The Privileges (18 page)

Jonas nodded as if this story served to confirm something he’d known all along. “Music sucks now,” he said. “It all comes out of a factory. It’s not about anything except wanting to be famous. How people can even listen to it is beyond me.”

Adolescence was all about overstatement; still, it made Adam sad to hear his son talking this way. “Well, cheer up,” he said. “Maybe punk is poised for a comeback.”

Jonas shook his head. “No way,” he said. “That world is gone for good.”

In the winter Robin had started showing up at the Moreys a lot more often. Not always with April either, or even preceded by a phone call; one night she showed up at their front door so drunk you could barely understand her, and Cynthia, after whispering to her for a few seconds, let her right in. There was a while where she was basically living there. April’s feelings about this kept turning out to be the wrong ones: when she wondered aloud why Robin continued to get away with murder in a way that April never could, her mother took her out on the balcony and told her that Robin was being physically abused at home, that one night at the Moreys’ Robin had taken Cynthia into the bathroom and shut the door and showed her a series of cuts and red marks on her stomach and chest
that had been left there by the power cord from a laptop. April acted totally shocked when the shameful truth was that she had heard that rumor before and thought that it was bullshit, that that kind of thing didn’t really happen to anyone she knew. In her least generous moments she had even wondered if maybe Robin was amping up all these stories about how bad things were at her home, not just for drama’s sake but because life at the Moreys’ was like some kind of spa for her: she came and went as she pleased, ate what she wanted, either studied or didn’t according to her whim. So April had to deal with her guilt over that. On top of which she felt disappointed and confused that Robin, who was her friend after all, had been moved to confess all this to her mother but not to her.

There was even one night when Robin’s father had shown up at their door, unannounced, to take his daughter back home. That was some drama. The doorman called upstairs and said that he was down there in the lobby, demanding to come up. Cynthia said no. Two minutes later the doorman called again. By this time all five of them, the Moreys and Robin, were gathered in the foyer staring at the video from the security camera. Robin’s father was just standing there in an overcoat, his hands in his pockets. “He says he isn’t going anywhere,” the doorman murmured into the phone. He seemed torn between excitement and fear that some sort of incident might imperil his job. “Ask if there’s anyone else down there with him,” Cynthia said to Adam, and when the answer came back no, Cynthia said to let him up.

They told Robin to go downstairs to April’s room but she wouldn’t; instead she withdrew into the living room, as far as she could get from the front door with her sight line unimpeded, as if her father’s reach were impossibly long. He was a good twenty years older than Adam and Cynthia and that seemed to sharpen his contempt for them. “May I come in?” he said on the threshold, and April’s jaw fell when her mother answered no.

When he made out Robin in the room beyond the foyer, standing behind one of the couches, he sighed. “This is ridiculous,” he said. “You are fifteen years old. You do not have our permission to be here. Get your things.”

Robin didn’t reply. “She has our permission to be here,” Cynthia said. “You might ask yourself why she feels safer here than she does in her own home.”

At first he ignored her, his eyes still on his daughter. Eventually he turned on Cynthia his most withering look. It was interesting to April that her father didn’t even try to come between them. Most husbands probably would have, even if they weren’t sure why. But her dad obviously felt, as she did, that if anybody needed protecting in this scenario, it was the older man, with his combed-back silver hair and his steel glasses.

“I recognize you,” he said to Cynthia. “All the parents talk about you. You like to play at being one of the girls. You’re the youngest mother there and yet the one least able to deal with getting old. I don’t know what kind of fantasy this is for you, but it couldn’t be of less interest to me.”

“You can see how eager your child is to have anything to do with you,” Cynthia said. “Kudos. As long as she feels like she’s in danger, she is welcome here. Her choice. Period.”

Even if you knew that parents sometimes talked to one another that way, it still seemed incredibly transgressive to overhear it. April turned and caught Jonas’s eye.

“She is fifteen,” Robin’s father repeated. “It’s a legal matter. If you won’t let her go, the police will have to get involved. I’ve lived in New York a long time and I know a lot of people.”

“Oh, you’ve said the magic word,” Cynthia said, smiling. She took a step closer to him. “Police. If you want to go there, we’ll go there. I took pictures of what she looked like last time she came over here.”

Something changed then, not on his face so much as behind it, but still April could see it. He knew he couldn’t intimidate Cynthia so he took one more shot at intimidating his daughter, calling to her over Cynthia’s shoulder to say that she had been forgiven for a lot of things, but she would not be forgiven for this. After he was gone the five of them stayed up almost all night, just watching TV in the media room, waiting for whatever would happen next without quite knowing what that would be. But nothing else happened at all.

The story was all over Dalton the next day. Robin and Jonas weren’t talking about it, but April had probably mentioned it to a few people. It bolstered the already considerable perception that April’s parents were the coolest parents on earth. And Robin’s misfortune, as misfortune will do, lent her an aura of respect, even a sort of celebrity.

But eventually Robin did go back home. Either the situation cooled down there or she agreed to pretend it had. That was the thing about families: once they decided to close ranks, for whatever reason, you really had no way of knowing anymore. In school she was just like always, laughing and way into sports and usually surrounded by guys—a little needy for April’s taste, maybe, but nothing that seemed like a red flag. If it was an act, she was fooling herself with it at least as effectively as she was fooling anybody else. The only one who really had trouble getting over the whole thing, April recognized, was her mother. Robin had all but stopped returning Cynthia’s texts, and when she did her tone was disappointingly chirpy and distant. It wasn’t just that Cynthia didn’t believe everything was now all right; she didn’t seem to
want
to believe it. More than once April came home from school and found her mother sitting at the dining room table with a cup of coffee, crying.

April was proud that her home had such a rep as a stable place that it would actually occur to her friends to go there if they were in trouble. There was always somebody staying over at the apartment, not necessarily because they needed a place but just for the hell of it. Other kids’ mothers would try to gain their trust by acting young, like they understood everything, and it was just pathetic. But April could tell that her friends really did consider her mother to be one of them—older, but just enough for her superior knowledge to seem attractive, like an RA in college. They confessed to her, they asked her advice, they shopped with her (though part of that was surely mercenary, since any time Cynthia thought something looked cute on them she would buy it). They would even talk about guys with her, which should have seemed creepy and out of bounds and yet somehow it did not. The fact that all the other Dalton mothers hated and mocked her only bolstered Cynthia’s cred.

April’s own circle had contracted a bit after eighth grade when a dozen or so kids went off to boarding school. Just like that they were gone from your social life, though occasionally in between classes some kid would immodestly flash a text or a camera-phone photo from a departed peer. The move didn’t always work out for them; there was always some story circulating about someone who had gotten himself expelled from one of these places and been forced to return home, not to Dalton but to the kind of second-tier private school that still had openings mid year. Still, an air of sophistication attached itself even to those of them who failed. April had no desire to go live in a regimented compound in some picturesque New England village where there was nothing to do at night and you weren’t allowed out anyway, but she felt a touch of envy all the same. They were her age but, just by virtue of leaving, they seemed older.

Of course they did come back in relative triumph for a few days at Thanksgiving and then for longer at Christmas. Their homecoming for any vacation was pretext enough for a series of parties. On one of the first really warm nights of the spring, April went to one at a townhouse in the East Fifties, thrown by some girl they didn’t even know—she’d been at Spence and was now home from St. Paul’s—but dotted with enough Dalton kids to make her presence there plausible. She even ran into Robin on the street outside. The townhouse itself was phenomenal, a real old-money museum, and its trashing had a terrible inevitability. It was like the reign of Pol Pot, when legions of ten-year-olds were handed carbines and put in charge of national security. On the first floor was the kitchen and living room, speakers hidden somewhere in the walls blasting Jay-Z, every surface already sticky to the touch. April saw a Matisse on the wall, one of those paintings where figures danced in a circle, and she almost asked someone if it was real but then realized what a stupid question that was. It was hot inside, even with all the windows thrown wide open, and bodies were everywhere. A girl named Julie from April’s Spanish class was lying on her back on top of the piano. She opened her mouth, and a guy in a hockey jersey poured streams of lime juice and vodka from two bottles he held up about
a foot above her head. He put the bottles down, placed his hands on either side of Julie’s head, and shook it. When he was done, Julie sat up and opened her mouth to show she’d swallowed it all. She bowed in triumph, but no one was looking.

April thought she’d just stick to beer for now. Robin was scanning the crowd for some guy named Calvin who was probably home from Andover and whom she’d hooked up with one night over Thanksgiving break. She staked out a spot halfway up the front-hall steps and said she’d promise to wait there if April would bring her a beer. April asked some strange girl where the keg was (you never asked a strange guy a question like that unless you were hitting on him, because that’s how he’d interpret it anyway) and found it in the bathtub off the maid’s room, behind the kitchen. She saw that some people had opened up the drawers in there and were trying on some clothes that belonged to the maid or the cook or whoever had been given the night off. Unreal. But low-rent shit like that went on at every party, though usually not this early. People continued to throw parties even though they always went bad in this way, every single time. Strangers showed up, fights broke out, cops came, shit got ruined. They were allowed to do whatever they wanted.

Naturally by the time April made it back to the front hall, struggling not to let the two beers she was carrying get dumped all over her, Robin was gone. There was no way April was going back through that mob again, so she kept going, out to the stoop, where some guys were smoking and where it was at least not so sweltering—a little chilly, in fact. She didn’t recognize any of them, but one was wearing an Andover sweatshirt. She asked him if he knew a guy named Calvin. He nodded, and smiled broadly, apparently at the very thought of Calvin. He was either stoned or else just one of those guys who always appeared stoned.

“Haven’t seen him, though,” he said. “Want to get high?”

She did want to get high, being at this stupid party where she didn’t really know anybody made it seem imperative to get high, but she didn’t like the looks of the guy: his interest in her, for all his glazed affect, was too obvious. Her cell phone started buzzing in the
back pocket of her jeans. She saw the caller ID and scowled and smiled at the same time. “Where the fuck are you?” she said.

“I’m at this party,” Robin said. “Where the fuck are
you?”

“Outside on the stoop,” April said, taking a couple of steps away from the stoner, who shrugged. “I looked everywhere for you.”

“I think not,” Robin said, giggling. She was already wasted and April felt a flash of resentment. “We’re up on the third floor.”

“There’s a third floor?” April said, looking up.

She got there eventually, picking her way past a group of boys who had found a silver tea tray and were trying to surf down the stairs. Robin, red-eyed, hugged her for a good thirty seconds, which told April that it was X. But the X was now all gone, supposedly. They were all in some kind of den or study or something; this house was a trip, one of those houses that even this crowd couldn’t quite believe somebody they knew lived in. The room itself, as a place to hang out, was tolerable—only about ten of them, the music reaching them as a kind of modulating throb—but the downside was that they were now so far away from the beer that there was no question of convincing anyone to make the trip. Someone passed April a warm bottle of Grey Goose and she did the best she could with it.

Two guys sitting about ten feet apart were texting each other and collapsing in laughter, and someone else was making a big show of checking out all the books on the shelves. Robin was talking with her eyes closed. Not the best sign. April was sitting in a club chair that was so comfortable she could have slept in it, even though it smelled like beer. Who would invite strangers in here, she thought? Who was this chick from St. Paul’s, and where had her parents gone without her? April didn’t understand some families. Most families, actually. Just then, as if on cue, her cell phone vibrated in her pocket again; it was Cynthia. April tried to think quickly. She was a little fucked up, but if she didn’t answer now her mother would just keep calling, and she wasn’t likely to get any less fucked up as the evening progressed. She walked out to the landing and answered. She was able to keep it short on account of the noise. A minute later she returned and they were all staring at her.