Evan paused, trying to think of a way out of this that didn’t involve lying. Maybe she could get Samantha off the Luke track, if she preemptively gave her some other information she might be interested in.
“It’s something new, but it’s big.” Evan said, speaking quickly. She hated the idea of exposing anyone for her own betterment, but Samantha wasn’t giving her much of a choice. “There was a huge scandal at our school because a photo of Ellie Walker and Gabe Mills—”
“For God’s sake, Evan, obviously I know about the photo. Paul doesn’t want to cover it, though,” Samantha went on. “He says it’s tabloid fodder.”
Evan felt a surge of respect for Paul Nelson, the celebrated host of the show, a journalist widely admired by politicians on both sides of the aisle for his fairness and ability to stay above the fray. Though Evan had to wonder if his decision to avoid the story had something to do with the fact that Ellie and Paul’s son, who everyone at G.A. jokingly called Narc (for fear that he would expose their secrets to his father), were good friends.
“But if you have any interesting intel from the ground, I might be able to persuade Paul otherwise.”
Red splotches of embarrassment crept up Evan’s neck. “Um, nothing really specific yet.”
“Then for now, the priority remains Luke. I need to know if you’ve heard anything.”
“You just asked me to look into it Friday,” she said, breaking out into a cold sweat. Luke was just twenty feet away, closely examining a floral romper. If Evan wasn’t so upset, she would have burst into laughter at the thought of Luke trying to get her into one of those. Instead, she gripped the phone harder. “I need a little more time.” Maybe if she could stall long enough, Samantha would forget about the story.
“We don’t have time. A source has already come forward.”
Evan swallowed. “A source?”
“An openly gay student at GDS is willing to go on the record and say he and Luke dated as recently as two months ago.” GDS was the widely used acronym for Georgetown Day School, another exclusive private school in the D.C. area. Though Evan didn’t know the details, she remembered Luke vaguely mentioning he’d been hanging out with someone on the GDS soccer team right around Thanksgiving time.
“What are you going to do?” Evan asked. Her voice shook as she said it.
“Paul is insisting we get one more source to corroborate before we move ahead with the story. He doesn’t want to risk the fall-out if it’s not true.”
Relief flooded Evan. But only for a moment.
“But if we don’t move forward with this source soon, he’ll take his story elsewhere. Maybe to Anderson. Maybe Diane Sawyer. We can’t let that happen. I want to be the one to break it. It could have huge implications for Congressman Jensen’s stance on gay marriage.”
Evan’s heart sank. “Definitely. I’m on it.”
She clicked her phone shut just as Luke approached her, a heap of clothing draped across his arm.
“Evs, what’s wrong?” he asked, concern filling his voice as he took in the nauseated expression on her face.
“Sit down, Luke,” Evan said, unable to look him in the eye, motioning to the bench in the private nook across from the dressing room area.
“You’re scaring me,” he said, as he eased his long torso down. “Are you okay?”
Evan looked to make sure there was no one in the near vicinity, then opened her mouth and finally blurted it out.
“My boss at Today in Politics asked me to look into a story they’re breaking about whether the son of Congressman Jensen is gay.”
The color drained from Luke’s face.
“Evan…I…it can’t…” His voice trailed off. He couldn’t even form a sentence.
“I’m trying to deflect it as best I can, but they have a source. Someone from GDS.”
“From GDS?” Luke looked up at the ceiling, willing himself not to completely break down. “I know exactly who it is, that little rat. I should have never hooked up with him. He stalked me for weeks after.” He paused for a beat. “And now I guess he’s retaliating because he’s pissed I blew him off.”
“I’m sorry, Luke,” Evan said, her voice breaking. It just wasn’t fair.
He looked at her, fear in his eyes. “What do I do?”
Evan had thought about that question all weekend. But Luke wasn’t going to like the answer. At least, not right away.
“You break the story first. Come out publicly before they out you.”
“How is that any better? Everyone would still know!”
“But it would be on your terms. If you announce it yourself, the message can be about identity and empowerment. But if you wait for them to reveal it, you’re coming out in shame and scandal.” From her job at Today in Politics, Evan had seen similar scenarios play out with dozens of different politicians who found themselves enmeshed in various scandals.
“None of that matters though. My dad—he’ll lose his job over this. There’s no way he’ll be able to get re-elected next term.”
“You don’t know that. Look at Dick Cheney. Elected vice president on a conservative ticket with an out-of-the-closet lesbian daughter.” Luke remained silent, keeping his eyes fixed on a stain embedded in the carpet near his feet.
“Just think about it,” Evan urged. Luke nodded and he looked so sad and vulnerable that Evan gave him a hug.
“I guess I have to tell my parents. See what they think.”
“You guys need to make a decision fast,” she replied. “Because if you ask me, you have forty-eight hours before this thing hits. Either on our show, or somewhere else.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Tuesday, 9:42am.
“Ready for history class?” Brinley came up behind Ellie in the hallway as she slowly pulled her textbook from her locker, like it weighed a hundred pounds. Brinley had popped an Adderall, her dirty little secret, in the bathroom just moments ago and the high was now grazing every part of her body like a feather.
“Not really,” Ellie answered sullenly, as everyone in the hallway gaped tackily at her like she was road kill. With Adderall surging through Brinley, she had to hold herself back from physically assaulting some of these losers. She had spent all day yesterday trying to spin the negative P.R. about Ellie, but even the Fed couldn’t manipulate a situation this bad. She just wished Ellie wasn’t looking down all the time, guiltily, like she deserved it all. It was only making a bad situation worse.
Ellie shut her locker but didn’t move. Psyching her up to make it to history and biology, her two classes with Hunter, had been a chore yesterday and now again today. Brinley always thought life coaches were perverse money-making scammers, but now that she was one, she was starting to see the value of the service.
“How do you deal with seeing Graham every day?” Ellie suddenly asked her.
Brinley pursed her lips. She wasn’t about to admit to anyone, even Ellie, that the reason she went into the bathroom earlier and popped her second Adderall of the day was because she saw Graham by his locker chatting up Marie Carducci. More like chatting up her boobs, actually, which were on prominent display in a tight V-neck wool sweater she must have bought at Baby Gap. Not to mention, word around G.A. was that last year, Marie showed up late night to a dorm room at Landon, the neighboring all boys’ school, with nothing on but a big red bow. Brinley shuddered at the thought that Marie might have something similar planned for Graham. She tried never to take more than one Adderall before lunch, but this was a special circumstance.
“I just look right through him,” Brinley answered evenly. “But I don’t want him back. You, on the other hand, need to be smiling at Hunter every chance you get so he knows you’re still interested. And not one of your fake smiles that makes it look like you have Bell’s palsy.”
Ellie shook her head. “It won’t matter. He hates me. He still hasn’t even returned the email I sent him over the weekend.” She heaved a sigh that hit the floor like a cement block.
“Hunter
doesn’t hate anyone. He’ll come around.”
She linked her arm in Ellie’s and practically had to carry her down the hallway. They strode past Rachael Martin, whose dad was one of the top pollsters in the country, talking to Portia Davies. Rachael and Portia exchanged a pointed look in Ellie’s direction.
“My dad said Marilyn Walker’s approval ratings are plummeting by the second,” Rachael haughtily whispered to Portia, her brown bob swishing dramatically. No doubt G.A.’s press secretary would soon be spreading this new tidbit of information around like an STD.
“My mom’s still not even speaking to me,” Ellie said, glassy-eyed, once they were a good distance away.
“It’s only stress. She just needs to take a bubble bath, listen to some James Taylor or whatever crusty musician our parents are in to, and pop open a bottle of Pinot. I’m sure Jasmine has a vineyard and crushes her own grapes so the Pinot shouldn’t be a problem.” Brinley was not easily impressed, but Ellie’s mother’s chief-of-staff was fierce. Even on four Adderall, Brinley would never be able to multitask like that woman could.
This brought a wan smile from Ellie, but at least it was a smile.
“And good news,” Brinley started excitedly, her heart beating like a drum. “I have someone looking into the photo leak.”
“Anything yet?”
“Nothing firm, but unlike most sources in D.C., my girl actually fact checks. She already has a few leads.” Her source was Sarah Corliss, her friend from sailing camp whose mother was BFFs with FLOTUS. That made Sarah even more dialed-in than Brinley.
They reached their history classroom. Brinley’s older brother, Brooks, was leaning against the door, looking dignified as usual in his perfectly pressed Burberry button-down and not a piece of his ridiculously thick brown hair out of place.
“You have a sec, Brin?” he asked her, the question sounding more like an order.
Brinley hesitated, looking to Ellie. She wasn’t sure if Ellie could handle the plank walk into class by herself.
“I’m fine,” Ellie said quietly, reading her thoughts.
“Remember to smile,” Brinley called after her as Ellie entered the room. She looked up at Brooks, once again jealous he got all the height genes in the family. “What’s so important?”
“I wanted to make sure you’ll be home after school. There’s something I need to talk to you about.” His light brown eyes were unblinking. She had no clue what was stuck up his creaseless khakis, but it didn’t sound good.
“I have a history project meeting, but we can talk after that,” Brinley answered. She had been dreading her little study session with Taryn. By now she must have put it together that Brinley was the one who had made her as unpopular as the one hundred and twelfth Congress with that Percocet rumor, so she was not expecting a pleasant afternoon. “Is something wrong?”
He gave a vague head motion that could have been a nod or a shake. Brooks was never vague. “We’ll talk.” He started to walk away, then turned back. “Oh, and I just got an email from Mother. We got the Washington Life cover.”
“Seriously?!” Brinley squealed with delight, holding herself back from the cartwheels she wanted to do in the hallway. “How could you have not led with that?” she asked him, incredulously. Brooks had wanted this as badly as she did. The Madison family had been on the cover of the annual President’s Day issue five years in a row and had been devastated when they found out the nouveau Reyes family was going to dethrone them. The Percocet rumor about Taryn must have slithered its way to the Washington Life editor, just as Brinley hoped it would.
“It’s a good week for you, Brin. With this and that A on your Wuthering Heights paper. Quite an accomplishment. Mrs. Hume never gives out A’s.”
“Thank you.” Brinley beamed as Brooks sauntered away. She loved when her older brother was proud of her.
And then it hit her.
Her Wuthering Heights paper was sitting on the desk in her bedroom, concealed under a thick stack of books.
Which meant Brooks had been in her room, going through her things. Her drum-like heartbeat increased to a rhythm she couldn’t keep up with. What the hell had he been looking for? And what else had he found?
As soon as she got home from school, Brinley dashed up to her bedroom. She was on her hands and knees in the back of her closet within minutes, aggressively tossing aside shoes, bags and accessories. Finally, she found it. The empty Miu Miu shoe box she used as the hiding place for her Adderall. She nervously clutched the box, her knuckles white, then threw off the lid. There it was—the gleaming white bottle filled with the same ten pills she had left inside before she went to school. Brooks hadn’t found them. She gulped in a relieved breath of air.
The relief, however, was only momentary. There was another bottle somewhere in her room. She had hidden it on Saturday night after covertly re-upping from Nathan Wright, her dealer, at a house party in the middle of nowhere out in Potomac. By the time she had gotten home, she was so buzzed off the sticky sweet Lemoncellos they were serving that she didn’t even remember she had hidden the other bottle until now. And she had no clue where she put it.
Dammit.
She should have catalogued her inventory like a pharmacy. She had been slowly increasing her personally prescribed dosage every week, which meant when she got down to ten pills, it was time for a refill. Not that she couldn’t just cut herself off whenever she wanted to, but she had a plan. After the stress and excitement of the Washington Life photo shoot in a few weeks, she would begin tapering off. Unless, of course, Brooks knew. Then that would completely screw up her withdrawal timeline.
On the other hand, there were a million reasons why he could want to speak with her. He had mentioned planning a ski trip to Vail in February—maybe he wanted to see if she was in. Or he could be seeking out girl advice. He usually sought Brinley’s take if he was seeing a girl with a particular penchant for the dramatics. Maybe Brinley misread his serious tone in the hallway and was just being paranoid.
She jumped when she heard a car door slam. She unearthed herself from the mess of shoe boxes and peered through her custom floral drapes. It was Taryn exiting her car. Of course it was a hybrid. This powwow was the last thing Brinley needed right now. She popped the cap off of the Adderall bottle and swallowed her fourth pill of the day, which barely made it past the suffocating lump in her throat. She just had to make it through this ridiculous meeting and then she could find out why Brooks needed to speak with her so urgently.
“That Fascist piece of legislation? No way,” Brinley told Taryn. They sat across from each other at the custom-made table in the Madison family kitchen—an expansive, but refined and tasteful space with maple and cherry wood cabinets and gleaming light beige granite countertops. Even though Brinley couldn’t recall her mother ever actually cooking anything, the kitchen always smelled of baked apples and cinnamon.
Taryn rolled her eyes at Brinley. Not an attractive look for her. Neither was that fringed vest she wore over her dress. Where was she planning on going? A rodeo? “The New Deal reduced unemployment and created social security,” Taryn responded resolutely.
“Yeah, and now we need to privatize it because FDR did a sub-par job. I will not do our thesis about how the New Deal brought relief to the country.”
The piece of paper listing the history project topics lay between them, ominously. They had already been through the first ten and couldn’t agree on anything. Taryn grabbed the list. As she looked over it, she pulled her annoyingly perfect runway waves into a bun and secured it at the base of her neck with a pen. Disgusting. Brinley had to practically chew on her tongue not to bring up the Washington Life spread. But her father had taught her never to rub a victory in someone’s face if it wasn’t a fair fight. And a fair fight this was not. Taryn had been out of her league the moment she stepped her irritatingly long legs on to the Georgetown Academy campus.
“What about the thesis on the history of campaign financing? We could make an argument tha
t it’s all about money now and not ideas,” Taryn babbled.
“Only the campaigns with no money say that,” Brinley countered, tapping her boot on the floor impatiently and wishing she had taken more than one Adderall before this meeting. They were going to be here for hours at this rate and Taryn’s tacky metallic gold eyeliner was giving Brinley a headache that was ballooning by the second. “What’s next on the list?”
“Immigration,” Taryn answered.
“No,” they both said in unison. The ensuing argument that would cause seemed too exhausting for either of them to handle right now.
Brinley grabbed the paper from Taryn and read the last topic to herself with a look of disgust.
“What?” Taryn asked.
“The last thesis argues that it took so long for women to gain the right to vote because we sabotaged our own cause. Ridiculous.”
“Completely. It took so long because men dominated everything and were threatened by the idea of women having more rights,” Taryn responded, her disgust proportionate with Brinley’s.
They exchanged a look. Finally.
“So it’s settled. We’ll argue against that thesis,” Brinley declared.
Taryn nodded. “So now we need to figure out how to present it. Mr. Walsh said we could use PowerPoint, but I was thinking maybe we could make a movie—”
Brinley was about to object on the grounds that that was the most idiotic idea she’d ever heard, but Brooks had just entered the kitchen with a penetrating gaze in Brinley’s direction. Her temples were about to burst out of her head.
“I thought your friend would be gone by now,” Brooks said to her, straightening out the one micro-wrinkle in his shirt that had probably been driving him crazy all day.
“She’s not my friend.” That garnered another eye roll from Taryn. “And we just finished.”
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