Mrs. Fletcher(76)

*

Unlike Amanda, Eve didn’t have the luxury of a clear conscience. She had no problem absolving her partners of responsibility—they were young (Julian was barely legal, for God’s sake), they’d been drinking, they were free to do as they pleased, no responsibility to anyone but themselves. That wasn’t true for Eve: she was the boss, the homeowner, the host, the adult in the room. The one who should have known better. Nothing but selfishness and bad judgment had compelled her to walk down the hall, barge in on Amanda and Julian’s private moment, and turn their duet into a threesome. And no, she hadn’t been checking up on Julian to make sure he was okay. Maybe she’d started out worrying that something might be wrong, but by the time she poked her head into the bedroom, she already knew what was going on. She’d heard them in there.

She just didn’t want to be left out.

That was all it was—simple loneliness. She couldn’t bear the thought of retreating to her room, shipwrecked again on the desert island of her bed. Didn’t want to lie there feeling sorry for herself—she’d wasted so much time feeling sorry for herself—while they had all the fun. So she’d behaved like a child and invited herself to the party, without a thought for the consequences.

It had taken her a while to understand how badly she’d screwed up, mainly because it could have been so much worse. By the time Brendan showed up, with no warning whatsoever—he’d let himself in with the spare key they kept hidden in a fake rock beneath the azalea bush—the main event was over, thank God. Amanda had gone home, too embarrassed to spend the night, and Eve had returned to her own bedroom to process what had just occurred. Only Julian remained at the scene of the crime, and that was all Brendan saw when he turned on the light: a kid he vaguely knew from high school sleeping naked in a tangle of sheets and blankets, a roll of condoms unfurled on the floor, two wrappers torn and empty. Brendan seemed more confused than upset, calling out, Mom? Mom? over and over, until Eve finally emerged from her room, clutching the lapels of her fuzzy pink robe. By that point Julian was already tugging on his jeans, talking to Brendan in a calm but frightened voice, assuring him that everything was cool, though it obviously wasn’t. Eve felt terrible about sending him home on his skateboard in the middle of the night, but it seemed like the best thing for everyone to get him out of the house as quickly as possible.

Then she lied to her son—what else could she do?—telling him that she’d thrown a little party for her fellow students, and that Julian had hooked up with one of the other guests, a girl named Salima from their Gender and Society class. This was a ridiculous, deeply unfair story—Salima was a modest young Muslim woman who would never have gone to a party where alcohol was served, let alone had sex with Julian—but Brendan was mercifully uninterested in the plausibility of her alibi. He waited for her to finish, and then announced in a matter-of-fact voice that he was dropping out of college, which Eve assumed was a melodramatic way of saying that he was homesick or had failed a test. They were both exhausted and embarrassed, for their own individual reasons, and agreed to postpone further conversation until they’d gotten some sleep and could think more clearly. But first Eve went back up to his room and changed the sheets on his bed, even though he insisted it wasn’t necessary, because she knew that it absolutely was.

*

The closeness of that call—the dizzying, weak-kneed feeling of disaster barely averted, of having been spared an unspeakable humiliation—had thrown her off her game in the days that followed, kept her from being as firm with Brendan as she should have been. She should have insisted that he return to school immediately, that he buckle down and study hard and finish what he’d started. She should have made it clear that quitting wasn’t an option. But she couldn’t locate her inner tiger mom, couldn’t find a good-faith way to access the voice of parental authority at the moment when she needed it most.

Instead she listened and sympathized—as if she were his friend instead of his mother—letting precious days go to waste while she gently interrogated him about what had gone wrong at school, and why he was refusing to go back. They spent hours hashing it over, but he never managed to give her a convincing explanation. His laundry list of grievances always struck her as vague and insufficient: his classes were boring, this one professor had a crazy accent, everyone was so PC, Zack was never around anymore, the food sucked, he didn’t have any friends. There had to be more to the story, but Brendan was a master at shutting down the conversation. If she pressed him too hard for specifics, he’d pull out his phone and start swiping at the screen with an expression of surly impatience, as if he were a busy corporate executive who didn’t have time for this nonsense.

Desperate for professional guidance, Eve called BSU and spoke to an academic dean named Tad Bramwell. He told her what she already knew—the university offered counseling services for students who were struggling emotionally and tutoring for those who were having trouble with their course work—but he reminded her that it was Brendan’s responsibility to avail himself of these resources. At Bramwell’s urging, she also spoke to her son’s faculty advisor, Professor Torborg of the Anthropology Department, who didn’t seem overly concerned about her son’s plight.

“Freshman year’s a tough adjustment,” he told her. “Not every incoming student is willing or able to meet the challenges of college work.”