And I knew. I fucking knew right then. And I was so angry that I hadn’t known it hours before. I looked at Madison, and of course she wouldn’t look at me. I grabbed her arm under the table and squeezed the shit out of it, but she didn’t even flinch.
“What’s the offer?” my mom said, slightly drunk, very interested.
“I believe that the headmistress would be more forgiving if the student were someone other than Madison,” he said. “I think if, for instance, it were your daughter, a virtuous girl who has made so much of herself while dealing with such hardship, the headmistress would offer only a cursory punishment, at most a semester’s suspension.”
“Why?” my mother asked, and I wanted to kick her in the face. I wanted to sober her up, but I knew it wouldn’t matter.
“It’s complicated, ma’am,” Mr. Billings said. “But I do believe this. I believe that if you and Lillian marched into that woman’s office tomorrow morning and told her that the drugs were actually Lillian’s, the punishment would be quite lenient.”
“That’s a big maybe,” my mother said. Maybe she wasn’t as drunk as I thought.
“Well, it is a risk, I admit that. Which is why I would be willing to reimburse you for your troubles. In fact, I have a check, made out to you, Ms. Breaker, for ten thousand dollars. I believe that would help toward Miss Lillian’s continuing education. I believe there’s enough in that gift to cover some of your own expenses.”
“Ten thousand dollars?” my mom repeated.
“That’s correct.”
“Mom,” I said, just as Madison was saying, “Dad,” but they both shut us up. Right then, Madison looked at me. Her eyes were so blue, even in the dim light of this shitty steakhouse. It was such a strange feeling, to hate someone and yet love them at the same time. I wondered if this was normal for adults.
Mr. Billings and my mom kept talking; the food came, and Madison and I didn’t eat a single bite of our dishes. I stopped listening to anything. Madison grabbed my hand under the table and held on to it right up until her father paid the bill and escorted us out of the restaurant, his check in my mom’s purse.
That night, after he’d dropped us off at our dorm and we’d signed ourselves back in, Madison asked if she could sleep in my bed with me, but I told her to fuck off. I brushed my teeth and then, while she sat in her bed and read Shakespeare for some paper she had to write, since she wasn’t going to be expelled after all, I packed up my duffel bag. How in the world did it hold less than it had when I arrived? What was my life? I got into bed and shut off my light. A few minutes later, Madison turned off her light and we both sat there in the dark, not saying anything. I don’t know how long it took, but she finally crept over to my side of the room and stood over me. She was my only friend. I scooted over, and she crawled into my bed. She wrapped her arms around me and I could feel her chest press against my back. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Madison” was all I could manage. I’d wanted something, and I didn’t get it. Or it was going to be harder to get it when I got another chance.
“You’re my best friend,” she said, but I couldn’t say anything else. I lay there until I fell asleep, and when the dorm parent knocked on our door in the morning to say that my mother was outside waiting for me, I realized that, sometime in the night, Madison had gone back to her own bed.
The headmistress seemed to know that I was lying; she tried several times to get me to alter my story, but my mother kept butting in, saying how hard my life had been. And then Ms. Lipton expelled me. My mother didn’t even seem that shocked. I’d never even smoked one of my mom’s cigarettes at this point, and I was kicked out of school for drugs. I felt like I’d been good for nothing.
When I went to the room to get my duffel bag, Madison was gone. On the drive back to the valley, my mother said that she would set aside money for my college tuition, but I knew that money was already gone. It had vaporized the moment it touched her hands.
Four months later, I got a letter from Madison. She told me about her summer vacation in Maine. She told me how awful the last weeks of school had been without me there, and how she so badly wanted me to come visit her in Atlanta. There was no mention of what had happened to me, what I’d done for her. She told me about a boy she’d met in Maine and how much stuff she’d let him do. I could hear her voice in the letter. It was a pretty voice. I wrote back, and I didn’t mention the awful shit between us. We became pen pals.
I went back to my awful public high school, which felt like returning to sea level after spending a year on the highest mountain peak. All the teachers and students, everyone in the town, had heard about my expulsion, the cocaine, the fact that I had fucked up my one chance to improve my circumstances. They invented little twists on the basic story to make it seem even worse. And they blamed me. They were so angry, like, fuck, why had they ever thought that someone like me could have handled such an experience? And so they gave up on me, stopped talking about college, about scholarships. I turned into a ghost, this story that lived in the town, a cautionary tale, but who would it scare? Who would listen?
Everything was so easy, and nobody cared, and I lost interest. I started working after school, helping my mom clean houses. I started hanging out with idiot boys and girls who had access to weed and pills, and I’d stay with them as long as they didn’t expect anything from me. Then, when they did expect things, I just bought weed myself and smoked joints on the back porch of my house all alone, feeling the world flatten out. I started to care less about the future. I cared more about making the present tolerable. And time passed. And that was my life.
As we neared the estate, all I could see were green pastures and what felt like miles and miles of white fence. I couldn’t understand what the fence was there for, because it wouldn’t keep anything in or out. It was purely ornamental, and then, like, duh, I realized that if you had this much money, you could make gestures that were purely ornamental. I reminded myself to be smarter. I was smart. I just had a thick layer of stupid that had settled on top of me. But I was still wild when I needed to be. I’d get smarter. Whatever Madison had, I’d get it easily.
The fucking driveway felt like it was a mile long, and it looked like it would lead you straight to the gates of heaven, that’s how perfectly maintained it was. It could have ended at a run-down pizza joint with bars on the windows and you’d still be so thrilled.
“Almost there,” Carl said.
“What’s the mail situation like?” I said.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Do they have to walk all the way to the end of this driveway just to get the mail? Or do they have, like, a golf cart? Or does someone get it for them?” I didn’t ask if he was the one who got the mail for them, but I feel like maybe he knew that I was wondering.
“Well, the postman just brings it to the door,” he said.
“Oh, okay,” I said. I thought about Madison sitting on her porch, drinking sweet tea and waiting patiently while the postman crept up the driveway, bearing a letter from me about my ideas for a tattoo on my ankle.
I had often fantasized about Madison’s home. It seemed weird to ask her for a photo of the mansion, like, Hey, I could live without another photo of your teddy bear son but please send me pictures of every single one of the bathrooms in your mansion. When she sent photos, I could make out parts of the house, expensive and well maintained. Maybe if I’d cut them into pieces and reassembled them, I could have seen the whole mansion. Sometimes it was simpler to just believe that Madison lived in the White House. That made sense to me at the time. Madison lived in the fucking White House.