“In May?”
“In May?” Charlotte mimicked, in a British accent. “What, you’ve been working at People Like Us for a day and you find the common people’s habits confusing?”
“I’ve been working there three weeks, Char, and my plan for signing up the nation’s elite is already in full effect.” Evelyn gestured toward the spectators. “It’s basically People Like Us membership sign-up day today. The people here just don’t know it yet.”
“Ah, Charlotte, you located some crackers.” Barbara Beegan had reemerged, casting a blockish shadow over the girls. Her pedicured toes were strapped into flat sandals, which merged into pleated powder-blue pants with sturdy thighs bulging within, up to a crisp white oxford. She ended in dry butter-colored hair arranged in fat waves and a pair of big black sunglasses. In her prime, after a diet based on green apples, Barbara Beegan had been thin; now she was the kind of stout woman who covered up the extra weight with precisely tailored clothes. She smelled, as she always did, of leather. She frowned as she examined the boxes. “These have pepper in them, though.”
Charlotte made a silent Munch-scream face at Evelyn. “Well, Mrs. Beegan, they were all I could find.”
“They’ll have to do, I suppose,” Barbara said, looking over Charlotte’s head.
“Say thank you, Mom,” Evelyn said.
“Yes, thank you,” Barbara said listlessly, and opened a box to begin arranging the crackers in a semicircle.
“I live to serve,” Charlotte said, bowing briefly. “Ooh, there’s Mr. Marshon from prep-year history. Do you think he’s still mad at me from when I reenacted the defenestration of Prague with his snow globe? I’m just going to say hi. Back in a jiff.”
Evelyn took the opportunity to slip away. Second Field’s grass had turned muddy and choppy with tire tracks and Tretorn tracks—Charlotte was smart to wear boots—and Evelyn picked her way over the chewed-up terrain to the field house. She watched in amusement as one alum tried to rein in a toddler while wiping down a Labrador who had apparently been swimming in the Ammonoosuc, but when the alum looked at her, she quickly coughed and looked away.
In the eight years since she’d graduated, she had not been back to Sheffield much, not wanting to see her classmates boasting about their children and jobs and weddings while Evelyn muddled along at her textbook-marketing job. Barbara, on the other hand, had been a steadfast alumna despite not actually attending Sheffield, and every year would call up Evelyn, pushing her to go to Sheffield-Enfield, and every year Evelyn would say no. Evelyn’s penance for this resistance was a recurring lecture about how she was aging and needed to meet someone soon and shouldn’t give up chances to meet eligible alumni.
This year, though, was different. After the textbook publisher laid her off a few months ago, she’d managed to talk her way into a job at People Like Us, a social-networking site aimed at the elite’s elite. Even Charlotte, who was brilliant about business, thought that social-networking sites were going to be huge, and Evelyn sensed if she was a success at People Like Us, she could choose whatever job she wanted.
In the interview, Evelyn had dropped a few references to Sheffield and, pulling from her memory of her upper-year class Novels of the Gilded Age, Newport. When the co-CEOs asked her how she’d access the target members, she’d bluffed, mentioning two Upper East Side benefits and making it sound like she’d attended them when she hadn’t. The made-up details she’d provided about the parties, the flower arrangements, and the specialty cocktails came out of her mouth surprisingly easily, and though it had made her feel unsettled, she’d reasoned that everyone stretched the truth in interviews. For $46,000 and a lot of stock options—Charlotte said this was how it worked these days—Evelyn became the director of membership at People Like Us, charged with recruiting society’s finest to set up profiles on the site. Now, three weeks after she’d started, she needed some actual recruits and had headed to Sheffield’s homecoming for that reason.