6. Day Student
The first day of school is Charley Hicks’s Super Bowl.
“I don’t know how to explain it,” she says to East. Sixth-formers are allowed to skip breakfast, but Charley dragged East to the Paddock nonetheless.
They’re splitting a good fruit salad (juicy peach slices, fat raspberries, ripe figs), Charley has two eggs over easy on buttered rye toast, and East took three of Chef’s homemade doughnuts—they’re better, he declares, than Krispy Kreme. “I just love to learn.”
“What were you and Maverick talking about at the end of the cookout?” East says. “Royce told me he was chatting you up.”
Charley suspends her fork mid-bite and narrows her eyes. “What?”
East finishes the last bite of doughnut and says, “I’m getting one for the road.
” He slides out of the Booth. Charley nearly yells after him—he can’t just say something that provocative, then walk away—but the Booth is the highest-profile seating in the Paddock, and any strife between them will be noted by the occupants of the sixth-form table, namely Tilly Benbow and Olivia H-T, who are sitting together sipping black coffee.
Olivia H-T is rummaging through the new plum-colored Goyard tote that she can’t stop humble-bragging about (“I wasn’t sure about the color, but it is one of a kind…
”) while Tilly stares morosely at her phone.
Chatting me up? Charley thinks. Royce saying that is so predictable.
Charley and Royce’s race for valedictorian is real, and it is heated.
East bringing it up is the problem; it’s his guilty conscience talking.
He got with Miss Bergeron last year. It has taken Charley all summer to forgive him (by choosing to believe that nothing happened between East and Simone Bergeron after he and Charley got together).
She’d hoped they could put all that behind them, but now, it’s as though Miss Bergeron is sitting at the table.
When East comes back with a doughnut wrapped in a napkin, Charley won’t meet his eye.
“Charles?” he says.
Charley whispers, “You, of all people, have no right…”
“I know, I’m sorry,” he says. “Royce was trying to get a rise out of me, I think. Because he knew it would make me jealous.” He leans in to kiss Charley’s nose. “Because you’re my girl.” He raises her chin so that she looks at him. “Right?”
Charley can’t help but smile. “Right.”
Tilly walks by. “You two are gross.”
“Hey, Tilly,” East says. “Fuck off.”
Charley and East burst out of the Paddock into the late summer morning just as the chapel bells toll nine.
When they reach the Schoolhouse, Charley peels away.
She has Boarding School Lit for A-period, followed by her history class: The 1960s.
East is off to the Sink to meet Mr. Ewanick for Linear Algebra.
“Don’t forget, I have newspaper after school,” Charley says.
Charley is the editor of the ’Bred Bulletin this year, though she has only modest hopes for its success.
Last year, they had a staff of four, which was reduced to three when the third-former Levi Volpere was discovered to be the mastermind behind the Zip Zap app and got expelled.
“Too bad,” East says, squeezing Charley’s waist. “I thought maybe we could rendezvous somewhere.”
“Somewhere like where?” Charley says. Last year, she helped East transform a room deep beneath the dorms into a speakeasy called Priorities; Charley lost her virginity to East there. But now the speakeasy is locked up, and the tunnels that lead to it have been outfitted with cameras.
“I have an idea,” East says. “A new place. Let me work on it.”
The only person sitting at the Harkness table in Schoolhouse 108 when Charley arrives is… Mr. Rivera.
“Charley!” he says, jumping to his feet. “How’s my favorite student?”
Leave it to Mr. Rivera to make it awkward, Charley thinks.
He’s beaming at her like he expects some kind of physical greeting—a handshake?
A hug? Charley chastises herself: Why didn’t she wait for Davi?
A handshake seems too formal, and so Charley gives him the briefest of hugs and notices—cringe!
—that he seems to flex his muscles under her hands.
(The girls on the first floor of South have all been talking about how “big” Mr. Rivera got over the summer, which makes Charley want to throw up in her mouth.)
Charley has to choose a seat that she can live with for the rest of the year (seats aren’t “assigned,” but people grow accustomed to their usual spots). How can Charley gracefully choose any seat but the one next to Mr. Rivera?
She can’t, is the answer. She sits to his left.
“Congratulations on your short story,” Charley says.
“You read it?” Mr. Rivera says. “Do you subscribe to LitBoo?”
“I don’t…” Charley says. She overheard Mrs. Wully talking about the story; the adjective Mrs. Wully used was interesting. “But I heard about it and, yeah, I read it last night.”
Mr. Rivera stares at her expectantly.
“I liked the duality,” she says. “How the date seemed to him, how it seemed to her. It proves the adage that there are always three sides to every story.”
Mr. Rivera collapses back in his chair. “I’m so happy to hear you say that. My goal was to represent both sides fairly, but as a man, I’m naturally biased. I’m relieved to hear you thought my female point of view was convincing.”
Where is everyone else? Charley wonders. Why aren’t they coming in? “Doesn’t A-period start at nine oh five?” she asks.
Mr. Rivera seems taken aback by the abrupt change of subject. “First day starts at nine fifteen so new students can find their classes.”
Shit! Charley thinks. She has eight minutes.
Mr. Rivera leans in. “Do you think… I mean, would you be comfortable posting about the story?”
“Posting?” Charley says. “Oh, I’m not really on social media.”
“You’re not?”
“I have an Instagram account, but I just, you know, creep around. And I’m not on TikTok at all.”
“What about Davi?” Mr. Rivera asks. “Do you think she might post about my story?” He stretches his arms out in front of him, which Charley fears is meant to show off his now-defined triceps.
“Davi?” she says. Her voice is squeaky; she is so uncomfortable. The only thing that’s keeping her even somewhat chill is imagining replaying this scene for East later. “Davi posts makeup and fashion videos. She doesn’t really do literature.”
“Right,” Mr. Rivera says. “Well, it was worth a shot. I’m trying to beef up my Gen Z audience.”
Have more boomer words ever been spoken?
Charley wonders. She shouldn’t have brought up the story…
what was she thinking? She did find the story compelling, mostly because she had never read a published story written by someone she knew.
The male protagonist definitely shared traits with Mr. Rivera, so what could Charley think but that she was reading about his dating life?
Rumor around the school last year was that Mr. Rivera was obsessed with Simone Bergeron.
(Bergeron is gone, Charley thinks, but also somehow omnipresent.) Charley searched the story for signs of her former history teacher, but thankfully, the story seemed to be about someone else entirely.
Mr. Rivera hasn’t asked about Charley’s summer. (Red flag: Is he a narcissist?) As she’s about to tell him that she worked at the Enoch Pratt Public Library (he’ll appreciate that), Davi enters the classroom.
“Hey, girl. Of course you got here early.”
Charley gives Davi a pained smile. She will never again arrive to this classroom alone.
Davi takes the seat next to Charley, and then the others file in: Royce (ugh), Willow, Taylor, Dub, Hakeem, Madison J.
Mr. Rivera shifts into full-on peacock mode, calling out each student by name, then saying, “I’ve got all the cool kids in my class.
” Eye rolls abound, except for Royce, who puffs out his chest. Charley notices Royce move his chair suspiciously close to Willow, he can basically feel her up under the table, they must be talking again.
Mr. Rivera hands out the class syllabus, and finally Charley recaptures her enthusiasm for the day. She’d checked numerous times to see if Mr. Rivera had posted anything on the class’s virtual whiteboard, but because Mr. Rivera is in his forties, he prefers paper.
Charley inhales the reading list like it’s a piece of birthday cake: Tobias Wolff’s Old School, Ethan Canin’s The Palace Thief, Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld (Charley had predicted this and read it over the summer), The Fall of Rome by Martha Southgate, and I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai (which Charley read right when it came out, before attending boarding school herself was even an idea).
“There will be three components to your grade,” Mr. Rivera says.
“A third will be your participation in class discussion. A third will be your written assignments. And a third will be an in-class essay final, which I’ll provide a selection of prompts for, but this class is so advanced”—here he looks directly at Charley; Why must he make it weird?
—“that you can also write your own prompt…” He breaks off as the door to 108 opens and another teacher steps in.
No, not a teacher, Charley realizes. A student.
“Who the hell?” Davi whispers. Then, “Are you fucking kidding me?”
Everyone on the far side of the table turns around.
The girl is nearly six feet tall and supermodel thin (flat chest, jutting hips).
She has curly blond hair half up in a claw clip, Chelsea Parke style, and she wears no makeup—but she doesn’t need to because her face is clean-scrubbed, blue-eyed, symmetrical perfection.
She’s got on a white oxford shirt over army green micro cargo shorts that show off her long, long legs.
She’s wearing a pair of Isabel Marant wedge sneakers.
“Hey?” the girl says. She has a gravelly voice that Charley immediately envies, although it’s accompanied by an ashtray stench. “Mrs. Spinner sent me here. She said I could add the class.”