“Are you supposed to tell us that?” Susannah said.
“Obviously not. But Catherine trusts you. And you know. She’s my best friend.”
Susannah narrowed her eyes at me. Then she smiled, confidently amused. Letting me know she understood: no one could ever displace her.
“Anyway,” Skye said. “Who are you going to tell?”
“I could call the newspapers,” Susannah said. “I could call the Republicans.”
Skye laughed. “Be my guest,” she said.
I couldn’t be sure what she meant: that she didn’t care whether Susannah blew the whistle or that she didn’t think anyone would believe her.
“But I thought your father was this big environmentalist,” I said.
“He is.”
Susannah and I looked at each other, confused and disbelieving. It was one thing to know Senator Butterfield had used and exposed his daughter. We expected little more from a parent. But as a politician, as a public figure, I trusted Skye’s father absolutely. Everything he said echoed our own vision of the world as it ought to have been. He promised to clean up Boston Harbor and heat inner-city homes. To shut down Chanticleer. He promised to fight for disarmament and ban nuclear testing. He wanted the United States out of El Salvador, out of Nicaragua.
It never occurred to me that he might not believe in his promises as deeply as we did.
“It’s difficult to understand,” Skye said. “That’s what he would say if he were here. He’d give a song and dance about compromise and lesser evils. Who knows how much of it would be true? But I promise, you’d believe every word.”
“Maybe you don’t know him as well as you think you do,” Susannah said.
Skye shrugged, dismissing this possibility. Either she didn’t register Susannah’s antagonism or she didn’t care.
Which surprised me. For all her imperiousness, wounded people were drawn to Susannah. At Waverly, a mentally retarded man named Cory worked in the dining hall—mopping floors and wiping down tables. After meals, we all had to carry our trays to a window adjoining the kitchen and empty our dirty plates and utensils onto a conveyor belt. Every day Cory would go about his work intently, barely looking up at any of us. But whenever Susannah finished her meal, he would stop whatever he was doing and run to meet her at the conveyor belt, so that he could empty the plates from her tray. Susannah always said a simple thank you, never protesting but accepting his help with a child’s flattered smile. I don’t know exactly what Cory saw in Susannah, but it wasn’t just her beauty. The Waverly dining hall was filled with pretty girls. But something about Susannah’s dark, freckled face conveyed equal parts sun and rain, carrying the world’s ills with a wistful air. I had expected Skye to keen toward this quality. But she didn’t seem to notice it.
“There’s nothing here,” she said, standing up and putting her hands on her hips.
“We’ll look in his office,” Susannah said. “My father always has cash in his desk drawer. Or he did, anyway, when he lived at home.”
We headed downstairs, to Senator Butterfield’s vast and private enclave—all oak and Oriental carpet, the first non-sea-facing room in the house.
BACK INTO THE LIVING ROOM, Skye held a hundred-dollar bill in each hand. She held up her find to show the boys, who had just removed a long, oak mirror from the wall. They lowered it on top of the coffee table, then congratulated Skye on her discovery.
Susannah and I replenished our wine. “Sure you don’t want a drink?” I asked Skye. Not to pressure her. I just didn’t want to be rude.
“Why not,” she said, the barest sigh of acquiescence. For a moment she stared at the mirror like its removal constituted supreme disarray, then seemed to decide she might as well give into the bacchanal entirely. I gave her a glass and sat down on the silk couch next to John Paul, who put his arm around me. He held a tumbler of whiskey, which made him look strangely adult and upper crust. Across the room, Skye looked toward us for a moment, then flicked her eyes away. She had yet to address a direct word to him.
“I wonder if it will be warm enough to swim tomorrow,” Susannah said. She kicked off her shoes and settled in a plush leather armchair, wriggling her toes through her stockings. She had a fondness for schoolgirl clothing, and on this day wore a field hockey kilt and white oxford shirt.
“I swim off this bluff during every month of the year,” Skye said. “My father and I always swim on New Year’s Day, no matter what the temperature is.”
“I think I read that once in the Globe,” Susannah said. “I seem to recall a picture of him all wet and shivering. I don’t remember seeing you, though.”
Drew pulled a small bag of coke from his pocket. I pictured him deciding on this non-hiding place; riding in the backseat as John Paul drove too fast and police cars cruised by. And then waiting for our bus, never once worrying about the drugs being discovered. In all our minds, getting kicked out of school was the worst thing that could happen to us. Local authorities—the police—never worried us in the slightest. We assumed their course of action would be to hand us back to the school, no matter the infraction. John Paul always joked that a Waverly student ID was a get-out-of-jail-free card.
“May I?” Drew said to Skye, jutting his chin toward the bill in her right hand. She handed it to him without question, and he rolled it into a tight, narrow tube.
Drew of course gave it back to her before using it himself—understanding that first honors always belong to the hostess.
WHILE THE REST of us sat around the mirror, John Paul walked outside to smoke a joint on the piazza. After a while he came back into the room, eyes red rimmed and fixed, bemusedly, on me. I smiled back. Stoned or not, he and I had a similar way of functioning in groups. We both tended to stand back, quietly observing, letting the dynamic unfold around us rather than contributing to it. So that although our blood pulsed just as quickly, and our vision widened just as far, it was the three of them—Drew, Susannah, Skye—who took over the bright, wide room.
Skye had proclaimed herself overheated and removed her sweater and shoes. She couldn’t stop moving, circling the perimeters of the room like a nineteenth-century woman taking a turn or Pippin going through his paces in a riding ring.
“I love this drug,” Skye said. She swung her arms as she moved. “It makes me feel like running. Or talking. Or just doing something. It makes me feel invincible.”
“If only I had a camcorder,” Susannah said, sprawling on the floor by the coffee table. “Think how much the networks would pay for footage of this famous good girl.”
To my surprise, Skye laughed. “Let’s see him put that in a positive light,” she said. “Maybe I’d get him votes from the Betty Ford contingency.”
Susannah stared at me from across the room, widening her eyes. I recognized the invitation to conspire but couldn’t bear to reject Susannah or betray Skye. I just smiled shortly, then looked away.
“So, what really happened last year?” Susannah said.
“Hey,” Drew protested. “Maybe she doesn’t want to talk about that.”
“Don’t be so protective,” Susannah said. “Of course she wants to talk about it. She just did.”
“What could I possibly tell you that you don’t already know?” Skye said. She halted, aware of the words’ narcissistic tinge as soon as they’d escaped. “Not that I’m a big celebrity or anything.”
“But you are,” Susannah said. “Of course you are.” She stood up and walked across the room to the bar. A good six inches shorter than Skye, at least twenty-five pounds lighter, she somehow managed to take up equal space.
“So tell us,” Susannah said. “What happened?”
“Just what you know,” Skye insisted. “They would have let me get away with Chanticleer if it hadn’t have been for that scholarship kid. But that’s their thing, once you’ve been suspended you get expelled on the next infraction. Stupid. Maybe they want plutonium leaking into our rivers? Or they’re in love with nuclear bombs?”
&n
bsp; “But what about the cheating?” Susannah said.
“It didn’t seem like cheating. The truth is, I’d been doing it forever. Writing papers for other kids. In English, in creative writing. Everybody hated doing it and I loved it. I still do. I love typewriters. I love thinking.”
“That’s cool,” Drew said.
Susannah laughed. “You’re an idiot,” she said fondly, and then turned back to Skye. “Not you,” she promised. “Tell us more.”
I waited for Skye to say something about the money. She cast the barest glance at me, perhaps waiting to see if I’d interject. Then she shrugged.
“There’s not more to tell. I’d always done it, for all sorts of people, and then I did it for this one guy and I got caught. You know, I’ve won two national scholarships, but my parents never let me use them. They paid my tuition and gave the scholarship money away.”
She made an oblique, half-conscious gesture toward the hundred-dollar bill on the mirror. “Doesn’t that seem like stealing?” Skye said. “I earned that money for school. I should have been allowed to use it, if I wanted to. My dad always made sure the press found out about giving the money away. He made sure everybody knew that I was smart and he was altruistic. When I got expelled, he leaked that story to the press, too. So that he could prove we were all great crusaders for the good of the world.”
“Perverse,” Susannah said.
Skye looked at her, startled by the sympathetic insult, and recognizing that she had invited it.
“None of it sounds like a huge deal,” Susannah said. “Catherine and I have done each other’s homework our whole lives. I do her science. She does my French. I only wish there was a way she could take the AP test for me, since thanks to her everyone thinks I can ace it.”
“The difference,” Skye said, “is in getting caught. Right?”
She climbed up onto the windowsill and pressed her body against the glass. Black night and silver ocean surrounded her.
“I feel like I want to break out of my body,” she said. “You know that James Wright poem? About breaking into blossom? That’s what I feel like.”
“Neat,” Susannah said. Her voice didn’t exactly drip with sarcasm, but it was there. I had hoped the poetry would be a point of connection between the two of them. Susannah loved anything to do with words. Last year, Allen Ginsberg had come to read at a Waverly assembly. We’d all sat reverently in our seats, not prepared for him to walk on stage carrying an accordion. He leapt about on stage, what few straggly curls he had left flying in the air around him—playing his squeeze box and chanting in a quavery voice. We tried our best not to laugh, but before long the entire auditorium erupted in laughter, even the most devout beatniks covering their mouths and shaking with embarrassed hilarity. All except for Susannah, who had leaned forward in her seat, brow furrowed in concentration, her eyes narrowed in disappointment over her schoolmates’ lack of control.
“Don’t they understand the man’s a genius?” she asked me afterward, as we filed down the aisle, kindly forgetting—or ignoring—that I’d laughed right along with the rest of them. If Skye had been there, she and Susannah would have been in complete and somber solidarity.
Unlike now—Susannah’s disapproving eyes following Skye’s ethereal and possessed skulk along the windowsill. The room’s bright track lights burned insistently, forbidding shadows of any kind. For a moment I thought Skye might levitate through the window, out toward sea—leaving the four of us staring, wondering if she’d ever really been here, with us, at all.
6
“SKYE’S NOT LIKE I thought she would be,” Susannah said to me, an hour later.
We stood alone at the bar, opening a new bottle of wine. The others had gone down to the boathouse to see the Sunfish and sea kayaks.
“How so?” I said.
“I don’t know.” She gathered her dark hair into a ponytail, unwinding an elastic from her wrist. “On TV she always looked so calm and controlled. But in person she has all this frenetic energy.”
“We’ve been feeding her cocaine,” I said. “Lots and lots of cocaine.”
Susannah laughed. She lifted her hand and watched her fingers twitch, involuntarily. “Still,” she said. “Before you met her, I would have expected her to be all elegance and serenity. Maybe a little prim. Then when you told me she wanted to bring us here, I thought she must be very sly. Slick. But she’s not slick at all. She seems kind of desperate.”
Her hand floated down to the counter but she kept her eyes on the same spot—as if her unkind words hovered in the air in front of her. “It’s like she’s Sybil,” Susannah said. “At war with her various personalities. I keep feeling like one of them is going to pick up the phone and turn us all in.”
My heart sank. I had probably known that it would be impossible, friendship between these two most important friends. But I had at least wanted Susannah to be impressed. To see the turbulent beauty, the layers of possibility. I had expected Susannah’s estimation of me to rise through my association with Skye. Like carrying a report card full of A’s back to my parents, or an armload of blue ribbons. Look what I brought you.
We crossed the room and knelt in front of the mirror, balancing our drinks near its edge. One day a cleaning woman would be perplexed by the perfectly round water marks.
“Skye’s not desperate,” I said. “She’s incredibly smart.”
“Yes, I know. She told me. Who quotes poetry like that?”
“She likes poems.”
“There’s something wrong with her.”
“But there’s not,” I said. “It’s hard coming into a group of old friends. And she’s not used to all this. Breaking rules.”
“She didn’t have much trouble stealing that two hundred dollars.”
“She’s not used to coke.”
“Nobody’s used to this coke,” Susannah said. Irritated with my refusal to excoriate Skye, she seized on another subject. She inhaled a line, then told me about a party she and Drew had gone to at Yale.
“The coke was like something the vet would give your horse,” Susannah said. “It made us completely paranoid.”
I nodded, appreciating the calm and cool exhilaration—like something tickling at the base of my throat, and spreading through all of my veins.
“I was thinking of going back to Venezuela,” Susannah said.
“To visit your father?”
She made a motion with her hand, like shooing away a fly. Since her father had left their family to take up permanent residence in the tropics, Susannah refused any feelings for him.
“No,” she said. “To get more coke. Even with buying the plane tickets, we could make a ton of money. If that guy wanted a hundred a gram for that swill we had last week? We could raise the money for the trip before we even leave.”
She fiddled with her collar. Small appliquéd strawberries, where the buttons would have been on a boy’s collar, matched the pendant on her gold necklace.
“So you and Drew would go?”
“Drew.” She made the same fly-shooing gesture. “He’s not going to last much longer, I can tell you that right now.”
I didn’t pursue this pronouncement, which she made often. I liked Drew but wouldn’t necessarily have mourned if Susannah got rid of him. He kept a python in a glass cage beneath his bed. I’d watched him feed the snake live mice and considered him capable of anything.
“You and me,” Susannah said. “We could go to Venezuela. You’d love these guys who sold me the coke. Rico and Alan. And oh my God, Catherine. The birds. I would love to show you the birds. It’s like being in another epoch.”
We each leaned over the mirror and snorted another line. The coke did a strange little tap dance up the back of my neck, clearing my brain of any misgivings. The dark shoreline outside gave way to lush jungle. Neon birds.
“Okay,” I said, and worried for a brief moment that I would have to draw blood to seal the agreement.
But this was Susannah, who knew and trust
ed me. So she only grabbed my hand and led me out the door into the unseasonably balmy evening.
JOHN PAUL STOOD on the tiled piazza, smoking a cigarette.
“Where’s Skye?” I asked.
“She and Drew took out the kayaks,” he said. I looked out over the water: calm, cold, and very dark.
“Drew went with her?” Susannah said. She sounded angry but resigned, like this were exactly the sort of thing she might expect from Drew—or any male. She took the cigarette from John Paul’s fingers. “What were they thinking?”
He shrugged. “They’re very high.”
Susannah blew out an abrupt stream of smoke. She had lost the ability to stand still—her feet doing an odd, unrhythmic shuffle. The three of us walked closer to the water, and I thought I could make out two banana-shaped forms, gliding alongside the jetty. Heading toward open sea.
“You’d never catch me doing that,” Susannah said. “I’ve seen Jaws too many times.”
We stood quietly for a moment, listening to the tide. Ordinarily Susannah was good at finding the fun in these evenings, and her bristle disconcerted me. I suppressed the urge to apologize, reaching out to touch her elbow instead.
“At least they’re not in the same boat,” John Paul said, and Susannah kicked sand at him.
“Shut up,” she said. “Like I care what that dirtbag does.”
It was exactly the sort of thing she said about her father. John Paul and I each threw an arm over her shoulder as we stood there, listening to the lap, lap, lap of the tide.
“YOU SEEM DIFFERENT when you’re with Skye,” John Paul said, a while later. Susannah had insisted we go off by ourselves. We left her with both reluctance and gratitude, her mounting disgruntlement fueled by a sudden bent on snorting lines.
“We won’t be long,” I promised, as we headed up the stairs.
“Be all night,” Susannah said, waving her hand and bending over the mirror. “I’ll be fine.”
Gossip of the Starlings Page 5