Commencement
Page 35
“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?” Ronnie said, spreading her arms out over the doorframe.
“I’m going to tell the police what happened,” April said.
“Like hell you are,” Ronnie said. “Look, you’re not thinking clearly. Let’s just get a good night’s sleep and we’ll figure it all out in the morning.” She cupped April’s chin in the palm of her hand, holding on tight.
“Please,” she said. “I’m begging you.”
“It’s fucking over,” April said.
“You owe me this,” Ronnie said.
April was filled with rage. “I owe you nothing,” she said. “I believed in you, I thought that you cared about all of it. But you only ever cared about yourself. God, Ronnie, you used to stand for something so good, and now look at you.”
Ronnie’s gaze turned icy. She grabbed April by the arms.
“You’re a child,” Ronnie said. “Do what you want, but know this: If you go to the police, you’ll spend your life in jail. And I will tell them that I had nothing to do with any of it, that you tricked me just like you tricked everyone else. You try to point them to one bit of evidence that I knew. You won’t find it.”
April shook out of her grip and ran up to Ronnie’s bedroom, her legs burning beneath her. The room had been emptied of all Ronnie’s belongings, but April pulled open the drawer in the night-stand, and there it was—her old cell phone. When she switched it on, the phone was almost out of power. She called Sally’s home number, her whole body shaking.
A man answered on the second ring, sounding half asleep. In the background, April could hear the chirpy sounds of a sitcom on television, the soothing wave of a laugh track. Sally’s house seemed to exist on a different planet from the one she was on here, and April longed to go there.
“Jake?” she said.
“No,” the man said. “Who’s this?”
“I’m a friend of Sally’s,” April said.
“Oh, this is her brother,” he said. “They asked me to hang at the house and do phone duty from here, in case anyone called about the baby.”
“The baby,” April said, her head swarming.
“Yes,” he said. “She had her baby yesterday. Seven pounds, four ounces. A little girl.”
“Oh my God,” April said. “Is she in the hospital now? Can I call her there?”
“Umm, yeah,” he said. “It’s the Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta. Hold on, I can give you the number.”
“She’s at the Piedmont?” April said in disbelief.
“Yes,” he said. “They were out there looking for a friend of hers when Sal went into labor.”
April lost her signal then, the phone going dead.
Below her, she could hear Ronnie dragging her luggage onto the porch. She would be gone by dawn, and who knew where. April sat on the bed. She waited until she heard Ronnie’s car pull out of the driveway and down the block before she left the house.
When April arrived at the hospital, the sun was rising over Atlanta, casting an orange glow across the lawn and over the heads of the orderlies smoking cigarettes by the entrance, making them look like angels in blue scrubs. It was the first sunrise she had seen in months. She wondered how long it would be before she saw another.
Her heart was thumping in her chest, and her hands shook as she made her way inside.
After so long underground, everything seemed brighter now, more crisp: the glossy magazines scattered around the hospital’s main lounge, the giant silver doors of the elevator, gaping open so she could step inside. The maternity ward was on the fourth floor. April pressed the elevator button, and took a deep breath.
A man in a fancy suit got in on two and gave her a puzzled look, as though he knew her but couldn’t say from where. She had gotten many of these looks this morning—from the bus driver who picked her up on the other side of town, from the woman out on the side-walk selling carnations from a large plastic tub.
Soon it would all be over. She would go to the police and tell them everything and face whatever punishment might come. April had always thought that working with Ronnie was her ticket to the exact sort of life she had dreamed of in college. Now she saw, quite clearly, that she had given all of that away.
The scariest part was knowing that the girls might not forgive her; that perhaps she had gone too far this time and lost them for good. Sally had always said that it was the modern woman’s joy and her burden to be given choices, endless choices. But she never said anything about what would happen if one of them made the wrong choice.
When the elevator opened on the fourth floor, April stepped out.
“Have a nice day,” said the man in the suit.
“You too,” she said.
The hallway smelled slightly sour. A baby cried somewhere in the distance. At a desk decorated with pink and blue teddy bears, a white-haired woman in scrubs sat alone playing poker online.
“Excuse me,” April said. “I’m looking for Sally Werner’s room. I’m sorry, Sally Brown.”
The woman didn’t look up from her computer screen.
“Seven B,” she said.
April made her way past several open doors. She saw a young mother nursing an infant by the window in one room, a couple holding hands under a burst of blue balloons in another.
And then she heard them—Celia, Bree, and Sally, the sound of their laughter unmistakable, just as it had been from the hallway of the Autumn Inn when she arrived there for Sally’s wedding. She stood just outside the door for a moment, taking in their conversation, remembering that first year when they lived in maids’ quarters and the air was always alive with the noise of their chatter. She had never been so happy and so terrified at once.
A moment later, she stood in front of the open door and knocked on its frame.
The girls looked up. Sally’s eyes grew so wide that April wished it were another time, another reality. She wished that she could make a joke.
“Is it you?” Sally said at last.
“It’s me.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to my wonderful friend and agent, Brettne Bloom, who encouraged me to write fiction and provided me with great insights (and many delicious home-cooked dinners) along the way; to my brilliant editor, Jenny Jackson, who cared about the characters as much as I did, and shared my vision for what this book should be. I am indebted to Jill Kneerim and Leslie Kaufmann at Kneerim & Williams, Jerry Bauer, Jenna Menard, Meghan Scott, and everyone at Knopf, especially Sarah Gelman, Andrea Robinson, Meghan Wilson, and Abby Weintraub.
Thank you to the generous friends who took the time to read this book before it was a book: Laura Smith, Aliya Pitts, Hilary Black, Laura Bonner, Noreen Kearney, Kate Sweeney, Becky Friedman, and most of all Lauren Semino, who was not only the first to read Commencement, but also the first to read every bad short story I wrote in high school, and beyond.
For those who have made my life infinitely richer through laughter, conversation, debate, understanding, encouragement, and advice, thanks to Karin Kringen, Caitlain McCarthy, Elizabeth Driscoll, Sara Stankiewicz, Cheryl Goss, Josh Friedman, Beth Mahon, Tim Melnyk, Erin Quinn, Olessa Pindak, Shilah Overmyer, Frances Lester, Theresa Gonzalez, Lucie Prinz, David Halpern, Amanda Millner-Fairbanks, Hilary Howard, Natasha Yefimov, Winter Miller, Liz Harris, Maureen Muenster, Ben Toff, Karen Oliver, Shelby Semino, Matt Semino, and while I’m at it, all the Seminos, and the Helds as well.
I will be forever grateful to my alma mater, Smith College, to the remarkable women I met in my time there, and to my inspiring teachers: among them, Maxine Rodburg, Michelle Chalfoun, Doug Bauer, Bill Oram, Michael Thurston, Craig Davis, and Michael Gorra.
For helping me understand the reality of sex trafficking in America, I owe thanks to Jane Manning, Rachel Lloyd, Melissa Farley, Stephanie Davis, the staff at Equality Now, and the writings of Catherine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan, and so many others. For explaining and re-explaining all things medical, thank you to m
y friend and fellow Smith alum, Dr. Michelle Burke Noelck.
To Bob Herbert, who has taught me more about journalism, politics, decency, and the New York Jets than I ever could have hoped to learn; and to the staff of The New York Times editorial department, the kind of co-workers you actually miss come Sunday evening.
Thanks to the many members of my amazing extended family, storytellers all.
And a million thank yous to Caroline Sullivan: a true artist, a quick wit, a warm heart, an incredible young woman. You are the best sister a girl could ask for, and then some.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
J. Courtney Sullivan’s work has appeared in The New York Times, New York magazine, Elle, Cosmopolitan, Allure, Men’s Vogue, the New York Observer, Tango, and in the essay anthology The Secret Currency of Love. She is a graduate of Smith College, lives in Brooklyn, and works in the editorial department of The New York Times. Commencement is her first novel.
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2009 by J. Courtney Sullivan
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by
Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of
Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to
reprint previously published material:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC, and Faber and Faber Ltd.: Excerpt from
“An Arundel Tomb” from Collected Poems by Philip Larkin, copyright
© 1988, 2003 by the Estate of Philip Larkin. Reprinted by permission
of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC, and Faber and Faber Ltd.
Random House, Inc.: Excerpt from “Brussels in Winter” by
W. H. Auden, copyright © 1940 and renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden
and excerpt from “Heavy Date” by W. H. Auden, copyright © 1945
by W. H. Auden, from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden.
Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sullivan, J. Courtney.
Commencement : a novel / by J. Courtney Sullivan.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-27198-3
1. Women college students—Fiction. 2. Female friendship—Fiction.
3. Young women—United States—Social conditions—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3619.U43C66 2009
813′.6—dc22 2008054386
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents
either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used
fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events,
or locales is entirely coincidental.
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