We left our things in the Castle and ran wildly through the trees, down the hillside stairs to the edge of the lake. We laughed and shouted at one another, sure we wouldn’t be heard and too tipsy to care if we were. The dock stretched out into the water from the boathouse, where a collection of useless old tools crumbled and rusted. (There hadn’t been a boat kept on the south side of the lake since they turned the Castle into student housing.) We spent many warm nights and some of the cold ones smoking and drinking on the dock, dangling our feet over the water.
Meredith, who was in by far the best shape and much faster than the rest of us, ran with her hair snapping like a flag behind her and got there first. She stopped and draped her arms over her head, a pale stripe of her back visible above her waistband. “How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!” She turned and grabbed both my hands, because I was closest. “Here will we sit and let the sounds of music / Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night / Become the touches of sweet harmony.” I pretended to protest as she dragged me to the end of the dock and the others tumbled down the stairs to join us, one by one. Alexander brought up the rear, wheezing.
“Let’s go skinny-dipping!” Meredith said, already kicking her shoes off. “I haven’t been swimming all summer.”
“The chariest maid is prodigal enough,” James warned, “if she unmask her beauty to the moon.”
“For God’s sake, James, you’re no fun.” She swatted the backs of my thighs with one of her shoes. “Oliver, won’t you come in the water with me?”
I didn’t trust that mischievous smile of hers at all, so I said, “Last time we went skinny-dipping I fell on the dock buck naked and spent the rest of the night facedown on the couch with Alexander pulling splinters out of my ass.”
The others laughed exhaustively at my expense, and Richard let out a long wolf whistle.
Meredith: “Come on, somebody swim with me!”
Alexander: “You can’t keep your clothes on for twenty-four hours, can you?”
Filippa: “Maybe if Rick could keep her happy she wouldn’t be such a slut around the rest of us.”
More laughter, more whistling. Richard gave Filippa a lofty sort of look and said, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
She rolled her eyes and sat beside Alexander, who was busy crumbling weed into a cigarette paper.
I breathed in and held the sweet woody air in my lungs for as long as I could. A sweltering summer in suburban Ohio had made me impatient to return to Dellecher and the lake. The water was black by night, deep blue-green like jade by day. Dense forest surrounded it on all sides except one, the north shore, where the trees were thinner and a strip of sandy white beach shimmered like diamond dust in the moonlight. On the south bank we were just far enough away from the firefly lights of the Hall that there was little danger of our being seen and even less of being overheard. At the time, we liked our isolation.
Meredith lay back, eyes closed, humming peacefully. James and Wren sat on the opposite edge of the dock, looking toward the beach. Alexander finished rolling his joint, lit it, and handed it to Filippa. “Have a hit. We’ve got nothing to do tomorrow,” he said, which wasn’t entirely true. We had our first real day of classes and convocation later in the evening. Nevertheless, she accepted the joint and took a long drag before passing it to me. (We all indulged on special occasions, except Alexander, who was at least a little bit stoned all the time.)
Richard sighed, a sound of profound satisfaction that rumbled in his chest like a big cat’s purr. “This is going to be a good year,” he said. “I can feel it.”
Wren: “Could that be because you’ve got the part you wanted?”
James: “And half as many lines to learn as the rest of us?”
Richard: “Seems fair, after last year.”
Me: “I hate you.”
Richard: “Hatred is the sincerest form of flattery.”
Alexander: “That’s imitation, dickhead.”
A few of us snickered, still pleasantly buzzed. Our squabbling was good-natured and usually harmless. We had, like seven siblings, spent so much time together that we had seen the best and worst of one another and were unimpressed by either.
“Can you believe it’s our last year?” Wren said, when the lull after our laughter had lingered long enough.
“No,” I said. “Seems like just yesterday my dad was shouting at me for throwing my life away.”
Alexander snorted. “What was it he said to you?”
“‘You’re going to turn down a scholarship at Case Western and spend the next four years in makeup and panty hose, making love to some girl through a window?’”
“Art school” alone was enough to provoke my rigidly practical father, but more often than not Dellecher’s dangerous exclusivity was the cause of raised eyebrows. Why should intelligent, talented students risk forcible ejection from their school at the end of each year and graduate without even a traditional degree to show for their survival? What most people who lived outside the strange sphere of conservatory education didn’t realize was that a Dellecher certificate was like one of Willy Wonka’s golden tickets—guaranteed to grant the bearer admission to the elite artistic and philological sodalities that survived outside of academia.
My father, even more staunchly opposed than most, refused to accept my decision to waste my university years. Acting was bad, but something so niche and old-fashioned as Shakespeare (at Dellecher, we didn’t do anything else) was exponentially worse. Eighteen and vulnerable, I’d felt for the first time the extraordinary dread of wanting something desperately and watching it slip through my fingers, so I took the risk of telling him I would go to Dellecher or nowhere. My mother persuaded him to pay my tuition—after weeks of ultimatums and circular arguments—on the grounds that my elder sister was on her way to failing out of Ohio State and they were relying on me to be the one they bragged about at dinner parties. (Why they didn’t have higher hopes for Leah, the youngest and most promising of us, was a mystery.)
“I wish my mother had been so furious,” Alexander said. “She still thinks I’m at school in Indiana.” Alexander’s mother had given him up for foster care at an early age and made only the barest efforts to stay in touch. (All she’d deigned to tell him about his father was that the man was either from Puerto Rico or Costa Rica—she couldn’t remember which—and had no idea Alexander existed.) His tuition was paid by an extravagant scholarship and a small heap of money left to him by a dead grandfather, who had only done it to spite his own profligate offspring.
“My dad’s just disappointed I wasn’t a poet,” James added. Professor Farrow taught the Romantic poets at Berkeley, and his much younger wife (scandalously, a former student) was a poet herself until she suffered a Plath-like breakdown when James was in grade school. I’d met them two summers before when I visited him in California and had my suspicions that they were interesting people but disinterested parents unequivocally confirmed.
“My parents don’t give a damn,” Meredith said. “They’re busy with Botox and tax evasion and my brothers are taking good care of the family fortune.” The Dardennes split their time between Montreal and Manhattan, sold fantastically expensive wristwatches to politicians and celebrities, and treated their only daughter more like a novelty pet than a member of the family.
Filippa, who never spoke about her parents, said nothing.
“A little more than kin, and less than kind,” Alexander said. “My God, our families are miserable.”
“Well, not all of them,” Richard said. His and Wren’s parents were three seasoned actors and a director living in London, making frequent appearances in the West End theatres. He shrugged. “Our parents are thrilled.”
Alexander exhaled a stream of smoke and flicked his spliff away. “Lucky you,” he said, and shoved Richard off the dock.
He hit the water with a monstrous splash, which sent water crashing over all of us. The girls squealed and threw their arms over their heads, while James and I yelped in surprise. A moment later we were all sopping wet, laughing and applauding Alexander, too loud to hear Richard swearing when his head burst through the surface again.
We lingered by the water for another hour before, one by one, we began the slow climb back to the Castle. I was the last man standing on the dock. I didn’t believe in God, but I asked whoever was listening not to let Richard’s prediction jinx us. A good year was all I wanted.
