2. Tiffin Talks How I Spent My Summer Vacation
Ms. Robinson calls out a name if she remembers it (she mistakes Madison R.
for Olivia P., but there are so many Madisons and Olivias, we forgive her), then she joins the mayhem outside the dorms. Mr. Rivera, the fifth- and sixth-form English teacher, is the point person for the boys’ dorm, Classic North, though it’s the girls who check him out.
Mr. Rivera has grown his hair, it now curls up at the collar of his polo shirt, and it looks like he’s been pumping iron, because he’s showing off some pretty impressive biceps.
Royce Stringfellow, who spent his summer at the Research Institute at MIT (where he grew two more inches and kiss-cheated on Willow Levy with a girl from the Hawken School), squeezes Mr. Rivera’s arm and says, “Dude, are you on ’roids?”
Secretly, Rhode is pleased that someone has noticed his new and improved physique.
His summer sublet in the West Village came with the unexpected perk of a membership to TMPL, a gym that felt like a nightclub.
Rhode also played pickup ball at the West Fourth Street courts (he only joined games where everyone was older than he was, for the sake of his self-esteem).
Afterward, Rhode would grab a beer with his teammates at the Four-Faced Liar.
Rhode’s summer wasn’t only about draining buckets and pints, however.
One night in the sweltering middle of July, Rhode went on a Bumble date with a woman named Yardley, a humanities teacher at Stuyvesant High School.
Yardley had a well-bred, healthy, sailing-and-horseback-riding look that Rhode found appealingly familiar.
Over dinner at Bad Roman (which used to be a prestige reservation but was, on that night in July, only half full), Rhode learned that Yardley had gone to Deerfield in years that overlapped with Rhode’s at Tiffin.
They started playing the Name Game and found a shocking number of mutual acquaintances (Yardley’s roommate’s older brother had been Head Prefect at Tiffin in Rhode’s third-form year, yada yada).
Happily, Yardley didn’t cringe when Rhode told her he was back at Tiffin teaching English. Why would she? She was a teacher herself.
The date had gone well, the food was impressive, the conversation animated, even exuberant.
Although he was on a tight budget, Rhode paid both the bill and for Yardley’s Uber back to her apartment in Tribeca.
He kissed her good night, and she waved and smiled at him once she was in the car. Rhode sauntered home whistling.
Imagine his surprise when he texted the next day to see if she’d like to go out again, and she responded: No thank you.
Rhode texted back: Did I miss something? I thought we had a great time.
Yardley responded with the emoji of a red flag.
Red flag? Rhode thought. He spent hours combing back through their conversation looking for nits.
Yardley had asked about his romantic past, and he’d told her about Lace Ann, the baker who left him for the man who financed her croissant business.
But Rhode told the story in an upbeat, good-natured way.
He pointedly did not mention his entanglement with Simone Bergeron, the Tiffin history teacher who had strung Rhode along while at the same time conducting an extremely inappropriate relationship with a fifth-form student named Andrew Eastman.
Maybe Yardley heard about Rhode and Simone? The Name Game had darker purposes, of course: It was a sticky web of gossip. Maybe a Tiffin student who lived in the city—say, last year’s editor of the ’Bred Bulletin, Ravenna Rapsicoli—mentioned Rhode’s obsession with Simone to someone who knew Yardley.
When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. Rhode had probably just texted too soon, seemed too eager. That was the red flag.
Rhode knew he should give Yardley some space, but he found himself unable to do so. He texted back: I’m sorry to hear that. If you give me another chance, I promise I’m a green flag guy.
This was met with silence. Rhode was officially being ghosted, and although it had been only one date, it stung.
It took a few days of wallowing and introspection for Rhode to figure out how to use the experience to his advantage.
“Hey, Mr. Rivera, what’s good? Let me introduce Spence Thorpe; he was my Baby ’Bred last year.” The kid speaking is Reed Wheeler, who is now a sophomore and is showing even more aura now than he improbably showed as a freshman.
Rhode daps up Reed and shakes hands with Spence Thorpe. A “Baby ’Bred” is what the kids call the incoming students who come to Revisit Day in May. Each incoming student is assigned a present student to show them around. Sometimes those relationships lasted until the fall, sometimes they didn’t.
“Welcome to Tiffin, Spence.” Rhode consults his clipboard. “You’re in 501, that’s a corner room.”
“Whoa,” Reed says. “How did my Baby ’Bred score a corner room while I’m still living in 404 with Pinkerton?”
“Room assignments are above my pay grade,” Rhode says. “If you have questions, you can ask Mrs. Spooner.”
“ ‘Mrs.’ Spooner,” Reed says, using air quotes.
Reed turns to Spence, who is holding a trunk and sweating profusely.
“She was getting with Ms. Vandermeid all last year, then Vandermeid hit on Miss Bergeron and Vandermeid was asked to resign. Miss Bergeron was a total smoke, so it was probably worth it. Right, Mr. Rivera?”
Rhode frowns. No matter how under wraps Audre Robinson tried to keep the events that unfolded at the end of last year, the kids still somehow heard about it. “Why don’t you show Spence where the elevator is, Reed.”
“Yeah, dude,” Spence pleads as he shifts the trunk in his arms.
As the boys walk away, Rhode notices a group of sixth-form girls looking at him. Checking him out, maybe?
After the disappointing fallout with Yardley, Rhode was inspired—for the first time in years—to write.
He’d always rolled his eyes at any author who said, When I sat down, the words just flowed right out of me!
But this is precisely what happened to Rhode in the week following his date.
He wrote a short story entitled “Green Flag / Red Flag,” told from a he said, she said point of view.
The man thinks the date goes well, the woman thinks it goes horribly—and the secret sauce is that both perspectives feel equally true and compelling.
Rhode was so happy with the story that he sent it to his former editor, Oscar, who now worked as a literary agent. Oscar called him immediately, declaring Rhode’s story a brilliant commentary on the bleakness of modern dating.
“It’ll be the next ‘Cat Person,’” Oscar said. “Viral for sure. I’m thinking The New Yorker, Esquire, or this site called LitBoo, which is all over TikTok. I’ll make some calls.”
Yes! Rhode thought. He treated himself to a beer at the Four-Faced Liar even though it was eleven o’clock in the morning.
By the end of the week, Rhode learned that The New Yorker had loved the story but passed; Esquire also passed, though it would be open to reading more of his work. LitBoo had made an offer of sixteen hundred dollars and would publish online in three weeks.
“Okay!” Rhode said. He wouldn’t beat himself up about the rejections from the magazines he’d actually heard of.
He googled LitBoo and found it was a respectable online community of eighty thousand.
The demographic, it seemed, was mostly millennial and Gen Z women.
This would be a new audience for Rhode’s work, which could only be a good thing—or so he thought until Oscar called with a request from LitBoo.
“Seems one of the editors read your second novel and found it misogynist-adjacent.”
Shit, Rhode thought. Would his novel The Writers, with its underdeveloped female characters, haunt him forever?
“Are they dropping the story?” Rhode felt a panicked sense of loss; he’d already spent the sixteen hundred dollars three different ways in his mind.
“No,” Oscar said. “But they wondered if you’d be willing to publish under a pseudonym. Initials, for example.”
Initials? Rhode thought. Plenty of fine authors did this—H. G. Wells, E. M. Forster, A. M. Homes, S. E. Hinton. But the point of publishing for most authors—Rhode included—was recognition. He wanted readers to know this was his work.
“Sorry, man,” Rhode told Oscar. “I can compromise on many things, but not my name.”
“I get it, I’m sorry I even had to bring it up,” Oscar said. “I’ll tell them either they use your name or we’re taking the story elsewhere.”
“Thank you,” Rhode said. But the instant he hung up, he thought, What if no one else wants the story? Had he just sabotaged his only chance?
Not at all. When Oscar informed LitBoo that altering Rhode’s name in any way was a deal-breaker and that the ask itself was so offensive that Oscar was considering selling to another platform just on principle, LitBoo apologized and upped its offer to an even two grand.
“Everyone wants what they can’t have,” Oscar said when he called to tell Rhode the good news.
Right, Rhode thought. If he’d played hard to get with Yardley, they might be a couple right now.
But if he and Yardley were together, Rhode wouldn’t have a story—and, frankly, he’d rather be published than dating.
Rhode’s story, “Green Flag / Red Flag,” went viral (well, micro-viral) with more than twenty-five thousand downloads. Not only that, but LitBoo had told Rhode they would be submitting it to Best American Short Stories 2026.
When Hakeem Pryce’s parents pull up in their Cayenne and when Hakeem gets out of the back seat and asks, “How was your summer, Mr. Rivera?” Rhode can answer honestly.
“It was the best summer of my life.”