20. The Haydensboro Massacre #3
They are yours, Olivia wants to shout. But she won’t, of course.
She replaces the oxygen mask, closes her eyes.
When she opens them again, she tells herself, she’ll be studying on the Senior Sofa with Tilly.
Grady will text her to see if she wants to grab a milkshake (Diet Coke) at the Grille.
Everything that happened this afternoon will be where it belongs: in her vivid imagination.
Audre isn’t on social media, but if she did have an Instagram account, she would post about her date with Coop.
Slide one: Coop arriving at Audre’s residence to pick her up for the concert, which starts promptly at five.
Audre wears a balsam-green DVF wrap dress and layered gold necklaces.
Coop is in a dark-green wool blazer with a white shirt and green-and-gold paisley tie.
Before they step out, Audre catches a glimpse of them side by side in the hallway mirror. They look like they belong together.
Slide two: The Mount, Edith Wharton’s estate, elegantly decorated for Christmas.
The grounds are lit up with thousands of tiny white lights, wreaths with burgundy bows hang in every window.
(They could do this at Tiffin next year, with a bigger budget.
Audre shakes her head. She will not think about the budget.) She takes a picture of the front entrance, then turns her phone off before they head inside.
Slide three would, naturally, have sound: The Harvard Krokodiloes cast a spell over the intimate audience gathered in Wharton’s library.
Who doesn’t love an a cappella group? The boys have glorious voices and are also talented showmen, weaving in bits of comedy and choreography between songs.
They belt out carols and standards; Audre’s favorite is a doo-wop version of “Runaround Sue.”
Coop puts his arm around Audre, and she leans in.
She can’t stop smiling; she is, as the kids say, a total bot.
She waits for the head Krok to play the pitch pipe, then hum, before the boys launch into a seven-part harmony of “What Child Is This?” that is so beautiful, Audre mists up.
She wishes she could hire the Krokodiloes to sing at Tiffin.
It would give their music and theater department, run by the long-suffering Mr. Chuy, a boost. It would give the kids something to aspire to.
Slide four: An intimate table for two at Mooncloud, where Audre and Coop order a bottle of wine and a lavish cheese-and-charcuterie board.
Audre is bursting with holiday spirit, enamored with Coop, impressed by his careful curation of this date.
This, she thinks, is what it feels like to be happy.
For the first time all year—for the first time in seven years, if she’s being honest—the strings that bind her to Tiffin have been cut.
Just for tonight, she isn’t Audre Robinson, Head of School. She is Audre Robinson, a fifty-three-year-old woman enjoying herself on a date.
She wants to run away from Tiffin and never go back.
Slide five: Coop’s apartment, which is located on Main Street in Haydensboro, above the old-timey pharmacy.
It’s still early—barely eight o’clock—so Audre agrees to go up for a nightcap.
Coop pours Audre a tiny glass of Bailey’s while Audre peruses the walls of books, the eclectic artwork, the stack of records next to a turntable.
(He has quite the range in musical taste—from Lauryn Hill to Fleetwood Mac to Kendrick Lamar.)
This is where the slides would end. What happens next—Coop kissing Audre, Coop unwrapping Audre’s dress like she’s a present under the tree, Audre wrangling off Coop’s tie, unbuttoning his shirt so she can run her hands over the broad expanse of his chest, Coop leading Audre to the bedroom—is for their eyes only.
Audre drifts off to sleep amid Coop’s soft pearl-gray sheets… and startles awake with a dull headache and a sharp sense of foreboding. She does a gut check: Does she actually have the Feeling, or is it what the kids would call “hangxiety” because she has succumbed to yet another deadly sin: lust?
She listens to Coop breathing softly beside her. She doesn’t regret a single moment with him; nothing about what happened tonight was sinful. The Feeling is coming from somewhere else.
She tiptoes into the living room and pulls her phone from her purse. She turns it on, telling herself that everything is okay, everything is fine. This will end up being the one time the Feeling is wrong.
Her phone vibrates and flashes like a pinball machine. Audre watches with mounting panic as thirteen texts and nine missed calls from Cordelia clog Audre’s screen.
She scrolls through the texts—Oh no, oh god no—then listens to the most recent of Cordelia’s voicemails. I’m still at the hospital here in Springfield, Roy Ewanick has called the Tishes, they’re on their way from New York.
Audre races into the bedroom to wake up Coop.
“I’m so sorry.” Among all the terrible thoughts Audre is having lies a tenderness for this man. He’s everything she could possibly want. When she explains it to him, he’ll make it all better. “There’s an urgent situation at school. I have to go.”