22. So Back II
Charley needs to make sure it’s not Beatrix.
They plan a day trip to DC. Charley wants to visit the National Gallery of Art to see Woman Holding a Balance by Vermeer (Mav told her there are only thirty-six Vermeers in existence) and Venus with a Mirror by Titian. Beatrix agrees to go as long as they can get hoagies from Wawa for the drive.
When Beatrix climbs into Charley’s car, Charley asks how Beatrix’s New Year’s Eve was.
Beatrix says, “I have something to tell you.”
Charley, who is backing out of Beatrix’s driveway, puts the car in park. “What is it?”
“Just go,” Beatrix says. “I’ll tell you once we’re rolling.”
“Tell me now.”
Beatrix blows her bangs out of her face. “I went to that party at the Shipleys. And I got with Bo.”
Bo Shipley: the boy Charley had a crush on all through freshman and sophomore year, before she left for Tiffin and met East. This time last year, Charley would have been furious at this revelation—it’s girl code not to get with your best friend’s crush, even if there was no chance that crush would ever like your friend—but now, Charley laughs.
“You should date him. You two would be good together.”
“You’re not mad?”
Charley says, “My mom found out Joey’s been having an affair, and I was worried it might be you.”
“Me?” Beatrix sounds flattered. “I think Joey is hot, but I would never.”
“Good.”
“But he is hot.”
“Bea.”
“But I would never.”
“Well, someone would, someone did.”
“Poor Fran,” Beatrix says. Then, a second later, “You’re happy about this, right? You hate Joey.”
Charley is, of course, happy. She does hate Joey and now her wish has come true: Joey and Fran will get divorced. With luck, Charley will never have to see him again.
Charley pulls into “their” Wawa, the one on East Joppa Road.
She has tried to explain the enormous appeal of Wawa to both East and Davi.
It’s the queen of American convenience stores.
At the sandwich counter, Charley orders her usual, the Hot Gobbler (turkey with stuffing and cranberry sauce on a hoagie roll), while Beatrix punches in her screwball combo of roast beef with bacon, pepperoni, and Muenster cheese, melted, with horseradish sauce and BBQ.
“Badlands” by Bruce Springsteen is playing in the store, and Charley can’t help but think of Mav.
He sent her a text on Christmas that said Merry merry!
which freaked Charley out. Why was Mav texting her?
Was he spending the holiday alone now that he was getting divorced?
Was he lonely? Was he drunk? Had he texted all the sixth-formers or just Charley?
Somehow Charley knew it was just her.
East would flip if he ever found out so Charley deleted the text, but then felt bad and responded: You too! with the Santa emoji.
Charley chooses a bag of Herr’s Ripples chips, her favorite, then a Tastykake blueberry pie. When she turns around to look for Beatrix, she does a double take. There’s a blond girl over by the coffee station who looks familiar, even from behind.
No, Charley thinks. It can’t be. Thinking about Mav and the unexpected (inappropriate?) text has simply put her in a Tiffin frame of mind. There is no way this girl is who Charley thinks she is. Everyone on earth has a doppelg?nger.
But as she closes in on the girl, her suspicion grows stronger.
“Tilly?” she says.
When Tilly turns and sees Charley, she drops her coffee—it splatters in a steaming brown explosion all over the floor—and dashes out the door.
“Hey!” a Wawa employee calls out. It’s a guy named Bruce, who has worked there forever. Bruce comes over to Charley and frowns at the mess. “Did she steal something?”
What is Tilly Benbow doing here? Charley wonders. And in that second, everything clicks.
Yes, Charley thinks but does not say. She stole my mother’s husband.
Taylor is seven weeks pregnant at Christmas; she vomits up her grandmother’s prime rib, she takes the two hundred dollars that her parents traditionally put in her stocking and thinks, This is my abortion money.
She fakes her way through the neighborhood “Between Days” party hosted on the 28th, where all of her parents’ fancy Main Line friends exclaim over Taylor’s early admission to Duke.
She endures the annual breakfast at her other grandparents’ house in Northeast Philadelphia, where her Nana forces a plate of eggs and scrapple on her.
The scrapple looks like (and possibly is?) a patty of pig intestine.
Taylor vomits in the upstairs bathroom, hoping the sound is disguised by the screams of her younger cousins.
Taylor’s mother takes her to The Nutcracker at the Academy of Music. At dinner afterward, at Dandelion, Taylor’s favorite restaurant, Taylor has no appetite.
“Taylor,” Kathy says, leaning in. “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” Taylor says quickly. “I’m just not hungry.”
Kathy places a hand atop Taylor’s and squeezes, which almost brings Taylor to tears.
Taylor strives, always, for perfection; she wants to make her parents proud.
They have given her a home, an education, a set of values, third-row orchestra seats to the ballet, a monogrammed signet ring, a never-ending fountain of love and support.
And unbeknownst to them, she has let them down in the biggest way possible.
“I’ve heard you throwing up,” Kathy says.
Taylor looks over at the bar where the Eagles game is playing on TV. She has been petrified of confiding in her mother—every time she psyches herself up to do it, she chickens out, she isn’t capable of crushing her mother that way—but now, maybe, her mother has figured it out?
“I’m worried you have an eating disorder,” Kathy says.
Taylor nods. “I don’t.”
Kathy slides her hand up Taylor’s arm. “Do you just miss Hakeem?”
“Yes,” Taylor says. “I miss Hakeem.”
Taylor is eight weeks pregnant at New Year’s.
She’s beset by a lethargy that keeps her in bed all day.
There’s a party she’s supposed to attend at Villanova, but she stays home instead, is asleep by nine.
When she wakes up, it’s a new year and nothing has changed.
Taylor is still pregnant with no idea what to do about it.
Hakeem still doesn’t know. Taylor wants to tell him, but doesn’t—initially out of anger, then later, out of kindness.
He will be so upset, so tormented; he might accuse Taylor of trying to trap him, even though he was the one to beg her for sex without a condom.
It will be easier if he never finds out.
When Taylor returns to campus, she’s nearly nine weeks pregnant. She texts Dub: I need help.
He writes back: You didn’t handle it in PA?
I didn’t. Taylor could have called a clinic in downtown Philadelphia, but the vacation had been crowded with commitments, her mother was watching her, Taylor didn’t have anyone who could go with her to an appointment. She was surrounded by people but all alone.
Want me to make some calls? Dub asks.
Out in the hallway of Classic South, all the girls are getting back.
There’s chatter about what Santa brought: a new Louis Vuitton pochette, a MINI Cooper wrapped in a huge red bow, Patrick Ta glow balm.
Morgan Wallen’s “Somebody’s Problem” is blasting, Alistair barks.
Taylor hears Willow Levy say, “I have the gossip of the century.” Taylor freezes.
Did Willow somehow find out that Taylor is pregnant?
But it turns out to be something about Tilly that Taylor can’t quite hear.
Yes, please, Taylor says. This week if possible.
I’ve got you, Dub says, and Taylor collapses on her bed.
Olivia H-T hears the news from Willow Levy, whose father, Ari, is friends with the Benbows: Tilly won’t be returning to Tiffin. She has been conducting an affair with an older man, married as Olivia suspected—and that man is Joey, Charley Hicks’s stepfather.
Holy shit, Olivia thinks. She stares at herself in the mirror, trying to process this news. She is both electrified and deeply, deeply disturbed.
“I still can’t fucking believe it,” Davi says.
“Me either,” Charley says. She had, of course, texted Davi in London about Tilly and Joey immediately, but she’s been waiting to give Davi all the gruesome details in person.
“She was at the Wawa in my town, Joey had just admitted the affair to my mother, then when Tilly saw me, she dropped her cup of coffee all over the floor and bolted. I didn’t see what car she got into, but I didn’t need to. It all just suddenly made sense.”
“How does any of this make sense?” Davi says.
“She was scheming him last year during Family Weekend. I didn’t want Joey to go to dinner with my mom and me on Saturday, so Joey went out with the Benbows instead. He’d been talking to Jim Benbow at the Friday night reception.”
“Remember when Zip Zap called out Tilly for sexting someone off camp?” Davi says. “Was that Joey?”
“I can’t even… but yes, obviously. Then this year, remember how off Tilly was? I think that must have been when my mom and Joey were in counseling. He probably broke up with her for a while.”
Davi whips out her phone. “I’m looking up the age of consent.”
“It’s sixteen in Massachusetts and Connecticut and Maryland,” Charley says. “I checked. I would love nothing more than to see Joey go to jail.”
“So your mom called the Benbows?”
Charley nods. There was a moment when Charley considered not telling Fran.
Tilly might have been in Baltimore for some other reason…
and Charley was afraid that once Fran found out it was a girl from Tiffin, she would view the whole thing as Charley’s fault.
If you had just let Joey come to dinner, none of this would have happened.
But Charley couldn’t let Tilly get away with it. She couldn’t return to Tiffin and see Tilly eating in the Paddock knowing that she was—ew, ew, ew!—sleeping with Joey.
It took a few minutes for Fran to process what Charley was telling her.
Joey is having an affair with a girl from my school.
Tilly Benbow from Greenwich, Connecticut.
But then Fran put the puzzle pieces together: Joey’s phone had started blowing up right after his dinner with the Benbows, Fran thought it was Ant texting, she’d never imagined otherwise.
Then, last year at New Year’s, Joey left to visit friends—in Connecticut.
“The girl is seventeen?” Fran barked out an ugly laugh. “She was sixteen when this started? He is such a lowlife. He’s disturbed.”
“That’s why Dad brought him home in the first place, Mom,” Charley said. “Because he was troubled.”
Fran logged into her laptop. “What’s the girl’s name, again?”
“Tilly Benbow,” Charley says. “Matilda.”
Fran brought up the Tiffin Parent Directory and found an email for Mrs. Sloane Benbow, as well as a phone number.
“I need to confirm this before I reach out to them.” Fran picked up her phone and texted Joey: Tilly Benbow.
There was a panicked moment where Charley worried she was mistaken, but a few seconds later, Fran’s phone buzzed, and Fran showed Charley the text: Your daughter is such a bitch.
Fran embraced Charley. “Someday I’m going to get to a place where I apologize for marrying him, but I’m not there yet. Just know, none of this is your fault. Part of it is my fault, most of it is Joey’s fault. If it weren’t Tilly, it would have been someone else.”
Charley thought but did not say: Beatrix. Charley had tried to warn Fran that Joey was into teenage girls.
“I love you, Mom,” Charley said. “And Dad loved you.”
Fran nodded, wiped away a few tears. “I’m calling Sloane Benbow.”
Tilly’s parents’ response was to withdraw Tilly from Tiffin. She’ll finish her senior year living at home, where her parents can keep an eye on her.
Classes resume the next morning, and while Olivia H-T is in the Schoolhouse receiving her second-term syllabi, Mrs. Benbow arrives to pack up Tilly’s room in Classic South.
During her free period, Olivia hustles back to the dorms and cracks open the door to 106 South, praying for a miracle.
Tilly’s bed has been stripped of her black watch plaid flannel sheets and her Ugg blanket; her closet door hangs open like an empty crypt. All that remains of Tilly is a constellation of blue putty dots where she hung her posters of Frank Ocean and First Beach in Newport.
She’s gone.
Pippa Sacks is also gone, though not quite as gone as Tilly. Pippa is still living in Haydensboro with Sondra, attending Haydensboro High School, which must be full of freaks and bots because by the end of the first week of school, Pippa is texting Olivia several times a day.
Olivia is, naturally, thrilled. It gives her something real to do on her phone while she sits, friendless, at the senior table in the Paddock.
Pippa asks if Olivia can spend the weekend at her house. Sondra will be home, but Pippa has full access to her wine and weed.
Olivia can’t believe Pippa is even asking: The Massacre was less than a month earlier, and there’s no way either her parents or the school would approve that leave request. When Olivia tells Pippa this, Pippa texts: So sneak out.
I can’t, Olivia says. College.
Pippa sends the eye-roll emoji. Then help me get revenge on Davi. She’s trying to steal Liam.
Trying? Olivia thinks but does not say that Davi has pretty much succeeded. Liam and Davi are together all the time—in the Paddock at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, in the Sink studying together. Liam and Davi and Charley and East have formed a tight square, a social fortress that can’t be breached.
Or can it? Olivia wonders. She relishes the idea of revenge. Charley and Davi have it coming, and East as well. The three of them were part of the secret shit going on last spring. They were all sneaking out on Saturday nights and drinking somewhere.
Olivia says: I’d love to see East and Charley go down!
Pippa says: I’ve heard East has a deal with the school.
What kind of deal?
Pippa doesn’t respond, and Olivia suspects she doesn’t know what kind of deal.
Olivia reminds herself that Pippa can’t be trusted—Kilimanjaro!
—but even so, when Grady texts to tell Olivia that the first ’Bred Bulletin meeting of the term starts in ten minutes, Olivia sets out for the Teddy with new purpose.
She has an investigative piece to write. She’s going to find out where this school’s bodies are buried.