5. Deadly Sins
Audre has every intention of attending the Move-In Day cookout—she’s never missed one—but she won’t be able to hold a coherent conversation or eat a single bite of food until she speaks to Oak Bellamy.
She sends him both an email and a text: I need to talk to you ASAP. It’s *urgent*.
Then, horrified by her lack of manners, she sends another: Please, and thank you.
A text comes into her phone and her heart jumps, but it’s from Jesse Eastman, finally responding to the news of their sixth-place ranking with… a thumbs-up emoji.
Okay? Audre thinks. What does the thumbs-up mean? Does it mean yay, good for us, solid showing—or is it a passive-aggressive thumbs-up that really wants to be a middle finger? Audre stares at the thumbs-up and thinks: Jesse is checked out. It’s as though the rankings no longer matter to him.
Audre passive-aggressively hearts the thumbs-up, then calls Oak Bellamy…
and is treated to his voicemail. Enough is enough, Audre thinks.
She opens the account statement, finds the number for the company, Evermore Investments, and dials, thinking, Evermore?
For some reason, she thought the company was called Everlast—or is that a battery company?
When the receptionist answers, Audre identifies herself and asks for Oak. The receptionist is sorry to say he’s not available. “I’ll add you to the call list.”
“It’s urgent,” Audre says. “So urgent that I’d like you to keep me on hold until he is available. I don’t care how long you make me wait, I’m not hanging up. If you disconnect me, I’ll keep calling back.”
“Ohhhkay,” the receptionist says. “He went to grab a kombucha. Let me see if I can find him.”
“Please do,” Audre says in her crispest Head of School tone.
While Audre waits, she gazes out the window of her office and spies Tilly Benbow walking out of the woods toward campus, crying on the phone.
If Tilly were a third-former, Audre would chalk this up to homesickness, but Tilly is a sixth-former and, beyond that, one of the most idolized girls at the school.
Maybe her grandmother is dying, Audre thinks. And isn’t Tilly’s grandmother quite wealthy?
“Audre, hello, hello!” Oak is now on the line, sounding offensively chipper.
Audre pictures him in a tailored blue suit, white shirt open at the collar, and shoes that look like they’re made from polished wood, taking a sip of his kombucha.
Oak took over Tiffin’s account this past summer when the original financial adviser, Dick Ryan, retired.
Oak had worked as Dick’s associate for years, and he assured Audre that “not much would change” with Dick’s departure, though it was Oak’s intention to “modernize” the investment strategy for Tiffin’s account.
Audre tells herself to remain calm. “Good afternoon, Oak. I’m not sure if you’ve received my messages?”
There’s no answer, which she suspects means that Oak has seen the messages, and ignored them.
“I have to admit, I didn’t pay much attention to the operating account over the summer.
I was in New Orleans, moving my parents…
” Audre stops. Oak Bellamy doesn’t care about Audre’s parents.
Dick Ryan would have cared, he was well into his sixties with a possible move into a retirement community in his own near future—but Oak Bellamy is a far younger man.
He’s a “finance bro,” and the thing about finance bros, Audre supposes, is that they care about only one thing: making money.
Audre starts over. “When I checked the account this morning, I saw the balance was incorrect, and I hoped you could fix it.”
Audre hears the soft clacking of fingers on a keyboard; a distant male voice calls out something about Cam Skattebo’s comeback.
“I have your account in front of me now,” Oak says. “How would you like me to fix it?”
“So, you’ll see the balance is significantly lower than it was at the end of May. If I’m calculating correctly, it says it’s down by seven million dollars.”
There’s more clacking, which Audre finds soothing. Oak will get to the bottom of this.
He takes a noisy sip of something (his kombucha?), coughs a bit, then says in a still-chipper voice, “Right. Since the end of May, it looks like you’re down seven million three hundred and twenty-one thousand dollars.”
Audre eyes the trash can under her desk. Suddenly vomiting seems like a real possibility. “So those numbers are correct? The account is down by seven point three million?”
Another sip, more clacking. “Yeah. It was a tough summer.”
Audre thinks, I spent the summer in New Orleans, where it was ninety degrees at midnight and a hundred and ten during the day, while I sorted through every cabinet, drawer, and closet of my parents’ house.
I drove all the way to Bridge City to rent a posthole digger so my parents could put a birdhouse in their new outdoor space.
I had to convince my mother to part with a stack of Time magazines from the Reagan administration.
That was a tough summer. You on the other hand…
had a criminal summer. You disappeared twenty-five percent of Tiffin Academy’s operating budget!
When Audre speaks, her voice is shrill, on the verge of screeching.
“Where is that seven million dollars, Oak? Where did it go?”
“Market fluctuations—”
“Don’t give me that…” Audre swallows the word “bullshit,” because she doesn’t want to sound vulgar. “That’s not an explanation.”
Oak sighs. “You’ll remember that we decided to invest a percentage of the account into high-risk, high-reward stocks rather than let it sit in cash doing nothing. And I told you about the crypto start-up.”
“Crypto?” Audre cries out. “I would never have given you the okay to invest in crypto. As I understand it, it’s pretend money. I did not—”
“But you did,” Oak says. “You’ll recall that I mentioned Mikayla Ekubo…”
Gah! Audre thinks. She does recall Oak saying he was excited about a new company that was showing remarkable growth.
He said he’d told Mikayla Ekubo—the Head of School at Old Bennington—about the company, and she’d been hyped.
(Audre remembers he used this exact word, because she knew the kids would find it cringey.)
“So you invested Old Bennington’s money in this crypto company as well?” This makes Audre feel marginally better. Maybe all the ISNEC schools have lost millions?
“Well, no,” Oak says. “Mikayla didn’t end up following me to Evermore. She’s still at Everlast.”
“Wait,” Audre says. “What?” In the search bar of her inbox, she types Dick Ryan—and sure enough, the emails all have an everlast address.
“I thought I was… did I switch companies? Did you move my money without my permission?” Someone, Audre thinks, is getting sued.
She’ll ask Taylor Wilson’s mother, Kathy, to take this on.
Kathy Wilson is a big shot Philadelphia attorney in corporate fraud… or something related.
“You signed the paperwork,” Oak says. There’s another sip, more clacking. “On Friday, June 19. I emailed you a Docusign and you sent it back, transferring your funds from Everlast to my new shop, Evermore.”
Audre wants to say this is impossible, she did no such thing and Oak will be hearing from Tiffin’s in-house counsel—but then she scrolls back in her email and spies the fully executed documents.
She has no recollection of signing them.
Certainly she wasn’t aware she was switching companies.
She didn’t want to switch companies! She’d liked Everlast, she’d loved and trusted Dick Ryan, and Oak was Dick’s associate.
Audre thought Oak was simply taking Dick’s place, a well-earned promotion.
Oak’s last name was Bellamy, the same as Tiffin’s longtime English teacher, Doc Bellamy.
There was no relation, but the name had given Audre comfort—it made Oak seem like family!
—and when Oak brought up Mikayla Ekubo, Audre thought, If Mikayla signed off on a crypto investment, it must be aboveboard.
Old Benn was the number one school in the country!
Audre moans. She’d signed the documents on June 19, which Audre now realizes was the day before the Robinson family reunion that her parents had insisted upon—because it had been years since Audre had made an extended visit home, and people wanted to see her.
So in addition to moving her parents, Audre had organized a party for seventy-five relatives across four generations at Liuzza’s by the Track, and she’d splurged on a half-hour performance by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band.
If she had signed these documents—and clearly she had—she would have done so without reading them through, because she was so consumed with making sure there was enough gumbo and crawfish étouffée at the reunion.
She would have thought, Bank paperwork to sign now that Dick Ryan is retiring. Fine, good, here you go.
“I can’t believe you lost seven million dollars of our school’s money!” Audre is shouting, which is fine because everyone else is at the cookout.
“I know,” Oak says. “It’s crazy.”
“What am I supposed to do?” Audre says. She wants to cry, but she’s too furious. “That’s my operating budget, Oak. You have to fix this, or the school will be flat broke by spring.”
“I can’t recoup that kind of loss overnight, obviously,” Oak says. “The crypto company went upside down, it turned out they were bad dudes, the whole industry is the Wild West, and sometimes you come across bandits. But there’s an AI company that everyone in the office is bullish about—”
“No!” Audre says. “No crypto, no AI. I want reliable stocks. Mining, manufacturing, cereal, sheet metal, things that are real.”
“We can play it safe for sure,” Oak says. “But the safe stocks don’t realize the kind of profits you’re looking for. It’ll probably take four or five years—”
“I don’t have that long,” Audre says. “I need that money back by January first at the latest.”
“January?” Oak sounds like he’s never heard of it. “We’ll have to be pretty aggressive.”
“You can’t lose any more of our money, Oak, or the school will come to a total standstill.
” Audre softens her tone, because she needs Oak Bellamy to make a super-heroic effort on her behalf and if she continues to berate him, he may just write her off as one more hysterical woman who doesn’t understand that investing is, essentially, gambling. “Just get it back, Oak. Please.”
“I’ll get it back,” Oak says. He sounds confident—but wasn’t it this confidence that landed Audre in trouble in the first place?
“Thank you,” Audre says, while thinking, For exactly nothing! She hangs up.
At one point over the summer, Audre’s parents dragged her to the nine thirty Sunday morning service at St. Louis Cathedral, telling her she needed to nourish her spiritual life.
Audre pointed out that she attended church twice a week at school, but that didn’t pass muster with her parents.
Episcopalians are social, not spiritual, her mother said.
At the service Audre attended, the priest’s homily centered on the seven deadly sins.
Audre fidgeted in her chair like a child (the church’s air-conditioning was not equal to the task of cooling a sanctuary holding four hundred people) and thought, Could you have picked something more uplifting to nourish my spiritual life?
Also, are the seven deadly sins even relevant anymore?
It felt like they should have evolved with the times—Audre would have put OnlyFans and “no background checks for assault weapons” on the list.
Now, as Audre gazes out the window at everyone leaving the cookout—Audre missed the entire thing—she realizes the old-school sins are still relevant.
She’s consumed with wrath (anger) at Oak Bellamy. What an incompetent, kombucha-drinking weasel! Once Audre’s account lost the first million—hell, the first half-million—he should have dumped the crypto company. That was Oak’s job.
Audre had succumbed to greed (Oak’s promise of “gaudy returns”—this was the term he’d used, she now recalls) and envy. (When Audre thought that Mikayla Ekubo might be making money, Audre wanted to equal or best her.)
But most of all, Audre fell prey to her own sloth.
She hadn’t read the documents she signed.
If she’d known Oak was leaving to start his own company, she would have wished him well and stayed at Everlast. Audre hadn’t paid enough attention to the twenty-six million dollars in her care—and this laziness had cost her.
Audre kicks the trash can under her desk, denting it with her custom green-and-gold Adidas Gazelle. Forget vomiting—she wants to throw both the trash can and her new shoes through the plate-glass window.
This is all her fault.
She watches Charley Hicks emerge from the wooded path deep in conversation with John Maverick, something Audre could have predicted. Charley is one of the best, if not the best student at Tiffin. But where is East?
Just thinking about East gives Audre a sharp pain in her chest.
Audre has to call Jesse Eastman and tell him what happened.
She winces, imagining how livid he’ll be. She insisted on keeping the operating budget under her control, and look what happened. She was cavalier and careless—and now more than a quarter of it has vanished into thin air. Jesse will berate her, and that’s if she’s lucky.
He’ll probably fire her. Audre would fire herself.
Dr. Coopersmith emerges from the woods wearing a navy polo and a green-and-gold Tiffin baseball cap.
(Cordelia curated a gift bag filled with Tiffin merch from the school store for both new hires.) Audre feels the stirrings of yet another deadly sin—but before she can put a name to it, her phone dings with a text.
It’s Cordelia. Everything okay? Coop was asking for you.
This year has so much potential, Audre thinks. She can’t bear the idea of not being around to watch it unfold.
The financial markets are up and down every day, Audre reminds herself. She had bad luck over the summer, but now that both she and Oak are paying closer attention, their circumstances will improve. They have to.
Audre will hold off on telling Jesse about the money. She does some quick calculations and figures they can make it to March or April based on what they have now. By March or April, some/most/all of their losses might have been recouped. Audre just has to be patient.
She texts Cordelia back: Everything is fine, just had to deal with something.
She hits send. Then she chews on her bottom lip and half smiles as she types a second text: Now tell me: What exactly did Coop say?