“Why didn’t she tell me?” Chad says. Mixed in with his emotions is the sting of betrayal. Bibi just walked off the day before like everything was normal. See ya, Long Shot.
“She wanted me to tell you,” Ms. English says. “She was afraid of a messy goodbye, I think. Some people are like that.” Ms. English nudges Chad with her elbow. “And the two of you grew so close this summer!”
“It wasn’t like that,” Chad says. He drinks deeply from his beer. It’s the first drink he’s had since May 22, and it gives him an instant buzz. “We were friends.”
“You were more than friends,” Ms. English says. “You planted that belt in the laundry in order to protect her.”
No, I didn’t, Chad wants to say—but he can’t lie, so he shrugs.
“I take it that belt belonged to your mother?” Ms. English says. “Has she missed it?”
Ha! No. The last thing Chad is worried about is Whitney missing her belt. “I thought Bibi might have taken the belt and I didn’t want her to get in trouble.”
“All of my cleaners are extremely honest people,” Ms. English says. “With squeaky-clean résumés. I see to that.”
“What about me?” Chad asks. He finishes his beer; he probably drank it more quickly than he should have. Without his even asking, another one arrives in its place. “Did you do any background research on me?”
“No,” Ms. English says. “You, I hired out of desperation.” She laughs, and Chad has to smile. “I had a feeling about you, but it was a gamble. That’s why I call you Long Shot.”
Yes, Chad gets it. Preppy dudes from wealthy families don’t clean hotel rooms—except this summer one did, and he did it well, he thinks. “Thank you for taking the chance,” he says. “This summer helped me.”
“Helped you?” Ms. English says.
Chad stares into his beer, then takes a long swallow. “Remember at my interview, I told you I messed up?”
“Yes, Long Shot, I do. I’ll admit, I’ve wondered about that statement periodically over the summer. You’re such a hard worker, conscientious, respectful, prompt, responsible, and, as I noticed in regard to your relationship with Barbara, thoughtful and kind. I can’t imagine you being otherwise.”
“Oh, but I was,” Chad says. “I was otherwise.”
Ms. English pats his back lightly. “You don’t have to share,” she says. “Unless you want to, in which case I will listen with rapt interest.”
Chad thinks it over. He has done everything right this summer but he hasn’t taken the most important step in moving on: He hasn’t talked about what happened with anyone. Share, the word Ms. English used, makes him feel like she’ll accept part of the burden he’s been carrying around.
“Something happened this spring,” Chad says. “On May twenty-second.”
On the morning of May 22, Chad woke up freshly graduated from Bucknell University with gentleman’s Cs, looking at a delicious, responsibility-free summer on Nantucket with his parents and his sister, Leith, before he joined his father’s company, the Brandywine Group, in September. Chad’s parents were driving to Deerfield Academy to pick up Leith, who had just finished her junior year. Paul and Whitney Winslow were making an overnight trip of it because they liked to include a romantic stay at the Mayflower Inn. (Chad didn’t like to dwell on this, obviously; they were his parents.) All he cared about was having the house in Radnor to himself so he could throw a little graduation party.
Before his parents left, his mother kissed his cheek and said, “Please be good, Chaddy. And remember to take Lulu out every two hours. She can’t make it to the door by herself anymore, so you’ll have to carry her.”
“I will,” Chad said. Lulu was their fifteen-year-old dachshund whom Chad loved like another sibling. He would be good to the dog—but TBH, he couldn’t wait for his parents to leave.
He’d invited everyone he’d ever known to the party, including a bunch of guys from Bucknell, some of whom had road-tripped for hours to get to the Winslow home. Chad wanted the event to be a step up from the parties he’d thrown in high school, so he bought steaks to throw on the grill, and a bunch of the girls he invited showed up with potato salad and guacamole. Tindley Akers, whom Chad had known since nursery school, brought pot brownies. Chad sampled one as an appetizer—and it sent him flying! After dinner, Chad started a bonfire in the firepit while a bunch of kids splashed around in the pool. Things got wilder from there; honestly, Chad couldn’t remember all the details. He knelt for the Full Send beer funnel multiple times; he did shots of J?germeister and hoovered cocaine off the vanity in the downstairs powder room (that became a joke—“Meet me in the powder room”—though Chad felt guilty when he looked at his mother’s little embroidered towels and fancy soaps).
Thinking about his mother made Chad remember the dog. He was supposed to take her out every two hours, and how long had it been? He found Lulu on her bed on the screened-in porch. Chad dutifully carried her outside, let her whiz, and then set her back on her plaid Orvis bed. She looked so old and forlorn that Chad almost wanted to tell everyone to go home while he and Lulu snuggled on the sectional in the rec room to watch Family Guy—that was their thing; Chad was certain that Lulu understood the show because it always held her rapt attention—but what was he, nuts? It was a party! His friends were here!
Still, he couldn’t just leave Lulu to wallow in her old-dog misery, so he went in search of a rawhide or a treat, which required a trip to the basement—where Chad’s attention was snagged by his parents’ wine cave. (They pronounced it “kahv,” which made Chad and Leith cringe.) He snatched a bottle of champagne off the rack, and upstairs, he grabbed a ten-inch chef’s knife from the kitchen. In Chad’s final week of school, his professor of French culture had shown the class how to saber the top off a bottle of champagne.
Chad ran outside to the deck, but the party was so out of control, there was no way to get anyone’s attention. Everyone was in or around the pool—swimming, drinking, smoking, making out, dancing. The outdoor speaker blasted Pop Smoke’s “What You Know ’Bout Love.”
Chad ran the blade of the knife along the throat of the champagne bottle, just as Professor Legris had shown them, then hit the bottle with the blade, and—whoosh—the top of the bottle sliced off, neat and clean. Bubbles spewed over Chad’s fingers. He enjoyed one split second of blissful satisfaction—the sabering worked! This was a party trick he could use for the rest of his life!—before he saw his college roommate and best friend, Paddy, hunched over, holding his face.
Somehow without even knowing, Chad knew.
He ran over to Paddy. “You okay, man?”
There was blood spurting out of the fingers that Paddy was holding over his left eye. The cork and the top of the bottle with its thick glass edge had hit Paddy in the face.
“Call nine-one-one!” Chad shouted, but nobody heard him and Chad’s phone was over by the outdoor speaker, controlling the music. He grabbed the nearest person—Tindley, as it turned out—and called the ambulance from her phone.
Paddy wasn’t making any noise, and he was as white as a sheet. Tindley had the presence of mind to bring Paddy a damp towel for his eye. Chad held Paddy’s arm, the one that wasn’t pressed to his face, and wished like hell the cork had hit anyone but Paddy. Paddy Farrell was not only Chad’s best friend; he was a genuinely good and smart person. He’d been a scholarship student at Bucknell. His dad was a long-haul trucker and his mom worked as a legal secretary; they lived in a town of four hundred called Grimesland, North Carolina.