“Well, yes.”
And then they’d come to the Welsh gate. They were silent as her father crawled up the sloping drive, through a second gate, then brought the car to a stop in front of the house. There was an actual fountain lit up in the courtyard, like some ruin they’d forgotten to tear down before they rebuilt their modern, if faux Mediterranean, mansion. The desire to make fun of it out loud, with her father, was so sharp it felt like an actual hunger pang. Amanda reached down to gather her purse from the floor.
“I’m not totally worthless, Dad,” she said. “I know these aren’t real problems. On the global scale. I know that. But you’re bullying someone I actually know, and then you’re making me stay here, where I see these people everywhere I go.”
“It’s my job, Amanda. I’ve told you that.”
“It’s not your job,” she said. “Not all of it. It’s not your job to enjoy it the way you’ve been enjoying it.”
“It is,” he said, “part of my charter. To speak truth to power.”
“You know you sound exactly like him,” she said. “When you two start complimenting yourselves, you sound like twins.”
“This isn’t yours to—” he was saying when she slammed the door. He’d taken her insult in stride; she’d hoped it would land with a bit more fanfare, maybe even unsettle him, to think that she might have been following news about Bob D’Amico from other sources. When she turned back to read his face, though, he was just peering up through his windshield at the big, glowing house.
WHEN WYATT WELSH ANSWERED the door and appeared to have no clue who she was, Amanda almost turned right around. She’d once sat at a table on the quad and actually told him and some of his idiot friends the story of how her parents met, on a subway platform.
But all that was waiting behind her was her father, driving home alone, and so she stepped over the threshold and into the house. Sure, whatever, Wyatt Welsh didn’t remember who she was. This was fine.
There was another fountain inside, emerald tiles wavering beneath the streaming water. The entire entryway seemed designed to fool visitors into thinking that the windows and balconies would offer a sweeping vista of the Italian Riviera rather than a few acres of tidy Greenwich lawns.
Wyatt turned away from her after a cursory greeting and led her back into the house. She couldn’t figure out what his costume was; he was just sort of dressed up. But then she heard voices, and they were walking down a short flight of stairs into a sunken living room.
The walls were painted the color of peach flesh, and two enormous forest green sofas faced each other at the center of the room. There was a tiled fireplace, with a fire going. The house was the kind of nice house that reminded you of its own taste, its own expense, but also of the way it had clearly been modeled on a magazine spread devoted to someone else’s even nicer house. With every large art book stacked on a low table, with every ghostly seating arrangement of furniture that had clearly never been used.
Zo? sat on one sofa with her feet curled beneath her, a pair of chunky black heels abandoned beneath the low coffee table. Three guys stood above her, almost directly over her, so that she was forced to let her head loll back onto a couch cushion in order to look up at their faces. They were dressed in varying degrees of costume—one wore a hunting cap with earflaps, and another wore a Batman cape over his otherwise normal outfit, a black mask pushed back on his forehead. One of them was a senior on the football team; he wore only his Greenwich Prep uniform and carried his helmet in one hand, which Amanda thought was actually pretty clever. Everyone else trying so hard, but he had just come as himself.
Zo? caught sight of Amanda and stuck out her tongue.
“I love your costume,” she called. “Get over here.”
Amanda, for some reason, obeyed.
“Wait until you see Madison’s costume,” Zo? said. “We went shopping in the city last week. We had to, like, bully her into buying it, I didn’t realize she was so against showing skin. Which you must know already. But she’s dressed as an angel! I mean, tell me that’s not perfect.”
The big difference, Amanda thought, between looking like me and looking like Zo? Barker is that random parts of our bodies look so different. Maybe her stomach isn’t any flatter than mine, but her collarbones look like really fragile straws, right beneath the surface of her skin. And I always have sweat on my upper lip, red bumps on the backs of my arms. And she has none of these things, and it doesn’t look like she even tries not to have them. All her effort is always concealed, and all of mine is always right out in the open.
“I can’t wait to see it,” she said. “Sounds adorable.”
“Allie’s looking for vodka,” Zo? announced. “All we have right now is rum and cranberry, it’s repulsive.”
She raised her voice artificially on those last words, so that Wyatt, who had been on his way out of the room, turned back.
“You were free to bring whatever. This isn’t your house, Barker,” he said, and left the room.
Zo? ignored him and patted the couch next to her, handing over a Solo cup. Amanda drank it down in one gulp, without having planned to do so, then held it out for more.
“So, I wanted to talk to you,” Zo? said. “Before Madison gets here. I mean, things must be so terrible for her right now. Have you been over there? Is her dad, just, like, devastated?”
“He’s been spending a lot of time in the city, I guess,” Amanda began, careful. She didn’t know if Bob was back in Greenwich yet.
“How would you know?”
“Because I saw him,” Amanda said. She knew she would regret this. There were so many different ways she could come to regret this. But she could see how seductive it was, in its way, Zo? Barker’s approach. She made you feel both interrogated and trusted, like a sidekick she was grilling to prove to herself what she already knew without question: that you were loyal.
“You saw him where? You went to their place in the city?”
“No,” Amanda said. “Just, around. I ran into him when I was walking near Grand Central.”
Zo? raised her eyebrows.
“He’s just chilling by himself in the city? Do you think he’s avoiding them?”
“No,” Amanda said, and the story was so slippery, she was losing her grip, every corner she tried to grab was sliding away from her. “No, it was like—it was a meeting. He was with a woman who used to work for him. I’m sure it was something official, like a meeting about something.”
Zo? smiled at her.
“A meeting on a random sidewalk,” she said, and then Wyatt was back in the room, and Zo?’s attention split away from Amanda’s face, from her fumbling attempts to explain Madison’s family.