3. New Blood #2
This year’s dorm parents are Chaplain Laura Rae and Ruth Wully in Classic South and Roy Ewanick and Rhode Rivera in Classic North.
Ruth Wully agreed to serve as dorm parent this year as a massive favor to Audre.
Ruth is married to fellow teacher Kent Wully, and they live in a beautiful old Victorian in Haydensboro, so it required a fair amount of financial persuasion to get Ruth to agree, and thank god she did because there was no one else Audre could trust. Audre had asked if maybe Kent would want to replace Roy Ewanick as dorm parent, and Ruth laughed and said, “Oh hell no, Kent will be in heaven with the house to himself, though we’re splitting custody of Ali.
” (Alistair is the Wullys’ English cream golden retriever.
There are no pets allowed in the dorms, so Audre has had to make an exception.)
After the meeting ends, Audre and Cordelia take a moment in Audre’s office.
Audre is dying to tell Cordelia about the money—but she decides not to sound any alarms until she’s talked to Oak Bellamy.
(Audre can’t believe he hasn’t called her back.
Perhaps her voicemail didn’t convey the proper urgency.)
“So, what did you think?” Cordelia asks.
“They seem suitable,” Audre says. “Of course, so did Simone Bergeron this time last year.”
“Simone was never suitable,” Cordelia says.
“You remember the dress she wore to First Dance? I could have told you then she’d be trouble.
” Cordelia wants to add: She stole my girlfriend—but throughout the summer, Cordelia has spent two hours a week with the school psychologist, Dr. Pringle, processing Honey’s betrayal and subsequent departure and has arrived at a place of near-peace.
Honey is now living in Naples, Florida, near her mother’s memory care facility.
What she’s doing and who she’s seeing, Cordelia doesn’t know—and, she reminds herself, she doesn’t care.
Cordelia has made a vow to focus on her job, which blurs the boundary between head of admissions and Assistant Head of School.
Cordelia conducted an exhaustive search for new faculty and is delighted with her choices.
She senses that Audre is too—especially with Dr. Coopersmith—though Audre seems preoccupied.
Or maybe she’s just being coy. In the seven years of Audre’s tenure, she’s never mentioned any kind of love interest.
“Dr. Coopersmith told me he’s been a widower for three years,” Cordelia says. “He has a daughter who works in the front office for… wait for it… the New Orleans Saints. Your team!”
A widower with an adult child, Audre thinks, who has a New Orleans connection. She can’t help but imagine how thrilled her mother would be about Dr. Coopersmith’s hiring.
“It isn’t your job to be my dating service, Cordelia,” Audre says.
She hopes her tone gets her point across, though she knows Cordelia means well.
The parents and Tiffin’s donor base will be impressed by Dr. Coopersmith’s credentials as a college professor.
“I think, after last year, we can both agree I need to focus on cracking down around here.”
At that moment, Audre notices the brand-new hunter-green Tiffin van pass by the office window.
The van had been an unforeseen expense to the tune of nearly sixty grand—but sixty thousand dollars is a far cry from seven million.
Audre can’t blame the purchase of the van, or the new furnace and water heaters for the dorms, or the interior painting of the Schoolhouse over the summer.
These things add up, but something else is wrong.
It will be fixed, Audre reassures herself. You don’t just lose seven million dollars.
She wonders for a second if Cordelia was fiddling with the account while Audre was away—or perhaps Chef Haz? Audre knows he has a dark history of embezzlement to cover his gambling debts. Did he perhaps get in over his head?
But neither Cordelia nor Haz can access the account.
Nobody can, except for Audre. This was something she negotiated for when Jesse Eastman took over as president of the board.
He retained control over Tiffin’s endowment and the capital campaign, but Audre wanted the operating budget under her sole purview.
She couldn’t imagine having to ask Jesse for permission every time she needed to allocate funds or approve a line item.
“Roy’s back from the bus station,” Audre says. “Time to meet our new sixth-former.”
“New blood is always good for the school,” Cordelia says. “Or almost always.”
Roy Ewanick has long been in charge of picking up the students who arrive at the Springfield bus station (though really, Audre thinks, Roy is so old, they should probably send someone else next year).
This morning, there are only two students who have arrived by bus.
One is Dub Austin, Tiffin’s starting quarterback.
When Dub climbs out of the van, Audre sees he’s shaved his head in advance of the season—but is something else different?
Audre gives him a hug, and when she pulls away, she studies him.
He grins. “What?”
“You look”—she nearly says “happy,” but she doesn’t want to call attention to the fact that, since the death of Dub’s girlfriend, Cinnamon Peters, Dub has walked around like he was carrying a 115-pound shackle around his neck—“relaxed.”
He laughs—and when is the last time Audre saw Dub Austin laugh? “Okay?” he says. “I guess I’m just glad to be back. And, you know, a senior finally.”
Hakeem Pryce and Taylor Wilson arrive to pull Dub into the fray, which allows Audre a chance to focus on the other student getting out of the van.
This year’s unicorn, Audre thinks. Liam Donovan.
The boy’s head is bowed as he descends the stairs—so at first, all Audre can see is his ginger hair. (With a name like Liam Donovan, what did she expect?) Liam is nearly as tall and broad as Dub; he has skin like strawberry milk and startingly bright green eyes.
Audre offers a hand. “Liam, welcome. I’m Ms. Robinson, Head of School.”
Liam grips her hand and looks her in the eye. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
Audre takes in the boy’s outfit: athletic shorts, a faded Mets T-shirt, black socks, and a pair of rubber slides. She notices a tattoo of a bleeding red heart on his inner forearm, threaded through with a name and dates. The dead brother, Audre thinks.
Liam squints around at the campus as though all the green is blinding. His eyes land on the chapel. “The school has a church?”
“That’s our chapel,” Audre says. “It’s a hundred and fifteen years old.
” Along with everything else this year, Audre has an anniversary celebration to plan (although minor, every milestone ending in zero or five provides a good bump for fundraising).
“We’ll give you a full tour later. Let me show you to your room.
You’ll be on the third floor…” Liam will be the sole senior on the third floor; the rest of the boys are sophomores.
But this was the only place Audre had a free room.
She dismissed a student last spring for masterminding the Zip Zap app, and while she wanted to replace that student with an incoming sophomore, Jesse Eastman had insisted that Audre and Cordelia Spooner admit Liam Donovan as a sixth-former.
“Consider it a personal favor to me,” Jesse said.
“Personal favor?” Audre said.
It turned out that Jesse Eastman’s new girlfriend, O’Malley Donovan (a name that, to Audre, sounded like a corner pub), had a cousin named Bobby who was raising two sons on his own—the mother was somewhere in North Dakota—and six months earlier, the older son had died of a fentanyl overdose.
The younger son, Liam, was an excellent student, top of his class at Flushing High School in Queens.
After the older son’s death, O’Malley offered to send Liam away to school, and Bobby agreed: Liam needed to get out of the city.
Audre has worked hard to make Tiffin a diverse community racially, ethnically, and religiously—and also, but to a far lesser degree, socioeconomically.
There are, of course, students on scholarship—Dub Austin, for example—but Liam is different.
He attended an underserved high school with a metal detector at the entrance and police officers in the hallways.
Audre imagines how Liam will thrive with the eight-to-one student-teacher ratio and how much he’ll enjoy Chef Haz’s Bolognese, apple turnovers, and wood-fired pizza on Fridays. Liam’s life is about to change.
Liam grabs a plastic trash bag out of the back of the van. It takes a moment for Audre to realize that the trash bag contains Liam’s things.
“Is that all you’ve…?” Audre says.
He squints at her. “Yes, ma’am. I didn’t have a suitcase at home. I’ve never really needed one.”
As Audre follows Liam and Roy Ewanick to the third floor of Classic North, her discomfort grows.
The gulf between kids like Liam and, say, Royce Stringfellow is vast. (Royce showed up with a treadmill desk and an air fryer, neither of which, Royce’s father pointed out, was expressly forbidden.
Audre really needs to update The Bridle.)
Audre has confided to Jesse that she’s most concerned about culture shock.
“The stipend for scholarship students is only two hundred dollars per semester, Jesse,” Audre said. This has always felt appallingly inadequate, but year after year, the board overlooks that particular line item.
“O’Malley will take care of it,” Jesse said.
But clearly O’Malley has forgotten. She’s too busy lunching in the Hamptons, Audre thinks ungenerously. Meanwhile, Liam has shown up with his possessions in a trash bag.
Outside Room 307, a placard says: L. DONOVAN. Liam presses his face close to the sign, then turns to Audre and grants her a dazzling smile. “I get my own room?”
Roy Ewanick nudges Audre and touches his glasses. Ahhhh, Audre thinks. The squinting.