Big Summer(28)
“But sometimes…” I remembered the day senior year that Drue had decreed Ferris Bueller Memorial Day. We’d watched the movie the night before, and when it was over, Drue had looked at me, smiling the smile that promised adventure and trouble. “We are going to do that,” she’d said.
“Do what? Cut school?”
“Cut school and do whatever we want.”
“I’m not getting on a parade float.” No need, my poisoned mind whispered. You’re practically the size of one already.
“Maybe we can just go to a parade. If I can find one.” Drue was already working her phone.
“So which one of us is Sloane?” Drue was between boyfriends, which meant that there were two or three boys, at Lathrop and elsewhere, who were in contention for the job. I, of course, had never even been kissed. Wan Ron was still years away.
“No Sloane,” said Drue. She rested her phone on her chest and smiled at me. “No boys. Just the two of us.”
I’d called my parents to ask permission to spend the night at Drue’s, and in the morning, after Drue had headed off to Lathrop, I called them again to say that I’d caught a cold and that I was going to stay in the guest room and drink Abigay’s chicken soup.
“Feel better,” said my mom. I felt a pinch of guilt for deceiving her, overshadowed by my excitement at the prospect of an adventure with my friend.
An hour later, I used the Cavanaugh landline to call the front office, pretending to be Mrs. Cavanaugh, whose Upper East Side lockjaw Drue and I had both long since mastered.
“Drue’s great-aunt Eleanor has passed,” I informed the receptionist. “Our driver will collect Drue at ten o’clock in front of the school.”
Instead of questions, I’d gotten a gulped “Yes, ma’am.” I was sure that the entire staff knew about Drue’s family’s history with, and generosity to, the Lathrop School. Luckily, none of them seemed to know anything about the health of her great-aunts. At nine-forty-five, I’d hopped in a car—I’d called for an SUV in case anyone was watching—and collected Drue on the sidewalk. “Why couldn’t we both have just pretended to be sick?” I asked.
“Oh, we could have,” she said, “but that wouldn’t have been in the spirit of the movie.”
We went to the Guggenheim and had lunch at the fancy restaurant, where we’d planned on peeking at the reservation book and impersonating another guest, as Ferris had done, but it turned out that the reservation book was an iPad, impossible to see. Drue’s parents had a Jacuzzi-style tub big enough to host a bridge foursome, but instead of going back to her place, Drue had decreed we’d end our day at Elizabeth Arden, where I’d had my first massage and my first facial. We’d put on robes and spent an hour in the Relaxation Room, gossiping and laughing, sipping cups of peppermint tea while our feet soaked in bowls of warm, rose-petal-dotted water. Drue told me the story of her great-aunt Letitia, whose beloved toy poodle had expired during a visit to the Cavanaughs’ home over Christmas. “Aunt Letitia was completely beside herself. We told her we’d take care of it, but none of the vets in the city were answering their phones. My dad wanted to wrap Jasper up in a trash bag and throw him down the trash chute, but my mother wouldn’t let him.”
“So what did you do?”
“Trip was home from college, so we borrowed his cooler, and we filled it with ice, so that Jasper wouldn’t, you know, start to decompose.” Her nose had wrinkled cutely at the thought. “We were just going to keep him there until the vets opened up. Which would have been fine, except my stupid brother’s buddies came to take Trip to some party, and they didn’t notice that the cooler was full of dead toy poodle and not beer. They were halfway to the Hamptons before they figured it out.”
I smiled, remembering that story. I was still smiling when I looked into Darshi’s suspicious face. “Sometimes it was amazing.”
Darshi’s eyes seemed to soften. “Yes,” she said quietly. “I always thought it would be.”
Chapter Six
“Daphne!”
I plastered a smile on my face and turned in the direction of the broad-shouldered fellow with the surfer’s tan and the petite brunette by his side. Drue and Stuart’s engagement party had started twenty minutes previously. The guest of honor had collected me at the Snitzers’ at the end of my workday, and so far, the two of us hadn’t made it more than five feet past the front door. I gave my hands a quick wipe on my skirt as the couple came barreling toward me. I was wearing my Jane dress and a pair of black suede sandals that had added inches to my height and were already making my feet ache. Drue, in a dress of glittering silver paillettes that made her look like a moonbeam with limbs and a face, was behind me, delivering a stream of whispered, champagne-scented commentary into my ear.
“Okay, so that’s my brother, the practice pancake, and his wife, Caitlin, who’s too good for him.” Drue stopped talking the instant her brother made it into earshot and hugged her sister-in-law. I vaguely remembered meeting Trip, whom I’d seen just in passing at the Cavanaughs’ apartment, but he seemed to remember me.
“Great to see you,” he said, hugging me, as his wife said, “I can’t wait to get out to the Cape!”
“I’ve never been, but I’m excited to see it,” I said. It had been less than a month since Drue’s reappearance, but she hadn’t wasted any time reintegrating me into her life, featuring me on her social media, or pressing me into maid-of-honor duties. So far, there’d been a bridal brunch, a dinner at Indochine with the groom and his parents, and three separate celebratory cocktail parties, culminating with this one, which Drue and Stuart were hosting in their brand-new penthouse apartment in the neighborhood that had once been Spanish Harlem and had just started to be called Carnegie Hill.