28. Tiffin Talks Blame It on Daddy D’s
Finally, spring break has arrived.
Whereas Tiffin in March is a cold, barren wasteland, Harbour Island means clear turquoise water, pink sand beaches, and pastel cottages with gracious front porches.
Like the classes who have visited Harbour before us, we intend to cruise the narrow streets of Dunmore Town in our golf carts, throw back rum punches during happy hour at Valentines, eat our weight in conch fritters, and party our faces off at the legendary club Daddy D’s, with kids from Brooks and Greenwich Country Day, until we all spill out onto the street, wondering who’s hosting the after.
Tiffin students have been living their best spring break lives on Harbour for decades… and we will be no exception.
Every year, a group of Tiffin students rent a villa called At Ease. This spring, the occupants are Charley, Davi, Royce, Willow, Madison J., Taylor, and Hakeem. (Taylor’s mom’s name is on the rental agreement, though she plans to stay at the Coral Sands with Madison J.’s mom, Naomi.)
Harbour is a tradition normally reserved for Tiffin’s sixth-form, but some of the fourth-formers (Cassie Lee and her minions, Reed Wheeler, Grady Tish, and Benj and the offensive linemen) decide to tag along.
They rent a villa called the Doll House down by the ferry docks.
Joining them, for some reason, is Olivia H-T.
We’ve lived among one another for the better part of our teenage years, but going away on vacation together gives us new information: Royce flies with a neck pillow, Olivia H-T and East fly first class, Madison J.
and her mom sound exactly alike, they wear identical pairs of Mystique jeweled flip-flops and they FaceTime the family dog before takeoff.
All of us agree: We can’t wait to feel the sun on our skin and put our toes in the sand. Look out, Harbour Island, here come the Thoroughbreds!
When the plane touches down in North Eleuthera, everyone cheers, including Charley. She has promised Davi that she’ll leave her sad, bitter self back at school, and fun, carefree Charley will jump into Harbour life with both bare feet.
“You’d better,” Davi says. “It’s our last spring break trip of high school.”
It’s Charley’s only spring break trip of high school. She’s never been to the Bahamas, never been on vacation without a parent, never had a legal drink (the drinking age in the Bahamas is a loosely enforced eighteen, part of its appeal to Tiffin students).
Charley makes a vow not to obsess about what East is doing. He was supposed to be staying in At Ease with the rest of them, but after the breakup, he booked himself at the Dunmore, the most exclusive hotel on the island.
The breakup has been worse than she expected.
For the first week, Charley received a barrage of texts and snaps from East, begging her forgiveness.
She ignored them all and iced him out whenever their paths crossed (they have no classes together, and he’d stopped eating at the Paddock, but Chapel was unavoidable).
They would have gone their separate ways in the fall anyway, Charley reminded herself; staying together was merely delaying the inevitable.
Then, suddenly, the texts from East stopped and Charley thought, WTF? Was he over her? Was he now texting with someone else?
She didn’t care, she didn’t care, she didn’t care.
Every time she thinks of East with his face between Bergeron’s legs, she wants to projectile vomit.
She takes a deep breath. She has brought five books with her. Will that be enough? This, she thinks, should be her only concern. Love is fleeting, literature endures; if she had a neon sign on her wall, this is what it would say.
Charley and Davi step off the plane into seductively warm sunshine. Davi is also solo because Liam went home to Queens for break.
Passport, please, state the nature of your trip, do you have any fresh fruits or vegetables, have you touched any livestock?
(“I don’t understand why they ask that,” Willow Levy says.
“They’re wary of parasites that might infest the native flora and fauna,” Royce says.) They pile into a taxi to the ferry terminal, where they wait in clusters in the sun.
East steps onto the ferry that leaves before Charley’s.
She feels both longing and relief as his form, clad in a white T-shirt and the faded jeans she loves, zips toward the island in the distance.
Bye, Charley says to his back. With luck, she won’t see him again all week.
Once they reach At Ease, there’s joyful mayhem.
The downstairs is decorated in beachy neutrals with comfy white couches and a lot of pale wood and glass.
Upstairs is a burst of tropical color. As promised, Mrs. Wilson isn’t setting foot in At Ease (“I’ll stop by at some point to make sure we don’t lose the security deposit,” she said as she climbed into a golf cart with Mrs. Jones and headed to the opposite end of the island), and so the couples—Taylor and Hakeem, and Royce and Willow—will, naturally, be staying together.
Charley, Davi, and Madison J. have rooms to themselves. As they lug their bags upstairs, Madison confides that she’s scheming the goalie from the Brooks boys’ hockey team and intends on bringing him back to the house.
Great, Charley thinks as she collapses face down on the queen bed that she and East should be sharing.
She tries not to bemoan the loss of an entire week of having sex with East in a real bed.
Instead, she notes the decor—the grasshopper-green rattan headboard, the duvet cover printed with hot-pink hibiscus, the teal window shutters.
It’s like she’s living in a Matisse painting.
But thinking this leads to thinking about Mav… and then to East with Bergeron.
Charley watches the blades of the ceiling fan spin above her head, certain that elsewhere in the house, the beds are getting a proper workout.
She’s doomed.
Hakeem and Taylor’s room has twin beds pushed together to make a king, but Hakeem is so hyped about the sleeping arrangements—no parents for a week, complete sexual freedom—that he doesn’t complain.
He locks the door and starts kissing Taylor, but she pulls away. “I have to unpack.”
“Unpack later.”
“Hakeem,” she says. “No. I need to hang up my dresses, then we’re going to provision for the house. Grocery store, liquor store. We have to do all that before happy hour.”
“What about a happy half-an-hour right here?” Hakeem falls spread-eagle onto his back and shucks off his shirt. “We’ve waited years for a chance like this.”
Taylor bows her head, trying to recapture the way she felt about sex in the fall.
You did this. Pure genius at work. But she can’t get there, not after what happened.
She and Hakeem have only had sex once since she miscarried—on the night of the Tuck, when they were both drunk—because Taylor has come up with excuses every other time.
She’s terrified of getting pregnant again.
What if there’s a hole in the condom or the condom slips off?
“We have all week,” Taylor says.
“Please, baby?” Hakeem says. “Don’t you love me?”
“Love and sex are two different things, Hakeem,” Taylor says. She flings her suitcase onto the bed, narrowly missing Hakeem’s head.
“Whoa!” Hakeem jumps to his feet. He’s running out of explanations for Taylor’s weird behavior—she’s premenstrual, she’s burned out, she’s protecting herself because they’re attending different colleges in six months. He thought spring break would be the reset they needed.
But apparently not.
Harbour Island charms Charley. It is, for lack of a better word, paradise.
On their first full day, Charley wakes up before anyone else, makes a pot of coffee, and reads her book on the front porch among the birdsong and the delicate smell of frangipani.
Once everyone else rises, there’s a golf cart run to Cocoa Coffee House for sandwiches, then they pack up and walk across the street to the pink sand beach.
Charley sits in the sun until noon, then moves into the shade of one of the At Ease cherry-red umbrellas.
Hakeem, Royce, and Willow play catch with the football Hakeem brought, Taylor takes a long walk by herself, Davi films the people horseback riding along the pink sand.
Madison treks down to the Coral Sands to play mah-jongg with her mom and Mrs. Wilson—and everyone asks her why she’s fifty years old.
When Madison returns, she stretches out on the chaise longue next to Charley and says, “I saw East.”
“I don’t care,” Charley says. “You don’t have to report his comings and goings to me.”
“You sure?” Madison says.
“I’m sure,” Charley says, but then she slams her book shut and sits up. “I’m ready to start drinking.”
They pregame at the villa by playing a version of beer pong called “Likelies, Targets, and Reaches,” then they drive their golf carts down to Valentines for happy hour.
The fourth-formers are already doing shots at the bar; Olivia H-T and Grady Tish are grinding to “Girl You Loud,” and everyone cheers them on.
Good for them, Charley thinks. She flags down the bartender.
Charley drinks two and a half rum punches, splits an order of conch fritters with Willow, takes a bite of Hakeem’s mahi sandwich, and ends happy hour by scream-singing “Rock Your Body,” a song she didn’t realize she even knew.
Next, it’s off to Gusty’s, where Davi thrusts a Goombay Smash into Charley’s hand.
This is the last thing Charley remembers before Hakeem carries her to the golf cart.
She squeezes her eyes shut, gulping in the sweet, cool night air as they tick up a steep hill.
At the top, Davi says, “Hold on, Charles,” right before the stomach-swooping roller-coaster drop downhill.
The next thing Charley knows, she’s in the queen bed she’s meant to be sharing with East. Davi tucks her in, kisses her forehead.
“I need a bucket,” Charley says. She spends the next three hours puking into a white wicker trash can and vows to never drink again.