance, taking in the greasy blond hair I’d pulled into a ponytail, the teeth I hadn’t brushed since that morning, somewhere in Ohio. I was wearing a baggy T-shirt—I always wore baggy T-shirts—but I felt his gaze linger for a moment on my chest. “Yep. Corn-fed goodness,” he said.
I looked past him, out toward the road, trying to figure out what came next.
He cleared his throat. “Isn’t there anything you want to ask me?”
“Like what? Your name?”
He dipped at the waist in a mock bow. “Joseph P. Natolo, at your service. Actually—I thought you might need a ride.”
“Well, yeah. I’m a—”
“A student at Keale,” he finished. “That’s not exactly rocket science. Come on, let me load you up.” He grabbed one of my duffel bags, mock wincing at its weight. “What did you do, pack your library?”
I hesitated, watching him cram the bag into his trunk, already cluttered with loose shoes and clothes and fast food bags spotty with grease. “Do you work at the college?”
He took the other bag from my grasp, his hand brushing mine. “Would you believe I teach cultural anthropology?”
“No,” I said.
He laughed. “Good for you, Midwest. Being gullible is never a good thing. No, I’m just Scofield’s one-man welcoming committee.”
The trunk was so full, he had to lean his weight against it before we heard the telltale click. He looked at me. “Well? Come on.”
* * *
Joe’s car smelled faintly of pot, although an evergreen air freshener dangled from the rearview mirror. I belted myself in, heart hammering beneath my rib cage to warn me this was not my brightest idea. Outside my window, the scenery was a dark blur of open meadows divided by wooded areas, dense with trees. I rested my fingers on the door handle, planning an emergency exit—stop, drop and roll.
Joe glanced at my hand. “Seriously, I’m not a psycho. I was driving by and I spotted you there, and I figured you needed some help.”
I gave him a weak smile. “Thanks.”
He pointed at a rectangular green sign that appeared in front of us and receded in the side mirror: Keale College, 3 Miles. “See? We’re heading in the right direction.”
“I wasn’t worried.”
The corners of his eyes crinkled as he laughed. “Could have fooled me. So let me ask you this. What’s so horrible about men, anyway?”
I half turned in my seat. “When did I say men were horrible?”
Joe rolled his eyes. “Please. You come all the way from Timbuktu or wherever just to go to a school where there are no men, except the odd janitor or history professor. What’s that all about?”
“It’s not about hating men,” I said, my mind searching for one of the phrases from Keale’s brochures. “It’s about empowering women.”
Joe shook his head. “Why would anyone want to deprive themselves of this?” He raised a hand from the steering wheel and made a circle in the air, meant to encompass the two of us.
I snuck a sideways glance, trying to determine Joe’s age. At least as old as me, maybe a few years older. Still, there was a confidence to him—the way he’d tossed my bags into his trunk without getting my explicit permission, his easy, flirtatious jokes. He seemed decades more sophisticated than the boys (men, really, although they didn’t seem to have earned the title) I’d known in Woodstock. I cleared my throat. “So, do you go to school around here, too?”
He shrugged. “It’s been a few years now.”
It wasn’t clear if he was referring to high school or college. “Here in Scofield?” I pressed.
“Sure. You’re looking at a proud graduate of Scofield-Winton High School, class of 1995. Well, I was proud to graduate. I’m not sure the powers that be at SWHS are thrilled to claim me. But beyond that—no. I’m not what you’d call scholar material.”
He didn’t seem embarrassed to tell me this, but I was embarrassed that I’d asked. Without taking a single college class, I was already a snob. Joe’s car slowed, and I spotted twin brick walls, formed like parentheses around either side of a wide entryway. Giant steel letters spelling Keale College rose out of a manicured lawn. “The school was established in 1880,” Joe boomed suddenly, adopting the inflections of a tour guide. “If you look straight ahead, you’ll see the place that has been home for more than a hundred years to privileged girls from Connecticut, the larger New England area and, apparently—” this was said pointedly to me, with a raised eyebrow “—regions beyond.”
“Ha ha,” I said.
We passed acres of gently rolling lawn before coming to the buildings themselves—towering brick structures bathed in golden lights. Footpaths crisscrossed the campus, cutting around and between buildings. Joe stopped to let a girl pass with her rolling suitcase and then cleared his throat, preparing to launch into the next stage of our tour. “Keale was founded by prominent members of the Episcopalian Church, presumably as a way to keep young ladies away from the horrors of intermingling with the opposite sex. I hear that the school isn’t particularly religious today, although they have maintained a fine tradition of refusing young eligible bachelors entry into the sacred dormitories of said young women.”
“Really?”
“Really,” Joe said, dropping the tour-guide impression. “And believe me, I’ve tried. Men aren’t allowed to step foot in the dorms unless they’re family. So up here we have the Commons—that’s the dining hall. Classroom buildings, the science center, fine arts auditorium, a gym complete with indoor track and racquetball courts...”
I followed his gestures, trying to take it all in. Keale looked like its own small town, separate and distinct from Scofield, operating on its own purpose and pace. I knew from the brochures that there were just under two thousand students at Keale, but only a few were visible that night, including a girl lying on a blanket, looking up at the stars, and a trio running past in gym shorts and tennis shoes, ponytails swinging, their steps perfectly synchronized.
“What’s your dorm?” Joe asked.
“Stanton.” I’d read the housing form so many times that I’d memorized the details by heart. Stanton Hall, room 323 South. Roommate, Ariana Kramer.
Joe circled a row of buildings and pulled into a parking lot that was mostly empty. He nodded his head in the direction of a brick monolith, patches of ivy creeping up its sides. “That’s it, then.”
I unbuckled my seat belt and it zipped back to its holster. “Thanks for the ride. I really appreciate it.”
“Hold on,” he said, shifting the car into Park. He popped the trunk and met me there, hoisting both of my bags over his shoulders with an exaggerated groan.
“I can at least carry one,” I protested.
“You ordered the deluxe service, right? This is the deluxe service.” He staggered next to me like a pack mule. At the door to Stanton, he set the bags on the ground and held out a hand, palm up. “So. Five dollars.”
“Oh.” I blinked and felt around in my pocket.
He laughed, shaking his head. “Just kidding. The first ride is free. Maybe someday we’ll run into each other in town and you’ll buy me a cup of coffee or something.”
“Absolutely.”
He turned, waving over his shoulder.
“Hey,” I called. “You ended up not being a creep after all.”
He put a hand to his heart. “I’m flattered, Midwest. A bit disappointed in myself, but flattered.”
I’d only managed to drag one bag inside the dorm when I heard his car start, followed by the rattle of his tailpipe, which grew fainter and fainter until it became part of the night.
* * *
Five minutes later, I’d retrieved a key from the resident advisor on duty and wrestled my bags into the elevator and down a long hall, past dozens of closed doors. My roommate hadn’t checked in yet, and two neatly arranged sets of furniture greeted me—beds, dressers and desks, industrial and plain. I was too exhausted to change clothes or find my bedding, so I collapsed onto one of the bare mattresses still wearing my tennis shoes.
You did it, I thought, grinning in the dark. You made it. You’re here.
For the first time in hours, I thought about my dad. I didn’t know if I believed in angels that could look down from heaven or karma or anything beyond this very moment. But right then, I thought he would be happy for me.
Lauren
The summer after I graduated from Reardon, I spent ten lazy weeks on The Island, our five acres in the Atlantic, not far from Yarmouth. The land had been in the Holmes family for generations, passed down to Mom as the last standard-bearer of the name. With nothing expected of me, I slept in until eleven, dozed in the hammock in the afternoons, avoided my mother except at mealtimes, and took late-night smoke breaks with MK in the old gazebo, perched on the east cliff of The Island.
“I wish I could just disappear,” I told MK, staring out at the water, the cigarette turning to ash in my hand.
He narrowed his eyes, giving me a faux push, as if it might send me not only toppling over the edge of the gazebo but out to the Atlantic itself, to the blue-green forever that waited beyond the rocky edge of The Island.
“Very funny,” I told him.
He stubbed out his cigarette and flicked the butt, which bounced on the railing and disappeared into the vegetation below. There were thousands of cigarette butts there by now, the accumulation of our idle summers. “Poor kid, condemned to a life of luxury.”
I tapped off an inch of ash, watching it crumble before it hit the ground. “Easy for you to say. You’re doing what you want to do.”
MK shrugged. He was starting law school at Princeton in the fall, following in Dad’s footsteps. The only difference was that he didn’t seem to mind that his life had been planned out for him, the way I did. “Well, what do you want to do?”
I shrugged.
“There must be something you’re half-good at,” he said, knocking his shoulder into mine in a way that suggested he was joking.
“Nope.”
He was quiet for a minute, as if he were trying to dredge up some hidden skill I didn’t know I possessed. Eventually, he said, “You used to draw people’s faces all the time. Remember? It made Mom furious. Instead of taking notes in class, you would basically just doodle.”
I laughed. “I could be a professional doodler.”
“Artist, dummy.” He patted me on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. You’ll get the lingo down.”
Except I knew that the little faces I drew really weren’t more than doodles, and certainly not the sign of artistic talent. I’d taken a drawing class at Reardon, and the instructor had been less than enthusiastic about my work. The proportions were all wrong, she said—the necks too skinny, the shoulders too broad. At The Coop, I’d watched Marcus capture the essence of a person with a few brushstrokes, not needing to pencil in first or leave room for erasure. I might have liked doodling, but it clearly wasn’t a skill that was going to get me anywhere.
Every day on The Island, I’d read the classifieds in the Boston Globe, scanning for options: education, engineering, medicine, social work—anything to get me away from the predicted Mabrey track. I didn’t even meet the qualifications to be a night clerk at the 7-Eleven, which required previous cashier experience. I’d entertained briefly the idea of the Peace Corps—a lifestyle that would have suited me for about five seconds—but there was a surprisingly long list of requirements, none of which I met. It turned out no one was looking for a spoiled eighteen-year-old with an unimpressive GPA.
Finally, I gave in.
It was easier to accept that I was nothing more than a cog in a machine that had been set in motion long before I was born.
* * *
Keale College in northwest Connecticut was the perfect choice from my mother’s viewpoint—far enough away that we wouldn’t bump into each other, but close enough to keep me under her thumb. Since it was an all-girls school, she must have figured I was less likely to become romantically involved with the resident pot dealer. She filled out my application, requested housing, registered me for classes and signed my name to everything: Lauren E. Mabrey. It amazed me to think of the strings she must have pulled to get me into Keale with my dismal grades and my spotty list of extracurricular activities. Had she begged administrators, promised to endow a scholarship or fund a new wing at the library? Or had the Mabrey name—as in Charles Mabrey, freshman senator from the great state of Connecticut and already something of a dynamo on Capitol Hill—done all the talking?
Mom drove me to campus at the end of August, the trunk of her Mercedes stuffed with the accoutrements for my dorm room: a new duvet, two sets of Egyptian cotton sheets, down pillows, thick blankets in zippered plastic bags. We were silent for most of the trip, the two hours stretching painfully between us. Mom’s face was stony behind her Jackie-O getup, the dark glasses and headscarf she wore whenever she was at the wheel of her car, as if to announce that she was someone, even if she wasn’t instantly recognizable. In the passenger seat, I closed my eyes against a pulsing headache and waited for the inevitable lecture, the Mabrey rite of passage, delivered on momentous occasions, like when I’d first gone away to summer camp, and every fall when I left for Reardon. Since my disaster at The Coop, her warnings were no longer vague but specific, centered on staying away from “certain kinds of people” and promising to yank me out of school if she caught so much as a whiff of pot. She wouldn’t have believed me if I told her I’d sworn off all that, that I wasn’t planning to get into any kind of trouble she would need to rescue me from, that I’d learned my lesson.
It wasn’t until we were in Scofield itself, just a few miles from Keale, that Mom cleared her throat. I waited, steeling myself.
“Your father and I disagree on certain things,” she began. “He’s willing to give you more chances, Lauren. He’s willing to excuse what you’ve done, saying you’re young and you’re still learning. He thinks we might have made some mistakes ourselves, taken our eye off the ball.” Her eyes were dark shadows behind her lenses. “But not me. I don’t agree with him, not for a second.”
I looked from her face with its slightly raised jaw to her white-knuckled hands on the wheel, a two-carat diamond winking in the sunlight.
“As far as I can tell, we’ve given you plenty of opportunities, and you’ve squandered all of them. You’ve had chance after chance to do anything, one single thing, to make us proud. But even when you were under our noses, you were involved in unspeakable things—”
Speak them, I thought, like a dare. Say his name, the one we promised never to say.
“—and we had to scramble to cover for you, in the midst of all the stress of the campaign. But I won’t do that again. I’m ready to cut you loose. The first time you get in any kind of trouble at Keale, I’m going to say, ‘Too bad, so sad,’ and let you figure it out on your own. What happens if you burn through all the money in your bank account? Too bad! What if you get caught for drinking and doing drugs because you haven’t learned your lesson? So sad! I’ll tell the officer to let you sit in jail until you figure it out on your own.”
I closed my eyes, as if I could ward off her words. I wondered if she really believed them, or if she had already come to accept that Dad’s career would always be paramount, the mountain that would bury all our sins.
“Can you at least nod to let me know you understand?”
“Mom,” I said, “I’m not going to—”
She waved a hand, like she was swatting away a fly. “Or you could choose to see this as a fresh start, a chance to fall in line. And if you do that, of course, there will be rewards. There are benefits to being in a family like ours.”
The laugh escaped my mouth before I could stop it. If MK had been here, we would have quoted lines from The Godfather to each other and talked about family with a capital F.
Mom’s voice was icy. “You’ll make your bed, Lauren, and you’ll lie in it. And maybe then you’ll see what it’s like to be cut off from all of this.”
We were heading out of Scofield by this time, in stop-and-go traffic on the tiny main street. I made eye contact with a little girl on the sidewalk holding a balloon in her chubby fist. Don’t let go, I thought.
“Lauren!” Mom snapped. “Are you listening to me?”
Behind us a car honked, and Mom pressed on the gas. The Mercedes jerked forward, only to come to a halting stop again a few feet later. I focused on what was outside the car—the hair salons and antique stores, a building with a giant tacky ice cream cone pointing toward the sky.
I already hated Scofield.
