Page 41

I look out the window at the bare trees going by and the students walking with their hoods up.

I tap my phone, not needing to look at where she is because I know she’s at Corvin Hall with her friends. I hate that I just saw her again. I hate that she’s not being careful anymore.

The house is lit up when we pull in, every window, the way my mother likes it, so people driving by can see. The fountain turned off for the season. The front door opens before Martin’s even out of the car, and my mom’s standing in it with her hands clasped in front of her and a smile already on her face.

“You wore the navy,” she says, and kisses my cheek, and fixes my tie.

“You told me to.”

“And you listened. Look at that.” She steps back to look at me. “You look like your father.”

She means it as a compliment. Everybody always does.

My dad isn’t home. He’s at the club, or the office, or somewhere that’s more important than walking downstairs. He’ll be back late. He’ll see me at breakfast. That’s fine. That’s how it goes.

“Who’s at dinner tomorrow?” I ask her in the kitchen while she pours herself a glass of wine she won’t finish.

“Some friends of your father’s.”

“Which friends?”

“Rafferty.” She smiles at me over the glass. “He wants it to be a surprise.”

She knows. She knows exactly who, and she’s not going to tell me, because he told her not to, and in this house, that’s the end of it.

I go up to my room. It looks the same as it did in August. It looks the same as it did when I was twelve. Somebody has vacuumed it so recently that the lines are still in the carpet. I lie on top of the comforter in my suit with my shoes on, which would give my mother a heart attack, and look at the ceiling.

My mom is the reason I went to public school.

That surprised people. It surprised my dad most of all, and he still brings it up at dinners when he’s had enough wine, like it’s a funny story about a phase she went through. Every boy in my family for three generations went to the same school, forty minutes away, with the gates, the chapel, and the blazers. My cousins went there. My father went there. His father went there. There’s a plaque.

And my mother put her foot down. She did it exactly once in my whole life that I know of, and it was about that. She said she wanted me to be well-rounded. She said I should know how other people live. She said she didn’t want me growing up thinking I was above everybody, and she said it standing in the doorway of my father’s study, looking at the back of his head.

She won. I don’t know how. I’ve never known how.

And then she drove me to the public high school on the first day of ninth grade in her car that cost more than most of the teachers made in a year, and she put her hand on my arm before I got out, and she said, Be kind. Be gracious. Remember who you are.

The first two never stuck.

The last one did. That was the part she meant. I understood that even at fourteen. She wanted me to sit in their classrooms and eat in their cafeteria and play on their rinks and learn how they lived, and she wanted me to know the whole time, every single day, that I was not one of them. That I was a visitor. That I was better, and the polite thing was not to say so out loud.

I was very good at not saying it out loud. I just made sure everybody knew it anyway.

I check my phone at eleven-forty.

Tess is at Corvin still.

I check it at one, when I can’t sleep, and the house is so quiet I can hear the heat moving through the vents my father had redone last spring.

Corvin. Three doors down from my empty bed.

At breakfast, my father is at the end of the table with his phone and his coffee. He looks at me over the top of it for one second, the way you’d check that a delivery arrived.

“Seven o’clock,” he says. “The club. Wear the navy again.”

Woodbury plays at seven.

He goes back to his phone.