Morgan points to the bartender, who’s dumping ice into the sink. “Wish I could say it was fate, but I asked her to give me a call if you came around.”
“Why?”
“I heard what you did for Wesley and Mickey,” Morgan says, his eyes quiet, shoulders tight.
“It was the least I could do. Richie’s the one who signed off on it. I just suggested it.”
“After the town hall. I was a little harsh.”
“No. Not at all. I needed to hear it. You were right, about everything,” Cece says. It feels good to surrender, to admit what she’s wanted this whole time.
Morgan rests his hands on Cece’s knees, assured and steady. “Lacy told me what you said.”
It is good to be touched. Cece feels like a boat in a storm, tossed this way and that. Her throat aches. It is so much easier this way, to sail with the wind, to roll with the waves. What’s the use in fighting Mother Nature? “I’m ready to eat humble pie.”
Morgan smiles a reassuring smile. “That won’t be necessary, but we can’t stay here,” he says. “You know my rule about getting more than one drink at a bar so close to home.”
“It is a very good rule.”
“Let’s go back to my place.”
“I’d like that very much,” Cece says, “and so would Bernard.”
“Good. I have a lot to tell you.”
Morgan tells Cecethen—seated on his couch, his hands in his lap, Lacy in her room listening to music with the door closed, Bernard curled up on the rug—about how he came to Deerfield in the first place, and how he left, or was forced to leave, and the terrible ways in which his betrayal at the hands of a few cruel boys shaped his life into the thing it is today.
By any standard, let alone those of his family, Morgan was a bright boy. Where his half brothers struggled in school, often spending more time in detention and summer school than class, Morgan excelled. He was a mystery to his father and stepmother, nose buried in a novel or history textbook whenever he wasn’t helping out at the family boatyard. Where Morgan was from, perfect grades didn’t get you into places like Deerfield; mostly they got you nothing, except for maybe the admiration of your teachers. A few made comments about how he could look forward to a full ride to UMass when he graduated from high school.
Mostly, Morgan’s academic aptitude was treated with a combination of curiosity and distrust, and his siblings often enjoyed placing random boat blueprints in front of him and watching him calculate the volume of a hull or the angle of a sail in his head. Morgan never enjoyed this activity; it made him feel like a circus animal, but he partook nonetheless, as it seemed to entertain his siblings.
It was during one of these moments of mathematical wizardrywhen one of their father’s clients was walking through the boat yard and noticed him. Morgan remembers the man vividly, dressed in a white linen suit, wavy white hair peeking out from under the brim of his fedora—he seemed to Morgan like a character in a novel. The man was intrigued by Morgan’s demonstration and gave him a few more problems to solve, which he did with ease.
“That’s my boat over there,” the man said, pointing to a sloop Morgan’s father had been working on for the last nine months. “Hoping to get her in the water this summer.”
Morgan paid the man no mind, now uncomfortable from the attention.
“Name’s Cody. Doug Cody. What’s your name?”
“Morgan.”
“Nice to meet you, Morgan,” the man said, and then he was gone as quickly as he’d come, his leather shoes tapping on the concrete, his suit the color of vanilla-bean ice cream.
It wasn’t until the next week when Morgan’s parents sat him down on their springless couch and explained that Doug Cody wanted them to send him somewhere called Deerfield Academy, and he was willing to cover all the expenses. He was an alumnus and board member of the school, and he explained how they had scholarships for kids like Morgan. Kids who were bright but didn’t possess the necessary resources to attend a fine institution like Deerfield.
“It’s like a school for the gifted or something,” his father said.
And so it happened that Morgan stepped foot onto Deerfield’s campus in the summer of 1999 for orientation. He never saw Doug Cody again.
From the outset, it was clear to Morgan, and everyone around him, that he didn’t belong. From his coarse Outer Cape accent to his single blazer, there was little doubt he was a scholarship kid. The students were generally nice about it, but Morgan could sense a quiet distancing, especially in his dorm, as if his very presence meant others couldn’t be themselves. They had to curtail their talk of skiing in the Alps or summering in the Hamptons around him. They had to lend context to every conversation when he didn’t recognize a neighborhood in Manhattan or a Caribbean island. In short, they pitied him—but not enough to be his friend. None of this bothered Morgan particularly, or at least he never let on about it. Only one time, during the ninth grade class photo, did he falter, slipping away from the other students, embarrassed by the haircut his stepmother had given him at home over break.
He knew it was a gift, him being here—a thousand-, no, a million-in-one chance—and he intended on making the best of it. And while Doug Cody had thought Morgan was bright, Morgan had his doubts after the first semester. His classes were demanding, his teachers rigid and unforgiving. They doled out reading at an endless pace, tearing his essays apart as if they were paid in spilled red ink. Still, Morgan kept on—determined to prove himself worthy of the scholarship. And so it happened that he lived in the library and fell in with the international kids, who, while rich, didn’t seem as intent on keeping him on the outside.
When the year ended and the summer came, when everyone else was heading off to internships and far-flung European countries, Morgan decided to stick around and take a job at the summer camp. It paid good money, and it would give him time to prepare for next year, which was somehow supposed to beharder than freshman year, but really, he couldn’t bear to go home. He was afraid of how much he’d changed and what his parents might think of him, but mostly, he was worried they’d set him back somehow. Slowly but surely, he’d started to make his way in this new world, and he didn’t want them limiting him, as terrible as that sounded. He stayed on campus all summer with nothing but a box fan to keep cool.
By the time the fall semester of his second year ended, Morgan was pulling straight A’s and catching jealous glances from classmates when teachers commended his contributions in the classroom. His comments were insightful and perceptive in Harkness discussions in English; his scores set the high mark in math and science; his oration skills were nuanced and powerful in speech class. He tried out for the rowing team and didn’t make it, but at least he tried. Girls started paying attention to him, and for the first time in his life, Morgan understood what confidence was.
As junior year approached, Morgan doubled his efforts, shunning all distractions real and imagined. By now, he’d come to experience some manner of popularity, and while he’d once been ignored, he now found himself the object of attention, not just of girls, but of boys, too. In particular, a group from the boys’ lacrosse team who lived on his floor in the dormitory took a liking to him and invited him to various social gatherings, but he politely declined. Princeton and Harvard were now chief among his priorities, and having tasted academic success, the singular joy of learning deeply and fully, he saw no goal more worthy than the pursuit of knowledge. Not even 9/11 or the subsequent war in Iraq could distract him. By the end of his junior year, with stellarSAT and ACT scores in his back pocket, Morgan allowed himself to dream of what college life might look like.
