She took the flank steak from the refrigerator, slit open its plastic cover. She took the strip of meat in her hands and laid it flat in its dish. She washed her hands with scalding water, covered the dish with foil, and slid it onto a shelf in the refrigerator.
Whatever was going on now, Lily had no real complaints, no smoldering resentments about her life with them. Anyone who didn’t believe her, who didn’t understand that this felt good, had clearly never felt it. She was embedded, now. And Isabel had to know this. There was no way, after this long. There was no way Isabel didn’t understand.
THREE
I guess I’m just struggling. To understand. This sudden . . . enthusiasm.”
Madison could see that Amanda was making a true effort not to roll her eyes. The end effect was twice as insulting as the most condescending smirk would have been.
“You hate football,” Amanda continued.
Madison slammed her locker door with a degree of force she knew was unnecessary.
“That isn’t fair,” she said.
“Oh, no?”
“I know nothing about football. It isn’t fair to say I hate it.”
“Okay, well?” Amanda turned her palms to the ceiling. “Then why would we go? Plus, I’ve got swim practice.”
“Friday drills are optional,” Madison said. “And it’s fun. Zoë Barker said that it’s, you know. Fun. It’s Friday.”
She watched Amanda close her locker and lean into it, pressing her forehead to the chilled metal. Amanda had always been the one person for Madison, the one she felt close to in the way other people talked about feeling close—to sisters, to friends, to mothers or grandmothers. Madison had Lily, but that was different. Amanda was her one choice to seize the real intimacy that was presented in every book, by every movie, as a fundamental part of being a teenage girl.
Even when they were small, she’d begged Isabel to let her call Amanda’s house in the middle of the night because she was trapped in the paranoid fog of some dream in which Amanda had been angry with her. These late-night elementary school phone calls, along with their accompanying afternoon marathon chats, had been the primary reason Isabel caved and allowed Madison to install her own phone line.
But that had been a long time ago, and all this past summer it was clear that Amanda wanted Madison to know that things had changed between them. That they were sophomores now, and no longer beholden to the ties that had bound them together as children, whatever those ties had actually been.
Madison didn’t understand why they would be growing apart. She couldn’t see that either one of them had changed at all. But it was hard to miss, by the end of the summer, that her best friend had almost completely lost interest in her.
She watched now as Amanda performed her own exasperation, forehead pressed up against the metal. And she could see that there was a small, unacknowledged part of her friend that enjoyed this, that felt a little thrill at letting herself be this cruel. Madison could tell. It must feel the way it used to feel when they’d shoplift chocolates together from Greenwich Pharmacy, while their mothers stood chatting, oblivious. All these small slights, over the summer. Amanda didn’t just want Madison to move on; she wanted to feel that electric charge, of being wanted by someone you no longer want.
“So the actual reason,” Amanda said, “is that Zoë Barker told you to come watch the football game, so you’re going.”
“Amanda, they’re not so terrible.”
Sometime in August, as if they’d sniffed out what was happening with Amanda, all of a sudden Zoë Barker and her sidekick Allie Wasserman—girls who had previously shown little interest in Madison beyond a healthy fear of her parents—were inviting her places, asking her along. Madison had never had any real expectation that Amanda would go along with it, would allow them all to become friends.
“Can you just explain one thing to me, though? Can you explain why she is so obsessed with that umlaut over her name? I’ve seen her when it gets left off some name tag. You’d think they’ve printed ‘Raging Slut’ in its place, she goes totally nuts. Does she think anyone’s actually going to be confused and pronounce her name Zoo? Or Zoah? Do you think it upsets her that it would rhyme with ‘Ho’?”
“I really think if you’d spent any time with them—”
“Right, Mad, but the thing is—I have no interest. I mean, truly. Zero. You go ahead. Make new friends. And Chip’s playing, right? But you know I have less than nothing to talk about with those girls.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Madison, I don’t have a lot they’re interested in. Okay? Maybe in two years they’ll decide that my father has something to do with admissions and they’ll want to go to Yale and I’ll get randomly invited to Zoo’s next party. But until then, there’s not exactly any magazine that named my father as the country’s top CEO last year. You know?”
Madison could immediately see the regret on Amanda’s face, her wrinkled nose and her gaping mouth. But as with most regret, it had flooded her synapses just a few seconds too late.
“You’re telling me you think Zoë Barker reads Institutional Investor? I doubt it.”
She tried to keep her voice dry, condescending, even. Amanda almost never violated this, their last unspoken rule. Their fathers.
“You know I don’t care about that,” she continued.
“Obviously, Mad. But you are one in a million. Most people around us aren’t like you. And they definitely wouldn’t be like you if they were you. You know what I mean?”
“Hardly ever,” Madison said, sliding her lock shut and turning back to Amanda.
Amanda reached out with one finger and deftly lifted a strand of hair that had slipped down to hang loose in front of Madison’s face, tucking it back behind her ear where it belonged.
“They can love you for different reasons than I do!” Amanda said. “You’re, you know. There are lots of things to like about you.”
It sounded like an insult, maybe even an accusation. They stood in silence, their classmates rushing past on either side.
“Look,” Amanda said, “I’m not trying to be a bitch. If you want to go to the game, you should go.”
“I don’t,” Madison said, and her voice had changed, flattened. She turned back to her own locker, her books, and ignored her friend’s gaze. She thought of Amanda’s father, of how they’d sat in on one of his Micro lectures at Yale a few years ago, in a soaring lecture hall with high windows that filled the room with late-afternoon light and rows upon rows of rickety wooden seats that would retract with loud, slapping sounds each time some lazy underclassman stood to duck out early. Amanda had flinched each time, as if the students were actually flipping off her father with each squeal and smack, and Madison had held her hand. Toward the end of the lecture, Jake Levins began calling out the slouching undergrads sitting in the first few rows, actually pointing at them with his index finger. It was something Madison loved about Amanda’s father, something that reminded her of her own father, even if their methods were different. He could look at you with such vehemence that you understood him, wordlessly: he knew you didn’t know what to say, but you were going to answer him regardless.
Amanda was still watching her.
“Mad,” she began, “I know it’s been a weird September so far, but you’re taking it easy, right? Don’t get stressed out yet, over nothing.”
Madison rapped her locker once with her knuckles.
“You know I don’t understand anything he does,” she said. “It’s not like he’s going to talk to me about his job.”
“That’s not what I asked,” Amanda said, but Madison had already turned away.
MADISON MOVED SLOWLY on the walk from her locker to the fields. She had always been aware, in a dim and unaddressed way, that Amanda might pay attention to things like that magazine award. But normally nothing like that would ever be said between the two of them. Amanda almost never talked about Madison’s father. Amanda’s parents, when Madison
was over at their house—which, until these past few months, she had been several times each week—looked at each other and exchanged thin, toothless smiles whenever she said her father’s name.
She saw Chip Abbott as soon as she got to the field. The other girls were huddled on the bleachers on the far side, so she kept her eye on him as she crossed the end zone. He stood with his hands on his hips, his shoulders hunched beneath his pads, his skinny legs squeezed into the shiny pants like straws in their paper wrappers.
She stumbled somewhat on a hidden divot in the field, the loose grass and bits of dirt flying up around her ankles, and she righted herself, brushed her skirt down over her thighs. She shook her head, just as she’d always done when an unpleasant thought crossed her mind in a public place, to dislodge anything like a frown from her face. Someone might be watching, noticing; she knew this, the awareness bred into her since babyhood by both parents. That your time, your face, your body—none of it was entirely your own, not when other people could see you.
There was a canvas, a slate, an Etch-A-Sketch, whatever. And she could control what was on it. What was visible inside her head. And what she wanted on there, the only thing she wanted on there today, was this: the fact that Chip Abbott had begun to say hello to her outside her third-period Trig class.
The first time had been one of the first days of the school year. Hey, he’d said to her, touching his fingertips to her left shoulder blade. He’d done it again the next day, at the same time, in the same crowded morning rush of the hallway. A boy down the hall had screamed, “Ball sack!” just as they made eye contact, and Chip raised his eyebrows and smiled at her, as if the rowdy eruption had been hers.
In the weeks since, that was essentially all that had happened. They had not had a real conversation. And yet it felt as though so much was going on. An entire catalog of glances and touches and jokes emerged, ready to be analyzed. A netherworld of nuance and suggestion rose up to greet her like an abandoned object suddenly emerging from the depths of a cobalt swimming pool; something she’d once lost, without knowing, and now had the unforeseen joy of retrieving. She had never felt, had only heard others bragging about, this constant excitement. This feeling that your body had been hollowed out and filled with something reactive that could be stirred, even by something so small as a smile in passing.
She kept her eyes low as she approached the bleachers, as she moved closer to him. Zoë and Allie saw her at the last moment, and waved.
“Are we winning?” she asked them. Allie was wearing leggings the same color as her own skin, so that from far away it looked, for a second, like she wasn’t wearing pants. Madison’s gaze darted back and forth from the girls to the field, Chip. This was what it felt like now, to be on a campus where she knew he was, somewhere. There was a part of her always drifting away from the conversation, floating into some untethered existence. Keeping her mind on one thing felt like keeping a room full of kindergarteners quiet and attentive.
“Winning?” Zoë said. “Of course, what’d you expect. It’s just a preseason game, it’s not serious. But Chip’s killing it. He could beat this defense with his eyes closed. He’s practically dancing around out there.”
Madison had known Chip, or known who he was, since she was five years old. They’d attended the same elementary school, and now he was a junior at Greenwich Prep. In middle school, sometimes she’d see him on the main quad, throwing a football around with some of the older players on the team. The ball arcing high through the air, his arm extending in one long line from his shoulder.
Last year, as a sophomore, Chip had been the second-string quarterback, but everyone knew that was only a courtesy to Justin Peck, who had patiently waited until his senior year for his chance as QB. Now, it was Chip’s turn, which seemed like a terrible idea to Madison. He was too lanky, too fragile. Chip was tall, and the ropy muscles in his arms jumped every time he raised his hand or shouldered his backpack, but even she knew that he was a shrimp compared to the varsity football players. These were the boys who spent their school days lounging around the same octagonal lunch table in the courtyard outside the cafeteria, their eyes permanently at half-mast, as though playing football for an affluent and predominantly white private school in Greenwich, Connecticut, was just about all they could be expected to handle in any given week.
But Chip: Chip smelled good, like soap mixed with fresh air and steam, like he was perpetually just stepping out from a hot shower. He clipped the strap of his backpack across his chest while he ran around campus, always fiddling with it, and sometimes he sang goofy songs at pep rallies and things. She had never known a single fact about football, a single rule, not even the scoring system. But she felt like she knew enough to worry about Chip, about the sound of his arm snapping beneath him when a bigger guy tackled him. About the way he would look with a black eye, with a fat lip. She’d already seen the way the football players walked on Monday mornings, that combination of swagger and a prancing sensitivity that favored their soreness, their multiple aches and pains. She sometimes thought that was how all men should walk: like they were all hiding something for your benefit, something that made them wince.
“Isn’t Chip,” Madison began with caution, “isn’t he kind of skinny? Compared to the other guys?”
Zoë ran a hand through her hair, swirling it over her head in one glossy motion, tucking the ends behind one ear. “You’re kidding, right? Madison! He’s the quarterback. He’s supposed to be small and fast, and then everyone else has to protect him. God, you really weren’t lying when you said you don’t know football.”
“You guys know a lot about it?”
“Well,” Allie said, dissecting a split end between her thumb and forefinger, “we don’t have much of a choice, right? My dad has a game playing in the house at all times, from September to the Super Bowl. I’d have to literally plug my ears and blindfold myself to ignore it.”
As the game meandered on, Madison did a quick mental scan of her tote’s contents. English class this year wasn’t much, but she couldn’t wait for next year, to finally get to reread The Great Gatsby, something with actual humans feeling actual emotions and falling in love and with many opulent party scenes. She’d read the whole thing a few years ago, in middle school, but she remembered those party scenes most of all. The way the book caught how it felt in real life, when everything swirled past in the air above your head. The lights and the sound of breaking glass.
But sophomore English was, all signs indicated, going to be the same sort of hit parade English class had been every year so far, with Beowulf, The Picture of Dorian Gray, even, she had a feeling, with The Scarlet Letter next semester. A series of chances for a series of male writers to cram their ideas of what it meant to be a man down her throat. And if she wanted that, she’d just linger outside the door to her father’s study the next time he shut himself up with some of his partners. Periodically paging her on the intercom to ask her to bring them drinks, his praise more lavish with each round. Mad, you there? The natives are growing restless. Be a princess and bring us a tray of drinks. You know what we need, all the fixings. The boys’ll be indebted to you, sweetheart.
She shivered, then admonished herself for feeling guilty. She had thoughts like this all the time; didn’t everyone do this, complain about their parents in the privacy of their own minds? Mocking her father this way usually felt gentle, harmless and inaudible, an appropriate counterweight to the rest of her life as a daddy’s girl. And yet this particular moment of disrespect sat heavily at the base of her spine.
She pulled her cashmere hoodie more tightly around herself and peered over her shoulder at the other spectators. The fathers were all standing off to one side, clumped beside the bleachers; the mothers all sat on the higher levels, their backs straight, leaning forward with their hands cupped around their crossed knees. They all wore muted versions of the things their daughters wore—quilted jackets, velvet flats, gemstones sparkling at their ears whenever they brushed back a
strand of hair. Several of them were staring down at her.
At halftime, the players gathered in a huddle not far from the bleachers, then scattered out across the field, some throwing a ball back and forth, others stretching on the sidelines. They all seemed determined to scowl.
“Chip is looking over here,” Zoë said without inflection. Madison felt the moisture drain from her mouth. Moments later he was walking past the bleachers, cutting his eyes up at them.
“This the cheerleading squad?” he said, his voice rumbling from some place deep in his chest. When he spoke, it was like something warm had been poured down your back, from your neck to your tailbone.
“We just thought you could use the support,” Zoë said, not looking at him.
“What about you,” Chip said. “Madison. This your first football game?”
She nodded, voiceless.
“It’s a rough one,” he said.
She shrugged, and figured out something to say. “It’s just the preseason.”
“Yeah, we’re hanging in.”
“Really?” she said. “I heard you were running circles around their defense.”
He grinned and looked back over his shoulder, wiping his mouth on his jersey, before turning his head back to her and looking her right in the eye. She felt something unfold in her chest, as delicate and expansive as a ship in a bottle. She sat up straighter.
“Well, you know,” he said.
“Madison,” a loud voice boomed, just beyond Chip, who looked back and then moved aside. Through the metal bars, she could see a man beaming up at her. “Madison D’Amico, how are you?”
A tuxedo, she thought. He’d been wearing a tuxedo—where? Had she met him at MoMA, maybe, one of her mother’s events? His voice, like a stick dragged over gravel, made louder by the glass of vodka in his hand. Her father, catching her eye, raising his eyebrows and then letting a look slip toward the man as if he were emitting an unpleasant smell. Her hand over her mouth, hiding her own smile. The smell of her mother’s makeup, which she’d been allowed to borrow, the waxy feel of the lipstick. The unpleasant static of her tights as they snagged on the tulle skirt of her dress. Years ago, at least—she’d been littler, then, an accessory for her parents’ evening.
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