Edgewater (2 page)

“Candy-
empire
owners,” Beth-Ann corrected, her face as deadpan as her voice. Humor and nuance were lost on her. “And some people need to be the ones to serve those people and do all the things we don't want to do.”

“That guy's handling, like, a dozen tables,” I said. “It's not his fault he wasn't born a candy empress.”

“That's not the point,” Beth-Ann said. “It's simply not my destiny to serve anyone. But clearly I've offended you and your future plans to be in the food-service industry.”

Heat rose to my cheeks, and my underarms were suddenly dripping with sweat. Even the restaurant's full-blast air conditioner was no match for the kind of hot it was outside; besides which, feeling self-conscious always made my body temperature rise a few notches.

“I've been thinking, you need a new passion project anyway,” Beth-Ann told me.

I fought to keep my voice steady. “I have no idea what you're talking about.”

“You and Orion haven't exactly been in sync lately.”

Orion had eaten a piece of moldy hay, and it had taken me longer than it should have to figure out the problem. But he'd been better for a week, and Beth-Ann knew it. “People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones,” I said.

“I don't have a problem with Easter. No one knows him like I do—and vice versa. He knows I can be a bitch, he knows when I'm sad, and he even knows when he's crossed me.”

“Sounds like your horse is the psychic,” I said. “And yet the two of you haven't been able to communicate when it comes to clearing the two-foot oxer.” Every time Beth-Ann had approached the double-railed jump on the North Course, Easter had slowed, and she'd had to turn away.

“Are you saying Easter's not much of a jumper?”

Isabella's gaze shifted back and forth between Beth-Ann and me, as if she was watching a tennis match. “Come on, you guys,” she said.

But I paid her no mind. “I'm saying, I bet you twenty bucks,” I said.

And there it was.

At that moment, I was just another entitled teen having dinner at a restaurant that most people went to only for a special occasion. My horse was stabled at an exclusive riding program, and in two months he and I would return to Hillyer Academy, the boarding school I'd attended since the ninth grade. Back home in Idlewild, the small town on the eastern end of Long Island where I technically lived, everything was in ruins, thanks
to Aunt Gigi. But I'd used my trust fund to get away and keep up appearances—I'll be the first to admit, they were extraordinarily extravagant appearances—and it had worked: Here, all the other girls thought I was one of them.

They couldn't have imagined how different it really was for me if they'd tried.

“You're on,” Beth-Ann said.

“When?”

“Tomorrow morning, before rounds.”

“Fine.”

“Fine.”

It was my turn to treat. As dinner wound down, so did my adrenaline rush from battling Beth-Ann, and I was a little nervous as I handed my Amex over to the waiter. With the “lack of sufficient funds,” chances were Aunt Gigi was late on paying our bills again. But, I reminded myself, she did always pay them eventually. The credit card companies knew it and extended our credit anyhow. They were probably happy about how Gigi conducted things; my family was good for the money, and they got what we owed them, along with all those extra interest charges and late fees.

I planned to add an extra-big tip to our bill, to compensate for what the waiter had, no doubt, heard Beth-Ann say, but just as I'd dreaded, my Amex was denied. And then my backup Visa. Before I could ask the waiter to try splitting the bill across both cards, Isabella leaned over and handed him
her
Amex. My cheeks burned as I made a mental note to call home first thing in the morning, apologized to Isabella, and loudly promised that the next dinner was on me.

But there would be no next dinner. By morning, everything had changed.

We were on the North Course, Orion and I, and Isabella and Sultan, and of course Beth-Ann and Easter Sunday. My dark hair itched under my helmet. I could feel the tendrils that had escaped from my ponytail curling at the base of my neck. But if the heat was getting to Beth-Ann, you couldn't tell. She looped around, showing off. Easter was in good form, as if horse and rider really had been communicating telepathically. The bet was on, and Beth-Ann pressed the horse forward, gathering speed. I knew at least five paces in that they'd do it, effortlessly sailing over, clearing the two feet and then some.

“Guess you owe me twenty, Hollander,” Beth-Ann crowed as she reined in Easter.

“Lorrie Hollander!”

I turned to see Woodscape's director, Pamela Bunn, waving madly from the end of the fence. She'd walked a long way from the administrative offices, and by the time she reached me, the underarms of her blue oxford were half-mooned with sweat, and her usually pale face had a baked-cherry redness.

“Lorrie, can you hand Orion off and come back with me to Whelan Hall?”

“Okay.”

Beth-Ann and Isabella watched as I led Orion to one of the stable hands. I met up with Pamela on the other side of the building, and we cut across the flat pasture to the winding pathway behind the tack room. Pamela was breathing heavily. She couldn't muster the strength for small talk to fill the space between us, and that was fine; I couldn't, either. Something was
wrong. I knew it. What had happened at the ATM had just been the first sign, the harbinger of doom.

We finally made it to Pamela's office, and I took the folding chair opposite her large, battered desk. “Lorrie,” she began, leaning forward on her arms. As if the weight of what she needed to say demanded the support. “I hate to say this, but it looks as if we're going to have to send you home.”

“What? Why?”

“Your aunt has not paid your tuition, and you cannot stay here for free.”

“She can get a check to you by the end of this week,” I insisted. “She's really bad at managing the money, but the funds are there. I swear.”

“I believe you, Lorrie. And if you could get her to transfer the money today, I'd overlook it. But she hasn't responded to any of our calls or e-mails. Today was as far as we were willing to extend the deadline.”

“Listen, I know Gigi is . . . erratic,” I said. “But she always—”

“Lorrie, please don't make this harder on me. This is a terribly regrettable situation for us, too. We decided to overlook the initial delays because you were here last year and because you're a talented rider. But now we're weeks into the program. It's not feasible for us to provide you room and board free of charge. Not to mention the fact that it's simply unfair to the other girls, whose families
have
paid.”

A large drowsy fly had begun to bat the mesh window-screen behind Pamela. I felt the same way. Tired but looking anywhere for a way out.

Pamela Bunn wasn't a cruel woman. I knew that. We were
both a bit like the fly. Trapped in this room, itching to escape. “Surely you've seen these invoices?” she went on, not unkindly. “In your in-box?”

I nodded. And I'd also received a voice mail and had a pointed conversation with Pamela's assistant, John, last week: “We're gonna really be needing that payment soon, okay, Lorrie? If you could call your aunt? Lorrie?”

I
had
called Aunt Gigi, a few times, even before John had tracked me down, to tell her to please make the transfer or send the check or do whatever she had to do to pay up. She'd said she would take care of it.

She always said she'd take care of things.

“My aunt isn't the most together person,” I said.

Pamela Bunn stopped me with a raised hand. “You need to speak with her today. Either she arranges for the transfer of funds, or she arranges for your travel home. There's a flight today out of Raleigh at six that would get into New York by half past seven,” she said.

Oh God. This was really happening.

“I can recommend a service to transport Orion, which shouldn't be more than a few hundred dollars,” Pamela continued. “He could be home with you in two days—three, max, if it comes to that. I think this is the best plan.”

All I could do was nod. It was too shocking for us both, in a way. I was going to be kicked out of Woodscape, and Pamela had to do the kicking. We stared at each other, almost unable to breathe through our intense mutual discomfort. But now it was done. There was nothing to say.

I said something anyway. “You're making a big mistake,” I told her as I scraped back my chair and stood.

“I am terribly sorry, Lorrie,” she answered. “I feel awful about this, truly.”

But did she, really? Mostly, she looked relieved as she sat back and folded her arms across her chest.

I left Whelan Hall and headed straight to the dorms. Back in my room I made one last-ditch call to Aunt Gigi, which, of course, went unanswered. And so I began to stuff clothes into my suitcase: underwear, socks, shirts, jodhpurs. I pulled my jeans out of the bottom drawer and dug through the pockets for spare bills. I also had a few dollars on my dresser, and I was pretty sure I'd stuck the change from lunch on Monday in the pocket of my barn jacket.

As soon as I finished packing, I'd call Lennox. My best friend would put my flight on her parents' credit card and pick me up from the airport. And she wouldn't even ask why, because she'd already know.

My final financial tally was twenty-eight dollars, in fives and ones. At that moment, it was all the money I had access to in the world. I folded eight ones into my wallet. The rest I slipped into an envelope and left on Beth-Ann's bed.

Woodscape could go ahead and toss me, but I was still a girl who honored her bets. Even if I was no longer a girl who could afford to place them.

2

ONE FALSE MOVE

LENNOX PICKED ME UP HERSELF IN A CAR I'D HEARD
about but never seen, a silver Audi with a tan interior that still had the new-car smell to it. It had been an early summer birthday present from her moms.

Lennox's moms, Allyson and Meeghan, were partners in life and in business, they always said. They'd founded an architecture firm together after graduate school and set up a home office on the Idlewild estate that had been in Allyson's family for two generations. When they decided to start a family, Lennox and her sister, Harper, were carried by Meeghan, using sperm from Allyson's brother, Craig. “My uncle who is also my dad,” Lennox sometimes joked. “Just your average American family.” Lennox had Meeghan's brown skin, stirred a shade lighter, with Allyson's (and Craig's) angular face and catlike eyes.

Lennox and I had met the first day of Pony Club at
Oceanfront Equestrian Center. We were six years old, and neither one of us had ever been on a horse. But somehow Lennox already had the whole place figured out, and she grabbed my hand to show me the peephole in the tack room. In exchange, I gave her a plastic Pegasus key chain. That same summer, we tied for the Marmalade Junior Cup. We'd been best friends ever since, and as we exited the Long Island Expressway, I could feel her restlessness with everything she wanted to ask me. She paused longer than she needed to at the first stop sign, turning to give me a look.

“You're not ready to talk,” she said. An observation. Not an inquiry.

“Not yet.”

The morning's memories were too fresh—Pamela's sad eyes, the walk to John's truck, head-down like a criminal being led to her cell, the judging stares of the other girls as I'd climbed into the van to the airport.

“That's all right,” Lennox told me. “In the meantime . . . maybe you'll come out to Oceanfront tomorrow? Claire has jumps school, and I told her I'd watch for moral support.”

“I don't know if I'm ready to see Claire just yet,” I said.

Claire Glidewell had started out in Pony Club with Lennox and me, and she never missed an opportunity to ask me about the state of my house. “How did you let it get so dirty?” or, “Why don't you clean it up yourself?” Meanwhile, I was certain that Claire Glidewell herself had never so much as made her own bed. Lennox always said she didn't think Claire meant any harm by her questions. But if you asked me, Claire had a little bit of the Beth-Ann Bracelee Superiority Complex in her.

“Sorry,” I told Lennox.

“That's okay,” she said. “What if we meet for lunch after? Just you and me. With ice cream.”

With ice cream
meant: long talk. Lennox and I had had a lot of those over the years. Her goal was to be a political journalist and expose all, but when it came to my life, she guarded my secrets like Fort Knox.

“Mmm,” I said. “With ice cream.”

“Okay, cool,” she said. “In the meantime, want a Twizzler or five?” She produced a fresh pack from her purse. Lennox was the kind of person who always had snacks on her. If ever I were asked to make a list of my favorite things about her, it would be quite long, and that trait would be right at the top.