Big Summer(17)

“So why didn’t you tell me?”

Drue made a face. “Remember Todd Larson?”

I nodded. Todd had been one of our Lathrop classmates. Todd’s dad had been a city council member until his name was found among the boldfaced entries in a Washington madam’s little black book.

“And Libby Ross?”

I nodded again. Libby’s mom had found out that Libby’s dad was cheating after she’d snooped on his Fitbit readout and noticed his heart rate spiking suspiciously at two in the morning for three nights in a row when he was allegedly at a great-aunt’s funeral in Des Moines. When that fact had come out in open court in the middle of their lengthy and contentious divorce hearings, the gossip websites had feasted on the scandal for days.

“I couldn’t talk about it. Not even with you.”

“You think I would have told people?” My voice was incredulous.

“My whole life, my parents told me not to trust anyone who wasn’t family.”

I rolled my eyes. “It wasn’t like you were in the mafia.” When Drue didn’t answer, I said, “Okay, so you were going through some stuff. Your parents were fighting. Lots of kids’ parents were fighting, or getting divorced. Do you think that excuses the way you treated me?”

“No,” she said. Her shoulders slumped. “You know what they say. Hurt people hurt people.”

“Who is they?”

“I don’t know.” Drue’s voice was small and sad. “My therapist? Oprah?”

I snorted. “Since we’re sharing quotations, how about ‘Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me’?” I wanted her to leave; to get out of this house, to stop calling, stop texting, stop writing, stop trying. I wanted her to leave me alone. But then, unbidden, my mind served up a picture: the two of us, in seventh grade, in pajamas, on a Monday morning in December. I’d slept over on Sunday night, and around midnight it had started to snow, an early-winter blizzard that had canceled all the city’s schools. We woke up to find the city covered in a blanket of pristine white. The streets were empty. Everything was quiet and still.

“I wish we had hot chocolate,” Drue had said. Abigay, the family’s cook, had left early the day before, trying to get home to her own children while the trains were still running. When I asked Drue where Abigay lived, Drue had shrugged, saying, “Queens. The Bronx. One of those places.”

“We can make hot chocolate,” I said. Drue had gone looking and reported back, “There’s no mix,” and when I’d found cocoa powder, sugar, and milk and made us a pot from scratch, she’d been as amazed as if I’d shown her actual magic. We carried our mugs over to the sofa by the window and sat there, looking down at the empty street, watching the snow fall. Her parents must have been somewhere in the house, but neither one of them made an appearance or disrupted the silence. There’d been a Christmas tree, a real Scotch pine, in the Cavanaugh living room, perfuming the air with the smell of the forest. I remembered its tiny white lights twinkling against the green branches, the richness of the hot chocolate on my tongue; and how happy I was, how thrilled to be in Drue’s company on that beautiful wintry day. We’d cut out snowflakes from gold and silver foil wrapping paper, and watched six episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. By the end of the afternoon I’d confided my crush on Ryan Donegan, one of the best-looking boys in ninth grade. By the second period of the day on Tuesday, Ryan had walked up to me in the hall and said, in front of at least six of our classmates, “Sorry, Daphne, but I don’t like you that way.” When I’d confronted Drue she’d shrugged and said, “You were never going to be brave enough to tell him on your own. So I did it for you. What’s the big deal?” Then she’d stopped talking to me, as if my anger was unreasonable, as if it had been my fault.

No, I thought. Absolutely not. No way was I letting her get close to me again. But then, right on top of that thought came a memory of a different sleepover. I’d been older, maybe fourteen, and I had woken up in the middle of the night, needing to use the bathroom. Rather than going to the one attached to Drue’s bedroom and possibly waking her, I slipped out into the hallway and was tiptoeing down the hall when I heard a loud, male voice ask, “Who’re you?”

I stopped, frozen and terrified, and turned toward the opened door. In the shadows, I could see a desk with a man-shaped bulk behind it. A glass and a bottle sat on the desk in front of him. Even from a distance, I could smell the liquor.

“I’m Daphne Berg. Drue’s friend.”

“What? Speak up!”

In a quavering voice, I said my name again. The man repeated it, in a vicious falsetto singsong: “I’m Daphne Berg. Drue’s friend.” His slurred voice turned the last two words into Drue’sh fren. “Well, I’m Drue’s father. Or so they tell me.” He made a barking noise, a version of a laugh. “What do you think about that?”

I wasn’t sure what to say, or even if I was supposed to answer. I knew that Robert Cavanaugh was a big deal—rich, powerful, a man who had the ear of presidents and the chairman of the Federal Reserve, according to Drue, who salted her conversation with references to him. My father says, my father thinks My father says a guaranteed minimum wage is a terrible idea, she’d announce in our Contemporary America class, or she’d casually drop My father thinks the Israeli prime minister’s kind of a jerk. She’d told me about her plans to work with him at the Cavanaugh Corporation after she graduated from Harvard, which he, too, had attended. But, as large as he loomed in my friend’s life, I’d never set eyes on Drue’s father until that moment, three years into our friendship.