Big Summer(63)

That didn’t seem like an especially generous way to discuss your brother’s newly deceased intended and your almost sister-in-law, I thought, as Arden kept talking.

“I was the one who tried to tell him about her. After they’d been dating for six months, the second time, he came home and asked Mom for Grandma Frances’s ring. I told him. I said, she’s going to screw you over the same way she did before. The same way she’s screwed over everyone, and it’s not like you haven’t seen her do it. He didn’t listen.” She shook her head, looking rueful. “Drue must have been amazing in bed. That’s the only explanation.”

“I wouldn’t know. And like I said, I barely knew her as an adult, but I hoped that she’d grown up and changed.”

“I guess Stuart hoped so, too. He said, ‘You can’t judge someone on the way they behaved in high school.’?” Arden rolled her eyes. “I told him, a leopard doesn’t change its spots.”

“So what happened?” I asked, keeping my voice quiet and level, trying to sound like all the therapists I’d ever seen on TV. “I know what she did to me. Tell me what she did to your brother.”

Arden reached back with both hands, elbows pointing skyward as she yanked her ponytail tight. “I think that Stuart’s a catch,” she said. “That’s not me being his sister, that’s me being objective. He’s cute, he’s smart, he’s creative, and he works hard. He’s got a good heart. You’d think that would have been enough for Drue, right?” Arden didn’t wait for me to answer before shaking her head. “The first time they were dating, they went to a football game together. And Drue met another guy, a classmate’s older brother. Who was smart and good-looking, and also Michael Leavitt’s son.”

Michael Leavitt, I knew, was a tech billionaire, one of the wealthiest men in the world, which would make his son one of the world’s most eligible bachelors.

“And Drue went after him.”

“Like a dog after a rabbit.” Arden’s eyes were fixed on the water. “Stuart said you could hear the wheels turning the first time she saw him. Like, How am I going to get that?”

“What happened?”

“She got him. For a little while. They went out for a few months, and then Jeremy ended it. Said he couldn’t give her what she deserved. How’s that for a line?”

“Maybe she really loved him,” I ventured. Arden gave a cynical shrug that made her look a lot older than twenty-four.

“I’m not sure Drue ever loved anyone. I think some people just always want more. There’s no such thing as enough.” She shrugged again. “Who knows? If she’d married Jeremy, maybe she’d have dumped him to try for Prince Harry.”

Something was sticking in my mind, nagging at me like a splinter. I shut my eyes, trying to replay our conversation. “When did this happen? When did Drue dump Stuart so she could go after Jeremy Leavitt?”

“Oh, that was Round One,” said Arden. She unfurled herself from her tuck, stretching her arms up over her head. “That’s what my parents and I call it, the first time they got together.”

“In college, right?”

Arden shook her head, her ponytail swinging. “Nope. When they were in high school. At Croft.”

Croft? “Drue went to the Lathrop School,” I said. “In New York City. With me.”

“Through twelfth grade, sure. I’m talking about after. She met Stuart at Croft. It’s a boarding school. In California. Stuart had been there, the whole way through. Drue showed up there after she graduated from Lathrop to do a PG year.” At my blank look, Arden gave a cynical smirk. “Yeah, I know she made it look like she was doing a gap year. I saw her Instagram. All of those pictures of Australia, or doing Habitat for Humanity, or whatever. The truth was that she went to Croft, the year after Lathrop, trying to get her grades and her SATs up high enough for Harvard.”

“So, those trips…” I tried to remember the pictures I’d seen on the Lathrop School’s website, tried to square this revelation with what I’d previously believed. “She faked them?”

“No. She did all that stuff, she just did it on vacations. In between all the tutoring she needed to make it across the finish line and into Hah-vahd. There was even some scandal at Croft about her parents paying someone to take her SATs. The school hushed it up. And it worked. She got in. Happily ever after.”

I closed my mouth, which had fallen open in disbelief. I’d stayed away from Drue’s social-media presence as much as I could, so I wasn’t sure how much to trust my own memory. Had she ever explicitly said she was on a gap year, or had she just made it look that way and guessed, correctly, that it was what most people would think?

I shook my head. “Wow. I always figured she got into Harvard the old-fashioned way. Good grades, good test scores, and a big donation from Mom and Dad.”

Arden smirked. “Even with her dad handing over the big bucks, she still had to show Harvard that she was going to be able to do the work. I guess she needed an extra year to clear the bar.”

Interesting, I thought. Of course, it wasn’t surprising that Drue wouldn’t advertise how she’d needed extra help or extra time to get into college. Drue was smart—smart enough to be one of our class’s top students if she’d applied herself. But she hadn’t. She preferred to party, and to shop, and to hook up with guys. I’ll never be this young again, she’d say. Which meant that she’d slack off for the better part of a semester, then do all of the reading in a single all-night binge, fueled by gallons of coffee and her mother’s diet pills. She also had me as her secret weapon, ever available to help write her papers, type them, run spellcheck, and sometimes, when she was feeling especially lazy, take her idea and do the actual writing.