Megan Mazeros and Lauren Mabrey are complete opposites on paper. Megan is a girl from a modest Midwest background, and Lauren is the daughter of a senator from an esteemed New England family. When they become roommates at a private women’s college, they forge a strong, albeit unlikely, friendship, sharing clothes, advice and their most intimate secrets.

The summer before senior year, Megan joins Lauren and her family on their private island off the coast of Maine. It should be a summer of relaxation, a last hurrah before graduation and the pressures of postcollege life. Then late one night, something unspeakable happens, searing through the framework of their friendship and tearing them apart. Many years later, Megan publicly comes forward about what happened that fateful night, revealing a horrible truth and threatening to expose long-buried secrets.

In this captivating and moving novel, Paula Treick DeBoard explores the power of friendship and secrets, and shows how hiding from the truth can lead to devastating consequences.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PAULA TREICK DEBOARD is the author of The Mourning Hours, The Fragile World and The Drowning Girls. She is a lecturer in writing at the University of California, Merced, and lives in Northern California with her husband, Will, and their four-legged brood.

Also By Paula Treick DeBoard

The Drowning Girls

The Fragile World

The Mourning Hours

Here We Lie

Paula Treick DeBoard

Copyright

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2018

Copyright © Paula Treick DeBoard 2018

Paula Treick DeBoard asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © January 2018 ISBN: 9781474083607

Praise for the novels of Paula Treick DeBoard

“In Paula Treick DeBoard’s latest breathtaking thriller, she paints a stark and chillingly real portrayal of a family torn apart by teenage transgressions. Gritty and inauspicious from the start, The Drowning Girls left me awestruck, revealing DeBoard’s true brilliance as an author. Spellbinding.”

—Mary Kubica, New York Times bestselling author of The Good Girl

“Think Fatal Attraction meets Desperate Housewives, and you have DeBoard’s latest thriller.... This is a gripping, tense suspense story with a good surprise ending.”

—Booklist

“Give this tale of domestic suspense, with its pitch-perfect pacing, to Gillian Flynn and Mary Kubica devotees.”

—Library Journal, starred review

“The Drowning Girls by Paula Treick DeBoard is cleverly plotted, full of twists and turns and so well-written that it pulls you in from page one. Genuinely suspenseful, DeBoard delivers a disturbing, multilayered, provocative novel that is impossible to put down.”

—Heather Gudenkauf, New York Times bestselling author of The Weight of Silence

“A heart-pounding look at what lies behind the deceptively placid veneer of the well-to-do suburbs. The kaleidoscopic view of innocence, danger, and malice shifts and twists as it races to a shattering conclusion.”

—Sophie Littlefield, bestselling author of The Guilty One

“This tale of a family in peril closes with a death that’s tragic and unexpected.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Fans of The Good Girl and The Luckiest Girl Alive, and really anyone who enjoys great suspense, have found their next must-read... I could not put it down.”

—Catherine McKenzie, bestselling author of Fractured and Hidden

“A coming-of-age tale about a family in crisis expertly told by Ms. DeBoard. The Fragile World examines how profound loss changes all who are forced to come to terms with it. Touching and compelling, it will move you.”

—Lesley Kagen, New York Times bestselling author of Whistling in the Dark and The Resurrection of Tess Blessing

“The Drowning Girls casts a spell as brilliant and alluring as the gated community of its setting. Paula Treick DeBoard maps this world of privilege and secrets with a deft hand... A suspenseful and compelling page-turner.”

—Karen Brown, author of The Clairvoyants and The Longings of Wayward Girls

For my sisters—the ones I was born with, and the ones I met along the way.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

About the Author

Booklist

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

OCTOBER 17, 2016

1998–1999

OCTOBER 10, 2016

FRESHMAN YEAR 1999–2000

OCTOBER 10, 2016

SUMMER 2000

OCTOBER 10, 2016

SOPHMORE YEAR 2000–2001

OCTOBER 10, 2016

SUMMER 2001

OCTOBER 12, 2016

JUNIOR YEAR 2001–2002

OCTOBER 12, 2016

SUMMER 2002

OCTOBER 15–17, 2016

2002 AND AFTER

OCTOBER 17, 2016

EPILOGUE FEBRUARY 2017

AUTHOR’S NOTE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Reader's Guide

Questions for Discussion

A Conversation with Paula Treick DeBoard

OCTOBER 17, 2016

Lauren

It was raining, and I was going to be late.

The press conference was scheduled for ten o’clock, and by the time I found a parking space in the cavernous garage, I had twenty minutes. I slipped once on the stairs, catching myself with a shocked hand on the sticky rail. Seventeen minutes.

I followed a cameraman toting a giant boom over his shoulder, navigating a path through the crowds of the capitol. Thank goodness I was wearing tennis shoes. I passed a group of schoolchildren on the steps, prim in their navy blazers and white button-down shirts. Their teacher’s question echoed off the concrete. “Who can tell me what it means that we have a separation and balance of powers?”

Only one hand shot into the air.

Balance of power, I thought. A good lesson for today.

I glanced at the display on my cell phone and quickened my pace, taking the rest of the steps two at a time. Twelve minutes.

* * *

I set my shoulder bag on the conveyer belt at the security checkpoint and watched as a bored guard picked through it with a gloved hand—wallet, cell phone, tube of hand lotion I’d forgotten about, an envelope with twenty-five dollars for the giving tree that should have been turned in to Emma’s teacher that morning. Shit. Annoyed, the guard removed a water bottle, waving the offending item in front of my face before tossing it into the trash container at his feet. His eyes flicked over me, already disinterested, already moving on to the next threat, which was apparently not a suburban mom in her stretchy pants.

I followed a directional sign for the press conference and hurried down hallways and around corners before arriving outside the door, where another line had formed. A woman at the front, officious in a burgundy blazer, was checking press credentials. My heart pounded. Each time one of the double doors swung open, I caught a glimpse of the people collected there, accompanied by their cameras and cords and laptops and phones.

Then I was at the front of the line, and the woman in the blazer was blocking my entry, shoulder pads increasing her bulk. “Show your credentials, please.”

I reached in my purse for my wallet. “I don’t have—”

“I can’t let anyone in without appropriate credentials,” the woman said, more loudly than necessary. She was a head shorter than me, but her voice carried enough authority to make up for it.

“I’m not a member of the press, but I have to get in there,” I pleaded. I flipped my wallet open to a picture of my face—my name, address, vital statistics. Behind my Rhode Island license was my old one, a Connecticut ID with my younger face, my maiden name.

She frowned at me, waving two others past, identification badges hanging from their necks. “Ma’am, I have to ask you to step to the side. This conference isn’t open to the general public.”

I gestured again with my open wallet, pointing desperately to my name. “I’m family,” I said finally, catching the attention of those waiting behind me. I could feel their ears perk up, the unsubtle uptick of their interest. Did she say she was family?

Finally, this got me her attention, in the form of slow blink and unabashed pity. “Go,” she hissed, and I darted past before she could change her mind.

* * *

I stayed close to the back wall, trying to find a vantage point but at the same time be invisible. At the front of the room was a podium with a microphone, and off to the side was the Connecticut state flag, its baroque shield visible on a blue background. A woman was at the microphone, saying Megan’s name.

And then she was on the stage, instantly recognizable despite the years between us. I gasped, catching the back of a folding chair for balance. She was more polished than I remembered, but then, she used to wear oversize sweatshirts and thrift store jeans, which either fit her waist or her inseam, but never both at once. She had been a teenager then, brash and funny and lovable and so different from me. The person at the microphone, of course, was thirty-five.

Still, I remembered her in our shoebox of a dorm room, drinking from my contraband bottle of schnapps.

I remembered her on our bike rides, the sun so bright on her hair that it looked like her head might, at any moment, burst into flame.

I remembered her that New Year’s Eve, wearing a borrowed dress, her feet wedged into my too-tight shoes.

And I remembered her as she’d looked that last night, sitting on the edge of my bed, hugging her arms to her chest.

Her voice now was shaky at first, as if from underuse. “I’m here today to right an old wrong,” she began. Camera shutters clicked, and she blinked away the flashes that momentarily blinded her. “I’m here today to tell you what happened to me fourteen years ago, and why, for far too long, I’ve kept silent.”

It was too much all of a sudden, and I bent down, hands on my knees, struggling for breath like a kid beaned in the stomach with a playground ball. Fourteen years. That was a long time to live a lie.

1998–1999

Megan

For years, my parents kept the painting I made in kindergarten on our refrigerator, secured by a free magnet from a local insurance company. The painting featured three stick figures so out of proportion they dwarfed the house and the tree in the background, and so tall they almost bumped against the giant yellow orb of the sun. Dad, Mom and me. That was my world, and we were happy. Not that Dad never raised his voice, not that Mom never nitpicked, not that I never misbehaved, not that we ever had any money. But still—happy. We had dinner together most nights, went to a movie once a month and ate out of the same giant tub of buttered popcorn, licking our fingers between handfuls. It was the sort of happiness that was so uncomplicated, I figured it would last forever.

Dad’s diagnosis came during my senior year in high school, and it stunned him, immediately, into submission. He seemed determined to live out his days in his recliner in front of TV Land and Nick at Nite, catching up on all the shows he’d missed during years of ten-hour workdays at one job site or another. That was when we still pronounced mesothelioma with hesitation, before we grew used to hearing it on television commercials, the symptoms filling the screen in a neat list of bullet points: chest pain, coughing, shortness of breath, weight loss. Dad had inhaled tiny asbestos fibers day after day and year after year, and those fibers had become trapped in his lungs like dust in a heating vent. The poor man’s cancer, he called it sometimes, because mesothelioma affected people who worked construction, who served as merchant marines.

Maybe because we didn’t know how to talk about what was happening, what would happen within twelve to eighteen months, according to the specialist in Kansas City, it was easier for Mom and me to join Dad in front of the television in our family room, listening to Sergeant Schultz claim he knew nothink! and laughing along as the POWs plotted their elaborate schemes, always a few steps ahead of the enemy. Our world had narrowed to this space with Dad’s coughs hanging in the air between us.

Before his diagnosis, Dad had trapped a garter snake in the backyard, and we kept it inside a terrarium filled with sand and rocks and a fake hollowed-out log from the pet store. We named the snake Zeke, and he was more Dad’s pet than mine, although once Dad became sick, it was my job to provide for Zeke’s general well-being and happiness.

Once a week, I bought a mouse at the pet store on my way home from school and transported it across town in my thirdhand Celica, the paper carton on the passenger seat jerking with sudden, frantic motions. At home, I dropped the mouse into the cage, and Dad and I watched until the poor thing was only a tumor-like hump in Zeke’s gullet. “Look at him go!” Dad would wheeze in his new, strange voice, with all the solemnity of someone announcing a round of golf.

All I could think was that it was too bad it had to be that way, that something had to die so something else could live. That was the lesson of biology textbooks and visits to the Kansas City Zoo, but it wasn’t so easy to watch it play out in our living room.

* * *

In high school, I had been one of the girls who was going somewhere. I’d ignored the boys in my class, sidestepping their advances at parties, letting the nerdy boys take me to prom. I was smart enough, one of the kids who always had the correct answer, even if I wasn’t the first to raise my hand. With my curly blondish hair and D-cup breasts, physical traits I’d inherited from my mom, I was pretty enough, too—and this was a near-lethal combination in Woodstock.

No matter what, I’d always promised myself, I wasn’t going to get trapped here.

Up until Dad’s diagnosis, I’d been planning to start Kansas State in the fall. But that spring and into the summer, I threw away the envelopes unopened—housing information, scholarship notifications. “Maybe next year,” Mom would say, her fingernails raking over the knots in my spine. We didn’t stop to talk about what that meant or what it would look like when the three-pronged family on the refrigerator was reduced to only two. After graduation, I got a job at the Woodstock Diner, a twenty-four-hour joint off I-70 that catered to truckers and the occasional harried families that spilled out of minivans, everyone passing through on their way to somewhere else. Always, they thought they were funny and clever, that they were better than this town and better than me. But in my black stretchy pants and white button-down, I was different from the Megan Mazeros I’d been before—honor student, soccer halfback, Daddy’s girl. Here I was witty and hardened as one of the veterans, old before my time.

“Where’s the concert?” one guy or another would invariably ask, making a peace sign or playing a few bars on an air guitar. “Different Woodstock,” I said over my shoulder, leading the way to a booth in the corner and presenting him with a sticky, laminated menu. “Although for a quarter, you can start up the jukebox.”

Inevitably, the guy grinned. Usually, the grin was accompanied by a tip.

Sometimes Dad was still awake when I came home from work, propped in his recliner. In the near dark of the family room, he wanted to talk in a way he wouldn’t during the daytime. “Just sit,” he urged. “Stay up with me a bit.”

I yawned, my legs tired and my feet aching, but I usually complied.

He always asked about work, and I would tell him about bumping into our old neighbor or receiving a twenty-dollar tip on an eight-dollar order. I didn’t mention that the neighbor hadn’t made eye contact, or that the twenty dollars had come with a phone number and the name of a local motel scrawled on the back. I didn’t tell him that I hated every second of it, the tedium of wiping down the same tables, of watching the minute hand slowly creep around the clock hour after hour. I didn’t tell him, as summer turned to fall, how I spent my time wondering what my friends were doing at KSU, how they liked the dorms, how they were doing in their classes.

“Look,” he said one night, pointing at the terrarium. Zeke was shedding his old skin, as he did every month or so, emerging new and shiny from a long, cylindrical husk that was so fragile, in a day it would crumble away to nothing. Dad made a funny choking sound, and when I turned, his face was shiny with tears.

“What’s wrong?”

“I can’t do this,” he wheezed.

Zeke must have been something for him to root for, the only thing that was thriving while the rest of us were in a horrible holding pattern, like a slow walk on a treadmill through purgatory. Dad couldn’t shed his lungs. He couldn’t grow a new pair, pink and shiny and tumor-free. Even if he’d been healthy enough for a transplant, I didn’t have an extra pair to give. Every morning as I spooned his breakfast into him, he said, “Well, maybe today’s the day, kiddo,” as if he were looking forward to it, as if death might arrive on our doorstep carrying balloons and an oversize check, payable immediately.

“Don’t be so morbid,” I told him, and even though it hurt him to talk, and there was nothing in the world to smile about, he managed his old Dad grin and said, “What morbid? I’m being practical.”

I swatted in his direction, and he said in his strange wheezy voice, “You could do all of us a favor. Put a pillow over my face. Done and done.”

“Is that supposed to be funny?”

He looked at me for a long time before he shook his head.

Mom and I took care of Dad in shifts, delivering reports to each other like nurses—noting intake and output, commenting on Dad’s general well-being and happiness. Mom had been young before all of this, but now her face sagged, puffy sacs hanging beneath her eyes. We didn’t even try to tell each other that it would all be okay, that it would work out. Our days were punctuated by the arrival of home health aides in cotton scrubs with cheerful, juvenile patterns—hearts and smiley faces, polka dots and rainbows. Their optimism was insulting. Who did they think they were kidding? Acting cheerful wasn’t going to change anything.

* * *

One night at the diner that September, I seated Kurt Haschke in a booth by himself, settling him with a menu and a glass of water. We’d gone to school together from kindergarten through our senior year and barely exchanged so much as an excuse me when we bumped into each other in the halls. He’d seemed as inoffensive and inconsequential as wallpaper. I asked, “Can I interest you in our dinner specials?” and he smiled at me, his face open and plain.

I thought, This is what you get, then.

Kurt came every night that week, waiting in the parking lot for the end of my shift. We kissed there, long and deep, my back to his truck, pinned between his erection and a half-ton of steel. That weekend and every other weekend when Dad was dying, I met Kurt at the ridge overlooking the Sands River and we had sex, sometimes in the bed of his lifted Dodge pickup, sometimes in the back seat of my falling-apart Celica, with a piece of the ceiling fabric dangling over our heads, sometimes on a blanket on the ground, never fully undressed.

Kurt wanted me to be his girlfriend, and I guess in a way, I was. There certainly wasn’t anyone else for me—between waiting tables and changing Dad’s soiled sheets, I couldn’t even consider the possibility. Kurt talked about us going places—not exotic ones, but just far enough away to be interesting—amusement parks and county fairs and festivals dedicated to things I wasn’t particularly interested in, cars and trains and beer.

“Mmm,” I said, neither a yes or no.

“I want you to meet my parents,” Kurt would say each time, practically while he was still zipping up. I had a vague memory of Mr. and Mrs. Haschke from various science fairs and class field trips, and while I always said, sure, eventually, I couldn’t imagine myself in their house, at their dinner table, as a part of their lives. It went without saying that Kurt wasn’t going to meet my parents, not now, when Mom’s face was etched with grief, when Dad was less and less lucid, his breath coming in ragged gasps.

* * *

Dad made it to Christmas, and we celebrated by putting on brave faces, as if this were any holiday and not our last one together. Mom picked out a spindly tree by herself, and we decorated it with Dad watching from his recliner, Mannheim Steamroller Christmas drowning out the sounds of his raspy breathing. He made it to New Year’s Eve, which we spent together, Mom drinking too much brandy and passing out on the couch, leaving me to get Dad into his bed.

Dad made it to February, which came with a snowstorm that clogged the roads and kept us homebound for days. He watched through the window as Mom and I took turns shoveling out the driveway, our limbs numb from the cold.

“I can’t take this anymore,” Dad told me that night, when I’d rolled him on his side to change his sheets, as efficient as a candy striper. “Look what it’s doing to you and your mom.”

“Don’t worry about us,” I said. “We want you as long as we can have you.”

“Not like this,” he said, tears leaking onto his pillow. “You don’t want me like this.”

Dad made it to March, and by that time, his speech was so distorted by pain, so breathy and thin, that it was hard to understand him at all. He was under hospice care, his pain managed by kindly nurses who talked about timing and dosages and offered gentle reassurances that left us numb. The doctor had told us that in the advanced stages of mesothelioma, Dad’s body would be racked with tumors, the cancer spreading to his lymph nodes, the lining of his heart, even his brain. Still, sometimes he rallied for brief moments, as if he were reminding us that he was still alive.

One afternoon, he tried to get my attention when Zeke once again shed his skin, a shiny new body separating from the old. I followed his limp gesture, but this time, I couldn’t summon enthusiasm for the process. I couldn’t make myself believe in new life and regeneration and second chances. We’d moved the terrarium closer, so Dad could see it from his hospital bed. Still, the effort of raising and lowering his arm had exhausted him, and his breaths were patchy.

“Maybe you should get some sleep now,” I suggested, tugging a blanket up to his chest.

His eyes were squeezed shut, blocking out the pain. The syllables came slowly, a breath between each one. “Please...help...me.”

“What do you need? More medicine?” That wasn’t the exact word for it, since nothing could make him better. Palliative care, the nurses had explained, another new word for our horrible vocabulary.

“Megan...” There was a sheen of sweat on his forehead, brought on by the effort of speaking.

One of Dad’s pillows had fallen into the crack between the mattress and the plastic headboard, and I lifted his head to adjust the bedding. “Tell me what you need. Are you hot? Or cold? I could bring in another blanket.”

His breath came sour against my ear, reeking of rot and medicine and the trickle of chicken broth he’d allowed through his lips. “Do it with the pillow,” he breathed. “Please, Megan.”

The pillow was in my hands, slippery in its hypoallergenic case that was changed daily in our constant rotation of linens. It would be easy to do—fast, almost painless. “No,” I protested, stopping my thoughts. “Dad, come on.”

“Please,” he whispered. “I can’t—You have to—”

Tears dribbled down my cheeks, and I wiped them away with the sleeve of my sweatshirt. “Don’t ask me that.”

His hand was on mine, the skin papery thin, a hand I didn’t recognize anymore. He was crying, too, his eyes strangely dry, too dehydrated for tears. “Megan...please.”

“I can’t,” I sobbed. But it was all just too much—for him, for Mom, for me. The part of me that could still reason was working through it like a complicated question on an exam. What was the right thing to do, the moral thing? To let him suffer, to let all of us suffer? It was cancer that was immoral; it was this horrible life, this horrible room, this horrible disease that was immoral. The pillow was heavy in my hands, and I considered its weight, its power to change our lives.

“Do it,” Dad said. A tear fell from my cheek and landed on his, sliding in a glistening trail to his neck. We held each other’s eyes until I placed the pillow ever so gently, over his face.

* * *

Afterward, I lifted the entire terrarium off its stand and lugged it through the house, down the back porch steps and across our overgrown yard to the invisible line where our property ended and the neighbor’s began. The snow was thawing and patchy brown grass peeked through, a reminder that spring was around the corner. I had to tip the terrarium on its side, and even then, Zeke was slow to grasp what was happening. “Go, go,” I urged, nudging my foot against the glass. “This is your chance.”

Snot dripped into my mouth, and I smeared it away. Finally, Zeke slithered out, hesitating as if he were waiting for me to reconsider. Then he inched forward and in another minute, he was gone.

Mom’s car came around the corner, tires squealing, the gravel in the driveway scattering. For a long moment she stared at me through her dirty windshield. I hadn’t been able to make sense on the phone. When I’d opened my mouth, all that came out was a wail.

Inside, I’d draped one of the clean blankets from our laundry rotation over Dad, and beneath it he seemed smaller than he’d been that morning, as if he were already decomposing, the flesh going, only the essential bones of his skeleton holding him together. Without him, no one in the world knew the truth of what I’d done.

* * *

A few of my high school friends came to the funeral, and afterward they stood around our kitchen with plastic cups full of red punch. Kurt was there, solemn in a pair of khaki pants and a new shirt straight from its package, boxy with creases. The hospital bed had been removed, and our house seemed larger now, smelling sharply of the Lysol that had been used to chase away the lingering odor of a slow death. My friend Becky Babcock cried on my shoulder for a full ten minutes, and when she was done, she wiped her nose and asked, “Maybe you’ll come to KSU this fall?”

“Maybe,” I said.

After our family members had cried their tears and hugged their hugs and scattered back to the four corners of the state, I met Kurt one last time out by the river, and he asked me to marry him. He had a ring and everything—a tiny diamond, a thin gold band. For all I knew, he’d had it for months and was just waiting for my dad to die. When I didn’t answer right away, he laid out his argument—he’d be finishing his auto tech program in another year, and that gave us time to figure out where we would live. I didn’t say anything.

“It doesn’t need to be a big wedding,” he continued, a desperate note creeping into his voice. “Or it could be big, whatever you want.”

I stared at him, wondering how he didn’t see that there was no possibility of me marrying him, that now that my dad was gone, I didn’t need to be tied here anymore. Until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to me that Kurt wasn’t just biding his time, that I wasn’t a substitute for something or someone else.

When I finally told him no—just that single word, that lone syllable—he’d snapped the velvet case shut, and a moment later he’d slammed the door of his pickup and gunned the engine, spinning an arc of mud into the air.

* * *

A week later, Mom told me about Dad’s life insurance policy—two hundred thousand dollars, which he’d wanted us to split down the middle. The paperwork had been neatly arranged in a fat manila folder, pages clipped together, notarized along with Dad’s careful signature: Mitchell E. Mazeros.

I looked at the date beside his name—January 7, 1998—and met Mom’s eyes. He’d taken out the policy, and then a month later, he’d visited the doctor about the lingering pain in his chest, his shortness of breath.

“He must have known a long time ago,” Mom said with a sad shrug. “Or at least he suspected. He never told me about this—” a gesture indicating the money that would change everything “—until a few months ago. He asked me not to tell you until he was gone.”

My throat was tight. All that time when Dad had been in his recliner growing weaker and weaker, he had figured out a way to take care of us. He’d known, when he asked me to end it for him, that this gift was waiting.

Mom rocked back in her chair, looking at me. “That’s a lot of money, Megan. It’s enough for me to pay off the house. It’s enough for you to go away to college—any college, wherever you want to go. Doesn’t have to be in Kansas.”

“But you would be...”

“I’m staying here, in Woodstock.”

“I can’t leave you,” I said. “At least, I could come home on weekends...”

She lit a cigarette, not meeting my eyes. It was a habit she’d put on hold after Dad’s diagnosis, but one she’d picked up again with grim purpose, lighting the next one off the first. I thought about the man she’d been referencing from time to time—Gerry, her boss at the tax office. Gerry who was not dead, was not dying, was very much alive. A puff of smoke trickled out the side of her mouth. “Listen.” She patted the back of my hand. “I’ll take care of myself. But you’re going to have to take care of yourself, too.”

* * *

That night, I dug in the back of my desk drawer for the admissions brochures I’d collected before Dad’s diagnosis, their finishes bright and glossy, offering rose-colored glimpses of college life. Of course, I’d been planning to attend KSU—it was close and convenient, it was where all my friends were going, and between in-state tuition and scholarships, it was affordable, too.

But now, I could go anywhere.

I sorted the brochures into piles—Harvard and Yale and Princeton, places that were out of my reach, thanks to the grades I’d pulled after Dad’s diagnosis; Bates and Brown and Bowdoin, schools that seemed too snooty now that I was truly considering them; the Southern California schools that featured tank-top clad students on beaches, where I would be forced to put my pale and flabby body on display; schools that were in big cities, where I might feel like a Midwestern hick; schools that were quirky and artsy, where I would stand out for not being quirky or artsy enough; schools that boasted NCAA rankings, schools that looked too institutional.

At the bottom of my stack was a brochure from Keale College in Scofield, Connecticut, a private, girls-only school. On the front of the brochure, before a backdrop of towering brick, two girls stood with their arms around each other’s shoulders in what seemed to be a spontaneous display of happiness and camaraderie. An inset picture showed a scene of ivy-covered buildings and open expanses of green lawn, complete with girls lounging on the grass, girls sitting cross-legged with books thrown open in front of them, girls chatting, laughing, girls with futures I couldn’t even imagine.

I ran my thumb down the fine print and found the fees. Tuition, housing and other costs totaled $23,000 annually. Dad’s life insurance would buy me four years, free and clear.

“Keale College,” I said into the silence of my bedroom, trying out the words.

It was about as far away from Kansas as I could get, which meant it was about as far as I could get from everything—from the whistles of the truckers at the diner, from Kurt Haschke, from the memory of myself standing over Dad’s bedside, tears running into my mouth, promising myself that it was the right thing to do, that I shouldn’t feel guilty for doing it.

Maybe somewhere else, it would be possible to believe that those lies were true.

Lauren

If you live in Connecticut, you know my family—or you think you do. You’ve seen us on the news, in the Hartford Register, on campaign posters. We’re the all-American family—the dad, the mom, the three kids, the golden retrievers. We have an estate on eleven acres in Connecticut, a townhouse in Washington, DC, and our very own private island off the coast of Maine.

We’re the all-American family on steroids.

A brief history:

My mother, Elizabeth Holmes, was born into a family that had made its fortune on steel, although by the time I came along the mines were long sold, and the refineries no longer bore any trace of the family name. Being a Holmes meant property and trust funds and serving on the board of various charities and foundations. She graduated from Vassar with a degree in history that she never intended to use, and later that year at a party in Manhattan, she met Charles Mabrey, who was in his third year of law school at Princeton. The Mabreys didn’t have the immense wealth of the Holmeses, but they had their own kind of pedigree; Dad’s father, George Mabrey, was a West Point grad, a general in the US Army and an overall badass. His wife and son had followed him around the world—Germany and Cuba and Kuwait and Italy and Germany again—and by the time my dad met my mom, the Mabreys and the Holmeses were like interlocking puzzle pieces. My parents spoke the same language of private tutors and elite schools, of dinners with ambassadors and troubles with housekeeping staff. I figured Dad was a lawyer for about fifteen minutes before Mom started planning his political career, but I might be wrong. She might have sniffed that out from their first dinner party in 1962. With her old money pedigree and his military connections, they were practically a golden ticket.

Sometimes, I wondered if it had all happened exactly the way Mom had planned it—if she’d been able to foresee each move, like our lives were pieces on a giant chessboard. Because planning was needed, and that wasn’t Dad’s forte—he was best at making one-on-one connections. He could remember every name and face; I used to joke that it took us more than an hour to pass through the dining room at the Wampanoag Country Club, because Dad had to stop to say hello to each person we passed.

There were certain expectations for the Mabrey kids, too—things that were planned in utero, that were written somewhere in Mom’s long-range planner, cousin to her well-worn daily planner. I was the third dark-haired, blue-eyed Mabrey kid, eight years younger than Katherine and six years younger than Michael, who to me were always Kat and MK. There should have been one in between MK and me, another Kennedy-esque boy, another future politician, but that baby was stillborn, the cord wrapped tightly around his neck during delivery. I figured that three was always the goal, and if that baby had lived, there wouldn’t have been a need for me.

Sometimes, I wondered if my parents blamed each other for how I turned out, how I didn’t fit the Mabrey mold. Maybe they worried about how much time I spent with nannies, since Dad and Mom had both been busy with his career. Maybe they questioned whether they’d sent me to boarding school too young—not every kid could hack it as well as Kat and MK had. Maybe they’d been too indulgent, giving in because it was easier than arguing. Maybe I should have been disciplined more or disciplined less, talked to more like an adult, talked to more like a child.

Maybe I was just the bad seed.

It probably started when I was in kindergarten, at the fancy Brillhart School where I didn’t sit the right way, didn’t follow directions and sometimes wandered off in the middle of a lesson. I remember my teacher showing me the proper way to sit at my desk—hands at my sides, thighs parallel to the floor beneath me. Everything was like that, it seemed—there was one exact way to do everything, and a million wrong ways that I tried instead.

Kat and MK had been straight-A students. They were the captains of their teams, honors students and debate winners—the sort of achievers who could be held up as models to everyone else. At Reardon Preparatory School, where I boarded from seventh to twelfth grade, there were reminders of Kat and MK everywhere, in trophies for academic decathlon and essay-writing and long jump and water polo. My most distinguishing characteristic was that I was not at the top of my class; there was a huge pack composed of future doctors and lawyers and Fortune 500 executives, then a large gap and then me—Lauren Mabrey, the senator’s daughter, content with her 2.5 average.

“You’ll never get anywhere in life like this,” Mom had seethed to me more than once, driving me back to our house in Simsbury at the end of the school term.

But I knew that wasn’t true. For one thing, she was determined to get me there, and where I hadn’t succeeded or hadn’t been particularly concerned with succeeding, Mom was going to be victorious—that I never doubted. She’d gotten me into Reardon, after all, no doubt greasing a few palms along the way.

I was eleven when Dad became a state senator, and I was thirteen when a kid at camp passed me my first joint behind the counselor’s cabin. The smoke stung my nose, but I laughed it away. A year later, a girl from Manhattan demonstrated for me on a zucchini how to give the perfect blow job, which I tried out the first chance I could on a skinny boy from Syracuse.

By that time, I was used to seeing my dad in the papers—his graying hair, his dark suits, his demeanor that was serious and affable at once. There was a growing divide between the picture-perfect Mabreys and me. Dad was instrumental in passing legislation that regulated the purchase of pseudoephedrine, an ingredient used in methamphetamine production, and I once snorted a line of coke in someone’s bathroom and danced the rest of the night on top of his kitchen table.

“Our wild child,” Mom would say without a hint of affection when she saw my report card, when she chatted with Reardon’s dean of students, when she saw me slouching next to Kat and MK.

She didn’t mean this as a compliment, but I wore it like a badge of honor.

* * *

When I was seventeen, Dad ran for a US Senate seat, a campaign that consumed our lives all summer with photo ops and media blitzes, the Mabrey name plastered on posters and lawn signs and headlines in the Hartford Register. Since I was officially too old for another summer away at Camp Watachwa, I was forced to present myself with a smile at family outings and lunches around town. Tired of dragging me along with her, Mom found a volunteer position for me at the Hartford Arts Cooperative, half an hour from our house in Simsbury. The Coop, as it was known, was a politician’s dream, bustling with five-to twelve-year-olds who arrived with dirty hands and growling stomachs to produce cheerful portraits of their future lives as pro football players, astronauts, doctors and teachers. Even though I knew my position there was more or less an extension of the campaign, a footnote on the larger résumé of what the Holmes-Mabreys had done for Connecticut, I loved it anyway. Four afternoons a week, I stocked supplies and rinsed brushes and posted artwork on the walls, while as many as thirty kids ran circles around me. By the end of the day I was exhausted and satisfied, convinced that for once I was doing something that actually mattered.

During my first week on the job, I fell hard for Marcus, a sophomore art major at Capitol Community College and one of the few paid staff at The Coop. That summer he was working on a giant mural going up on the south side of the building, where previously there had been only the initials of taggers and a giant F YOU in five-foot letters. Marcus had a broad chest and ropy arm muscles, and his fingers were permanently paint stained with a crusty layer of blues and yellows and greens. The first time he touched me, brushing a piece of hair out of my face as I stood over the sink washing brushes, I felt a thrumming all the way to my toes. The next night he stood behind me at the sink, his thumbs pressing into the knots of my shoulders as the water ran from blue-purple to clear. When I turned off the faucet, he wrapped his arms around me in a giant backward bear hug, rocking me from side to side in a goofy, loose way, as if to tell me I shouldn’t take it or him too seriously.

Another girl might have left it at that, but not Lauren Mabrey. Marcus was the exact opposite of everything that had been planned for me from day one. He had never known his father, had three half siblings, lived off student loans and a stipend from The Coop. He didn’t own any button-down shirts, and he hadn’t recognized my father until I pointed out a campaign advertisement with the five Mabreys all lined up, Dad’s arm around Mom’s shoulders. “That’s cool,” Marcus had said. “So your family is famous or something?”

I laughed, not denying this, although famous was the wrong word. Powerful was more accurate. Influential.

At any rate, I knew Marcus was the exact wrong pick for me, but when the bear hug ended, I turned around, pressed my wet hands to his T-shirt and kissed him full on the lips.

Twenty minutes later, I’d lost the rest of my virginity on the sagging couch in the break room, and soon enough sex became an everyday thing, part of our closing ritual after the paint caps were tightened and the brushes laid out to dry. Marcus locked the outside door and flipped off the light switches, and we undressed each other in the semidarkness, laughing at our more adult version of blind man’s bluff. Afterward, staring up at the bulbous tubes of exposed piping near the ceiling, I felt for the first time that I could have been anyone in the world, not Lauren Mabrey, not part of a political family, not a prep school kid, not wealthy.

I was just happy.

Marcus always had a baggie of pot in one pocket or another, and sometimes we went up to the roof of The Coop to smoke, the sky darkening in lazy purple drifts, and listened to the sounds of the city: horns and sirens and barks and scraps of conversation that floated upward from street level. That summer, more and more, I was flirting with disaster, arriving home long after The Coop closed, sometimes after my parents had returned from one fund-raiser or another, picking a fight with them the moment I walked through the door. I was lazy, I was irresponsible, I had a bad attitude and I didn’t care.

I’d smoked here and there at Reardon, whenever one of my classmates went home for vacation and connected with a local hookup, returning with a few buds. The most I could handle was a hit or two before I felt sleepy and weak-kneed, but I didn’t want Marcus to see that I was a lightweight. When he passed me the joint, I always took my turn.

“I can get you more, if you ever need any,” Marcus said into my ear, a sweet trail of smoke wafting past my nose.

I laughed. “Pretty sure my parents bought into the whole Just Say No thing.” My words came out slurry—sure as soor, bought as brought.

“I mean like a side business, for when you go back to school. I bet those Reardon kids have deep pockets.”

I shifted, leaning back against his chest, hoping he would drop the idea if I didn’t offer encouragement. This time when he passed me the joint, I only pretended to inhale. My body felt heavy, and I still had the drive back to Holmes House.

“Or bennies or ’shrooms. Whatever you want, I could probably get it.”

“What are you, my dealer?”

He pinched out the end of the joint and dropped it in a plastic baggie, which he returned to his pocket. “Hey, some of us have rent to pay, you know.”

I’d been to a pharm party last January at Reardon, where everyone was required to contribute a few tablets filched from their parents’ medicine cabinets to enter, and then got to take from the bowl whatever they wanted to try. I’d added three muscle relaxers, my dad’s drug of choice for his occasional back spasms, and fished out two pastel pink pills for myself. On a beanbag in the corner, I’d waited for the pills to do something, to make me feel anything, but it never happened. The only thrill had been from the idea of getting busted, of my parents driving up from Hartford, the blue veins in their foreheads pulsing with rage as they helped me pack my suitcases and then led me in disgrace from the dorm. But nothing so exciting happened. A staff member came in, took one look at the pill potpourri and unceremoniously flushed the remains down the toilet, before ordering us back to our rooms.

This fall, if everything in the campaign went as planned, I would be Lauren, the senator’s daughter. It gave me a perverse thrill that I might also—or instead—be known as Lauren, the girl with the pot. I stood up, brushing my palms on my jeans, trying to sound casual, like this was the sort of deal I negotiated every day. “Maybe,” I said. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

A week later, at the beginning of my shift, he showed me a quart-sized baggie fat with green clumps of pot, then shoved it deep into the zippered interior pocket of my backpack. “It’s good stuff,” he said. “Two hundred should do it.”

My stomach turned, a weird, queasy flip-flop. I’d pictured myself at a party this fall, casually producing enough to roll a joint. I couldn’t possibly hide this much at Holmes House, where Mom would sniff it out with her razor-sharp sense for whatever I was doing wrong. I thought about telling Marcus that I’d made a mistake, that I couldn’t do it—but that would mean losing whatever reputation I had with him. It would mean, most likely, losing him. Maybe I could ditch it somewhere on my way out of Hartford, make some homeless person’s day when he found it in a Dumpster.

“I know you’re good for it,” Marcus said, giving me a quick kiss on the cheek, and I said, “Course I am.”

That afternoon, I was replenishing paint palettes from giant tubs of tempera when the police officer came in, a radio crackling at his hip, a drug-sniffing German shepherd at his side. It was like watching an after-school special, some cautionary tale about what happened when a good girl met a bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks. I watched as the officer and my supervisor chatted with their heads bent close together before they disappeared into the break room. Later, the rumor would be that someone had smelled marijuana and called the police. More likely my supervisor had been watching Marcus and me all along.

A minute later, she reappeared in the doorway of the break room, scanning the studio until her gaze settled on me, frozen in place, a blob of yellow paint running down my arm.

It was one thing to flirt with disaster, to tiptoe up to the edge of the canyon and peek over the side. It was another thing entirely to jump.

I said, That’s my backpack, but I don’t know what that stuff is.

I said, Someone must have put that there.

I said, I need to make a phone call.

A lawyer met me at the police station, demanding that I be released immediately. Marcus, it turned out, had a previous misdemeanor; he was cuffed and led away, and he passed me without making eye contact.

I never knew what my parents did, what strings they pulled or how they’d known to pull them in the first place. That night, I was cited for a misdemeanor and released, and my name never made it into the papers. At home, Dad paced while Mom did the talking, her voice losing its customary coolness. Did I understand the damage I had caused? Did I know what something like this might do to Dad’s career, to his reputation, to our family? Was I aware of his stance on drugs, the hypocrisy of his daughter being involved with a drug dealer, being found with an amount that constituted a felony? And just what did I have to say for myself?

I asked what would happen to Marcus, whether he would have to spend the night in jail.

“Wake up!” Mom hissed. “What do you think will happen to him?”

A few weeks later Mom wrote a check, I pled to a lesser charge and my record was sealed. My only punishment was the type of community service that would eventually work its way onto my résumé.

More pot had been found at Marcus’s loft, a place I’d tried to imagine over the six weeks we’d been together, when I’d fantasized about the two of us in an actual bed, on an actual mattress, with actual sheets. For bringing drugs into a place whose official mission was to serve children, Marcus was charged with a felony. That fall, I served a Mabrey-imposed house arrest, only leaving my bedroom on Tuesdays and Thursdays when Mom brought me to a local senior center to serve out my sentence.

One day that October, she slapped the Hartford Register in front of me, open to an article about an inmate that had been killed in a brawl. He was identified as Marcus Rodriguez, twenty, of Hartford, awaiting trial for felony drug sales. The article didn’t mention that he’d been a student at Capitol Community College, that he’d coordinated the new mural at the Hartford Arts Cooperative, that he’d had a kind smile, that he liked to talk after sex, that his girlfriend had sold him out.

In November, Dad won the senate race by a landslide.

* * *

I spent most of that fall on my childhood bed in Holmes House, shifting from hysterical to catatonic like they were the only settings that had been programmed into me. Marcus was dead, and I was going to come out unscathed. Marcus was dead, and his death was directly related to me, set in motion by the kiss I’d given him that night at the slop sink, my hands soapy with water, as if a line could be drawn between the two, a simple dot to dot.

Mom had spread the word that I was suffering from a bad case of mono, and from time to time get-well cards arrived from my classmates at Reardon. I completed my coursework that semester through independent study, moving zombie-like through worksheets and take-home tests.

Once Mom found me on my bed, sobbing into a pillow. “What now?” she asked, as if I’d done some new horrible thing.

I wiped away my tears, but my voice came out weak and blubbery. “He was so young.”

Mom leaned close, and for a moment I thought she might do something to comfort me, like pat me on the shoulder or tell me it would be okay. Instead, she slapped me across the face. “You will snap out of this,” she ordered. “You’ll get on with your life and we will never speak of this again, do you understand?”

She was true to her word; if Kat or MK knew anything about what I’d done, they never mentioned it me. Dad had already leased an apartment in Washington; after the election, that became his permanent residence, his stays at Holmes House brief and rare. Up until then, Dad had been a buffer between Mom and me, a mild-mannered negotiator. Now that he was gone, the silence stretched between us, too large to be breeched with a phone call.

Once I wandered downstairs while Mom was hosting a meeting for the local branch of the League of Women Voters, pausing in the hallway as the women chatted and sipped tea from china that had been in the Holmes family for a hundred years. Hildy, our live-in domestic help, passed me with the tea service rattling faintly on a silver tray.

“How is poor Lauren?” one of the women asked, and I started, hearing my name.

Mom didn’t miss a beat. “We were so worried about her, but she’s been growing stronger every day. This virus just hit her hard, poor thing.”

I leaned against the wall, listening to the women’s sympathetic murmurs as Mom reinvented my troubles—fevers and listlessness, loss of appetite, how devastated I’d been not to participate in more of the campaigning. “Lauren’s a strong girl, though,” Mom said. “She’ll be back to her old self in no time.”

It was an amazing performance, award-worthy. Somehow, Mom had managed to erase the drugs in my backpack, the hours I’d spent in the police station, Marcus bleeding to death in the Hartford Correctional Center, the months I’d spent crying into my pillow. She’d reinvented me as a brave warrior, a dutiful daughter.

She was so convincing, I almost believed it myself.

OCTOBER 10, 2016

Megan

The alarm on my cell phone went off at 6:25, then again at 6:30 and, as a last call, at 6:35. Marimba—the world’s most hateful sound. Bobby’s side of the bed was empty, and when I entered the kitchen five minutes later, he was already draining his first cup of coffee and filling his thermos with the thirty-two ounces that would get him through the day.

I stood in the doorway, yawning.

“Well, if it isn’t the woman of my dreams,” Bobby said, grinning at my disheveled state. I was wearing one of his old UMass shirts, the decaying hem hanging to my knees.

I pulled a face. “Save any for me?”

Bobby gestured to a steaming cup on the end of the kitchen peninsula. The coffee was the exact murky shade of brown I liked, tempered with a bit of cream. He was dressed in everything but his shoes and his pants, which were draped over a bar stool, and I gave him a thumbs-up at the effect: a blue-and-white striped shirt, a tie with the tiny floating heads of the Beatles, plaid boxers, tan dress socks. Bobby was one of the cool teachers. Every high school had one—the teacher who donned the giant tiger mascot for pep rallies, who somehow managed to make class so interesting that his students forgot all about their smartphones for fifty minutes. If he had to, he would stand on his desk to get their attention, à la Dead Poets Society or challenge a student to a lunchtime dance-off as a form of motivational bribery. Once, I accused him of having literally no shame, and he seemed surprised by the idea. Why in the world should he have shame?

I took a few fast sips, willing the caffeine to head directly to my brain. “What’s on the agenda for today?”

He screwed the lid on his thermos, tightening it and holding it upside down, just to make sure, before setting it next to his briefcase. “Still slogging through the American Revolution.”

“At least you’re finally done with those Puritans,” I commented.

“Those prudes.” He grinned, giving me a slap on my decidedly round ass. I looked more and more like my mother each year, despite eating salads for lunch and pounding out the miles on a treadmill at Planet Fitness.

The movement sent my coffee sloshing, and I cupped my hands around the rim to stop it from spilling. “It’s far too early to be so frisky.”

“No such thing as too early.” Bobby was stepping into his pants, creased sharp from ironing the night before. “What’s your day like?”

I grimaced. “Meetings from eight-thirty to noon, drop-ins after that.”

“Do we have any plans for tonight? Because if we don’t—” he tucked and zipped and reached for his belt “—a few of my buddies are playing at this bar in Ballardville.”

I shrugged. “Okay.”

Bobby worked his feet into his shoes, bending to tie the laces. “They aren’t very good, or at least they weren’t the last time I heard them.”

I smiled. “I’ll adjust my expectations accordingly.” Bobby was the exact opposite of me—he made friends easily and collected them everywhere he went: work, fast-pitch softball, hockey games. Two minutes after leaving a party, Bobby’s phone would ping with the notification of a friend request from someone he’d just met. Me—I kept things cooler, played my hand close to my chest. For the most part, other than those times I snooped from Bobby’s account, I avoided social media altogether, and my work friends were just that—friends at work.

I met Bobby’s goodbye kiss head-on, cringing at my own blend of sleep and coffee breath. Bobby didn’t seem to mind.

He grabbed his thermos and laptop bag, patted around for his wallet and keys. “Maybe we can leave around seven?”

“Sounds good.”

I emptied the rest of the coffee from the pot, swirled it with cream and sugar and reached for the remote. These were my private moments each morning—coffee, the Boston Globe and whatever dishy gossip was happening on the Today show. At work, I would be slammed—first our weekly departmental meeting, with its twenty-bullet-point agenda, then the dozens of students I would see, some in two-minute bursts while I helped them find the right form or directed them to the right staff member, and others for long, tear-streaked discussions that began with a question about registering for fall classes and ended with a general unburdening about the difficulties of balancing work and school, the impossibilities of child care, the unreliableness of their transportation.

I flipped from NBC to MSNBC to CNN, dodging commercials. Like the rest of America, I was on election overload, but it was an itch I couldn’t resist scratching. What had happened overnight? Who had said what on Twitter? Bobby and I rarely talked politics—not because we weren’t interested in elections or invested in their outcome, but because there were sticking points, touchy subjects that led us from reason to argument in about sixty seconds flat. “I thought people from the Midwest were supposed to be conservative,” Bobby would tease.

“That’s a stereotype,” I would remind him, and besides, it was a long time since I’d been in the Midwest.

I heard news of a suicide bombing at a market in Pakistan, then the financial report. The Dow was up, and that was a good thing. Thirty-five years old and I still had only a basic grasp of the stock market, although for the first time in my life, I actually had money there, in the form of a direct transfer from my monthly paycheck. I stretched and stood, making my way back to the sink. Behind me the news had switched back to the national scene, to politics. That’s when I heard the name Mabrey and wheeled around. It was as if I could face him head-on, as if he were in the room with me, that slow grin on his face. My head went fuzzy with the white noise of memory—rushing and pulsing, things that were long buried threatening to rise to the surface.

The caption on the screen read Senatorial Sex Scandal.

I didn’t even know that I’d dropped the mug until I heard it shatter, the last inch of lukewarm coffee splattering on the tile and a small shard of ceramic nicking me in the shin.

And just like that, it all came back.

FRESHMAN YEAR 1999–2000

Megan

From the window seat on the bus, America was a blur of fields and forests, the brick fronts of small-town buildings, the jutting skylines of cities. Every bit of it was unfamiliar and terrifying. Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe Woodstock, Kansas, was my destiny, and I was only fighting it by heading all the way to the East Coast with my worldly possessions crammed into two army-green duffel bags and my old JanSport backpack. Maybe Woodstock was what I deserved after everything I’d done.

Enough. I tried to sleep, but besides the occasional jolting was the fear that I might close my eyes and wake up in Canada or Texas, or all alone. Each time the bus stopped, I hooked my backpack over my shoulder and lined up for the exit, then rushed to the bathroom and back, afraid to be left behind. Once a man about my dad’s age tried to chat with me, but outside the bounds of Woodstock and the diner, I seemed to have forgotten how to have a polite conversation. Did I look like a typical college student or an overgrown runaway?

“I’m not going to kill you, you know,” he huffed, and when I slid back into my seat, my cheeks were flaming.

We were delayed fifty miles outside of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, with an overheating engine, and it took a few hours for a replacement bus and luggage transfer, then for new tickets to be issued. It didn’t occur to me until we were on the road again that I would be arriving at the bus station in Scofield much later than originally planned. Keale’s shuttle system ran on the half hour, but it stopped each night at nine. Using my wristwatch and the illuminated road signs, I calculated the distance and realized I was officially screwed. The bus wouldn’t be arriving until ten at the earliest. In the beam from the overhead light, I consulted the map supplied by a travel agent at AAA and learned that the Scofield station was five miles from campus—an impossible distance to walk with my bulging duffel bags.

Three hours later, I pressed my forehead to the glass when I saw signs for Scofield. You live here now, I told myself—something that seemed both impossible and incredibly surreal, as if I were trying to convince myself that I’d grown a third foot. Two miles south of town, the bus rumbled past a good-sized lake, the surface shimmering with boats and Jet Skis docked for the night. Everything felt sleepy, winding down from too much summer. I squinted out the window at the license plates on the Audis and Peugeots, trying to determine if they belonged to locals or vacationers.

Either way, I thought, wealth lives here. Privilege. People different from me.

The main drag was settling down for the night—lights off at most of the stores. Everything had a cutesy name—To Dye For and Slice of Heaven and Scoops & Swirls, which had a giant ice cream cone protruding from its striped awning. A few families were still clustered around sidewalk tables, wearing flip-flops and suntans, catching the drips on their ice cream cones.

There were four passengers left aboard the bus, and only two of us—myself and a man with a pronounced limp—stood to disembark at the Scofield station. The porter handed down our luggage, and the other man left immediately with his pull-along bag, dragging his bad leg behind him, aiming for the lone car in the parking lot.

I stood with the duffel bags that contained everything I owned in the world, my gaze following the porter’s gesture to the pay phone at the end of the platform.

“Maybe you can call a taxi, if you don’t have someone meeting you,” he said, although his voice was hesitant, rising in a question. We hadn’t passed any taxis in town.

“I’ll be fine,” I said, not wanting to concede helplessness already. As the bus pulled away, I hauled my bags one at a time up to the platform, plopping them beneath the closed ticket window. Fishing a few quarters from my wallet, I set out to investigate the payphone. If there was no taxi service in Scofield, I’d try the college. And if no one answered there, what would I do? I could call Mom back in Kansas, where she and Gerry Tallant were probably sitting down to dinner, thrilled that I was out of the picture and that they had the place to themselves. It was a horrible idea, one that belonged to my life as a teenager, not an independent college student. How could my mom help from fifteen hundred miles away?

Twenty yards out, I saw that the payphone was broken, its coiled metal cord dangling without a receiver.

Well, shit.

The night had quickly descended into late-summer darkness, the air humid and thick with insects that dive-bombed my face. I circled the station, weighing my options. In Woodstock, I would have hailed a passing car, because I was likely to know the person who stopped—someone whose kids I’d gone to school with, someone who had worked with Dad or managed a booth at the fair with Mom.

The phrase You’re not in Kansas anymore burned in my brain. Hah, a bad joke.

An older-model Honda passed on the road, tailpipe rattling. I wondered if the driver had seen me, or if I should have tried to flag down the car. Too late now.

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.

* * *

By the time we arrived on campus, Mom was back in loving mom/senator’s wife mode, schmoozing with the other incoming freshmen and their parents, shaking hands and commiserating about “our babies going off to school,” like she hadn’t rushed to ship me off to Reardon each fall and to sleepaway camp each summer. A few Keale upperclassmen were on hand to help lug things from the parking lot to the elevator bank, and Mom asked them polite questions about their hometowns and majors. “Oh, let me help you,” she said, holding the elevator for a harried-looking woman carrying a giant plastic bed in a bag. And then she held out her hand, introducing herself in her full, hyphenated glory.

“Elizabeth Holmes-Mabrey,” one of the upperclassmen repeated as we stepped out of the elevator. “Isn’t that—” The question was cut off by the doors closing, and by the time I caught up with her, Mom was already halfway down the hall, pushing open the door of room 207.

There were already two women in the room, wrestling with the corners of a fitted sheet. From the doorway, it was difficult to determine which was my roommate and which was her mother—they were both tall and slim in jeans and saltwater sandals, blond hair spilling to the middle of their backs.

I dropped my bags on the other twin bed and said, “Hi, I’m Lauren.”

One of the women stepped forward, holding out a hand with a perfect French manicure. Up close she was clearly the younger of the two, wearing only slightly less makeup than her mother. “I’m Erin.”

“Oh, goodness,” Erin’s mom gushed, clasping her hands together nervously. “I know who you are. I voted for your husband in the last election. Carole Nicholson.”

Mom beamed. “Oh, that’s wonderful. It’s so nice to meet you, Carole.”

The four of us bustled around each other, unpacking boxes and trying to navigate a space designed for two. Then Carole Nicholson let out a squeal and clapped her hands. “Oh, look, you two have the same sheets! Those are from Garnet Hill, aren’t they? The flannel ones?”

Mom looked back and forth between Erin and me, as if we’d pulled off a noteworthy accomplishment. “Well, this couldn’t have worked out better.”

“We’re practically twins,” I said drily.

When Mom stepped around me to begin organizing my toiletries, the heel of her sandal ground into my instep as a warning.

* * *

That night Erin chattered away in her bed about her boyfriend back home and how amazing it was to meet all these other girls, and my thoughts drifted to Marcus, who had been dead for almost a year. If he had lived, we would have broken up at the end of that summer and gone on to the rest of our lives. If he’d lived, he would have finished the mural and gone on to other projects, other dreams. Instead, I was here, and I had no dreams at all.

Erin’s questions interrupted my thoughts. “Were you a good student in high school? Did you have straight A’s and everything?”

“I did okay.”

She laughed. “I bet you’re just being modest, and you were like class valedictorian or something.”

“I wasn’t a valedictorian,” I assured her. It occurred to me that the Keale girls had probably all been at the tops of their classes, the sort of motivated girls who took seven classes a semester, played two sports and one musical instrument and spoke conversational French. Basically, they were just younger versions of my sister, Kat.

“Don’t you think it’s exciting?” Erin gushed, and I realized that I had no idea what she was asking, or what was supposed to be so exciting.

“I guess,” I said. From her silence, I knew it was the wrong answer.

“Maybe it’s not so exciting for someone like you,” Erin said, and she snapped out the light.

* * *

The day before the semester was scheduled to begin, I made an appointment with the registrar. Mom had scheduled me for five general education classes, and there wasn’t a single one that interested me.

“My parents are concerned about my class load,” I told Dr. Hansen, who had a severe white bob and owlish eyes behind her oversize frames. I leaned close to her desk, keeping my voice conspiratorial. “I was hospitalized for stress last fall.”

Dr. Hansen raised an untrimmed eyebrow, frowning at her computer screen. “There was no mention of a hospitalization due to stress,” she murmured, tapping keys.

“No, there wouldn’t be. My parents were trying to protect me, I think. They probably said it was mono or something.”

“Ah,” Dr. Hansen said, nodding. “Well, of course it’s best for you to talk with your academic advisor, but—”

“Oh, I’ll absolutely do that. But for now, with classes starting tomorrow...”

Dr. Hansen said, “Right. Well, let me pull up your schedule and see what we can do.”

After a bit of searching and waiting for the appropriate screens to load, she agreed that with my medical history, it might be best to drop Biology for now, and switch my math class for Introduction to the Arts. Half an hour later, I left her office feeling decidedly better about life.

* * *

Intro to the Arts was taught by a team of professors, each quirkier than the last: a visual artist, a theater director and a musician. The goal was to spend five weeks studying in each discipline and finish the semester with a portfolio of critical and creative work. I completed a shaky landscape sketch and a self-portrait that looked more like the face of a distant cousin before attending a presentation on basic photography skills. Fill the frame. Align by the rule of thirds. Look for symmetry. I watched pictures flash by on the giant screen at the front of the room, subjects so close that I could see the crackly texture of leaves, the blood vessels in a woman’s eyes. Afterward, on a whim, I wandered up to the front of the lecture hall where Dr. Mittel was packing up his equipment.

“Hi, I’m Lauren. I’m in this lecture,” I began.

“Dr. Mittel,” he said, his lower lip almost lost in an enormous beard. “But I imagine you know that.”

I looked down at the table, where a binder was open to a page of detailed notes. I wasn’t used to chatting with instructors eye-to-eye; I had never been the kind of student who was distinguished for academics, admirable work ethic or even, for that matter, decent attendance. “I was just wondering. You mentioned there was a darkroom on campus.”

“Ah,” he said. “Are you a photographer?”

“No. I mean—I’m interested, though.”

He gave me a quick glance before closing the binder and zipping up his bag. “Do you have a camera?”

“Not a very good one,” I acknowledged. Most summers, when I’d gone off to camp, Mom had sent me along with a cheap point-and-click camera and several rolls of film with the understanding that neither might survive the summer. Somewhere, in my jumble of unpacked belongings, I had a 35mm Kodak.

“Tell you what,” Dr. Mittel said. “Why don’t you shoot a roll or two and bring it by my office? I’d be happy to develop your film and look at it with you.”

“Is there something...” I hesitated, afraid the question would be stupid. Knowing it was. “I mean, in terms of a subject, is there something I should focus on?”

Dr. Mittel’s smile was kind, and behind it I read a sort of mitigated pity. Poor little rich girl, trying hard for that A. “Shoot what speaks to you,” he said. “People, scenery, whatever.”

* * *

That weekend, I rode the shuttle into town and bartered with the owner of an electronics repair store over a forty-year-old Leica, all but draining my bank account.

Erin whistled later, finding the receipt I’d placed on my desk. “You spent nine hundred dollars on that thing?”

“The owner said it was the best,” I told her. The camera and its accessories were spread out on the bed, and I was figuring out the lenses and attachments from the store owner’s scribbled notes. The Leica came with a somewhat battered case that I instantly loved, thinking of all the places it must have gone with its previous owner.

“But this is just for one assignment, right?” she asked. I could see her mind clicking like a cash register. She would tell her friends, all the other Keale girls who were just like her, and I would be an anecdote to their stories, an inside joke. The girl who tried to buy her way to an A.

“For now, but I might take a photography class next semester,” I said, the idea just occurring to me.

Erin frowned. “Isn’t everything supposed to be switching to digital?”

I raised the camera to my eye, locating Erin’s perfect, pouty face in the viewfinder. She raised a hand in protest, and I snapped a picture, relishing the smart click of the shutter, the dark curtain spilling over the lens.

“Lauren! I don’t even have my hair done.”

“Relax,” I said. “It’s not loaded.”

I spent the next week shooting rolls of film all over campus, looking for interesting angles and tricks of light. I lugged my camera bag to the chapel to shoot the sunrise streaming through stained glass, and onto the roof of Stanton Hall at sunset to catch the last wink of sun as it disappeared over a row of elms, the branches backlit. I stopped some girls on the way to class, and photographed them with their arms around each other’s shoulders. “Is this for the yearbook?” one of them wanted to know, and I told her it just might be. What I liked most was the feeling of authority that came with the camera hanging from my neck, and the way I could instantly disappear when I looked through the viewfinder.

Dr. Mittel developed two rolls for me and we met in his office to look at the contact sheet through his loupe, a cylindrical magnifying lens that he kept on his desk. He passed over the smiling girls in their stiff poses, the sunrises and sunsets. “This is good for a first attempt,” he said finally. “You’re looking for all the right things—angles, lighting. And you must have a good lens on that camera of yours.”

I told him about the Leica, my splurge, and he frowned, either at the expense or at the thought of some no-talent hack having access to such nice equipment.

“I assume you’re serious about this, then,” he said, passing me the contact sheet. “The best thing for you, I think, would be to take a class this spring. I teach an intro course—very hands-on, lots of time in the darkroom, some developing techniques—”

“I’ll look into it,” I said, my heart hammering. Suddenly it was imperative that I take that class.

“As far as your portfolio is concerned, I think you probably already have a few prints here you could work with. But we’ve got some time, and you could certainly keep going. I feel like you’ve shot the things you think I wanted you to shoot—maybe the things you thought you should shoot. I’d like to see what you’re interested in. What does Lauren find fascinating?”

Over the next two weeks, I shot a half dozen rolls of film, trying to let Dr. Mittel’s words sink in. What did I find fascinating? I shot the empty girls’ bathroom, with its rows of gleaming sinks, the jumble of shoes in the bottom of my closet, the third floor of the library, the shadows of the shelves creeping across the carpet. I shot tree branches and leaves, a lone red-breasted bird perched on a fence. Shoot what you want to shoot, not what you want me to see.

And then one morning, I looked over at Erin, sleeping, lovely Erin, who was just like all the girls I’d ever known. She had a boyfriend at Boston University, and during her nightly chatter, I learned that she had planned their lives down to the most specific detail—engagement after their junior year, the wedding after graduation, kids two years apart. During the daytime, she looked too calculated, too poised, her face hidden behind foundation and powder, blush and mascara, the pinkish lipstick she reapplied even when it was only the two of us and her grand plans for the evening included sending an email to her boyfriend.

But at that moment, with the sunlight filtered through our Venetian blinds, creating light and dark panes on her face, she was a different Erin entirely. Pale wisps of hair covered one cheek, and her mouth was slightly, sweetly slack, with the tiniest bulge of fat beneath her chin. Beneath her pale yellow pajama top, the hard knot of one nipple was visible.

Before I knew what I was doing, I was freeing my camera from its safe spot at the top of my closet. I snapped one picture, and then, moving closer, another. In this moment, Erin was lovely in a way she’d never been before—relaxed, vulnerable. A small red blemish on her chin was visible; her lashes were pale and fragile against her eye socket. I knelt next to the bed, snapping away, entranced.

“What are you doing?” she murmured, drawing a hand over her face.

“Sorry. Just checking something on my camera,” I said, letting it hang loose from the strap around my neck. “I was going to head out to take some pictures...”

“It’s so early,” she moaned, rolling over, pulling her Garnet Hill sheets and the matching comforter into a heap over her head.

I was aware that it was creepy, that photographing a person without her knowledge was crossing a definite line. But I’d captured something good in that fleeting minute, which made me understand something else: none of the pictures I’d taken before—the landscapes and sunsets and reflections off buildings, the stained glass in the chapel—were any good. These ones were.

By this point, after a few weeks of tailing Dr. Mittel, I’d picked up the basics in the darkroom and he usually let me operate more or less on my own, only popping in occasionally to look at my negatives. It was a thrill to see Erin’s face appear during the developing process, the sunlight catching the fine strands of hair, the wet corner of her mouth. I stared at her face in the stop bath, warmth spreading through my body. I’d created this. No—that wasn’t quite right. It was simply there, but I was the one who found it. Afterward, I held my breath while I waited for Dr. Mittel’s regular verbal cues—the harrumph and hmmm, the tapping of his finger against an image. Instead, he was silent.

Maybe they weren’t good, I thought. Maybe they were horrible. Maybe I didn’t have an eye for this kind of thing at all. Maybe, like the faces I used to draw in the margins of my notebooks, photography was something that couldn’t be taught beyond the technical processes.

“What’re these?” he asked finally.

“My roommate,” I said, wiping my suddenly sweaty hands against my jeans.

He nodded. “Tell me about them.”

My words came out in a rush, stumbling over each other. I told him about seeing the sun on her face, how it was like I’d never seen her before until she was framed in the viewfinder.

“They’re good,” he said. “Obviously, there are some techniques you need to learn, some tricks of lighting and shadow, and then there’s a whole host of printing options...”

I waited, leaning back against the counter.

“But there’s something here, Lauren. Something raw and intimate. You let the camera speak. It’s almost like a lover’s gaze, seeing everything.”

“She doesn’t know—” I stammered, my gaze flickering to the outline of Erin’s nipple, which somehow looked innocent and obscene at the same time. “She was asleep.”

He frowned. “Obviously, that’s an issue. You’ll need to get her permission if you’re going to display these or use them in your portfolio. But maybe this is your thing. Portraiture, but not posed. Candid. Catching these unaware moments. This is something to pursue.”

I nodded, trying not to burst through my skin with happiness. This is something to pursue.

“You’re taking my class in the spring, I know. Maybe we’ll see about getting you on the Courier, too. Have you considered that? They’re always looking for photographers, and I could write a recommendation.”

I grinned. The Courier was Keale’s weekly newspaper, something I’d only glanced at occasionally in the Commons, thumbing through pages while I twirled my spaghetti with a fork. “That sounds great,” I admitted.

I left his office feeling the most alive, the most right, I’d ever felt. The closest I’d come otherwise was with Marcus, when everything was thrilling and dangerous, thrilling because it was dangerous. This was something I’d done, something I’d created, not dependent on anyone else. Dr. Mittel didn’t give a damn that I was a Mabrey, and I didn’t, either.

Megan

Mom wanted to know everything about Keale, but even after the initial newness wore off, I had trouble putting it into words.

Keale was its own little world—sprawling green lawns and clusters of Victorian-era buildings, bordered on two sides by horse pastures and on another by a seventeen-acre forest that backed onto a tributary of the Housatonic. The buildings were named after female suffragettes and abolitionists and artists—the Susan B. Anthony Auditorium, the Alice Stone Blackwell Hall of Arts & Letters, the Rebecca Harding Davis and Elizabeth Cady Stanton residential halls. “Who?” Mom asked, but I could hardly keep them straight myself. The school seemed torn between its past—earnest and vaguely religious—and its present, where couples openly held hands and as a form of protest art, girls hung their bloody tampons on a display in the student center.

I’d expected a campus built in the 1800s to be showing its age, imagining a dusty reference library, cracks in foundations, crumbling facades. Instead, every outward inch of Keale was maintained to perfection. The brickwork gleamed; the sidewalks were pressure-washed to sparkling silver. Leaves and food wrappers were whisked away by a small army of maintenance workers in green jumpsuits. Inside, the buildings were light and modern, housing computer labs and rows of microscopes.

That first night, alone in my room, I had the impression that Keale was a sort of sacred space, a feeling enhanced by a quaint bell from the original chapel marking otherwise silent hours. But then the dorms filled, and this vision was shattered with feet pounding in the hallway, music pulsing through walls, female voices echoing up and down the stairwells. In the common kitchen on each floor of Stanton Hall, someone was forever burning popcorn in the microwave or losing the remote control right before Friends was scheduled to start or bitching about who had used the one-percent milk, despite the fact that it had been labeled in permanent marker as Hailey’s Milk.

By contrast, my room was a tomb. Someone in Housing must have thought that Ariana Kramer and I made a perfect match, based solely on the fact that we were both from the Midwest. But Ariana was quiet and studious and serious, charged with living up to the expectations of her pediatrician father and her law professor mother. She lined the bookshelf above her desk with ribbons and plaques and trophies—First Place Academic Decathlon. National Honor Society Lifetime Member. Soroptimists International Achievement Winner.

“I didn’t think to bring my Pinewood Derby participation ribbon,” I told her that first day, after her parents had left for the airport and she was carefully arranging her clothes, grouping the hangers by color. I expected at least a courtesy laugh, but Ariana didn’t crack a smile.

She had already started her course reading during the summer, something I’d never even considered, and her thick copies of Organic Chemistry and Human Biology and World Cultures looked worldly and sophisticated next to the yellow spines of my Nancy Drews, packed for sentimental rather than practical value. From the critical glance Ariana gave my side of the room, I might have brought my stuffed animals and pink plastic ponies.

“I’m an English major,” I said, as if this might explain it. “I mean, at least, that’s what I’ve declared for now...” I trailed off, not wanting to explain about my unplanned “gap” year and the feeling of comfort I’d felt when I stumbled on Keale’s list of English courses. American Literature I and II, Writing Between the Wars, Post-Colonial Voices... Reading, I’d thought. Writing. I could do that. “What about you? Did you declare a major?”

“Oh, I’m a bio girl. Premed,” she clarified, fiddling with her hair. I watched as a French braid emerged from her deft fingers, the strands of hair pulled too tight, giving her eyes a squinty look. If it were someone else, I might have suggested a different hairstyle, volunteered to do a loose fishbone braid like I used to do with my girlfriends in junior high. But somewhere, Ariana probably had proof that this was the best kind of braid—a ribbon from the county fair with her name embossed in tiny gold letters, maybe. “I’m leaning toward the heart,” she said.

“The heart,” I repeated, distracted by the efficient rotating motions of her wrists.

“You know, cardiology?” The last syllable rose to a question mark, as if to ask if I’d heard of it.

* * *

We didn’t have the chumminess that other girls had, but we didn’t have the volatile ups and downs, either. Ariana spent most of her time in the library, and during the day I caught rare glimpses of her crossing campus, bent forward beneath the weight of her backpack. Most days she couldn’t be bothered to go to the Commons for dinner, and crinkly foil Pop-Tart wrappers glimmered in our trashcan.

The other girls—women, I supposed—seemed to move in packs, united by shared characteristics. At first, I assumed that they all knew each other somehow, like they’d been fed into Keale from the same high school, and the same middle schools before that, all the way to the preschools where they’d first finger-painted their names. It took me a while to realize that their familiarity was based on loosely shared experiences from communities up and down the East Coast—prep schools and summer camps and tennis lessons, summers on the Cape. They didn’t need to know each other; they understood each other. They spoke the same language. In class, they raised their hands confidently, referencing books I’d never heard of, historical events that hadn’t been mentioned in my history classes at Woodstock High. I might have been one of the best and brightest of my graduating class, but the bar was much higher at Keale, the work more rigorous, the competition fierce. In high school, skimming the reading and turning in completed worksheets had earned me A’s and the occasional B, but at Keale the quizzes focused on obscure passages in the reading, and my papers were returned full of red ink.

On my weekly phone calls home, I told my mom that everything was fine, that Ariana and I were getting along well, that I was learning a lot in my classes. It was only to myself that I wondered if I’d made a huge mistake, if KSU wouldn’t have been a better choice after all.

* * *

At the end of September, sick of riding the Keale Kargo shuttle into town, I bought a bike from an upperclassman for ten dollars. Even though the green paint was chipped and the banana seat was in need of repair, it was a steal, with a giant wicker basket perfect for transporting the toiletries and snacks and other things that cost a fortune on campus. One afternoon, I was locking the bike outside the Common Ground, Scofield’s artsy coffee shop, when Joe Natolo walked up with his hands slouched into his pockets.

“A granny bike. Nice,” he said, running his hand over the seat I’d repaired with a few strips of duct tape.

“A cruiser,” I corrected. “It gets me around.”

Joe laughed. “Tell the truth. Too many female hormones on campus. You just had to get out of there.”

I rolled my eyes. “You know it’s nothing but constant talk about our periods.”

He gave me a grin that was already identifiable as his alone, a mismatched alignment of teeth, a dimple that appeared in the hollow of his cheek. “You headed in here?” He jerked his head in the direction of the coffeehouse, and I nodded. It had become my own little oasis on the lazy afternoons when I didn’t have class.

I didn’t tell Joe that part of the reason for wanting a bike was wanting this, the chance to bump into him again. In the weeks since I’d arrived in Scofield, he had begun to seem like a conjuring of my travel-addled brain, but here he was—floppy dark bangs, the long eyelashes that my mom would have said were wasted on a man. Joe Natolo, in the flesh.

Remembering the promise I’d made when he’d dropped me at Stanton Hall, I paid for his coffee. Joe took one sip and grimaced, reaching for a canister of sugar. He asked about Keale, and I told him about my classes, my work-study job at the switchboard, life with Ariana.

He stirred his coffee elaborately with a tiny spoon and sipped, testing its sweetness. “Have you been to any good parties?”

I laughed. “Um, no. I basically study all the time, and still, I’m hardly keeping up.” As proof, I unzipped my backpack and took out my notebook and dog-eared copy of The Awakening. My paper wasn’t due for four days, but I was already starting to panic about my thesis, and my ideas weren’t coming together. On my last essay, the professor had written “Remember, there are tutors available in the writing center.”

Joe reached for my notebook, spinning it around so that my scribbles were facing him. “‘In fact,’” he read, loud enough to get the attention of a frowning woman at the next table, “‘through penile penetration, she both finds and loses her identity.’ Writing an autobiography?”

“Very funny.” I slapped the notebook closed before he could read any of my other observations, such as the one about Edna Pontellier confusing orgasm with independence.

He sat back, arms folded across his chest. “Tell the truth, Midwest. The lack of men is killing you.”

I rolled my eyes. “I’m managing. Besides—” I took a careful sip of coffee and leaned forward “—you do know that everyone at Keale is a lesbian, right?”

The smile he gave me sent a rush down to my toes. “Not everyone, surely.”

No, not everyone. Just sitting across the table from Joe was enough to confirm my own sexuality, not that I’d ever been in doubt. I hadn’t come to Keale to find a boyfriend, but I had a sixth sense dedicated to Joe alone, marked by hairs that stood up on the back of my neck when he entered a room and sweat glands that seemed to sprout from nowhere. Through Joe, I could easily find and lose my own identity.

* * *

We started bumping into each other more regularly—at Common Ground, at the Stop & Shop, where I loaded up on off-brand crackers and jars of peanut butter, and once when he pulled up next to my bike at a stoplight, revving his engine. “Race you,” he’d called through the open window.

It was impossible not to laugh when he was around, impossible not to feel a thrill when his knees bumped against mine under a café table.

“We should get dinner sometime,” he said, and I didn’t overthink it.

“We should,” I agreed.

We made plans to meet during Parents’ Weekend, to get me away from campus while it was overrun with families. I hadn’t mentioned the event to my mom—it seemed too far to come for two days of scheduled activities that wouldn’t have interested her. Ariana’s parents had flown out, and I’d unsuccessfully dodged their presence on Friday, surprised when they burst into our room after sharing a meal in the Commons. I kept my nose in a book as Mrs. Kramer worried over Ariana’s chemistry grade—an A overall, although she’d received a B on a recent quiz—and turned a page noisily when Mr. Kramer wondered whether it would be beneficial for her to find a tutor.

By now I knew Ariana well enough to recognize her controlled fury, like a toy that had been wound too tight and was ready to spring loose. “I do not need a tutor,” she said, each word bearing staccato weight.

This was easily verified—several times Ariana had tutored me, making precise notations in the margins of my work—but I decided to stay out of it.

“Maybe this isn’t a conversation we should be having right now in front of Ariana’s friend,” her dad interjected, and I looked up from where I was sitting on my bed, as if I’d been summoned. Were we friends? I felt closer to the girls I saw twice a week in my American lit seminar.

Ariana’s mom looked at her watch. “Well, we can talk on the way to the lecture, I suppose.” She cast me the same pitying smile she’d given me in August, when she learned I’d taken the bus all the way from Kansas, alone. “Maybe you’d like to join us for dinner afterward?”

I noticed the spark in Ariana’s eye, a silent pleading. She didn’t want to be alone with her parents any more than I did. I mouthed a sorry in Ariana’s direction and explained that I’d made other plans.

“Maybe you could meet us for ice cream, then,” Ariana’s mom pressed. “We’re going to go to that cute place in town, the one with the giant cone on the marquee? Maybe around nine?”

I smiled. By nine o’clock, I hoped to be in Joe’s Honda, the windows fogging from the heat of our kisses. “I’ll definitely try.”

* * *

I changed clothes five times before meeting Joe, deciding on my most flattering jeans and a shirt that was tight across the chest and too sexy to wear around Keale. We’d planned to meet at Slice of Heaven, and Joe was already there when I arrived, breathless from my bike ride into town.

He whistled, spotting me through the window. We hugged, same as we’d done the last few times we’d seen each other, but this one lasted a few beats longer, and our bodies were pressed just a bit closer.

“I hope you don’t mind. I got here a bit early and ordered for us,” Joe said, gesturing to the glass of soda in front of him, the empty glass in front of my spot. “Just regular pepperoni and breadsticks.”

“Just regular pepperoni and breadsticks sounds great,” I said.

“I was trying to beat the rush,” Joe said, nodding to the line that had formed at the register, snaking halfway to the door. Most of the booths were already full. “I mean, this town is typically overrun with WASPs, but during Parents’ Weekend, the BMW-to-human ratio is especially skewed, if you know what I mean.”

I laughed at his description.

“Well, what about you? Don’t you have parents, Midwest?” When I hesitated, he covered quickly. “Did I put my foot in my mouth? Sorry. It’s none of my business.”

“No, it’s fine. It was just too far for my mom to come.”

“What about your dad?”

I shook my head, my throat suddenly clogged. Since coming to Keale, I’d managed to avoid any mention of my dad. It was easier that way, although the omission implied that he’d never existed at all.

“I am an ass,” Joe said. “Remember?”

I stood up quickly, grabbing my frosted red cup. “Be right back.”

By the time our pizza came, we’d already refilled our bottomless sodas twice. Joe laughed as I blotted the top layer of grease from the pizza with a handful of napkins. It’s not a real date, I told myself. It’s pizza and Coke. Beneath the table, his leg brushed against mine, but instead of pulling away like a reflex, it lingered there. Or maybe it is.

While the restaurant filled up, we talked about our jobs. I mentioned the woman who called the switchboard fifteen times in one night, insisting that there must be a problem with the phone lines since her daughter hadn’t picked up. Joe said that a former coworker at the body shop had opened a place in Michigan, and he’d offered Joe a job.

He shrugged. “But, I don’t know. Michigan. It’s pretty far away.”

“Right,” I said, picking off a pepperoni. I felt his loss as keenly as if he’d already packed up the Honda and left. So far, Joe was the only good thing about Scofield. “And you’d have to leave all this.”

“Some things would be harder to leave than others,” he said, and although he wasn’t looking at me when he said it, my cheeks burned. “Anyway—it might not pan out. There are a lot of things to figure.”

“Right,” I said again. Someone at the next table stood, jostling my elbow. The restaurant was crowded now, the line out the door. I recognized some girls from Keale with their families and felt a stab of longing for my own family, back when it had been intact and perfectly imperfect. We would never again order a pizza, bicker over our choice of three toppings, then load up our leftovers to eat later that night in front of the TV.

“Whoa,” Joe said, tapping me on the arm. He gave a subtle head tilt in the direction of a family standing by the door.

I half turned, pretending to casually glance at the line. “Who are we looking at?”

“The guy in the button-down shirt.”

“You’ll have to be more specific.”

Joe laughed. “With the lady in the sweater.”

“Again, you’ll have to—”

“And the dark-haired girl with legs up to her neck.”

“Ah,” I said, glancing again toward the door. The man was tall with a full head of salt-and-pepper hair, a striped shirt with sleeves rolled up to his elbows. The woman wore a patterned sweater set, a giant diamond glinting from her finger. They didn’t look familiar, but I recognized the tall girl from Stanton Hall. I associated her with the summer camp crowd, as I’d come to think of them, girls who played lacrosse and rode horses and moved around campus in tight cliques. “That’s Lauren somebody. She lives in my dorm, but not on my floor.”

Joe leaned forward, conspiratorially. It was hard to hear him over the general noise of happy families. “Her last name is Mabrey.”

I raised an eyebrow. “And?”

“Her father is Senator Charles Mabrey of Connecticut.”

“Seriously? A senator?” I craned around, getting another look.

“Be cool,” Joe said, his thumb and forefinger reaching for my chin, steering me to face him. “People will think you’ve never seen a senator before.”

I burned under his touch. “I haven’t.”

“Well, I suspect they’re just like you and me, only they live in a nicer home—or more likely homes, plural—and they drive better cars if they drive themselves at all, and they’re on a first-name basis with the president of our freaking country, but other than that, no reason to stare.”

“Got it,” I said. We were close enough for me to see a tiny red fleck caught between Joe’s front teeth. “Did you learn all this in your civics class?”

Joe released my chin and reached for his tumbler, taking a long swig. “They’re probably all douchebags, but Mabrey at least seems to be a douchebag of the people.”

I snorted, choking on a bite of cold pizza. “You should volunteer to write his campaign slogans.”

“You know what?” Joe said, wadding his napkin into a ball. “Want to get out of here? There’s a better place down the road, one that won’t be overrun with all these hoity-toity types.”

“Do me a favor,” I grinned. “Say that again. Hoity-toity.”

Instead, he stood up and pulled me to my feet, threading his fingers through mine. I shot a last glance over my shoulder and saw Lauren’s father, the senator, bantering with a cashier. It was the same way married men had talked to me at the Woodstock Diner, as if he were saying, Look how young and virile I still am. In that split second, Lauren turned and our eyes met. She smiled in a faint, pleasant way, as if she didn’t recognize me at all. And why would she? Girls like that moved in their own circles, existed in their own worlds.

* * *

We ended up at a place called Moe’s, too shady for the Keale crowd with its dim, low-ceilinged interior and the haze of smoke that hovered just above our heads. Joe navigated the rowdy crowd at the bar and returned to our table with a pitcher of beer. I thought briefly about pointing out that I was nineteen, and then let it go. It seemed like an incongruous fact, unrelated to this experience. I felt older and wiser, like a more mature version of Megan Mazeros, one who didn’t have to worry about basic rules and regulations.

For a while we drank and watched a vigorous game of darts unfolding between a tiny, dark-haired woman with dead aim and her towering, tattooed companion; with each throw, they razzed and taunted each other. It was like watching an elaborate mating ritual, one based on catcalls and innuendos. When she won, he pulled her onto his lap and whispered into her ear. She stood, tugging him toward the door.

Joe drained his glass. “Do you play?”

“Do I ever.” I slid off my stool, feeding off the charge in the air. We were an extension of the couple who had just left, playing off their energy, becoming more sexualized versions of ourselves. Between throws, Joe’s hand lingered on my elbow, my waist, my hip.

I hadn’t played darts since before Dad got sick, but we used to have a dartboard in the garage, our throw lines taped to the cement. Once I got good enough to be competitive, I’d lost the handicap and he’d eliminated my line once and for all. After a few warm-up shots, Joe and I were evenly matched, going head-to-head, throw for throw. We brushed against each other deliberately, laughing, when we retrieved our darts. When he beat me by three points, I conceded the loss with a mock bow.

“An honor, sir,” I said.

He hooked an arm around my neck, pulling me into him. Our kiss felt effortless, a natural progression of the evening. He trailed one finger down my spine, coiling it in my belt loop. “Want to play another round?”

“Not particularly,” I said.

Our faces were so tight together that I saw his beautiful, crooked grin up close. It was like looking at him through a magnifying glass, all his good parts becoming even better.

* * *

According to the clock on Joe’s dashboard, it was just after nine. He agreed to drive me back to campus, so I could leave a note for Ariana. I didn’t know what I would say, just Sorry I didn’t make it to ice cream or Don’t wait up. I planned to stuff my backpack with toiletries and a change of clothes, just in case. The night was ripe with possibility. At each stoplight on our way out of town, Joe and I kissed like we were perfecting what we’d started earlier. In the parking lot of my dorm, we reached for each other again, his hands inching beneath my sweater, palms hot on the small of my back.

“You know what I like about you, Midwest?”

I murmured, “No.”

“What I like the most is—”

“I meant no, don’t talk,” I said.

“You see? That’s it.”

The car windows began to fog, and Joe’s hand was on my bra, my nipple hard beneath his thumb. It was so close to what I’d imagined that it hardly felt real. Nearby, a car started, headlights springing to life.

“Hold on, cowboy,” I said, pulling back. “Give me five minutes.”

He groaned. “Five minutes is eternity.”

I gave him a teasing kiss and grabbed my backpack from the floorboard. “Five minutes.”

The night was cool, but I felt warm and reckless and happy. I took the side stairs and was breathless by the time I reached the third floor, where I paused to look down at the parking lot. Joe’s car was there, idling with its headlights on. I spotted my reflection at the same time—blond curls wild, cheeks flushed. I’m doing this, I thought. I’m doing it.

In the hallway, I waited for a group of parents to pass. They were chatting loudly about how college had changed since they were in it, how the cafeteria food was better, the exercise facilities first-rate. After I passed, I heard one of the men say, “And the girls are prettier, too.”

Our door was unlocked, although the lights were off. Ariana and her parents must have come and gone, forgetting to lock it behind them. I flicked on the light switch, moving fast. Fresh underwear, a tank top to sleep in, a clean shirt for the morning—if that was how it played out. I hesitated, momentarily frozen by the practicalities. Would he have condoms? Of course. This experience wasn’t the novelty for him that it was for me. Still, I cursed myself for not refilling my birth control. It had seemed a silly, extravagant expense to pay thirty dollars a month for pills I wouldn’t need at an all-girls school.

I was zipping up my backpack when I caught the movement from Ariana’s side of the room and jumped a foot. She was in bed, her body a slight hump beneath the covers. Maybe she’d skipped out on ice cream and come back early, exhausted by her parents’ constant nagging.

Then she moaned, a ragged and gasping sound that made me look closer. Her head was turned to one side, hair plastered against her face and half-covering her mouth. Across her pillowcase was a trail of vomit.

Fuck. Not now.

“Ariana?” I asked, then repeated her name louder. When she didn’t respond, I dropped to my knees, shaking her shoulder. “Are you okay? Should I call someone?”

Her head flopped backward, mouth open. Flakes of white powder stuck to the corner of her mouth.

“Did you take something?”

I had to put my ear almost to her face, wincing from the stench of her breath, to understand what she was saying. Your pulse. Yourpilse. Your pills.

My pills.

* * *

Later I told the paramedics about the generic bottle of ibuprofen I kept in my desk drawer, taking a pill here and there for a headache. There had been a hundred pills initially, and I wasn’t sure how many had been there earlier that night. Seventy? Eighty? Ariana had taken whatever was left, as evidenced by the empty bottle on her nightstand. I tried to imagine her swallowing the pills, one by one or two by two, washing them down with water from her Peanuts mug, the one that read The Doctor Is In, 5 cents.

After the lecture, Ariana had told her parents that she needed to study, and they’d gone out for dinner without her. She’d already taken the first pills by the time I met Joe at Slice of Heaven, and she’d finished them by the time we’d begun our game of darts at Moe’s, when her parents were having ice cream sundaes without her. She must have been unconscious by the time Joe and I kissed; she’d vomited later, when Joe and I were in his car, when I was being reinvented by his touch, inch by inch. And I’d found her in time, so lucky, everyone noted. Only I wasn’t sure if Ariana meant for me to find her earlier, or hoped I would only find her after it was too late.

Viv, our resident advisor, kicked into supervisory mode and took charge of the situation—which meant contacting Ariana’s parents and taking care of me. “You cannot blame yourself for this,” she said, taking hold of my shocked shoulders. Until that point, it hadn’t occurred to me that I was responsible. Then guilt kicked in hard: I’d been planning a night of reckless abandon, and Ariana had been trying to end it all.

Worse, I felt just as bad for myself, for the lost possibilities of that night. By the time I’d alerted Viv and the paramedics had arrived, twenty minutes had passed, maybe more. When I finally wormed my way through the cluster of girls and their parents in the hallway to look down into the parking lot below, Joe’s car was gone.

Lauren

Although I hadn’t mentioned it once, somehow everyone at Keale knew my father was a senator. It had started out with a little joke: my resident advisor, Katy, mentioned during our first floor meeting that we all had to follow the rules—whether our fathers were elected officials or not. She said this with a wink in my direction, and I heard the general buzz around me. Who? And he’s an actual senator? Later that week, a mousy blonde girl sat next to me in the Commons and over eggs on toast mentioned that her grandfather had been an ambassador to Ghana, as if that made us related somehow, like second cousins.

“Do you have like, diplomatic immunity or something?” another girl at the table asked.

“No,” I assured her, to general laughter.

Later I thought about it and realized that a more accurate answer would have been yes.

My parents had more or less ignored me since I left for Keale, but they came for Parents’ Weekend, bustling into my dorm room with a towering gift basket from Harry & David, as if I were a client and not a daughter. It didn’t occur to me until I was giving them an abbreviated tour of campus that this was an opportunity to see and be seen. For Dad, it was an unpaid advertisement, a chance to shake hands and trade college stories with other dads, homing in on the ones from Connecticut, his constituents. More than once when we were walking across campus, I was aware of camera flashes, of people catching the three of us in motion—Mom with an arm linked through Dad’s, each of us holding bags from the Keale College bookstore, full of the sweatshirts and visors and coffee mugs that proclaimed them the proud parents of a Keale College student.

I was sure we would show up in future brochures advertising the college, with some kind of pretentious caption: Senator Mabrey, His Wife, Elizabeth Holmes-Mabrey, and Their Daughter Lauren Enjoy Family Time during a Visit to the Fine Arts Auditorium. It wasn’t so much a visit as it was a campaign stop.

We went into town for pizza, but the line at Slice of Heaven was out the door.

“We could bring it back to my dorm,” I suggested. “There’s a little kitchen down the hall.”

“It’ll be like old times, Liz,” Dad said, draping his arms around Mom’s shoulders. She smiled up at him, and I wondered how much of this was genuine, and how much was for show, another chance to impress Scofield’s voting public. Photographic evidence of my parents in their twenties did exist, but I’d never seen snapshots of them eating pizza out of a cardboard box, sitting cross-legged on the floor. In the photos I remembered, they were at important dinners, separated by centerpieces and goblets and place settings with three different forks, Dad in a suit, Mom’s hair in a complicated updo held together by a million bobby pins.

I recognized a few other people in the pizzeria, including Cindy Hardwick, a girl from my dorm. We’d only exchanged the occasional hello as we passed in the hall, but she bounded over to shake Dad’s hand and then, for good measure, Mom’s. She lingered for longer than necessary, beaming up at them. “You must be proud. Lauren is so talented,” she said. I tried to steer her away with an arm on her elbow, but it was too late. “I love her work.”

Worse than the explanations that I would have to provide were the subtle frowns on my parents’ faces, their hesitant glances between Cindy and me, as if to confirm she was in fact referring to their daughter.

“Lauren hasn’t told us much about her classes, actually,” Mom said, the question mark buried in her words.

“It was going to be a surprise,” I said.

Cindy’s perky face fell, her cheeks literally deflating. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”

Mom touched her reassuringly on the shoulder. “You couldn’t have known. Lauren’s so modest. Why don’t you tell us, honey, so we can all be on the same page?”

Dad’s smile was nervous, his focus drifting around the room. This conversation wasn’t part of the scheduled event, not even a bullet point on his agenda.

“I’m putting together a photography portfolio for one of my classes,” I said.

“It’s so brilliant,” Cindy gushed. “She takes the best pictures—she really does. I can barely hold a camera steady...”

One of the pizzeria employees called a number, and Dad stepped forward to collect our order.

“Maybe you can show us some of those photos before we head back,” Mom suggested. “It was wonderful to meet you, Cindy.”

We gathered plates and napkins and little packets of Parmesan cheese and smiled our way stiffly out the door and down the street to Mom’s Mercedes. The street was clogged with cars, and it took Dad a while to find an opening.

I popped the lid of the pizza box and put a slice of pepperoni on my tongue, relishing its salt and heat.

“I don’t remember signing you up for a photography class,” Mom said.

I chewed the pepperoni slowly, deliberately.

Dad’s eyes met mine in the rearview mirror. “Well? Your mother asked you a question.”

I shrugged. “It’s for a class called Introduction to the Arts. We study visual art, music—”

“You’re taking that in addition to your other classes?”

“No, I dropped the biology class.” I’d also switched out of math, but this didn’t seem like the best moment to mention it.

In the front seat, Mom’s mouth was set in a tight line. “You need to be taking your general education requirements, Lauren. You’re not just here to try a little of this and a little of that. There’s an educational plan—”

“It’s one class,” I repeated. “And I’m thinking of studying fine arts, so it’ll be part of the requirements for my major.” This much was true, although I had been planning to wait as long as possible—at least another semester or two—before announcing it to my parents. Before their visit, I’d carefully packed away my Leica and slid my burgeoning portfolio underneath my bed.

Dad sighed, adjusting the visor so the setting sun didn’t blind him. “At least your friend seems excited about your work. She said you were very talented.”

Mom couldn’t let it go. “Everything’s always a lie with you. It’s always about sneaking around behind our backs.”

I leaned forward, my head between their bucket seats. “It’s my education, Mom. You can’t control the classes I take, like you did at Reardon.”

“If I hadn’t intervened there, you never would have graduated,” Mom snapped.

I rolled my eyes. I’d earned mostly B’s at Reardon, with the odd A and a few C’s, yet the arrival of my report card in the mail had always felt like doomsday, as if I’d brought shame upon the family for not being as brilliant as my siblings.

A car slowed in front of us, and Dad braked suddenly, the motion shooting us all forward against our seat belts. The pizza box slid from the back seat onto the floor, but thankfully the pizza in all its greasy gooeyness remained inside the box, folded over on itself. I lifted the lid to inspect the damage and said, “Still edible.”

Dad smiled, meeting my eyes quickly in the rearview mirror before returning to the road. I felt sorrier for him than I did for myself. He didn’t seem to understand all the intricacies of being a Mabrey, although all of our lives revolved around him. He was the one who would have to drive back to Simsbury with Mom, after all, listening to her complaints about my thoughtlessness.

In the parking lot outside Stanton Hall, I unclipped my seat belt and Dad did the same. Mom sat stony, staring ahead.

I gestured to the pizza. “Aren’t you coming inside?”

“Now that I think about it, we probably have to get on the road,” Mom said.

“Liz, we have food to eat. We might as well—”

“I don’t think I’m particularly hungry.”

Dad sighed, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.

I scooped up the pizza box. No point in letting perfectly good food go to waste. “It’s a class,” I repeated. “A stupid fucking class. That’s all.”

Mom said, “You will not talk to us that way—” And I knew there was more, but I wasn’t going to stick around to hear it. I’d already slammed the door behind me and was walking fast across the parking lot, pizza box in hand. I waited for them to do something—for Mom to come after me or for Dad to pull even with me in the Mercedes, but none of that happened.

In my room, I moved some papers out of the way and set the box on my desk. Erin was still out with her parents, probably having the sort of happy family meal that regular people had, laughing and reminiscing and making plans for the next time they would see each other. But maybe there was no such thing as a normal family, a happy family meal. Maybe everyone was secretly, deep down miserable and they only put on brave faces for the rest of us.

More out of spite than hunger, I ate half the pizza and lay down on the bed, still dressed in my jeans and sweater in case Erin and her parents came back. I must have fallen asleep with the overhead fluorescent light still beaming down because the next thing I knew there were people running past my door, their footsteps echoing down the hallway.

“What’s going on?” I called to a girl who stood near the elevators, a hand over her mouth.

“Someone on the second floor took a bunch of pills,” she said. “It’s horrible.”

“Is she...” I faltered. “Is she going to be...”

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