In any case, they remained engrossed on this particular morning even after Amanda came downstairs. This was new. On any given day, Amanda would have said that she’d kill to enter a room of the house and have no one notice her presence. The youngest of three, with two older brothers and excessively attentive parents, she was used to being poked and tickled and yanked and sneezed on from the moment she crossed the threshold. Every floorboard in their house groaned, protesting years of abuse beneath the tyrant energies of adolescent male feet and hands and elbows.
“Hi,” she said. No one replied. She slid across the floor on her socked feet and twirled her hand through the air, performing a sloppy curtsy. The image of Isabel came into her head, unbidden—that carefully measured enthusiasm, the way Madison’s mother always greeted a crowd. Charity auctions or teenage girls or Bob’s colleagues; she treated everyone with the same warmth at a distance. Watching her move through a crowd felt like watching some electric-hued, exotic fish cut a swath through a school of minnows.
Amanda pasted a grotesque beauty-queen smile on her face and waved to her parents, assuming they’d get the joke. No one loved to analyze the D’Amicos like they did.
But all she got was a blurry look from her father, who raised his head at half speed, as if he’d sunk far underwater and then been warned not to resurface too quickly.
“Hi, monkey,” he said. “Sit with us for a minute. Let’s all talk before you take off for the day.”
Sometimes, Amanda came home from school to find her father standing just at the edge of the swimming pool, motionless, his head tilted back as if a necessary theorem, or perhaps his next column, might be written in the treetops.
“I’ll guess,” she said, sliding into a chair across from them. “You’re going to say . . . that we’re moving! Finally. You’ve been listening to my misery all these years, and we’re leaving Ye Olde Greenwich behind. Pedal to the metal, gone for good. You’re giving me a chance to maybe one day spot another teenage brunette out there. I am so on board.”
“Amanda,” her mother began.
“Or, a black person,” Amanda said. “It might be nice, you know, to occasionally sit in class with a black person.”
“There are black people in Greenwich,” her father began, and Amanda threw herself down across the table, miming the trauma of being struck down by his comment.
“Da-ha-ad. Let’s not start telling straight-up lies.”
“Amanda,” her mother said again, sharper. “This isn’t a joke. We need to talk to you.”
Her father put one hand to his bald pate and cradled it for a few seconds. He took off his glasses and rubbed vigorously at his right eye.
“Amanda, we are all aware, I trust, that I’m no fan of Bob D’Amico. I’ve always believed the man to be just one step shy of a riverboat gambler. But there’s been—he’s going to come under quite a bit of scrutiny. And it won’t just affect him, or Weiss. It’s going to affect, you know, everyone.”
Amanda stared at her bowl of dry cereal. Sometimes, when her parents took her into the city, she’d run down into a subway station and feel certain that she’d just missed a train. She’d hear nothing, none of the clanks and thuds of the departing trains, but the air would tingle with the sudden absence of motion, the new void, and you’d just know.
“I’m sorry, but I think you’ve buried the lede. What are we talking about?”
“I want to go over this before you leave for school,” he said, shaking off her mother’s hand on his wrist. “Lori, just give me a second. Let’s get granular here.”
Amanda busied herself with the toddler-simple task of pouring milk into her cereal. One of the intractable conditions of having a Yale economist for a father was the constant demand for not merely awareness, but interest, not only conversational trivia, but actual understanding. She’d acquired a certain amount of skill that allowed her to manage this aspect of her father’s parenting style; after all, she was an athlete living alone with two professors, so she either had to fob him off in an inoffensive way or else make a good-faith effort actually to understand what he did for a living. Why some people—who had presumably never seen him sit down on, and crush, the pair of glasses he’d spent an hour searching for—thought he was so brilliant.
But it was childish of her, she knew it was. Like she was too good to try to understand any of this? Madison had been her best friend for years.
The summer before this last one, she and Madison kept going to see the two Judd Apatow movies at the Twin Cinemas, sometimes paying to see the same movie three or four times in a month because they were seemingly the only girls in Greenwich with strict parents, and couldn’t go to a party unless adults were present. That movie theater was closed, now.
All those hours she’d spent with Madison, and Amanda sometimes worried that her favorite thing about her friend was the way it felt to be around her parents. The way you felt both accepted and absolved, somehow. Amanda had been both grateful for and fascinated by the kind of rich people they were, that Isabel and Bob never acknowledged their ungodly amounts of money, never tried to remind anyone about it. Just kept buying house after apartment after house but otherwise didn’t discuss it at all. So that Amanda was excused, when she spent time there, from acknowledging the colossal disparity between her life and Madison’s. Their house had sometimes felt like the only place in Greenwich where she wasn’t being asked, commanded, to display all the ways her life was different from Zo? Barker’s, or Wyatt Welsh’s, or even Chip Abbott’s. They had a lot of flaws, Isabel and Bob, sure, but this was one thing they gave to her. And her own father had never, ever been able to accept that.
Now she did her best to drift somewhere beyond the outer borders of her father’s voice, until the moment he said that his next column would be focused on Bob.
“No,” she said. “No, you can’t do that.” She swallowed back the unpleasant bile taste of Madison walking down the hallway that past Friday, alone, her ponytail swinging through the air just behind her. The stale caramel smell of their lockers and textbooks mixed with disinfectant and air freshener.
“Amanda, I’m not asking.”
“Why? So you can kick them while they’re down?”
“Sweetheart,” her mother interjected, but her father erupted immediately, coming down over Lori’s voice and drowning her out altogether.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes. Is that so hard to understand? They deserve to be kicked while they’re down!”
“Why?” Amanda was sputtering. “Who will that help?”
“Us! The rest of us! It will help the rest of us to see them suffer.”
“Guys,” Lori was saying, “I don’t see how this is a productive form for this conversation to take, and if we’d just—”
Amanda realized she’d been leaning back on her chair’s rear legs, and now she let the chair fall forward with a clatter. Her knees smacked the edge of the breakfast table. She thought distractedly that the punch of the cold water would hit those spots first, those barely-bruises, when she slid into the pool later today, at practice. She left the kitchen.
LATER, DOWNSTAIRS, her father caught her by the arm just as she’d opened the front door.
“He’ll land on his feet, Amanda,” Jake said. “These guys always do. And then who’ll speak up for the lives he’s ruined? Who’ll make him answer?”