by Alexis Bass
“Hey!” He ruffles my hair as he stands. His phone rings, and he takes it out of his pocket.
“Hi,” he says quietly, answering the call. “Okay. I don’t know who told you that, but like I said before, it’s not up to me, I don’t have control over—Hello? Hello?”
He sees me watching him and shrugs. “Bad connection.” He sets his phone down on his desk and plugs it in to charge before he disappears into the bathroom.
He must’ve silenced the ringtone, but I can hear it vibrating aggressively against the top of the desk. Message after message after message.
When I hear the shower going, I walk over and pick up the phone. It vibrates in my hand as the messages pop up on the screen, continuing to come in. They’re all from the same person. Rose.
By now, I guess I should’ve figured out that Rosie and my dad keep in touch. But it still surprises me to see so many texts from her when she’s in Buenos Aries with Mimi.
You say you have no control, but you’re the one who wrote the proposal.
You said your hands were tied, but that’s not true.
You said there were no guarantees, but you’re all that’s standing in the way.
You know I’ve put everything into Spectacle Barkley.
Let the Robames lawsuit play out, Jake. Don’t screw me over.
I know you don’t believe me, but my family is the most important thing to me.
I gave you your family. Don’t forget.
If you care about us, you’ll pull the proposal for consideration.
We’re your family, not her. She has her own family, and they aren’t your responsibility.
I can’t afford to lose what I’ve put into Spectacle Barkley, but you can afford to lose Robames Inc.
You’re not thinking clearly because of her.
You’d do this for me if you weren’t with her.
I know you think you love her, but she’s using you.
If you don’t withdraw your proposal, you’ll be sorry.
Promise me you’ll stop pushing your proposal on Robames Inc.
I won’t ask you for a single thing ever again, I swear.
Something about the wording in these messages is familiar. You said your hands are tied. And the parts about family being important, the phrase no guarantees. It reminds me of the phone call I overheard my dad having with Mrs. Mahoney when we first arrived at Hylift. Unless he wasn’t talking to Mrs. Mahoney like I’d thought, and it was Rosie he was on the phone with.
During the other phone call I’d heard him on that day, he said his proposal was all that could save Robames from the lawsuit. But he’d also said that Rob wasn’t accepting it. He’d wanted to convince her. And here Rosie is telling him to drop it. But why?
I put my dad’s phone back where I found it and take out my own phone. I search for Spectacle Barkley to try to understand what Rosie was talking about, why she kept bringing it up. I’m directed to a home page advertising a company that takes the DNA of those with chronic illnesses and tells them the best way to eat to preserve their health according to their genetic makeup.
This information doesn’t exactly answer my questions or give me any more insight into why Rosie wants my dad to pull his proposal for consideration and let Robames collapse under the fallout of the lawsuit.
But there is one thing that’s clear to me now. Rosie blames Mrs. Mahoney for why my dad isn’t doing what she’s asking. I get that, even though I don’t understand why she’s demanding he drop the proposal. She’s not worried about him being with someone who’s using him. She’s not worried about me or about Mimi. She’s only worried about herself. And she’s using us to threaten him.
I think of the dishes clattering to the floor, splintering the day Rosie told me who she really was to me. The sound was almost as loud as Mimi’s screaming. Rosie had looked at me from the kitchen window. Her expression was stable—flippant, even. She appeared confident, like she stood by what she’d done. She’d wanted me to know that she was my mother so that I’d understand why I was capable of doing all the things she wanted me to do at Rutherford. She unveiled the truth she’d helped cover for so many years because getting my father away from Mrs. Mahoney is that important to her. But not because she’s afraid of my father being taken advantage of and how that might affect Mimi and me. She wants him to withdraw the proposal and thinks Mrs. Mahoney is the only reason he won’t do what she asks. You’d do this for me if you weren’t with her.
She didn’t reveal the whole truth about why she wanted to break up my father and Mrs. Mahoney, only a truth she knew I would get behind; that she was counting on me to save him.
And it’d worked. After she’d told me she was my mother, it made me feel like I could trust her—like she might be the only one who’d ever tell me the truth because she dared to expose the deepest buried secret, regardless of the risk. I believed her blindly about my father and Mrs. Mahoney and what I had to do, because with the new knowledge that I was actually hers, I not only thought I could pull it off, I also really, really wanted to.
My phone chimes. A text from Jasper.
What are you doing right now?
Now I see I was being manipulated. Rosie’s agenda is entirely self-serving. She tricked me, and I fell for it. But I don’t have to go along with her plan. Not anymore.
I text Jasper back.
Nothing. I’m free.
Forty-two
Jasper Mahoney sneezes whenever he eats a peppermint. He’s almost never hungry for breakfast food and hates the taste of coffee. When he laughs, he gets this expression on his face, as though he’s surprised that something in this world could be so funny. He has a constellation of moles decorating his back that spread along his shoulder blades. I try to find a pattern in them, touching my fingers to the points, but they’re arranged in perfect disorder. When he falls asleep, he does so with his whole body; as his eyes close, his shoulders curve in, and he becomes so incredibly still that I have to fight the urge to put my hand over his chest, to check if he’s still breathing. It’s like this every time he falls asleep. Be it a quick nap after skiing or at night, when I’m lying next to him, as I am for each remaining night we’re at Hylift, promising my dad he has nothing to worry about, pretending half the time I’m staying with Anastasia.
Jasper and I stay up talking until we are too sleepy to make sense of words anymore. We whisper under the sheets, his hands sliding along my skin, my fingers trailing down his sides. We kiss until our lips are numb or we lose our breath or it becomes too wonderful and too overwhelming all at once that I have to stop and turn away from him but still need his arms around me, and I can tell that something wonderful and overwhelming is happening to him, too, by the way he’s slightly shaking as he holds me, the way he’ll whisper my name as he hangs his head against my shoulder. He sleeps better when I’m there, and so do I because when I awake right before dawn with a start—thinking it was all a dream—he’ll groggily drag his arm across me, pulling me to him.
“I’m not ready to go back to Rutherford,” he tells me on our last day at Hylift, as the first signs of sunlight send streaks through his bedroom window.
“Let’s stay here forever, then.”
He smiles like he knows I’m only half kidding.
We go for one last ride on the tram. I lean against him, taking in the view. The sky lounge is nearly empty when we get back. But Rob is there, sitting in a corner booth, surrounded by older men and women, my father among them. Jasper’s hand tightens around mine as he quickens his pace. My father pushes his hair back, a sign of stress. No one at the table looks very happy, a sea of black suits surrounding Rob in her white blazer and gold headband. For the first time, I wonder what it must be like to be in charge of a company that large, to have the vision and the idea and all those men and women with their money to appease. Maybe it would make anyone desperate—paranoid enough to want to have leverage over even the people who’re supposed to be closest to them.
After we’ve
packed up our things and said goodbye to our parents, we walk with Anastasia and Theo to the helicopter. Jasper keeps his arm around me and whispers statistics into my ear. Right before I climb on board, he kisses me.
They all sing for me again as we soar over the mountains, this time with Anastasia belting even louder than the pilot, and I stare at them, wondering how I got so lucky. Can you worm your way into people’s lives, get to know all sides of them, without also starting to feel close to them? The helicopter takes a sudden dip, and I reach for Jasper at the same time that he reaches for me, draping his arm over my lap like he knows I need both something to grab hold of and something to make me feel steady in my seat.
“That’s adorable,” Stewart says.
At the same time, Anastasia says, “Gross.”
We burst out laughing.
It doesn’t seem possible to filter through people’s lives and not begin to care about them; it seems as impossible as making someone fall in love with you without falling for them right back.
Forty-three
When the five of us arrive at Rutherford, it’s dark outside. The outline of the forest is a shadow against the gray and clouded sky, and the ocean can be heard in the distance, each determined wave barreling into the shore.
We’ve missed most of the welcome-back social event, but we still have to drag ourselves to the common room to make our drops in the storage closet box and play a quick round of Go Fish to determine the winners of this month’s game.
I greet Elena and Ruthie and catch up with some of the girls on the field hockey team. I don’t know what to say when they ask me what’s new. They casually glance at Jasper, who’s sitting two sofas away with the lacrosse team, like maybe they’ve already heard. I shrug and say, “Not much,” but I look in Jasper’s direction while I say it so that maybe they’ll pick up on my small smile and I won’t have to say I’m dating him, words that sound too regular for the way I feel about him.
When the whole group is ready to start the game, I tell Elena and Ruthie I’ll catch up with them later, and sit down at the large round table. My phone alarm vibrates in my pocket during the third hand, signaling it’s my time slot for depositing my item in the box. I excuse myself and head down the hall, slinking into the storage closet as quickly as I can.
I move fast, setting in my brooch shaped like a statue of the three graces, something my father gave me three Christmases ago when I was really into dressing up my sweaters. Just as I’ve made the drop, I hear the door click open and shut. I see a tall figure moving through the shelves. Taking a deep breath, I remind myself that the faculty can’t come in during the socials because the locks have been changed. No one else doing their drop tonight ran into an ounce of trouble either. The person who entered steps into the light at the end of the row and walks slowly toward me.
“Sebastian, you scared me,” I say. “Sorry—do I have my time wrong? I set this alert back in November and—”
“You don’t have the time wrong,” he says as he approaches me. “I wanted to see you alone, and, well, judging from how close Jasper was sitting to you around the table, and the way he put his hand on your knee, and that kiss he gave you before you arrived at the social—don’t think no one saw that because he had the audacity to do it right in front of the main hall windows—I’d guess it’ll be a long while before I get the chance to be alone with you.”
“Jasper and I started dating over break,” I say.
“So it would seem.” He smiles as he looks away, slightly shaking his head. “Anyway, I wanted to give these back.” He reaches out and hands me the earrings he’d taken during one of the exchanges. “I had something more fun planned for giving them back to you, but it doesn’t seem appropriate anymore. It was going to be cheeky.”
“Okay.” I shrug. “Do it for the next girl, I guess.” I regret it as soon as I say it. It doesn’t sound playful, like a joke, the way I intended.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Surprising someone with an item they lost during the game is one of your moves,” I say to his incredulous expression. “Like kissing behind the angel and sending flowers. It’s not like it’s a secret; you do it with everyone.”
He frowns. “And now you’ve chosen a boyfriend with no moves at all, so let me know how that goes.” He turns to leave and immediately spins around and comes back. “Shit, sorry. It’s just—I was so excited to see you. And then when you walked in with Jasper … it was a shock.”
“It was kind of a shock to me, too, if you can believe it. I didn’t know I would fall—feel this way about him.”
“It’s that serious?” He leans against the shelf and puts his hand over his heart. “Ouch.”
He gives me a small smile, and I roll my eyes. “Oh, come on. It’s not as though you spent all of break thinking about me.”
“Except I did spend all break thinking about you.”
He’s probably exaggerating, even though being forthcoming and transparent has always seemed entirely genuine from him.
“But I never heard from you. Not once since we left Rutherford.”
“And I didn’t hear from you either.”
He’s right. “Because nothing had happened between us—”
“Yet,” he adds, interrupting. “The start is the best part. When you have no idea what’s coming; you just know you are very, very, very interested in finding out.” The way he says this makes me blush. “Plus, Collins Pruitt, I didn’t want to seem needy. And okay, fine, I was having a blast over break and keeping busy and there wasn’t always reception where I was, but I still thought about you and the what-if between us constantly. I’m talking every day. We’ve never even had a date, and now I guess we won’t get to until—” He cuts himself off, but there’s a shadow of a smirk on his face.
“Until what?”
“Until Jasper goes to Dartmouth. Or until things go sideways. Still plenty of time for that.”
I remember what Sebastian said at the beginning of the year. You know you can’t date someone in college while you’re here, right? It never works out. He’s honest to a fault, unafraid of letting his truths come out, no matter how humiliating. He must really believe that no relationship can sustain that kind of distance. I believed it once, too, and it was going to be the way Jasper and I would part slowly, no heartbreak involved. But now I don’t like to think about it. Now I know it wouldn’t be that simple.
“Some things do work out, Sebastian.”
“Just not you and me, I guess. Pity that we’ll never know.” He grins; he knows that’s a good line.
“Save it,” I tell him, smiling as I move past him.
He catches me by the arm. “I’m not happy for you. But I’ll pretend I am until he’s gone.”
The door opens quickly. I must’ve taken too long and am now cutting into someone else’s turn. Theo enters, his hands on his hips. His expression is flat as Sebastian walks past him to the exit.
“He cornered me,” I say.
“I’m sure he did.”
The door shuts with a low thud as Sebastian leaves, sealing the room in silence.
“I can trust you, can’t I?” Theo says.
“I’d never do anything to hurt Jasper, I swear.”
Theo reaches inside the box, leaving something in a blue box behind.
“That’s not what I mean,” he says. He’s nervous and distressed. I can see it in the furrow of his brow, the way he keeps biting at his thumb. “Over Thanksgiving, I told you how much my family needed the money from the Robames investment. You wouldn’t want anything getting in the way of that, would you?”
He watches me, like he’s skeptical of what I’ll say.
“Theo, what are you talking about?”
“Your dad has this proposal—an idea that would limit the effects from the lawsuit and keep it from going to trial.”
When I nod, Theo looks relieved.
“So you know about it?”
“Sort of,” I say. “But I
heard Rob hates his idea and won’t accept the proposal.” My father told Rosie that his hands were tied. No guarantees.
Theo sighs. He rubs his temples. I’ve never seen him so worried before. Theo, the epitome of cool. “It’s unreasonable that she’s not even willing to consider it. And more than that, it’s not fair.”
“She doesn’t seem to be at all nervous about this lawsuit. Your dad is the only one who can see clearly what this could do to her company. I mean, public perception alone will be hard to recover from.”
I nod. “I’d like Robames to avoid the lawsuit so that Jasper can be kept out of it. And I trust your dad. He’s made his living this way. He knows when to revive a company and when to kill it and when to change it.”
We hear the door open again—this time with a hearty swing. It falls shut slowly as the noise of shuffling feet approach us.
It’s Stewart who turns down our row. He steps back when he sees us, like our presence has startled him. “Collins—what are you doing here?”
Or just my presence, apparently.
“You’re early,” Theo says to him.
I glance between them, trying to gauge if it’s simply Stewart’s turn to make his drop and that’s why he’s here or if Theo was waiting for him because they were meeting.
Stewart studies his watch. He flicks it, then puts it up to his ear like he’s trying to hear if it’s still working.
“Well, did you ask her?” Stewart says to Theo.
“I was about to.”
“Ask me what?”
“We need your help with Jasper,” Stewart says. I hold my breath, wondering if, since they know about the proposal, they also know about Jasper being on the list of those deposed.
Theo nods. “We need Jasper to convince Rob James to accept your dad’s proposal and—”
Stewart continues, talking over Theo. “It’s the only way to salvage her company and protect our families’ investments, thanks to this serious lawsuit—”
“She’s caught up,” Theo says.
“Okay, so what do you think?” Stewart asks me. “Will you help us with Jasper?”