every first night she was alone again after a weekend with her husband.
But this time it was different: she got up out of the bed and padded down the hall in her bare feet to one of the other bedrooms, climbed up into a single bed, surprised at herself for being so weird, and promptly fell asleep again.
ON TUESDAY MORNING the sky was blue, the air fresh, a perfect September day. The faculty would return; the campus would be busy again. And this morning she would interview a candidate for business manager to replace the geriatric, incompetent, beloved man whom Marjorie Boyd should have let go but didn’t, leaving that nasty job to Fred Kindler. The business manager was also the chief financial officer in Rachel’s scheme, a critical part of the team she needed to create around herself. Maybe this was the one.
He was a retired CFO of a successful mail-order business who’d grown sick of playing golf all day. His CV and references convinced her he had the necessary sophistication to think outside of the box about the finances of what was actually the combination of a school, a hotel, and a kind of orphanage. So, before she broached the subject of the school’s history of poor discipline regarding finance, and the one-million-two-hundred-thousand-dollar accumulated deficit, Rachel asked him some questions about how he would interact with the faculty. She explained that the teachers savored their autonomy and had a tendency to hold their issues as more important than “business” ones, and was about to tell him she could use some help in modifying this aspect of the culture, when he interrupted her and went on and on about how if you just give people the data they always catch on to the truth. She waited for a chance to tell him that she agreed—unless the data came via the way he was pontificating at her now, but he just kept on going, and by the time he finished, she was pretty sure he didn’t have what it takes to be the business manager of Miss Oliver’s School for Girls.
She gave him one more chance. “Our teachers can be a bit resentful of all the people they know who have twice the money and half the brains,” she said. “How would you react to that?” She was hoping for a laugh. Instead he got a little huffy right there in his chair, and it crossed her mind to suggest he check with her husband: maybe the sporting good business could use his expertise. Instead she told him she would get back to him and stood up. He left, shaking his head.
The next day the students arrived.
SIX
It was the vodka, Claire Nelson thought, walking toward Rachel Bickham’s office on the first day of school. Without the vodka, she never would have told. Did Amy’s father leave the bottle out on the counter when he stumbled off to bed just so he could sneak downstairs and out onto the porch and catch her giving a drink to Amy? He was weird enough. What would he have said when he found out Amy was only drinking tonic? But he never did come downstairs and so she poured another vodka tonic for herself and another straight tonic for Amy and then another and another.
And then they ate the ice cream.
“Ice cream and vodka!” Amy said. “Good nutrition makes you strong.” She had no idea there was no vodka in her tonic. “Only forty billion calories,” she giggled. They fed each other chocolate ice cream until it was all gone. It was smeary on their faces, and there were hundreds and hundreds of stars in the black above them, and the soft air carried the rich smell of Long Island Sound up to them from the beach. So maybe it wasn’t imagined alcohol that Amy was drunk on, maybe it was her happiness. “We’re going to do this every Labor Day weekend until we are a hundred and ten years old,” she said to Claire. “You and me. Promise?”
Claire burped. “Abshiludely!” She crossed her heart, and burped again, this time on purpose.
“Oh yes!” Amy said. “And always for dessert a burping contest!”
“Until the day we die!” Claire said. She stood up, opened her mouth, and spread her arms, a singer about to perform, and burped a perfectly satisfactory burp, and Amy responded with a louder one, which Claire tried to exceed in volume and length, but nothing came out. She swallowed air until it hurt and tried to expel it, but it got stuck somewhere down there, and then Amy stood up, leaned over, and, sticking her butt way out behind her, produced not a burp but instead an explosive, heroic, and very loud fart into the silence. Both girls dived to the floor. They were laughing too hard to stand.
When the laughter subsided, they spread their arms out, their fingers touching, and looked up at the stars, and while Amy was thinking how much fun it was, how liberating, to act like a jerk, to be an asshole on purpose, just for the fun of it, like boys do when they want to fool around, Claire felt that sudden lightness she always got when the Oh what the hell words came up in her brain like headlines, and she knew right then she was going to tell Amy everything.
Amy had said, “I won’t ever tell.” But that’s what Claire had said. And look what had happened! Twice now, once last year, and now this.
But last year’s confession—was that what it was?—was different from telling Amy. Karen Benjamin, the editor of the Clarion, the student newspaper, had been working on an article about the sexual activity of Miss Oliver’s students, and Karen, who was about the naivest person the world, needed Claire’s help. Karen needed to know that stuff like this happened if she were going to get the article right—even though both Karen and Claire knew that Mr. van Buren, the paper’s faculty mentor, was much too smart even to think about letting them print it. During their discussions, Claire had blurted out the scandal—maybe just to see how shocked Karen could be. But Karen was ethical—she wanted a journalist’s career, and that meant keeping secrets. Karen wouldn’t break her promise not to tell any more than Amy would. Besides, Karen had graduated in June and gone off to college where there were other things to think about.
What was she going to tell Rachel about first? The thing she did with the teacher? Had telling Amy been practice for that? Or was it not telling Nan White, the admissions director, last year when she was admitted—even though that was her father’s responsibility, because he was the grown-up? But she never expected that much integrity from her father, and she was sick of feeling guilty. She couldn’t talk to her father about it any more than she could to Mr. Gaylord Frothingham, the headmaster who’d caught them. He’d made it perfectly clear to Nan White that Claire had been sexually active. That was the term, those were the words: sexually active, like she did it jumping up and down, in a gym, maybe with lots of boys when she’d never actually done it with any boy in her whole life—and her father was being transferred to London, so they needed a boarding school, especially one without any boys. He just didn’t say sexually active with whom, that’s all, and who could blame him? He needed to get rid of the teacher and keep everything quiet. Mr. Alford, only twenty-three years old. His first year of teaching. She had no idea where he went. Or what he told his wife when she asked him why he was fired.
One thing she did know: Amy was the only girl she’d want to have a burping contest with every Labor Day weekend for the rest of her life. It wasn’t coincidence that their fingers touched when they lay on their backs and looked up at the stars. They both had reached for each other’s hand. Like sisters. Maybe it was even lonelier to be ashamed of a father when all he needed was for you to love him back than to have a mother who ran away and a father who’s too busy. Amy had planned to spend the second half of the academic year on exchange at St Anne’s School in England, but she’d decided to wait till next year so she and Claire could be together this year while Claire was still at Miss O’s. Only sisters do things like that for each other.
CLAIRE WAS HALFWAY across the lawn, getting closer, getting nervous. Did she dare? Up ahead, that tree she’d painted. Her teacher, Eudora Easter, a perfect name for her, a black lady too, built like a snowman, said, “Paint what you see,” but Claire didn’t, she painted what the tree made her think about instead. What she felt while she watched it grow. Because
