Chapter One
Caroline narrowed her eyes, focused on the last red cup on the opposite side of the Ping-Pong table, and exhaled to steady her hand. She lofted the little plastic ball into the air and watched it land in the perfect center of her opponent’s cup. She allowed herself only a tiny, fleeting smile of victory when he sighed and chugged the final beer in front of him.
“Good game,” she told her business school classmate, hoping he’d respond.
He didn’t.
Caroline had attempted to shake hands at the end of the first match, but that was apparently not done in beer pong. She’d thought it was like a tennis match or business deal, but her classmate had stared at her outstretched hand until she pulled it back and pretended to have been stretching.
“Are you still mad that I called your pants pink?” she asked him.
“They’re Nantucket reds,” he stiffly replied.
“I was trying to give you a compliment,” Caroline said, desperate to salvage the single social interaction she’d enjoyed at the party. She’d liked the color of his pants, not to mention how they fit him. She’d liked the idea that he was a little different too, because everyone else was injeans or chinos. Caroline wore a sundress from an Old Navy outlet she’d passed on the trip into Boston, but she felt overdressed.
“Oh, thanks,” he said, putting his hands on his hips and swiveling to scan the yard behind her.
Maybe it wasn’t the pants. Maybe he was upset she’d beat him in straight sets. That would usually do it.
It was her first time playing beer pong, but it seemed like she was good at it. It was her third round, and she’d only lost a couple of throws. The hardest part had been figuring out the rules; everyone else seemed to have learned in undergrad, but Caroline’s tennis coach had forbidden his players to attend parties where alcohol was served during tennis season. Not that she’d been invited to many.
The rules of beer pong weren’t complex, but they were counterintuitive: the person who lost a point had to drink the beer, even though everyone seemed to be at this party just to drink beer. Maybe it was a penalty because the beer had someone’s dirty Ping-Pong ball in it? But if that was the case, why didn’t the winner getcleanbeer?
These questions remained unanswered, but the action was close enough to tennis that Caroline had figured it out after watching a few matches from the back patio.
“Can someone else take a turn now?” her opponent asked as he reracked and refilled his cups, voice pitched in that fake-nice tone that usually meant Caroline had annoyed someone. He’d given her his name when they met, but she’d immediately forgotten it in her haze of anxiety, and now it seemed awkward to ask.
“I didn’t realize anyone was waiting,” Caroline said.
The weather was pleasant in Boston’s September, and people were sitting in lawn chairs under the string lightscrisscrossing the packed-dirt yard, but nobody was especially near the table. She’d thought the rule was that she got to keep playing until she was defeated, but she must have been wrong about that.
“I was going to grab my girlfriend from inside,” her classmate said, pointing his chin at the interior of the row house. “See if she wants to play with me.”
“You have a girlfriend?” Caroline blurted out, surprised. She’d been certain he was flirting with her before they started playing, but possibly she’d been wrong about that too. Her stomach sank; she’d already started telling herself a story about how she met this cute guy at the beer-pong table and he introduced her to all his friends.
Nantucket Reds hesitated and rubbed the back of his neck as though the existence of his girlfriend was potentially subject to dispute. A contingency that might not make it onto the audited financial statements.
“Yeah, I mean... unless you wanted to get out of here?” he suggested, lifting his eyebrows. “You seemed pretty dead set on the game. But we could head back to my place if you wanted to.”
Caroline glared at him. She’d toyed with the idea that she might go back to someone’s house from the party, but in that fantasy, they’d wanted more from her than five to ten minutes of potentially adulterous sexual contact. If Nantucket Reds had a contingent girlfriend, he probably wasn’t going to make brunch plans with Caroline. She shook her head.
Slinking back to the outdoor couch where she’d spent the first hour of the party, she took a longneck from a cooler by the wall. The couch smelled like piss and spilled beer, and most of the tattered surface was taken up by a sleepy Labrador retriever, but the dog obligingly shiftedher paws to make some room as Caroline squeezed in at one end.
“I won three games in a row,” she told the dog after a few minutes of watching the next match. “Good job, me.” She tried and failed to convince herself that this was a significant achievement, and the evening had been a success.
A Friday night in college would have been spent at a budget motel on the way to a tennis tournament, if it was tennis season, or watching TV with her grandmother, if it wasn’t, and she would have enjoyed either of those activities more than going to a party and not meeting anyone new. Thinking of her grandmother made Caroline cringe.
I know you haven’t been happy, she’d written in the letter attached to her revised will, even though Caroline had never complained.I’m leaving you everything, even though Caroline had only asked about the SUV.Go live a big life, even though Caroline’s stated ambitions had been limited to moving out of her parents’ house. However unexpected that last vague command had been, Caroline had initially considered it a natural consequence of getting the hell out of Templeton. Everything else was supposed to follow naturally.
In her headlong dash for freedom, Caroline felt as though she’d run straight into a screen door. Whatever she’d meant bya big life, Gam had probably not intended for Caroline to spend her time petting someone else’s dog and watching strangers play beer pong.
Caroline’s plan had been very modest: she’d save a couple thousand dollars for business school applications, somehow acquire a car, and when she moved away to the other side of the country, she’d get to quit doing exactlywhat her father told her to do every minute of the day. The kind of life she’d have was very hazy in her mind, but she’d populated it with friends, a boyfriend, even, and she’d imagined all sorts of new experiences. She’d go on dates and ski trips and cosmopolitan adventures. She’d meet interesting new people who were funny and kind. Gam’s will shouldn’t have changed anything about the plan, but somehow it had.
Caroline couldn’t say which had been the bigger shock—the number of digits on her grandmother’s brokerage account balance or the furor that erupted when the rest of her family learned that it would all go to Caroline. Two million dollars! That ought to have let her do whatever she wanted. It ought to have convinced her family that there would be plenty left over for them once she was done with business school. But instead, Caroline had managed only a few stilted conversations about classes with the other people here, she’d scarcely left her apartment since arriving in Boston, and most of her family weren’t speaking to her. Caroline shredded the last bit of the label on her beer bottle and sighed at the pile of scraps in her lap. Her older sister had once told her that beer was an acquired taste, but Caroline hadn’t managed to acquire it yet.
“The guy in the pink pants didn’t really have a girlfriend, I bet,” she said to the Lab. “He was just insecure about his beer pong skills and weak grasp of color theory.” The dog didn’t lift her head, but Caroline sensed her agreement with those propositions. Caroline nodded as though the dog had replied. “I should probably go home and let him recover from his defeats.”
It was still early, and the party showed no signs of abating, but Caroline had exhausted the few openinggambits she knew for interacting with strangers. She wasn’t going to meet anyone else here.
