He greets me with a hug, then offers me his arm.
“Well, this place seems nice, if you’re into rose gardens and historic architecture,” he jokes. He’s a good dad. Truly, the very best. Even living a thousand miles away, the man doesn’t miss a birthday, a holiday, a recital, a playoff game. Every year he takes the entire month of July off to spend time with me at the vacation spot of my choosing. Last year it was Cape Town. This year we went to Barcelona.
My father and I ignore the family to the left until, by way of the shuffling crowd, we’ve moved too close to deny them any longer.
“Jake!” Garret Mahoney says, seemingly surprised to find my father here. “This must be your pride and joy, Collins!” He extends his hand, and I shake it. Hidden inside his palm is a peppermint, which he passes to me when our hands meet. He winks at me, and I give him a bashful smile. Garret Mahoney has a wide grin that reaches his forehead and a sunglasses tan around his eyes—probably from the Mahoneys’ annual vacation to St. Barths. He has this clumsy genuine quality about him like maybe he really didn’t know that my dad had enrolled me at the Rutherford Institute or that the Mahoneys’ endorsement had anything to do with it. Of course, it wasn’t his endorsement that got me here. It was her endorsement.
Marylyn Mahoney is wearing what I can now see is a grown-lady version of the Rutherford Institute uniform. Her slacks are the exact Rutherford heather gray, and her crisp white button-up is paired with a maroon sweater, a gray silk scarf, and a pin with four black pearls to signify the four years she spent here. A Rutherford Institute legacy. She has dark hair like her sons. When Mrs. Mahoney introduces them, Jasper gives me a tight smile and mumbles, “Nice to see you.” My father and Mr. and Mrs. Mahoney don’t pick up on the insinuation that we might have already met, but Jasper’s younger brother, Theodore, glances back and forth between Jasper and me, and I think I spy the slightest smirk on his face.
“I’m Theo,” he says, revising to the name he prefers to be called versus what his mother introduced him as, nodding at me, still with that subtle grin. Theo is a third year like me. His hair is a shade lighter than Jasper’s and shorter, with tighter curls. His eyes are green. His whole demeanor is altogether friendlier. He’s probably easier to get to know and easier to impress, but he shares my sexual preference for men, so it’s next to impossible for him to desire me the way I need one of the Mahoney brothers to desire me in order for this to work. There’s more power in love and in want, is what I was told—what I was promised. And besides, Theo has a different weakness—an already-open wound. Not one I’ll have to create myself.
Mrs. Mahoney is rattling on about Jasper’s early acceptance into Dartmouth—just like his father—and telling us that Theo’s a Princeton hopeful—just like she was. Jasper keeps that polite smile on his face that isn’t exactly friendly but does make him appear more pleasant. Theo has stopped listening and is waving at someone across the courtyard. A girl with long auburn hair waves back. I recognize her; I met her earlier while I was moving into the girls’ dormitory. She’s a third year named Anastasia Bowditch. But as she prances over to him with her family trailing behind her, she doesn’t acknowledge me. She reaches Theo and grabs his arm, and he gladly lets her steer him toward her family. Anastasia’s very young sister jumps into his arms. And so the Mahoneys are forced by social graces to migrate toward the Bowditches, effectively leaving my father and me on our own. Mrs. Mahoney glances back once more to smile, and to anyone watching, it would appear she’s simply ensuring the abrupt exit wasn’t rude, the way her husband gives us one final wave, saying, “We’ll have to catch up later this year when I return from Munich.”
Jasper doesn’t look back at all. Theo does, wearing a peculiar expression, as though maybe he can feel it coming already, the curse of what’s about to happen to them.
Two
“This is what you really want?” my father asks as we sit on the brick patio of Bello Italiano having dinner. We’re beyond the wrought iron gate and brick walls of the Rutherford Institute, in the Cashmere, California hot spot of Guthridge Square, where an assortment of shops and restaurants surround a courtyard and a fountain.
The Mahoneys are eating at the burger place across the square, next to the gift shop. My father and I pretend we haven’t noticed.
“Of course,” I say. It’s not the first time he’s asked me this.
He’s always suspicious of my answer, as if his instincts are telling him that something is off. His instincts are usually not wrong. But he also has no reason to assume I would lie to him about something so big.
We used to tell each other everything—or most things anyway. Now he sits there eating carbonara and sipping red wine, pretending he isn’t about to ruin our lives because of the woman wearing a black pearl pin across the square.
I pretend I’m at Rutherford for the higher learning, for the prestige, for the opportunity.
He pretends he doesn’t still have his doubts about leaving me here.
Convincing him wasn’t easy. He didn’t understand what was so wrong with the private school I was currently attending. He didn’t understand why I wouldn’t want to live at home with Mimi—which is what I said instead of Mommy when I was learning to speak and so it stuck—or why I’d want to leave my lifelong friends, Cadence and Meghan.
I’d prepared a whole argument about needing to be challenged, about wanting independence, about all the additional opportunities attending a school like Rutherford would provide for my future, and I’d done it in a way that he would understand. My father made his fortune at twenty-five by investing his entire meager savings into a company that manufactured a contraption that made underwater communication seamless. His best friend from Penn State had invented it. His friend got the patent but didn’t have the funds to make his invention until my father stepped in. This turned out not only to be a very, very profitable business venture but also allowed my dad to uncover his true passion and hidden talent, which was that he was good at analyzing potential business ideas and savvy at investing in and building great rewards off said potential. So I spoke his language and broke things down into a cost-benefit analysis, an approach I knew he’d have a very hard time arguing with. And I was right.
After a few months of my insistence, he finally caved. “I happen to know someone who would be able to put in a good word for you and help you get in even as a third year,” he’d told me—something I already knew and was counting on.
“Have you called your Mimi and Rosie yet?” he says. “I’m sure Rosie would love to hear all about it.” He takes a long sip of wine.
Probably the hardest part about letting me come here was that it had been Rosie’s idea.
“Rosie and Mimi are probably somewhere over the Atlantic right now.”
“That’s true.” He smiles. He likes picturing Mimi on an adventure. “Leave them a message anyway.”
Rosie is my aunt Rose, who only lets me—and no one else—call her Rosie. My father and Mimi only ever use Rosie when in reference to me. My dad has many reasons to be wary of her, and in this case, he’s right to be.