One Hot Fall Term (Yardley College Chronicles Book1) (7 page)

And nerves—I am definitely feeling nerves. But I am going to succeed.

I’d heard the old story in which the professor tells you to look to your right, then your left, and two out of the three of you will be gone by the end of the year. A really smart friend of mine in high school freaked out over that concept, until I pointed out that she would be the one left, as long as she was determined to succeed.

I am determined to be one of the last ones standing. I have to do this, otherwise, what am I going to do with my life?

I have a list of some books I need, though the required textbooks for the School of Architectural are few in number. Following my on-phone map, I locate the University Store, where textbooks, novels, souvenirs, sweatshirts, snacks are sold. It’s closed this early in the morning of course.

Okay, I’ve accomplished something scholarly.

Then I hike around the campus, figuring out where my classes are. It’s only at dinner in the res cafeteria that I realize that I forget to text Ryan all day. And I didn’t receive any messages from him.

***

Through the week, I buy books, explore the campus and the small college town of Westingham and take part in Frosh Week activities—lots of parties, silly scavenger hunts. There’s a big football game on Saturday with a rival college, and I go with Lara. Drunk guys try to pick us up and we have to constantly rebuff their invitations and tacky pick-up lines. I’ve called and texted Ryan a bunch of times over the week, but not too often, since he’s been busy with physical training.

The phone calls don’t get any easier. I just have to hear his voice and I’m so sexually and emotionally frustrated, I want to scream.

On Saturday night, Jonathon’s limo arrives at eight promptly. Under my bare thighs—my dress is short—the leather of the bench seat in the huge car is supple and satin-soft. Lara sighs and stretches her legs along the seat across from me. She wears rolled-up jean shorts, sandals, an off-the-shoulder, grey sweatshirt over a tank-top, and she looks stunning.

She plucks a bottle of champagne that’s on ice on a silver bucket, but struggles with the cork. “I don’t usually drink, but Jonathon’s champagne is amazing,” she says. “Da-y-am, I don’t think I’m going to get this open in this lifetime.”

I take the bottle from her. Before I moved to Milltown, I used to sneak out to parties where the older boys knocked back beer and Jack Daniels, and the girls drank champagne. The stuff was cheap, sparkling, and sugary. I didn’t drink more than a swallow but I learned how to remove a cork. Of course those corks were white plastic, but this one works exactly the same way. I pour two crystal flutes of champagne as we roll through the Yardley campus.

“Jonathon’s party is a tradition,” Lara tells me as she takes a glass. “Every year he throws a huge bash on the Saturday night before classes start. Some people get so drunk they aren’t even sober by the time classes begin.”

Tradition? “How long has he been doing it?”

Lara taps her lips. “Six years, I think.”

“He’s been going to Yardley for that long? Is he getting a master’s degree?”

She shakes her head. “He started in Economics. His dad wanted him to go into law, but he doesn’t want to, so he keeps changing his major. After Economics, he did Art History, then English Literature. Now he’s in Mathematics.”

Professional student
, I think, using a term I’ve heard my stepfather use. Which is strange, because I usually avoid remembering things he has said to me. If Jonathon started here at eighteen, that makes him twenty-four now. I want to be graduating at that age. By then, I would want things to be happening in my life.

“Why doesn’t he just do what he wants?”

Lara pours more champagne for both of us, then lifts the bottle and squints into it. “Fortunately, while these bottles are heavy, there’s not much in them,” she observes. “He can’t do what he wants. His father would cut off his allowance.”

“He’s a grown adult. Surely, he wants to do something else. Why doesn’t he build his own career?”

“He gets about thirty thousand dollars a month.”

I cough on my champagne. I can’t say anything. It would be very hard to walk away from that much money. But I’d rather have nothing than feel I couldn’t do what I wanted. That’s why I’m at Yardley—so I’m not ever going to be dependent on anyone and I can do what I want.

I pull out my phone and text Ryan, telling him about the limousine and the champagne. He sends a text too, apologizing because it’s been a couple of days since he answered me. But he’s been busy with his training.

I picture his physical training like in movies, where Ryan clambers up rope ladders, runs through tires, slogs through mud on his stomach. Maybe it’s more intense: parachuting from helicopters, running simulated searches in enemy zones. Things I’ve seen on T.V. news. I have no idea if this is what he’s actually doing, but I know he’ll be exhausted. He’s also on a curfew and expected to go to bed early, so I stick my phone back in my purse.

I pick up the champagne and take another drink because I’m feeling sorry for myself and lonely. But I’m already feeling a giggly and giddy so I set it down.

The limo glides onward. The campus sits on the outside of Westingham, a small town near the White Mountains. During the school year, the college takes the town over, but it’s still quaint. We drive down the main street—a long, winding street filled with antique shops, eclectic restaurants, ice cream places, candy stores, and inns with huge front porches and flags that whip and snap in the cool fall wind.

Further out are chalets rented by students who want to live off campus. Some students stick around in the summer, getting jobs in the town’s tourist haunts.

“Is this where Jonathon lives?” I ask Lara.

“His dad bought him a house when he first went to Yardley. It’s another twenty minutes from town.”

The limo sweeps up a mountain road lined by cute Swiss-style chalets and monster homes of stone and slate and shimmering glass. Then the road dips down the other side, where a small valley is laid out before us, thick with gloriously colored maples and dark firs. At the bottom, a lake sparkles, reflecting the last of the golden sunset.

Then we drop low so the vista disappears and the road twines through the valley and begins to climb again. The car leaves the main road and follows a narrow, tree-lined drive. Branches arch over it, almost touching in the middle. Then the trees stop suddenly, followed by rows of well-manicured shrubs with blood-red leaves, and the woods have been tamed and turned into a stretch of mowed lawns.

Last night, I dreamed I went to Manderley again…

The opening line of
Rebecca
by Daphne Du Maurier echoes in my head. I am a complete book worm. My mother shared many books she loved with me, even though, in those days, she didn’t know I had anything I needed to escape.

At this moment I feel like the girl in
Rebecca
, the girl who cleverly has no name. She is the reader’s eyes as she follows the drive, waiting to see the famous Manderley, filled with trepidation, nerves, and feelings of inadequacy—three feelings with which I am very familiar.

We follow more twists and turns.

“We’re here,” Lara announces, finishing her champagne in one quick tip of the glass.

The limo smoothly purrs around a last curve, and the drive opens onto something breathtaking and sparkling.

There is so much glass it is as if there is no house there at all. Deep in my heart, I wish we’d rounded the corner and found Manderley, but as an Architecture student, I am awed by Jonathon’s sprawling, severe modern house. It glows with light, and the twilight sky is purple behind it, making the house appear to be made of pure gold.

People are everywhere. Hundreds mill outside on the huge lawn, and inside there are dozens more, revealed by the windows which put almost every inch of the house on show. The drive makes a sweeping semi-circle in front of the door. Our driver pulls in, gets out and opens the car door for Lara and I.

He tips his cap to her, I thank him—I mean I know it’s his job, but I like to be polite.

Then we are whisked inside with other arrivals and we step not into Manderley, but into a different world. This one, I think, is the Great Gatsby. Gatsby in the modern world, in a house made of glass, white maple, tile, and granite.

The foyer soars above us, three stories tall, and it faces south, so it is deliciously warm. Music flows through the house, and it looks as if the entire student population of Yardley is here, making for a crowd you have to squeeze through.

Lara takes my hand. “This way,” she says.

I can’t quite believe a college guy—even one who should have graduated two years ago, and is therefore an actual adult—has a house like this. Maids in uniform move through the rooms, and I spot a bald man in a bowtie and a jacket with tails. He stands with arch correctness.

“Is that—” It can’t be, can it? “A butler?”

She looks. “Yes. That’s Carleton.”

I let out a whistle. Jonathon has a staff.

“I’m starved,” Lara says. I’m too busy staring in astonishment at everything to think about food. The living room is four times larger than my mother’s entire bungalow. Two-storey glass windows display a breathtaking view of the golden and red leaves, the mountains, and the deep blue lake nestled in the valley.

Lara points. “It’s a private lake, owned by Jonathon.”

I move to the window, drawn by the water. It’s not a huge lake, but really—a private lake? Jet skis whizz around on it. I make out colorful blobby things floating on it, and realize they are inflatable rafts and trampolines. A long silver dock juts out, like a needle lying on blue satin.

The dock makes me think of Ryan. I’d love to be attending this party with him. This house is an adventure and I want to share all my adventures with him.

I find myself drifting through the party, like Nick Carraway in the Great Gatsby, an observer who is not part of the wild action. The music comes from a live band, who are playing in an enormous room that Lara calls the ‘gallery’. Gleaming pale maple hardwood provides the floor on which fifty couples are dancing. I don’t know the group, but Lara informs me that Jonathon hires up-and-coming bands to play his parties, who are then signed by the indie record label that Jonathon helped finance.

 I begin to see why Jonathon sees no need to finish school. According to the guests, who gossip freely about him, Jonathon has used his allowance to invest in bands, tech start-ups, bars, and restaurants. Technically all of these should have drained him dry, yet from the babble of conversation I learn that on each venture he has made money. He’s accumulated his own personal fortune of twenty million dollars.

Intriguing. He shouldn’t be going to college. He should be teaching at it.

Like Gatsby’s parties, this one is a live thing in itself. It is sumptuous and decadent.

Lara takes me to the dining room. A table, long enough to fit the entire Royal family, runs down the center of the room. The dining room is separated from the rest of the house by French doors with stained-glass panels. The feel of the room is unique. Instead of modern glass, this room has a row of arched windows, beautiful mouldings, scrollwork along the edge of the ceiling. Brilliant colors above my head catch my eyes and I peer upward. Painted on the ceiling—the entire hundred foot length of it—is a mural of an autumn woodland scene, with a brook winding through red maples, all done in impressionist style.

Lara is halfway down the table, so I grab a plate, a huge piece of square china which undulates like the waves on the lake. It looks far too graceful for food. Already, a woman in a uniform is sweeping up the shards of a broken plate, while a drunk-looking boy is being led out of the room by friends.

I balance the plate carefully.

There are tiers of oysters, all bearing labels that describe exotic sauces. Trays of meat—carved roast beef, chicken breasts, quails, a roasted pig that is being served by a chef wearing a white toque. There are warming dishes of vegetables—broccoli, asparagus, baby carrots, and exotic things I don’t recognize—along with more pastas than I’ve seen on Italian menus. One is orzo, colored black with squid ink. Another is fettuccini with lush, pink shrimp. There are a dozen types of salad—from Caesar with silvers of fresh parmesan to a spicy Thai salad that smells heavenly.

Another table placed opposite the windows contains plates of cake and other desserts. Edible silver gleams on some of the cakes. There is a dainty silver creation that holds six different cheesecakes, and there are trays filled with chocolate truffles.

I don’t want to eat very much. I know it’s dangerous, since I’ve already drunk champagne and I should eat to soak up alcohol, but there is too much to see. I’m filled with the sense that I have to hurry and see everything, even though I know I’ll have the entire night to experience this.

After we eat, Lara and I go back to the gallery and we join a group of girls who are dancing, their purses piled on the floor in the middle of their circle.

“Aren’t you going to find Jonathon?” I shout to her, over the music. The pounding bass makes the floor vibrate.

She shrugs. “He’ll have me found soon. He doesn’t spend much time at his party. He said he had something important he had to talk to me about tonight.”

Like Gatsby, throwing a party that didn’t interest him for an agenda of his own? I’m curious. Gatsby’s desire was to impress Daisy, the rich ‘nice girl’, and win her heart. What’s Jonathon’s motivation?

***

After dancing and sucking back mineral water to fend off dehydration, I really need a bathroom. Jonathon’s butler had approached Lara and took her away to see the man himself, which is so Gatsby-esque that I rolled my eyes.

There are six washrooms in Jonathon’s house and all of them are locked tight. Giggling comes out of some of them, moans out of others. I finally pound on one door, shouting, “Really? Have you seen how many bedrooms there are in this place?”