Nothing to See Here (59)

“Oh, okay,” I replied. “So then, what? You get them, like, a real governess?”

“Well, I haven’t had much time to think about this, you understand? Like, there are huge things going on. But I think maybe boarding school would be good for them.”

“They’re ten years old,” I said.

“In Europe,” Madison said, “kids go to boarding school when they’re eight. That might be really good for them, to go abroad, to experience the world after being cooped up in that house with Jane all this time.”

“I think that’s a terrible idea,” I countered. “I mean, what happens if they catch on fire, right? Don’t you think sending them away is going to make that worse?”

“Honestly, it’s better if they catch on fire in Europe than in D.C.,” she replied. “It’s less visible, less verifiable.”

“They’ve just been through a lot,” I said.

“We went to Iron Mountain,” she replied, “and that wasn’t so bad, was it?” And before I could even reply, her face fell, and she stuttered, “Well, I mean, it was a good school, right?”

“You’re going to ship them off somewhere?” I said. “That fucking sucks, Madison.”

“What else can we do?” Madison replied.

“You can take care of them!” I said.

“Okay, Lillian,” she said, taking a deep breath. “I appreciate the fact that you helped me when I needed it. But, truthfully, you have been watching them for, like, hardly any time at all. You think it’s just so easy. But you don’t have the kind of pressures that Jasper and I have. You can focus entirely on these kids because that’s all you have to do. We have to plan for our long-term future.”

“This isn’t right,” I said.

“This is the thing about you sometimes, Lillian,” Madison said, and I knew that this was going to be soul-crushing. I knew it was going to hurt. “You act like you’re above it all, and you act like the whole world owes you something because you had it rough. And you judge people like crazy. Like, I know you hate Jasper. I know you think he’s not nice. But you haven’t given him a chance. You just saw that he was rich, and that makes you feel weird, and so you think he’s a bad guy. You never really tried at anything. You had this bad thing happen, you got kicked out of school, and you let that sit there forever like it was the worst thing that had ever happened to anyone in the world.”

I honestly couldn’t tell if Madison remembered the past at all. All those years that I wondered why she never once thanked me for taking the fall for her, I had just assumed that it was because she was so embarrassed. But now it felt like maybe she just didn’t remember it, like her version of the past was that I’d gotten caught with some coke and gotten kicked out. And that she had stayed friends with me because she was a good person. And that I had fucked up because I was bound to fuck up.

“Your father paid my mom so that I would get kicked out of Iron Mountain instead of you,” I said.

“Okay,” she said, like she was humoring me, like she would let me spin this conspiracy theory for as long as I needed to.

“And you let them. You let your dad do that, because you didn’t want to get kicked out. And because you thought it didn’t matter if I got kicked out, because I didn’t really belong there.”

“That’s really unfair,” she said. “I was your friend. I cared about you. And you never thought about what I was going through, what I was dealing with. And, Lillian, even if you’d graduated from Iron Mountain, what would you have done? Do you think you’d have my life? Do you think that would be possible?”

“I don’t want your life,” I told her. “Your life seems fucked up. It seems sad.”

She stood up suddenly, and I thought we were going to fight. I clenched my hands into fists, my face already so messed up that it didn’t matter what else happened to it. But Madison just started jogging away from me. She started running. She ran to the basketball court and she flicked on the floodlights, the whole court now illuminated. She started dribbling, running drills, and hitting layups. She set up at the free-throw line and hit turnaround jumpers. And that sound, the ball bouncing on the court, the way the net swished, it just opened me up, made me feel like there wasn’t a single emotion in my body. It made me not want to kill her. I was so grateful for that half-second reprieve from wanting everyone to be dead. And I walked over to the court.

For a while, I just watched her shoot. And she ignored me. And if I was in her head, her game didn’t show it. She was hitting almost everything, so easily.

“You really are my best friend,” she finally said, not looking at me. “And, yes, I know that’s pathetic because I haven’t seen you since freshman year of high school. But you were. For that little while, you were the best friend I ever had, and I just never met another person like you. But I was so embarrassed by what my dad did—or what I did, whatever—that I kind of thought of you as my friend, but frozen there, in that dorm room. I wrote to you and it made me happy to share my life with someone who fucking cared about me. And I liked hearing from you, knowing that you still thought about me. I wish I’d been a better friend to you. I wish I’d done the right thing and taken the blame. Honestly, I’d still be right here. Nothing was going to keep me from this. But, okay, maybe your life would have been better.”