The Thoroughbreds of Tiffin

1. So Back

Oh, what a difference a year makes.

Last September, Charlotte Hicks rode through the wrought-iron gates of Tiffin Academy for the first time in the passenger seat of her mother’s garden center van, the lone student entering the school as a junior (known at Tiffin as a “fifth-former”).

The drive to Tiffin—located in western Massachusetts—from her Baltimore suburb had been tense: Charlotte (who went by “Charley”) and her mother, Fran Hicks, weren’t speaking.

Fran was opposed to Charley going to boarding school—but Charley despised her mother’s new husband, Joey, and would not live in the house with him another minute.

Charley’s father, Thad Hicks, who had died unexpectedly the previous fall, had gone to boarding school, and Charley decided she would too.

But Charley had been terrified. When they’d stopped for breakfast at a Panera in Connecticut (they’d left their house in the middle of the night in order to reach Tiffin by nine), Charley took only a few bites of her oatmeal before excusing herself to throw up in the restroom.

What had she set in motion? Was her mother actually…

right? Should Charley have stayed at Loch Raven High School, where she was securely at the top of her class, with her best friend, Beatrix, by her side?

Charley held no delusions: While she was respected at Loch Raven for being smart, and accepted because Beatrix dragged her out to parties on the weekends, Charley knew she was nobody’s idea of normal.

The back of her mother’s van was filled with crates of books and Charley’s collection of houseplants.

She was a freak.

Charley recalls riding onto Tiffin’s campus, past the buildings she now knows are the Edward Tiffin Student Union (the “Teddy”), the Mary Tiffin Sinclair Library (the “Sink”), the Manse, the Schoolhouse, and the Gothic chapel, taking it all in as she watched the suspiciously attractive members of the student body greeting one another with squeals and hugs.

Charley had to remind herself that she wasn’t at Tiffin to make friends, and she certainly didn’t come to fall in love.

She was attending Tiffin to escape the hellscape of her house… and to get an elite education.

Looking back, Charley can see how her first year at Tiffin had started poorly, gotten worse, then, through a series of unexpected twists, become the best time of her life.

If someone had told her that, a mere twelve months later, she would be driving to Tiffin not in her mother’s van, not with her mother at all, but rather in the black pickup truck that belonged to Andrew Eastman, the hottest and most intriguing boy at Tiffin, she would have cocked a skeptical eyebrow and turned back to her Edith Wharton.

Once East pulls onto the two-lane road that leads to campus, Charley lowers her window and stretches her legs outside into the sun like a girl in a country song.

She has been DJing all the way from Baltimore, and East has indulged her eclectic playlist—Vampire Weekend (for him), Lorde (for her, though he sang along to “Supercut”), old Outkast, Mac Miller, Chris Stapleton, Morgan Wallen, Phoebe Bridgers, Cage the Elephant’s “Whole Wide World,” and “F**k You” by CeeLo Green, which they agreed was the best driving song of all time.

East blows past the line of cars waiting at Tiffin’s front gates, and Charley lets out a triumphant whoop (who even is she?) as they circle around campus to the service road and pull into the Back Lot, which is where East—and East alone—is allowed to park his truck.

He shuts off the ignition and turns to Charley with that lazy half smile of his. “We made it,” he says. “You should call your mom.”

Charley will not call Fran, though she does send a text: Arrived safely.

At first, Fran Hicks said no to East driving Charley to school: She was Charley’s mother, it was her job, Baltimore was four hours out of East’s way, they were both too young to take on that kind of road trip without adult supervision.

But then East showed up. He charmed Fran Hicks, presenting himself as a mature young man who had spent his summer interning at his father’s commercial real estate company.

He’d driven his own vehicle to Tiffin the two previous years, he had a clean driving record, he would take it extra slow with his precious cargo—Charley, her books, her parlor palm and fiddlehead ferns.

Oh fine, Fran Hicks said. Charley knew that, secretly, her mother was relieved.

Fran suspected her husband, Joey, was having an affair; all summer, she’d been stuck to him like a barnacle on a boat.

The one time Joey wanted to go to a Dead it survived the drive just fine.

East grabs her hand. “Come on, Charles,” he says. “It’s time to make our entrance.”