“Okay,” she said. “Enjoy your fucking witch hunt.”
“No,” he said. “I know you know better than that. People trusted him, Amanda. With their livelihoods. They gave him the freedom to make their decisions for them. They’re the tragedy, not him.”
She focused on the clouded copper umbrella stand by their front door, the one that held mildewing umbrellas and single gloves divorced from their erstwhile partners, and a golf club that had almost certainly been placed there in error during one of her father’s fugue states.
“While you’re doing this to him,” she said, “I have to keep living here. I have to keep going to school with Madison. She’s—”
Her sense of her own moral rectitude wavered, for a moment, but then her father didn’t know, surely had not noticed, that she had been a terrible friend to Madison all summer. That she’d been moving on, sort of, until this started to happen.
“She’s my best friend,” she continued. “You’re making a choice, and you didn’t even ask me first.”
“It isn’t a choice,” he said. “There is quite literally no explanation I can think of whereby he hasn’t committed some sort of crime. They told their investors the firm was solid, sweetheart. They announced earnings in June that can’t possibly have been real numbers. I know that’s not—maybe I should be explaining this differently—”
She was looking, still, at the umbrellas. Small things, the sorts of things you cast off as soon as you came into a room, had always accumulated in the corners of this house. Those small things—that was what they had to show for their life, here. They left traces of themselves all over this house to prove how different they were from the antiseptic, tidy, public families all around them, even though these ephemera were still chosen quite carefully. Bric-a-brac from Ios, from Budapest, from Oslo. So her parents could tell stories about their semesters as guest lecturers, visiting scholars. So everyone would know they were in demand. All these seemingly offhand treasures left lying around, but anything actually embarrassing, actually unsightly, was packed away in a dusty shoe box under a bed somewhere. These damp umbrellas didn’t fit the narrative. They might be the only truly unglamorous things on display in this house.
“I don’t think I’m wrong here, Amanda. Do you think I’d put you through this otherwise?”
But she knew, more every time he opened his mouth, that her father wasn’t interested in her answers to his questions.
“You know how this works,” she told him, and left the house.
AT SCHOOL, SHE WAS FAMOUS. It made her ill. Never in all her time at Greenwich Prep had she been approached, in one month even, by half as many people as were clamoring to get close to her today. The worst were the girls, girls she was certain had never known her name until now, had known her only by sight as someone who was always standing next to Bob D’Amico’s daughter. These same girls were jealous now—of Amanda Levins!—because they believed that she was playing a series of exciting, demanding roles: confidante, nurse, enforcer, publicist. They assumed she had access, above all else. And wasn’t that really, in the end, what everyone at Greenwich Prep wanted? To be the right kind of insider? That was why every one of these girls’ parents had moved here, had followed one another from their starter apartments to their classic sixes uptown to, finally, “the country,” their movements and decisions so thoroughly scripted by the migrations of the previous generations.
She probably shouldn’t hate her classmates, then. For seizing the chance, on this juiciest day, to follow every code they’d been taught. None of them were actually so pathetic or misguided as to want to be Madison right now. Or at least they were smart enough not to cop to those longings in front of Amanda, an unfriendly observer. But they wanted desperately to brush themselves against the scandal. To know something the rest of the school didn’t. To be needed.
That was maybe the first thing she understood that morning, each time an unfamiliar, manicured hand clutched at her elbow. Teenage girls were so desperate to be needed. None of them actually wanted boyfriends, or high drama, or true pain. They just wanted to feel essential, exposed in some crucial way to the vicissitudes of the world. And so they did things like give blow jobs in movie theaters, cry in public when something tragic happened to strangers across the country, throw themselves into her path in the hallway to ask her how Madison was feeling today. How she was managing. Did Amanda know anything. They just wanted the communal energy of crisis, the sense that they had to yank their best selves from somewhere deep within. They wanted, so very badly, to rise to the occasion.
And yet there was something more, too, she had realized by the afternoon. They didn’t know what this meant. They didn’t know what destructive forces had gathered in New York or how close they might come to Greenwich Avenue, to school, to the back steps of the public library on West Putnam where they all hung out waiting for their SAT tutors, to their very own houses. When they asked if Amanda knew anything, they weren’t only asking about Madison. They were asking Amanda, of all people, whether their fathers were going to lose their jobs, too.
She tried to distribute information with as little fanfare as possible, tried not to enjoy her own clipped efficiency.
“She’s doing well,” she said repeatedly. “Really, really well.”
And: “I think it’s best if we just give them all the privacy we can.”
And: “You know, I haven’t even really read anything about it. It doesn’t really interest me, to be honest. It’s mostly gossip.”
The truth was that she had not seen Madison yet that day. They had no classes together. This was the first year that neither one of them had flounced into the dean’s office with Isabel or the more reluctant Lori in tow, to insist that both girls needed to have Mr. Schrode for Honors English, or Mr. Coombs for European History. Amanda tried to remember whether Madison had suggested their usual approach, whether she’d called in late August to compare class schedules. If she had, Amanda had probably ignored the call. Late August wasn’t so long ago. Things must have already been teetering at Madison’s house. Amanda put it out of her head.