In the wintertime: basketball. Bill now had season tickets to both the UConn men’s and women’s teams. For years, in the 1970s and ’80s, the UConn men’s team was a humble program, playing most of its home games in a rundown field house that felt more like a high-school gym. Then, in 1990, the team shocked the world of college basketball, playing deep into the NCAA tournament, coming within a single possession of advancing to the Final Four, the pinnacle of the sport, for the first time in the school’s history. That team captured the hearts of the state, and since then the men’s team had been a perennial national powerhouse. The women’s team was even more dominant, winning five national championships in nine years, including 2004, when the men won, too. For a basketball-loving family like the Petits, it was a fun time to be a UConn fan.
The core was Bill, Hayley, Bill Sr., and Hanna. Hanna would pick up her dad and Hayley, then they’d stop by and get Bill at his office on Whiting Street. As they motored east on I-84, sometimes in the snow, Bill would sit in the backseat making calls on his cell phone and eating a tinfoil-wrapped plate of food that Barbara had sent for his supper. Jennifer came to two or three games a year—that was plenty for her—and Michaela sometimes, too. But Hayley truly loved it. For her and her dad, it was their thing. When she got to high school, she was always busy, rowing crew, serving as cocaptain of the basketball team, doing her homework until after midnight alongside Bill up in the second-floor room they used as an office. She pushed herself hard. At the UConn games, though—at the UConn games, it was glorious. Father and daughter, standing and cheering from the minute the Huskies ran onto the court. They knew every player and all the statistics. They screamed and whooped and clapped and jumped, losing themselves for part of an afternoon or an evening. It was the perfect activity for this father and this daughter. Just so much…fun.
There was a boy they used to invite along sometimes. Jen was getting to be good friends with Patty Poisson, from the health center, and her son Otis was a sweet kid who liked basketball, too. He was only a year older than Hayley. Bill liked Otis because Otis liked basketball. He started inviting Otis to UConn games, and the three of them would ride to Hartford together—Bill driving, Otis and Hayley in the back, a tall, good-looking boy and a tall, pretty girl at the awkward age of thirteen or fourteen, not talking.
Patty and her husband lived on the campus of Cheshire Academy, and they also had a daughter, Mairi, who was two years older than Michaela. In the afternoons, when Michaela finished school, she would come to the health center to wait for Jen. Her homework at that age took only a half hour at the most, and when she was done, she would plead to Jen, “Mom, when can we go home?” Mairi’s routine was the same as Michaela’s: zip through her homework and then wait for her mom to finish work. So the two girls started playing together. Michaela was not only tall for her age but mature—all that time spent watching Hayley and Abby—and the two girls got along as if they were the same age. At first they would play in the health center itself so Jen and Patty could keep an eye on them. Once, they turned a linen closet into their office, with a little desk and a step stool for a chair, a bell outside (for when they had the door closed), and a mailbox taped to the wall. They complained whenever there was no mail waiting for them, so Jen and Patty would deposit little notes in the mailbox while the girls were in school.
Michaela, Christmas morning, 2006.
On the days when Patty’s husband, Fran, wasn’t coaching sports or tending to faculty business, he would be at their house on campus after school, and the girls would go there and play for hours. They played outside in the rain, they played dress-up, they concocted elaborate snacks in the kitchen. KK was quiet around Fran, but around Mairi she could be hilarious. She was even freer at her own house. Michaela had a box full of earrings before she even got her ears pierced. She had a trundle bed in her room, and when Mairi came for sleepovers they would watch Spice World, the Spice Girls movie, or the Lizzy McGuire movies, over and over. Or Legally Blonde. She and Mairi, and even Jen and Patty, could recite that one from memory.
Michaela had already discovered that she loved cooking by the time she and Mairi found themselves with glorious long afternoons to fill, and they staged make-believe cooking competitions in the Poisson kitchen. Mairi gawked at the stuff Michaela came up with, hunched over the kitchen island. The best day was when Michaela made hot chocolate that was spicy. Spicy hot chocolate! She was probably not even nine years old. She wrote down the recipe on blue-lined paper in big bubbly handwriting with a red Magic Marker and left it for Mairi:
Michaela’s Chocolate Chili
1) cinnamon sprinkle
2) chocolate chips handful
3) chili powder sprinkle
4) ½ cup milk
5) tablespoon ovaltine
6) whipped cream
7) melt chocolate, add all other ingredients, then put whipped cream on top
Otis Poisson was tall for his age, like Hayley, with a long, muscular frame. He was boyish and handsome, with sandy hair and blue eyes, and was not shy so much as hesitant to give himself over to the world. That could make him seem quiet, but Otis was smart and friendly, and happiest when he was running around on a basketball court. From even the first few times he was around Hayley, usually with their moms, at some school event or family thing, Otis felt that she got him, and that he got her.
Fran and Patty Poisson hosted a party every Christmas Eve for anyone who was on campus. Neither of them had a big extended clan to fly off and visit, so they made their home a place where people could come and feel like family. It was an open house, friends and coworkers and students and neighbors coming and going all night. The Petits always had so much to do on Christmas Eve. There was church, of course. And then it was the crowd of Bill’s family, a huge gathering at his parents’ house in Plainville, with two Christmas trees and acres of food, kids running everywhere. But every year, on the way home, they would stop in at the Poissons’ party. Even if it was ten or eleven o’clock. And they wouldn’t just pop in. They’d take their coats off, eat some food, and have something to drink. They would visit. Mairi and Michaela would squirrel off somewhere and be little girls, and the grown-ups would talk about grown-up things. Otis and Hayley, all elbows and knees and flashing eyes, would talk quietly, the shyest of flirting. Otis loved that the Petits were always the last ones at the party, because they were the people he really wanted to see. He wanted to see Hayley.
By their junior year, Hayley and Otis were close friends. She was the person he wanted to talk to first when something great happened, or something bad, or sometimes when nothing was happening at all. More than anyone else in his life, he loved to make her laugh. She was so smart, and so funny herself, so to get a good laugh out of her was an accomplishment. She would do this wonderful thing with her eyebrows, inverting them while she laughed at his jokes, like this boy was too much.
Otis played varsity basketball for Cheshire Academy, and Hayley for Miss Porter’s. They both loved to practice—gym rats, Bill called them. Because his parents worked at the school, Otis could get into the gym anytime he wanted. The summer between junior and senior year, he used to call or text Hayley at night to see if she wanted to come over and shoot around. She always dropped whatever she was doing, jumped into her sweats, and drove over. In the gym, she and Otis would put their sneakers on and start shooting. They’d joke around a little, which was easy. After a while, they’d start a game of one-on-one. Hayley was over six feet, and strong. Bigger than plenty of high-school boys. She could compete against Otis. But the games were just fun. Both of them knew they weren’t there only to practice driving the lane or boxing out. They were there because of the other one.
Once, when school was out for vacation, they went to the gym and saw a plastic sign next to the gym floor saying that it had been resurfaced, and no one could use it. Otis went back and checked the next day, and the sign was still there. Finally he called Hayley and told her to come over, because the floor had to be dry by then. Bu
t the sign was still there. They tapped the floor with their fingers, careful. It felt dry, not even tacky. Totally fine to play on. They looked at each other, smiled, hid the sign, laced up their sneakers, and started shooting around. After a few minutes, the maintenance man, who knew Otis, walked in, an unhappy look on his face.
Sign? Otis and Hayley said. No, we didn’t see a sign.
The maintenance man looked both annoyed and confused as he left. As soon as he was out of earshot, they just laughed. It was about as much trouble as either of them had ever caused, and neither would have done it without the other.
They kept playing. In the gym—sneakers squeaking against the glossy floor, the lights bright even as dusk fell over the town around them, sweat in their hair, smiling when the other one made a good shot. They could have been anywhere.
When they finished playing that night, they put the sign back out on the floor and ran out laughing. That would really confuse the guy.
—
Hayley and Otis both applied to Dartmouth early-decision. They both wanted it badly, and they wanted it for each other just as badly.
Dartmouth is one of the best colleges in the country, founded in 1769. Nelson Rockefeller went to Dartmouth. Thaddeus Stevens. Robert Frost. Of course, to Hayley the most important alumnus was her father, William A. Petit Jr. Her entrance essay was called “My Dad.” “My dad looked on as my four-year-old hands clasped the handle of the black medical bag he’d just given me for my fourth birthday,” she wrote. “Looking inside I saw a child’s stethoscope and various other instruments which mirrored his professional tools. From then on I had gone with my dad to the hospital on Saturdays. I loved trailing behind Dad’s long, white coattails through the endless maze of hallways with shiny white floors. I was always fascinated when he strode confidently into a patient’s room, talked to them for a few minutes, and recommended a treatment. I clearly remembered how he always made the patients laugh or smile before leaving. He possessed this amazing God-like power not only to heal people physically, but also to make them feel safe and brighten their days. His presence made the hospital seem a fortress and anyone within its walls safe.”
Hayley was cocaptain of both the crew and basketball teams.
The college had recruited Hayley to row on the crew team. Otis wanted to play basketball there. He was good, really good, but the coach told him he couldn’t intercede with the admissions office for him. Still, Patty drove Otis up to New Hampshire to visit the school. They walked around, and Otis bought a Dartmouth windbreaker. They ate at Lou’s, a restaurant that had been serving pancakes to Dartmouth students since 1947. When Otis wasn’t looking, Patty bought two coffee mugs that said “Meet Me at Lou’s.” One for Otis, one for Hayley. Gifts for when they got accepted. But when they arrived home that night, Patty was unpacking the car, and the mugs were nowhere. She looked under every seat, in every bag. Then she remembered that when they stopped for gas on the way home, she threw away a bunch of trash from their trip. She must have thrown away the mugs by mistake! Patty felt like kicking herself.
On the day in December when Dartmouth was scheduled to send notification e-mails to the students who had applied early, Hayley ducked into the library as often as she could to check her e-mail on the computers. Abby followed her, so excited for her cousin to find out good news. Abby wanted to be there partly because Hayley was so modest that if she got in, she probably wouldn’t even tell anyone. When Hayley found out she had been accepted, Abby tackled her, screaming with laughter.
Hayley, of course, didn’t go out of her way to tell anyone. She didn’t even call her father. Instead, one of her friends called and told Dr. Petit herself.
Hayley didn’t call her dad because, for one thing, he was working. Seeing patients was the most essential part of his job, the most important part of his day. Also, in a family like the Petits, you didn’t talk too much about yourself, didn’t run around looking for pats on the head. Hayley was what grown-ups call wise beyond her years, as Bill had been. Her friends had a saying, WWHD, for “What would Hayley do?” She knew she could just tell him that night when he got home. No point stopping the world.
Hayley did tell one person right away, though. She called Otis. She urged him to check his e-mail as soon as he could. But he had a basketball game after school that day, and this was before everyone had smartphones, so he would have to wait until he got home that night. When he did, his parents and Mairi stood behind him as he logged on to check his e-mail. There it was, a message from Dartmouth College: “After thoughtful consideration, the Admissions Committee has decided to defer final action on your early decision application for the Class of 2011.” Instead of accepting him early, the admissions office would reconsider Otis’s candidacy during the regular admission period. “To assist in your planning,” the e-mail concluded, “you should be aware that in recent years a very small proportion of deferred candidates have ultimately been offered admission to the College.”
—
Patty thought about those coffee mugs. “Meet Me at Lou’s.” Maybe it was good she threw them out accidentally. Otis gave his Dartmouth windbreaker to Hayley.
If anything, the Dartmouth thing—Hayley getting in, Otis not getting in—made them even better friends, it seemed to Patty. Hayley downplayed getting chosen, and Otis made her feel good about her acceptance. The very fact that it didn’t cause any awkwardness between them seemed to prove the strength of the bond between them. Otis had a girlfriend at Cheshire Academy his senior year, and she grew jealous over Otis’s friendship with this Miss Porter’s girl, Hayley Petit. His girlfriend could sense that it was a special friendship, and she didn’t much like it. Mairi and Michaela used to giggle about their older siblings. If Otis and Hayley get married, they thought, we’ll be sisters! It was a grand scheme, and Mairi and Michaela signed up for a new Web site called Facebook for the express purpose of spying on Otis and Hayley, who were also on the social network. Michaela was only in fourth or fifth grade at this point, so she wasn’t active on Facebook—Bill barely knew what Facebook was, didn’t even know she had a page. But she and Mairi loved looking at Hayley’s. Even Jen and Patty talked about how much fun it would be if Otis and Hayley found their way to each other.
To Otis and Hayley, it was something deeper than a crush. They were the same, in so many ways. Everyone thought Hayley was beautiful and Otis was handsome, and they were both athletic and intelligent and confident, but they were still teenagers, and being a teenager isn’t easy. They had their own friends at school, of course—Hayley’s group of eight girls, and Otis’s circle of guys. Her friends knew she liked the boy from Cheshire Academy, but it was hard to explain that he was different. At their age, to find someone of the opposite sex who was so like you, who got every dumb joke you made and understood the constant daily collision of awkward moments and successes and disappointments that made up your high-school life—that was unusual. That was special.
Senior spring, Hayley was organizing her annual Hayley’s Hope team for the MS Walk, collecting money to fight multiple sclerosis. In April she sent a Facebook message to Otis:
Hey!
I got your check today…thanks so much, that was so nice of you! (and I’m kind of impressed you have your own checks haha) My mom said I should invite you to come to the walk on sunday…in case you need community service hours? haha i don’t even know, but you can come if you want to walk 5 miles : ) I also hear (from my mom obviously) that you’re visiting Wesleyan this week sometime, so I hope it’s fun!
hayley
Just a quick Facebook post, one of billions of messages flying around the world each minute by the spring of 2007. Airy and light, managing to not mean much and yet meaning everything all at once.
—
Bill tells the story of Hayley’s graduation from Miss Porter’s School as if he’s retelling a legend. She had experienced lung problems, serious but not uncommon, and they were exacerbated during her final week of high school. “Hayley was and will
always be my hero for her Senior Week,” he will say years later. “She was at school Tuesday night of Senior Week and felt pain in her left shoulder and knew what it was. She knew because she had had a right-sided spontaneous pneumothorax—a collapsed lung—during a cross-country meet. She called crying and we rushed to Farmington and took her to the hospital. The X-ray confirmed the diagnosis and a chest tube was placed between her chest wall and her lung. I had hoped the leak in her lung would seal so she could graduate with her friends. There was no progress. Further tests showed she needed surgery. I left briefly one night to accept her writing award at the ceremony she could not attend.
Hayley’s graduation from Miss Porter’s School, June 2007.
“Late Thursday we made a decision: She went into surgery at 10:00 p.m. and had a partial removal of the top part of her left lung. She still had a tube in place and got back to her room by about 2:00 a.m. At 8:00 a.m., the nurses helped us bandage her up so she would not bleed on her white dress, and we signed her out for graduation. The surgeon, a friend of mine, was not entirely happy, but she had the tube in place and a nurse and an M.D. with her. She got a standing ovation as she walked across the stage on her own power twelve hours after a major surgery. She barely made it through the ceremony, and by 12:30 we were taking her back to the hospital for her convalescence.
“She showed what a tough and brave kid she was that day. I had previously looked up to her, but now did so more than ever. She was a hard worker, honest, kind, and very brave. I often wished I could be as calm and tough as Hayley.”
—
A few weeks later, Bill and Jen threw a graduation party for Hayley in the backyard. It was raining that day, but it was warm, so they put up a tent and everybody sat outside. Aunt Hanna, the professional caterer, cooked everything—she was in and out of the kitchen all day. There was beer and soda, stored in the basement fridge, and friends and family. Hayley’s girls, the tightknit group of eight from Porter’s, were there. Abby and Andrew were there. The Poissons were there, too, which meant Otis was there. Jen had invited Patty’s family specially. She had written a card to Otis when he graduated from Cheshire Academy a couple of days before Hayley’s graduation. In it she wrote, in her neat handwriting with the curlicue here and there: “Otis, We’re very proud of you and think Dartmouth made a huge mistake! Wesleyan is lucky to have you and we are privileged to call you our friend. I’m counting on you to help Hayes get back into shape! Love, Petits.”
The Rising Page 6