Where the Grass Is Green and the Girls Are Pretty

by Lauren Weisberger

  Marcia smiled, and got up to get the bottle of Baileys. “Peyton Marcus, if you and that sister of yours would stop mocking me long enough to listen, just once, one of you might actually learn something.” She returned and topped them both off.

  The tears that came this time were both heavy and light, a strange mix of sorrow and relief.

  “Go,” her mother said gently. “Take your boo-hooing home and make things right with Max. And your sister. And your husband. And your viewers. My god, woman, you’ve got a lot of repenting to do.”

  Peyton burst out laughing through her tears. She gave her mother a hug. “You’re a crazy old bat, but I love you.”

  “You’re a conniving criminal, but I love you, too.”

  Peyton held her mother tight, unable to remember the last time they’d been like this, and she didn’t ever want to let go.

  27

  Ivy League Outcast

  “Let your breath come and go naturally. Don’t try to control it, just feel the breath moving in and out of your body. Try not to judge your breathing. Perhaps you’re noticing things other than your breath. Noises in your surroundings, or feelings in your body. See if you can return to—”

  “Max, honey?”

  “…your breathing. If you become aware of thinking, bring yourself back to your next inhalation and—”

  “Mackenzie? Can you hear me, sweetheart?” Her mother’s voice echoed from the bottom of the stairs, and even with the newest AirPods turned to their highest noise-cancellation capabilities, Max couldn’t block it out.

  Exasperated, she yanked the pods out and exercised every ounce of self-control not to throw them across the room. Eight minutes. Eight fucking minutes of peace and quiet was all she needed to complete the first lesson of her new meditation app, but was that possible? Of course not.

  Just as she’d swung her legs onto the floor, her mother appeared in her doorway.

  “I was doing a meditation exercise. I was two minutes from being done.”

  “Sorry, honey, I didn’t realize. I was trying to tell you that I’m running to CVS, if you want anything.”

  “CVS?”

  “The pharmacy.”

  Max went to stick a pod back in her ear, but her mother sat down on the edge of her bed. It was all Max could do not to place both feet on Peyton’s hip and nudge her off. Leave, leave, leave, she silently willed.

  “Max. Honey, can you look at me?”

  Max raised her gaze to meet her mother’s, briefly.

  “I know this is hard. I know everything, especially between us, feels impossible right now. But…” Peyton’s voice broke. “Please try to understand. I made a mistake. A huge, awful, inexcusable mistake. And I’m so sorry.”

  Max could hear her mom’s voice break, but she kept staring at the darkened screen of her phone.

  “I’ll regret what I did to you every single day for the rest of my life. Maybe one day, when you’re a mom yourself, you’ll understand a little bit more how or why I could have done something so stupid, but something that stemmed from…a place of really intense love for my child. For you.”

  Almost instantly, the feeling of pressure in Max’s throat expanded. She’d be damned if she was going to cry.

  “I get it, Mom, I do. I’m not a complete idiot, and I don’t think you need to have a kid to understand that in some admittedly super fucked-up way, you were doing it because you wanted what was best for me. Even if that means you didn’t trust me enough to do what was best for myself.”

  “Max, that’s not—”

  The tears started to flow down her cheeks, but Max’s voice was strong and confident. “I’ve barely spoken to Dad for the entire summer! How could you let me think that he did this?”

  “Max—”

  “Not to mention all those girls, and it makes me…” Her voice trailed off.

  “I know,” Peyton said quietly. “I’m going to figure out a way to help. I don’t know how yet, but I’m not going to stop trying until I find her other investors.”

  Max wiped under her eyes. “I’m trying hard not to be a bitch right now, I swear, but can you please leave me alone?”

  Her mother opened her mouth to say something but changed her mind. She nodded and closed the door.

  Taking a deep breath, Max returned to her meditation app, but an email notification caught her attention before she could resume. She swiped it open and started reading.

  Dear Max,

  I’d like to take this opportunity to introduce myself. I am the Dean of Undergraduate Students, and I look forward to welcoming you to our beautiful Princeton campus for Orientation Week. I’m including a link to the entire week’s schedule; I encourage you to peruse the many options and begin to plan your time.

  Max’s eyes widened. How had this woman gotten her name? This was the first Princeton email she’d received since they’d rescinded her admission. It was clearly a mistake, and she knew she should delete it, but Max couldn’t stop reading.

  Prepare to bond with your residential college in our small-group experiential trips, before rejoining the large community back on campus. Our world-class professors will be holding breakout sessions in their specialties, and our dining halls will be showcasing their various cuisines. All of our athletic facilities are available to you, as are a sizable sampling of our laboratories, art studios, and libraries. Residential college advisors will be on hand to help facilitate your move-in, and every evening, there will be a mixer with music and refreshments on the lawn of Nassau Hall. Nature lovers will want to consider joining our Frosh Trip with a hike to the Delaware Water Gap or some rock climbing in The Gunks.

  Please do not hesitate to get in touch if there is anything I or my team can do to make your transition to Princeton as smooth as possible. My office doors are always open, and I hope to meet each of you during the first few weeks of school.

  All my best,

  Deanna Cook

  Her mind flashed to the previous spring, when Max and her parents had attended a campus tour. The prospective students and their parents had hailed from everywhere: Montreal, Tampa, Dubai, Santa Fe, Asheville, and Hawaii. Their tour guide, a senior English major who specialized in nineteenth-century literature and walking backward, obviously loved her time at Princeton. That night, Max’s parents left for their off-campus hotel and Max nervously accompanied her freshman buddy, a girl named Molly whose sulky demeanor and sarcasm immediately charmed Max, to a night out. The two parties they swung by weren’t her scene, but they weren’t as horrible as she’d envisioned. But when they ended up at some junior’s apartment, right in the middle of a heated game of Cards Against Humanity, something inside of Max switched: she could see herself belonging there. Maybe it wasn’t her first choice in terms of visual arts, or the campus only an hour from the city, but the people were cool and smart. Diverse. Interesting and interested.

  Sitting on her bed, in a bedroom that wasn’t her own in a town she didn’t really live in, Max had an obvious but nonetheless crushing epiphany: some of those people from the campus tour, and all the ones she’d met at the New York City lunch event for accepted students, would be starting their freshman year in two weeks. Enrolling in challenging courses and meeting new people; going to parties and on hikes. She didn’t even like hiking, but she suddenly wanted to give it another chance. Instead, Max would head back to the city, back to her parents’ apartment, and she would wait. Wait for her father to start a jail sentence for a crime he didn’t commit. Wait to see if her mother ever worked again. Wait to see what on earth Max could possibly do with her own life now that, thanks to the internet, she’d been branded a liar and cheater for all eternity.

  Fuck this! Max slammed shut her laptop, grabbed her phone, and pulled on a pair of Converse sneakers that were still wet from last night’s excursion out back to see the Ladies. She made it t
o the kitchen before she remembered that her mother had taken their only car.

  Oliver picked up on the first ring. “Are you calling me?” he said, instead of “Hello.”

  “It’s an emergency. Can you come pick me up? I need to get out of this house.”

  He laughed, and Max couldn’t help but smile. “So, by ‘emergency’ you mean ‘I need a break from my mother’?”

  “Something like that. Anyway, I can see you don’t have to be at work until two today.”

  “What’s in it for me?”

  “You really need an incentive to get out of your own house? Come on, Stroker. Get moving.”

  She could almost hear him shaking his head. “See you in ten.”

  Rummaging through the pantry toward the very back, she extracted a family-size box of Lucky Charms and poured a gigantic bowl. How had her mother not found these yet? Max had bought the Charms plus oversized boxes of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Cocoa Krispies and smuggled them into the house in a goddamn duffel bag like it was cocaine. She packed her backpack as she ate: handheld video camera, laptop, external hard drive, and a supplemental microphone since the one on her computer was garbage. She threw in two bottles of water and a couple of her mother’s disgusting diet granola bars and was standing in the driveway by the time Oliver arrived.

  “Here,” she said, handing him the cranberry one as she climbed into the front seat. “I also have lemon if you’d rather.”

  “Wow, you shouldn’t have.” Oliver waited until Max had buckled, then began to reverse.

  “You can thank my mother. Apparently, they’re, like, practically negative calories. Burns more to chew them. Or something.”

  “Mmmm. You’re selling it really well.” He tossed the unwrapped bar over his shoulder; it landed with a thud on the backseat and slid to the floor. “So, you going to tell me where we’re going?”

  “Let’s drive around. I’d like to get some footage of the town for tonight’s vlog.”

  He turned to glance at her; Max noticed his acne had cleared considerably. “I’ve been watching, you know. I mean, not every night. But I’ve definitely seen a few.”

  Max’s eyes widened. “You have? What, did you sign in under an assumed name or something? I haven’t seen your email address.”

  “Something like that.” Oliver brushed the hair out of his eyes and made a sudden right turn onto a private street. “Have you been down here? Sickest houses ever.”

  Oliver rolled slowly down a tree-lined lane, which was flanked on both sides by stately mansions. Not knowing exactly why, Max began to film them: an imposing stone castle with spires; a chic modern farmhouse with black steel windowpanes; a dramatic glass house set far back from the road; a gated colonial with a circular driveway; and finally, at the very end of the cul-de-sac, a sprawling estate with a main house, a guesthouse, a separate six-car garage, and a stable, where Max could just make out a stable hand leading a magnificent horse.

  “This is unreal,” she murmured as she filmed, still uncertain how she would use the footage. “I mean, it’s not like people don’t have money in the city. But you never see it like this, all splayed out over acres and acres.”

  Oliver executed a three-point turn. “I imagine the people who live in houses like this are tortured by conflicting needs: they want complete privacy, but they definitely also want everyone to see how much money they have.”

  “This is what it’s all about,” Max murmured, nearly forgetting that she was still filming. “This is why they’re all doing it.”

  “Doing what?” Oliver asked, but Max didn’t answer.

  They drove down another private street, past more beautiful homes, and then headed into The Village, with all its designer shops and high-end restaurants. Teenagers climbed out of hundred-thousand-dollar cars; their mothers adjusted their Hermès handbags on their barre-crafted shoulders and waved to one another with diamond-laded hands. Children toddled after them, clutching the newest iPad, little ears covered in enormous Beats headphones, begging for more time on Roblox. And the fathers, few that there were, murmured agreement to things they wouldn’t remember even five minutes later because they were checking the latest market fluctuations on their phones.

  Max hung out the passenger-side window, capturing all of it like she was seeing it for the very first time. “This is why parents are literally buying their kids’ admissions to Ivy League schools. So they can have all this. What a dream, right?”

  Oliver pulled into a tiny parking lot behind a local hardware store that sold exclusively Yeti brand everything and turned the car off. Without thinking—and for the first time ever—Max handed him her camera and motioned for him to record her.

  “My name is Mackenzie Marcus, and for anyone who may not know, I’m the one whose father has been convicted of trying to buy my way into Princeton.” Max could see Oliver’s eyes widen, but he held the camera steady and she continued. “I didn’t ask for anyone to interfere on my behalf. My dream was to go to the American Film Institute for their video-editing program. And I’m at fault for not insisting that I was going to pursue my dream, no matter how important my parents thought it was to go to an Ivy League school.”

  Max took a deep breath. Her throat was dry and her hands clammy, but a calmness settled over her. This was good. This was right. These were things she’d been thinking for months now—years, actually—and she finally had the clarity to say them aloud.

  Oliver gave her an encouraging nod, and she continued speaking directly to the camera. “So, I’m here to tell you that I’m going to spend the next year busting my ass applying to art schools with great video programs, even if my parents think schools like that won’t prepare me for the ‘real world.’ What’s really unfair, of course, is that either way, I’ll be fine. Because I was lucky enough to be born into a well-off family. I can’t deny that privilege; I can only try to use it to help other people. So I’ll also spend this upcoming year doing everything I possibly can to help my Aunt Skye get her charitable program back on track. All the children she was going to help deserve it. Does anyone care about them? Well, I’m here today to say ‘Yes. I care.’ And I want to help. It may not be much, but all the money I earn scooping ice cream or babysitting is going directly toward ensuring this girls’ residence actually happens.”

  Max made a slashing motion across her neck; Oliver laughed and switched off the camera. “That was great,” he said. “Bit of an abrupt ending, but great.”

  “I’ll clean it up in post,” Max said, taking a sip from the steel water bottle she’d brought with her. “Thanks for doing that.”

  Oliver turned, looking straight out the windshield. He had a strange look on his face.

  “What? Did I say something?”

  He shook his head.

  “Why are you being weird?”

  Turning back to look at Max, he gave her a funny smile. “Lunch at the Trivet before my shift starts?”

  Max shrugged, hoping she appeared more casual than she actually felt. “Sure, why not?”

  He put the car in gear, and Max tried to suppress a funny, awkward-feeling smile of her own. “A burger with a side of E. coli sounds perfect right now,” she said, and his laugh gave her a warm feeling.

  Later that night, after completing her own six-hour shift at the Ice Cream Shoppe, Max was too exhausted to edit her earlier footage. She surfed and clicked through YouTube and TikTok, unmotivated to do much more than stare passively at her screen, until a text from Skye came through.

  You up? her aunt asked.

  Y. It’s 11. That’s like 7 pm to a teenager

  Hahaha true. Just checking in. How are you doing?

  Max considered this. How was she doing? The whole incident at the sushi restaurant and its ensuing fallout had been surreal. It was comforting to know that her dad hadn’t done this awful thing—and so great to have him at the
Westchester house, even if he was sleeping in a guest room—but now there was her mother to contend with.

  Doing ok. Extremely ready for some distance from your sister.

  I hear that. But go easy on her, ok?

  Nope. Strong NO.

  She f’ed up, no doubt about it, but she’s not a bad person

  In your opinion

  Max! Come on.

  Subject change: how’s Aurora?

  Skye replied with a happy face emoji, followed by a crazy face one.

  Max laughed. Feeling energized, she switched over to uploading her footage. As she scrolled through the footage of Paradise town, she felt a little trepidation over showing her face and giving her name for the first time, but it vanished when she thought of Skye’s residence. Fingers flying across the keyboard, Max quickly superimposed the charity’s name and link on the video and attached a big, splashy graphic of the house’s architectural rendering that Gabe had, months before, emailed the entire family. In a text box underneath, Max wrote an impassioned description of how the residence would serve the inner-city girls and provide them with access to the very best public education the United States had to offer. It wasn’t hard—Max believed in Skye’s mission with her entire being. She wrote and edited, clipped and perfected, and by the time she finally pressed Publish, she felt drained but satisfied, and she fell almost immediately into a deep, exhausted sleep.

  28

  Mommy Needs a Ritalin

  It flickered once before the book light went dark. Sighing, Skye unclipped the light from page 326 of her novel and slid it onto her night table. She propped her phone between her chest and chin and positioned her book so its flashlight shone on the page and not in Gabe’s direction. If only she could concentrate. Her mind flipped back and forth between the baby (the baby!) and the scene from the sushi restaurant, three days earlier, when Peyton had stood up in front of everyone like she was accepting an Oscar for Best Actress and admitted to ruining all their lives. The digital clock on Skye’s night table read 2:27 a.m. Normally, she’d call her sister and Peyton would no doubt be awake, organizing her underwear drawer or shopping online for suitcases or raiding the supply of Thin Mints she kept hidden in her pantry. But not tonight. It was insane that her own sister didn’t know Aurora’s birth mom was pregnant, yet here they were.