IN LATE AUGUST BEFORE senior year, I returned to Yale to find that my best friends had locked me out of our house.
If it were one of them, they would have simply gone to a boyfriend’s apartment or the suite of a prep school friend—or, fuck, into the city for a night at the St. Regis, faster than you could say Amex Black. But I didn’t have a boyfriend. I hated asking favors from anyone, let alone mere acquaintances. And though there was $3,000 in my bank account (enough for about three nights at the St. Regis), it was the most money I’d ever had at once, by a lot—and it had to last me until the following May.
I wasn’t like them.
They didn’t know it.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
You cannot believe the beauty of Yale until you bathe in it yourself. And unlike some of my friends, who wrinkled their noses at the run-down city, the broken-glassed sidewalks and empty lots surrounding us, I found New Haven necessary to actually enjoying Yale. When we’d visited colleges the summer before my senior year of high school (driving through the night, my father grim-facedly adding up the costs of tuition), I’d found Princeton too precious, Harvard its own colonial world, Cornell and Dartmouth so impossibly remote they might as well have been in Western Plains. But to watch Yale’s Gothic greenness arching up out of the jagged city around it—it was like plunging into a pool on a baking hot day.
And I was so ready for it. After two weeks in my southern Illinois hometown, a layover after a year in Buenos Aires, I felt dried out, like my skin was cracking from within.
I had craved the green of Yale before August even began. By the time I left for school, I could almost feel it in my hands, juicy as an aloe leaf. I thought about its trees, its grass, its stones, and its gates the whole eleven-hour trip: car to plane to subway to train.
Almost there. Almost back. Almost quenched.
I’d already realized that Cressida had forgotten to send me the keys to our shared house, of course. But these were the things my friends were particularly bad at. I always astonished them a little when I offered to return their overdue library books or to pay back the twenty dollars I’d borrowed. They looked at me like I was a stranger.
It took spending my junior year abroad—working at Miguel and Ana’s polo stables, studying at the universidad—for me to realize the power of what I could do on my own. I didn’t need my friends’ approval. I didn’t need to keep proving myself to them.
I was one of them, wasn’t I? I’d been one of them for years.
As I stood outside the train station in the late-summer heat, I was already sweating through my white tank, wishing I’d worn my denim cutoffs instead of sweatpants. There was no sign of a taxi, and the walk toward campus offered little shade and total danger, as older girls had warned us our first year.
Then again, that had only made it more appealing to me, not less. I was brave. I’d always been the one grabbing the wildest horse for a trail ride, the one confronting a bitchy rider who was not being a team player. Besides, it couldn’t have been more than two miles, and it was good to move my legs after all that sitting. Still, I could feel the grime of eleven hours of travel coating my damp skin as I walked, could feel my curly red hair frizzing out from its ponytail. The whole time, my mom’s voice echoing in my head: There’s a fine line between brave and stupid, babycakes.
But then, there it was: Whitney Avenue. My new home.
I saw the tower before I saw the house as a whole. From a spacious, grassy corner lot, that garret was visible before I’d even turned onto the street. Most off-campus housing was in run-down three-story houses with ancient vinyl siding kept by slumlords, as we called them, specifically to be rented out to a never-ending cycle of students one year at a time. The rest were college-owned, glossy modern apartments that lacked character and that none of my friends had any interest in.
No, Cress had written to me the previous spring when I’d mentioned getting one of those suites. She was the only one of our little equestrian group left on campus, training through junior year so she could go pro after graduation. Just no.
I’d trusted her. And I’d been right to. Our new home was a tasteful white Victorian with a wide wraparound porch, bay windows poking out from every side, and an enormous stained-glass panel framing the door in purple and red and gold.
I trotted up the front steps and rang the bell.
I could hear the little melody ringing out inside; around me, bees buzzed, everything smelled like summer and grass. I held myself back from ringing again too soon, but there were no thumping footsteps on what had to be hardwood floors.
I flipped my phone open. No calls, no messages. Cress’s number went to voicemail after two rings, while Lila’s was off. I didn’t bother calling Andra; she never picked up.
I texted all three of them: Here! Anybody home?
Nothing.
The four of us had kept in touch throughout junior year, through expensive texts that wouldn’t always send from the farm and what Lila called Skypey when the internet connection would allow for it, but I’d only had a few random emails from Lila and Andra over the summer, once they were back in the States. I was in Argentina through July, and they had quickly dropped into their summer routines of family travel and hometown parties without a backward glance.
Cress, on the other hand, sent rambling, almost manic emails with surprising regularity throughout the school year and summer—about her horses, the shows, the team, but most of all, about her new BFF, whom she was clearly waving in my face, trying to make me jealous.
Cress was my best friend, but was I still hers? Then again—who else would be? The other girls on the team had always treated her with a respect that bordered on awe. The kids she’d gone to Dalton with had always told her whatever she’d wanted to hear. It was one of the things she loved about me, she’d said many times—that I couldn’t lie, not without a splotchy red blush spreading from my cheeks down to my neck and chest.
But could Annabelle, the new girl on the team, have taken my place? Annabelle’s such a great rider, Annabelle has this crazy style. Annabelle’s like this beautiful witch, she’s so floaty and ethereal and calm. I’d never acknowledged any of it. Cressida was just mad that I’d gone abroad, mad because You know I have to stay here, Rosie, if I’m ever going to win a thing after college. You’re going to leave me all alone?
But I think, deep down, she also respected that I’d stuck to my choice.
What she didn’t know was that Argentina hadn’t entirely been my choice. It had just been the cheapest program on offer—plus I had guaranteed free housing and even a job through a friend of our coach’s.
I’d spent my whole childhood just outside doorways beyond which my parents whispered furiously about paying suppliers, about this month’s gas bill, about new shoes. Eighteen years of that made being among my Yale friends a revelation. The idea that if you needed something, you could just buy it, pay for it, and forget about it. The idea that if you were stuck in a bad situation, you could just leave, pay to transport yourself somewhere else.
The idea that all of life was open to you, not just a little sliver of it—that all you had to do was go around pointing at things, experiences, people. Saying mine, mine, mine.
The ability to choose?
That was my idea of heaven.
I MET CRESSIDA TATE EARLY IN OUR FIRST year at Yale. It’s so easy now to say, yes, she had an aura; yes, everyone knew her name, knew about her father’s money. But there are actual Kennedys at Yale, princesses and heiresses and stars; there are models and actresses; there’s every kind of person you never thought you’d meet in real life, gathered all around you. The daughter of a hedge-fund manager wasn’t all that notable.
But in a place where nobody stared at the famous people, they stared at her because she was just so beautiful. She was like an Old Master painting; she glowed in a way you couldn’t name but you couldn’t tear your eyes from. And she dressed so perfectly, every detail so exactly right that you felt if you studied her hard enough, you could learn how to do it, too.
That’s why the straight girls stared at her, at least. The straight boys stared at her for a different reason; she was voted hottest new meat by the frats our first year.
Tate. I hadn’t put it together yet. At that point, assuming she was related to Grayson would have been like meeting a Becky McDonald and assuming she was related to Ronald. What were the odds? I still hadn’t realized that, at Yale, when you met a DuPont—yes, they were one of those DuPonts. If you met a Rockefeller—yes, they were one of those Rockefellers. And if they weren’t, you could bet they’d tell you, if somewhat abashedly, in your first or second conversation.
From the first equestrian recruitment meeting, I heard the other girls whispering about her. She didn’t come—why would she? From what everyone had said, Cress was basically already guaranteed a spot. She was that good. By the end of that session, as senior captains Mallory and Beth explained the logistics of tryouts and the season’s schedule, the sound of Cressida’s whispered name had already started to get my back up. Cressida Tate. What kind of girl had that kind of name?
And I got even pricklier when I saw her riding an incredible thoroughbred around the outside paddock during the tryouts themselves. While I was trapped in the inner ring, walking and trotting and basically proving that, yes, I did know what a horse was, I caught glimpses of that horse’s coat gleaming in the sun every time I passed the open door.
“If I make it, what are the chances I get to ride her?” I asked Mallory on the way back to the barn.
She followed my gaze to Cress’s horse.
“Bambi?” she said, and snorted. “She’s Cressida’s. A present from his holiness. She pays a fucking fortune to board her here, but what do you expect from a first-year with a Range Rover? Good luck getting her to share. The horses we ride are mostly rescues.”
But I was still looking at Cress, soaring over the jumps in creamy leggings. The kind you could only wear once or twice before staining irrevocably. “His holiness?” I said absently.
“Grayson Tate.” Mallory and Chips, the school’s gray gelding, had gone up ahead, and she threw an impatient look over her shoulder. “Billionaire developer. Hedge-fund founder. Sponsor of the team? Also, Cressida’s dad.”
Sponsor of our 4-H club, too, back in Western Plains. Once a fort for wagon trails going farther west, to somewhere fortune could still be found, the town now had a main street of whitewashed storefronts, displaying only what used to be: a Woolworth’s, a Gimbels, an A&P. Outside of town, there were fields of monocrops where farmers took their government subsidies or sold out to corporations, whichever devil they found easier to live with. And then there was my parents’ little veterinary practice, still chugging along out of our ramshackle Victorian mansion, as the locals called it with no trace of irony. One hundred fifty years in the Macalister family, even though the neighboring dairy had sold out to Nestlé (with their in-house vets) the year before. We were proud of that.
“Oh,” I muttered. “Of course.”
I didn’t meet Cressida that day. She was yards ahead of me in ability, miles ahead socially. Anyway, she was always with two other girls, sleek brunettes: pleasant-faced Lila and sly-eyed Andra, never Alexandra. The three of them reminded me of a gang of cats that had once taken up residence in our back shed. Thin as anything but glossy, as though they’d been taken care of; looking sweet as pie but hissing like devils whenever you’d come near them.
My social life at the time focused exclusively on the first people I’d met in my own college. Plain, serious girls who planned to major in science, nice but awkward boys whose jeans came from Hollister. It was discomfiting that they were at Yale, too—kids like the ones I’d grown up with. The bland ones I thought I’d gotten away from. Mostly, they were just people I hung out with during orientation so I wouldn’t have to go to things alone—the ice cream socials, the welcome dances, the safe-sex talks.
Cressida Tate didn’t do ice cream socials.
No, I didn’t meet her until a week after making the equestrian team.
Did I know, as I looked around the classroom of EQ girls during our first official meeting, that they would end up being my only college friends? Of course I knew. And I was vibrating like a rung bell with the joy of it. These girls weren’t wearing anything you could get at the mall.
And Cressida Tate, with her perfectly waved pale beach hair, her tan from a summer in Greece still dark. Her earrings (Chanel but without the interlocking Cs; she found anything with a logo on it tacky as fuck, she would never) were slick mother-of-pearl disks that winked in the light. She looked like a tall Olsen twin—at the time, the absolute paradigm of cool. Heart-shaped face, pointy chin, huge eyes. At her side, Andra Cooper, shiny and self-satisfied, and Lila Farrow, an apple-cheeked girl with glossy chestnut hair who seemed by far the nicest of the group.
My future friends, the only other first-years. But I couldn’t bring myself to talk to them yet; not even Lila. They already knew some of the upperclassmen from their time competing on the junior circuit, and were chatting languidly with any who stopped in front of them.
Mallory, the captain, explained how it would work. We were divided into levels based on our competition history. As I’d never done an official show (did 4-H count? I certainly wasn’t going to ask), they were placing me in Walk-Trot-Canter, the second-lowest level, stacking the deck. I’d have lessons with Kelly, Lacy, and Anna: two sophomores and a senior who’d never managed to make her way up the ranks. Andra was Novice; Lila, Intermediate; and Cressida was placed in the highest level, Open.
Without lessons together, we’d only ever see each other at shows. Yet, I was still on the team. I still had a place where I belonged; and as far as Yale went, it was a good one. It wasn’t Skull and Bones, but it still said: I am an athlete. I have talent.
I have money.
I wore my gear to meet the rest of my level for our first lesson of the season. I didn’t know yet that I could change at the barn. At the library, I’d printed out MapQuest directions to the place where Anna had said to meet—a couple miles off campus. Could that be right? But she was a senior, she must live in a house with friends. And so I trudged through the already-turning leaves in the stiff Ariat show boots my parents had gotten me for graduation (should have worn paddock boots and half chaps, like I did back home—but these girls were fancy, surely they’d be wearing show gear?), blisters already grating on my heels.
The Gothic arches fell away, replaced by town houses. The town houses fell away, replaced by row houses. There were a hundred trees per block—then fifty—then ten. Stained glass gave way to double glazing gave way to chipboard and flapping plastic and duct tape.
I stopped in front of a boarded-up house, one side of it sunk into the ground at almost a forty-five-degree angle, planks from its small porch plucked out like missing teeth.
This couldn’t be right.
I double-checked the directions. My feet throbbed; the Ariats were so stiff they could have been made of cement.
Behind me, the faint sound of male voices sent my heart stuttering. I was wildly out of place in my shiny black boots, my skintight beige leggings, the J.Crew outlet purse that looked so much more expensive than it was and that held the flip phone I’d begged for as well as all the cash I had for the rest of the month (what if we went out to lunch afterward? Better to look flush, surely?).
The voices hooted and hollered. I squinted into the windows surrounding me, but I couldn’t see anyone. They sounded closer. They sounded like they were talking about me. They sounded—
And then a black Jeep. No, a Range Rover, a car I hadn’t even realized existed in America until I saw Cressida Tate cruising around campus in it. The team assumed that enough girls would bring cars that they didn’t organize public transport from campus to the stables. Instead, they left it to each group to figure out who would drive the rest.
Cressida, as usual, was one step ahead.
The car rolled up in front of me. As I stared at its tinted windows, it suddenly occurred to me that it wasn’t necessarily Cressida inside; it could be anyone. But then the driver’s window rolled down.
Cressida, three-quarters of her face covered by Jackie O sunglasses, 50 Cent blaring from her radio.
“Get in,” she said.
“What—”
She pushed her sunglasses up into her hair. And then, she made the strangest face I’d ever seen. An index finger on either side of her mouth, her middle fingers pulling her eyes down. It was a grotesque mask of a face, a ridiculous, disgusting expression—and I never would have thought such a beautiful girl would stoop to making it.
“Get. In,” she said again through her stretched lips. Then she let them go and giggled.
I didn’t know it yet, but Cress had a deeply silly streak. The kind of silliness an uglier girl, even an average-looking girl, would have hidden. Later, during sophomore year, she had a horrible allergic reaction to aspirin. Her whole face swelled up until she looked like a cross between a purple balloon and a red chipmunk. But she just stood in front of the mirror, laughing and laughing. She wouldn’t let us take her to health services until we got a photo of it.
I scampered into the car, where calm washed over me and I took a breath so deep I could feel the bottom of my lungs. It took me a minute to figure out why. It was the cool of the air conditioning. The scent of the black leather seats. The thrum of the bass in tune, it seemed, with the powerful engine.
“Thank you so much,” I gasped. “But how did you—”
“They did it to me yesterday,” she said, bumping up over the curb as she made the most egregious U-turn I’d ever seen.
“But Anna’s not in your group…?” I said.
She paused so long I could practically hear her eyes roll.
“It’s hazing,” she said, an unspoken you idiot hanging between us. “Did you really think Anna lived here?”
The empty beer cans on the porch, one of them turned on its side and rolling back and forth in the wind. The hoots and hollers that might have followed us, that I could no longer hear from inside the car. The pair of ancient sneakers tied together and hung over a telephone wire.
“Somebody does,” I said softly.
“I know,” she said, and wrinkled her nose beneath her sunglasses. “Ew.”
THE MORE I THOUGHT ABOUT my friends, the more I suspected I already knew exactly how to get into the house. I followed the porch around back, and sure enough, the screen door swung open at my touch.
I stepped into the kitchen, which definitely wasn’t designed for students. Had the house been left by some professor on sabbatical? The floor was wonderful, blue and white Portuguese tile that was echoed in the backsplash over the sink. A huge slab of a driftwood table surrounded by chairs with a distinct designer feel to them took up the center of the room. Already there were water rings on its unfinished surface; already there were piles of dishes overflowing from the sink onto almost every inch of counter space. Flies buzzed over a pan left to soak, rainbow grease shining on its surface; and yet, all I could think was, one of them cooked something?
It made me smile.
Sophomore year, the common areas of the suite we’d all shared after ditching our randomly assigned first-year roommates had been disgusting. It was only my perfunctory attempts at tidying up that had kept it from slipping into a full-on biohazard. I hadn’t minded because my own single room was clean. The other girls hadn’t seemed to notice the squalor of their own rooms. After all, we were almost never there.
I slipped into the main hallway, lit from the sun filtering through heavily curtained windows. A double-depth living room featured a suite of elegant white couches that, though pristine, made me wince. All I saw was nine months’ worth of dabbing away red wine stains in the faint hope that I’d get my six-hundred-dollar security deposit back.
An image of me in the Argentinian paddock, finally breaking Perdita, the wild horse nobody’d been able to get near, flickered briefly in my memory. Would that girl have cleaned up somebody else’s wine stains? No. And she wouldn’t have cared about a piddling security deposit either.
Up the wide wooden staircase, my sneakers squeaked the whole way. Cress must have done some number on the owners. Really, who in their right mind would have rented this place to a bunch of students? I stopped at the top, pausing for a moment to watch the light dance through the golden stained-glass scroll above the window seat at the end of the long hall. To smell the warm wood, the beeswax and polish, to imagine the family that must have vacated the place just months before. It made me ache.
The first door, the same gleaming walnut wood as the floorboards, had a tarot card taped on it: the Queen of Swords. Andra, somebody’d scrawled beneath it in handwriting I didn’t recognize. The next had the Queen of Wands with Lila below. Then a tiled bathroom, already in disarray.
On the other side of the hall, the Empress: Cressida. I couldn’t help it; I twisted the doorknob to peek at the room she’d chosen for herself. The tower room, the garret that I’d seen from outside. Two levels with a spiral staircase connecting them; the second level was just a wrought-iron walkway, its walls lined with bookshelves, empty now except for a few crumpled, quilted handbags here and there. Cress was never much of a reader. Below, a white wicker bed with a silk quilt twisted up with a sheet, clothes on the floor mixed in with bootjacks, lotions, magazines.
The last, then. A blank door, the one that had to be mine. But it took me a minute to open it, the metal knob sticking in the heat.
The room overflowed with color and life.
Eggplant velvet curtains hung at the windows. There was a blue, purple, and red mandala tapestry on the long wall, a photo of a bare-breasted Janis Joplin. Half a dozen plants, scattered on side tables, an antique bureau, the windowsills. Overlapping rugs of various colors and patterns.
Cressida had promised to furnish my room, but this?
That was when I noticed that the far half of the room was empty.
I flung open the closet door. There, overstuffing exactly half of the small space, was a jumbled collection of bohemian garb. Patterned cotton scarves that would wrap around a neck six or seven times. Chandelier earrings. And mixed in with them, the kinds of attire my friends always defaulted to: tall polished boots, pea coats, cashmere.
Whoever lived here, she had style.
But she wasn’t me.
I was supposed to share my room, and no one had told me? I’d been gone for a year, but so had Lila and Andra. And just because I was poorer than they were, I’d been demoted to coach?
I took a deep breath, smoothing my palms down the front of my jeans. It could be a mistake; there must be another room that I’d missed. I went back into the hallway. But the only doors were the ones I’d already seen.
There had to be an explanation. Cress would tell me why.
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