on hard times, the strivers looking for their next advantage – they were all here. It’s not like there were no good people at Carlisle, but there were plenty of indifferent ones, as well as some who’d been corrupted at a young age through no fault of their own and couldn’t help but misbehave. Aubrey put Kate in that latter category, if she was being honest. Lately, Kate had been thumbing her nose at her father and living off handouts from the fat trust fund that belonged to Griffin Rothenberg, her Odell swain. Griff was the son of a wealthy investment banker and a Swedish fashion model. With his striking blond head on his compact jock body, he bore enough of a resemblance to Kate that they were sometimes mistaken for brother and sister. As far as Aubrey could tell, Kate thought of Griff that way. Griff followed her around like a lovesick puppy while Kate treated him with a comfortable, dismissive indifference that Aubrey found hard to watch. Aubrey carried a torch for Griff herself, though she did her best to hide it. Griff was the male Kate, really. Not only did they look alike, but he had that same careless confidence, that ease in the world, that Aubrey both coveted and lacked utterly. Griff was the boy she’d most like to lose her virginity to, but she had no hope of achieving that. He was obsessed with Kate, and Aubrey was nothing but a third wheel to be patted on the head on those rare occasions when he noticed her at all.
At the sound of the knock, Aubrey looked up. Kate and Griff were down on their knees in the window well, making faces at her. Griff slammed a rectangular object up against the glass – a plastic tray from the dining hall.
Jenny leaned over from the adjacent carrel and gazed up at the tray pressed against the window.
“They’re going traying now?” she asked. It was a rhetorical question.
The snow was deep enough that winter that the skiing at the local resorts was supposedly sublime. Aubrey had never been on skis and couldn’t afford a lift ticket to save her life, but she’d gone mad for sledding. The speed, the abandon, the sharp taste of snow in her mouth when she crashed. Traying was the Carlisle version of sledding. You blasted a stick (smoked a joint), stole a tray from the dining hall, and walked a mile in the cold to Belle River Park to the crazy steep sledding hill, where you flew down the slope using the tray as your sled. The hill had been rigged up with all sorts of homemade jumps. The most popular jumps sent you rocketing high into the air, or directed you off into the woods to confront an obstacle course of trees. The broken limbs and the concussions were piling up, to the point that the college infirmary recently sent out a memorandum warning the students not to sled. But everybody ignored it. Traying was too fun.
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