Confoundingly, Oliver and Amber had wound up living in the same Singer-Baird apartment where they’d met, which had once been Fran’s childhood apartment. A sociologist could write a hell of a paper on communities in which people are constantly moving into each other’s homes.
I found myself standing in what was, for me, the third iteration of the Hoffnung kitchen. The fridge was covered with cheesy rest stop magnets from all fifty states, but otherwise the aesthetic was sleek and spare, a black leather sectional dominating the living room. Both Oliver and Amber hugged me and offered drinks, and I was thrilled to learn that Amber was expecting.
Two women I didn’t know stared at me from the corner. It’s funny: Because Fran had forgiven me, I hadn’t particularly considered that I might be walking into hostile territory tonight. Fran had assured me that admissions numbers were fine. This might change, I thought, if any cover-up on the part of Granby came to light, but I didn’t bring that up. The women leaned together to talk, and I assumed it was about me. But maybe I was being paranoid. Maybe it was just that I’d traveled from out of town and although I’d worn my mask in the door, I’d taken it off to drink and snack. Whoever brought the glorious pimiento cheese dip four years ago had made it again.
“You’re gonna send your baby to Granby!” I said to Oliver. I was already a little buzzed from the glass of whiskey I’d had in my hotel room. “You came here like What the hell is boarding school, and now you’ll have little baby Dragons!”
Oliver was teaching programming and web design. He told me about a programming student from Botswana, one who’d just gotten into Stanford. He was beaming.
I said, “Look who drank the Flavor Aid.”
Geoff had made himself at home on the couch, chatting it up with my erstwhile host Petra. She looked riveted, and I tried to remember if she was single, tried to figure out if Geoff was flirting. I took him in through her eyes: handsome and successful and funny, with no trace of the awkward adolescent I could still see in him. Petra hadn’t said hello to me yet, but at least she wasn’t scowling, either.
The young English teacher who’d told me to read Shirley Jackson asked if I’d managed to. I said I had, and we gushed about We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and he poured me a celebratory cocktail despite the glass of wine in my hand. He told me I had to come back in April for the musical, which he was helping with. “Maybe I’ve just been living in the woods too long, but these kids are extraordinary,” he said.
Dana Ramos came right up and hugged me. I told her Silvie was learning leaf shapes in fourth grade science, and she gushed. “Children are zoochauvinistic, is what I like to say. All animals, no plants. It would be far more useful to understand plants first!”
Geoff was telling the story of the kid who kept an elaborate glass hookah in his dorm room for a whole year, simply perching a small lampshade on top; no teacher ever looked twice. Petra found this hilarious, rocked her head back to expose her long neck.
Priscilla Mancio walked into the party with a bag of chips. I didn’t know how she felt about the hearing, or if she was still in touch with you. If she came near me I’d just ask about her bulldog. But the moment she saw me, Priscilla put the chips down, said something to Oliver, gestured at her phone, walked out. A made-up emergency. Well, perfect, and now we could eat her chips.
Anne introduced me to the new director of development; he said, “I’m familiar with your work,” and walked away.
It occurred to me that I might actually be ruining this party.
My phone buzzed with a message from Mike Stiles: You won’t believe where I am. There followed a photo of the Samuel Granby statue. Then: I was hanging w my nephew and now I’m walking around in a daze.
I wondered why he’d texted me and not, say, Robbie, but I didn’t dwell on it long; this could be my ticket out. I wrote back, I’m on campus too! and asked if he wanted to meet on the Lower Campus quad in twenty.
I showed the texts to Fran, who found them hilarious. She said, “I’m giving you my master key! Knock yourself out.” As if Mike and I would go make out in the senior lounge. But Fran was tipsy and insistent, wresting a key from its ring.
17
Mike stood in a pool of light in front of Old Chapel, breathing into his cupped palms. The temperature had plummeted in the past hour, so while I’d thought we would take a walk, the first thing I did was show him the key. We let ourselves into the darkened sanctuary, saw our way around by the exit lights. It was a quarter the size of New Chapel, built for a school of a hundred undernourished boys, the benches puritan-narrow and puritan-hard.
“Let’s look at the dead kid plaques,” Mike said. There were, I’d forgotten, twenty or so small memorials, engraved brass on wood, lining the side wall. All for boys who’d died while students, none more recently than the 1920s. Mike turned his phone flashlight on to read them. Three had died in the same dormitory fire in 1840. Two different boys, fifty-some years apart, had both drowned in the Tigerwhip on the nights of their graduations, presumably drunk.
“You’re gonna think I’m weird,” Mike said, “but these were the first things I loved about Granby. On my eighth grade tour.”
“Maybe more morbid than weird.”
“It felt so legitimate. I knew I wasn’t getting into Deerfield or Exeter, but these made the place feel old and serious.”
I said, “I’d definitely never heard of Exeter or Deerfield when I got here.”
“Oh—Iowa, right?”
“Indiana.”
“My dad and brother went to Exeter. Honestly they might’ve let me in just because of that, but I was too scared to risk it. My grades were crap.”
“They were?”
“Dyslexia. Took a while to work that one out. This guy here,” he said, illuminating the plaque for Louis Stickney, deceased in 1890, “this was an initiation ritual gone wrong. They dumped cold water on his bed every night for a week and he got pneumonia.”
“Initiation into what?”
“One of those stupid things.”
“A secret society? Lola implied that you were in one.”
Mike coughed out a laugh. “We thought we were a secret society.”
I was surprised he was willing to say this much, although I suppose the charm of adolescent hijinks had long worn off.
“I can’t tell you which,” he said. “It was honestly dumb, like a bush-league frat. You got initiated, that was about it. Sometimes we’d all wear blue, but no one even noticed. Once a year they’d have a Heritage Day thing where we busted out of the dorms at night.” He glanced at me. “It wasn’t March third, don’t get ideas.”
“But you’d swear loyalty?”
“Sure.”
If a significant number of boys on campus had sworn an oath to protect each other, that would be useful information for the defense team.
“Who else was in it?” I asked, and he laughed.
“Not Serenho, if that’s where you’re going.”
“I wasn’t! I’m—I hope you don’t think I think that. About Robbie.” I didn’t add that this was more because of his incapacity for time travel, and what I knew about you, than any great admiration of him—but it was still true.
“Right,” he said, and visibly relaxed. “A lot of people do. He’s been in the shit. I’m not blaming you at all, but these people online are nuts. Did you know his kids had to switch schools?”
I shook my head.
“Some whack job kept calling the school office. It was this little private school without security, so Robbie and Jen pulled them out and put them in public. I mean, it might’ve been a financial decision, too. He’s lost business. Like, a lot of business. They had just bought this house, and—I don’t know.”