Now, winter break was about to start. They’d been on four dates. Some dim, scrambled part of her brain knew that it must be a conscious decision on his part not to push for anything much beyond his tongue in her mouth and his hand up her shirt. But this felt charmed, she felt lucky. The sharp corners of any distressing thought felt muffled, unimportant.
Seeing him was the only thing she had any interest in doing for the next two weeks. Her mother did have a tree in the foyer, tall and fragrant, its spice filling every room on the ground floor and even the hallway at the top of the stairs. But Madison had known from the start that the tree wasn’t for her. It had been standing there, a complete, twinkling package, when she came home from school one day in early December.
Decorating the tree as a family had been Gran’s favorite Christmas tradition. She’d loved it more than her annual Christmas open house in Georgetown, more than she loved a solitary, quiet winter evening drinking mulled wine from a jelly glass out on Shelter.
And now it was apparently one more thing they were just going to discard in silence. It didn’t matter to Madison, she wasn’t upset over it herself. But it made her sad on behalf of the twins. They hadn’t even asked any questions about the tree. They’d just walked into the room, looked at it in doleful silence, and then walked quietly upstairs together.
She let her head loll back against the torn leather of her train seat.
“I’ve been to this place before,” Zo? said. They were headed to Grand Central, the first stage of a plan Zo? had dictated to them earlier this week.
“You have not!” Allie insisted. “You would have told me.” She linked her arm through Madison’s. Zo? still hadn’t looked up from her phone.
“Are we going there because Wyatt will be there?”
“I have no idea where he is,” Zo? said. “We’re going to meet new boys, not follow around the same ones we’ve known since we were eight.”
“Men,” Madison said. She looked out the window and for the first time she realized they were coming out of this endless autumn, that the gray-streaked houses and parked cars were decidedly the elements of a winter scene. The sidewalks and pavements everywhere had that ice-bitten look so that you knew they’d be cold to the touch. It was only three thirty, but it would be dark soon.
“Excuse me?” Zo? looked up from her phone.
“If we meet anyone at this bar, it’s going to be men. Not boys,” Madison said.
Zo? snorted. “That’s very optimistic.”
Madison put her forehead to the window, feeling her skin shrink back momentarily at the chill, keeping it there, closing her eyes. She spoke very little for the rest of the train ride, but this did not seem to bother Zo?, and Allie was too busy letting herself imagine, out loud, every single thing that could possibly go wrong with their plan. Someone at Greenwich Prep would notice their absences during eighth period. Her mother’s assistant would forget that Allie had called to say she’d be going home with Zo?. They’d run into a family friend at Grand Central who would realize it was far too early for them to have attended a full day of school. The fake IDs Zo? had gotten from her cousin’s girlfriend at Choate would so little resemble their actual faces that they’d be arrested on the spot. It didn’t seem to occur to Allie that cops in New York might have something better to do than come collect them from the street outside a bar that would surely rather just send them on their way.
Madison imagined a world in which she could turn to Allie and speak to her honestly. She had newfound access to things Allie couldn’t possibly know. That it was always the plans like this one that actually succeeded, the white-knuckle moments that implausibly came off. It’s the things you take for granted, she would have liked to tell Allie, the things you believe in without question or fear—the things you don’t even know enough about to view as dangerous—that are sure to leave you vulnerable, exposed.
She had all this new knowledge, she was realizing these past few weeks, and no one who cared to hear it.
COMING UP OUT OF THE TRAIN always felt like being launched from a sluggish cannon. Making your way through the clammy tunnel that smelled of newsprint and exhaust, the air uncomfortably close to your skin even in the dead of winter, the archway that spit you out onto the endless, swarming floor of Grand Central.
There was a fluid rhythm to everyone’s movement in that room. You felt like one small part of an enormous wave of humanity being swept up and out beneath the vast expanse of the restored ceiling, borne up to consider that span of burnished teal above you, its twinkling constellations. You fought the sensation that if you gazed up at it for a moment too long you’d be carried out into the city, not because you made the decision but simply because the anxieties and schedules of this many people propelled you forward with a strength greater than that of any engine.
Zo? moved with quick, decisive gestures toward the south exit. Out on the street they all stopped and looked at one another, as if the spirit of their caper had carried them as far as it could.
“Do you know how to get there?” Allie faltered. Zo? fixed her with a cool gaze.
“We’ll just get a cab to Stone Street,” she said. “I can look up the exact address on the way downtown. There’s going to be crazy traffic right now.”
They all continued staring at one another.
“Get a cab!” Zo? urged, and Allie tiptoed out into the street, her weight resting on the pads of her high-heeled feet, her knees buckling inelegantly. They’d all left their school shoes in Allie’s locker.
“You’ll love this place,” Zo? said, her eyes once again on her phone’s screen. “It’s wall-to-wall bankers. It’s all the way downtown, right near Wall Street, so they all go there for happy hours.”
Madison looked up at the slate sky. It wasn’t yet five o’clock and already the light was fading, leaving the windows of the tall buildings all around them burning in the gloom. It looked so beautiful, the city humming all around them, and all it was, really, was fluorescent office lighting viewed from a distance. Madison kept her neck back until she was absolutely certain her face wasn’t red, or that if it was, it would be indistinguishable from the redness of her wind-chapped cheeks. It had been a mistake, coming into the city. She knew that now, but it was too late. It was inevitable that when the cab pulled up, she would climb into the backseat.
Zo? tried to sit in the front seat, next to the cabbie, and when he rebuffed her with a guttural exclamation, she took her place next to Madison in the back as if that was where she’d intended to be all along. Without saying anything, she patted Madison’s knee twice.
The cab pulled into traffic and began its cruise down Park Avenue.
TWENTY-SIX
Jackson had never seen the house before, and from the moment they walked in, Lily remembered why that was. Why she’d structured her life this way, kept him always so far from this place.
“Jesus,” he said when they came into the kitchen. “You always say it’s tasteful. Are you kidding me?”