Hobson Brown - The Upper Class Book 1

HOBSON BROWN, TAYLOR MATERNE & CAROLINE SAYS

To our families

Contents

Outside the black window of the country club, moonlight glazes

Nikki paces her room, Kanye West thumping her eardrums, XXL

Who knew a trip to destiny would begin on the

Orientation is really to wear out students and minimize homesickness.

Late September is a slow burn of leaves and earth

Nikki stands at the mouth of the dining hall. Lunch

Field hockey has three teams: Varsity, JV, and Thirds. From

The middle of October brings a truly cool spell, finally, 115

Laine gets up, groggy, at some hour close to dawn.

The Lensks get pumpkins for Lancaster Four to carve. The

Dean Talliworths office dead-ends Swallow Wing, next to Admissions. His

A scratch on the door, and Laines stomach turns. 5:12

The next Tuesday Laine gets her first one. Shes talking 192

Dad, hook up my iPod. I cant listen to Sinatra

Laine tries to sleep but shes restless. So she tiptoes

Schuyler grabs Laine the minute she walks back into Lancaster

Yeah, wed like a bottle of Patron and Grey Goose.

The Old Greenwich stations stone trestle will be dusted with

Acknowledgments

About the Authors

Credits

Cover

Copyright

About the Publisher

Outside the black window of the country club, moonlight glazes tiger lilies, dripping off the petals like cream. The Connecticut night pants. Tomorrows forecast is 99 degrees.

Laine Hunt is Going Away . With enormous and untelling blue eyes, she surveys the dining room in its seer-sucker and gingham glory, trying to know what shes leaving, what exactly shes Going Away from. Shes known this room, these portraits of men in banana cashmere sweaters or madras sportcoats, this muted chandelier, since before she knew what knowing was. But the essence of it all slides through her fingers now.

Her mother, Polly, thinks Laine needs cheering up. Its going to be Parents Weekend before you even know it, sweetie.

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Thats nice except I dont think I want it to be Parents

Weekend. Youre right, Mom. Its not so far away.

Philip Breck, her stepdad, pats his mouth with a linen napkin. Laine, youll be back in this room for Christmas before you can blink an eye.

When I get out of this tiny town and our tangled-up house, Imnot exactly going to be racing back.

Everyone speaks lines as though Ang Lee and crew are hiding behind the swinging kitchen doors. Laine envisions rolled-up, much used scripts instead of napkins by each of her family members plates.

The Brecks look wholesome in dinner table formation: Polly and Philip wear formal and benevolent clubhouse expressions, and Christine and Maggie, Laines younger sisters, squabble in hushed sibling code over cherries in their Shirley Temples. The two little girls are angelic and glum, nut-brown skin covered in Band-Aids and bruises, the diminishing season of sailing and swimming and diving having written its script on their bodies.

Like Laine, their hair is white as swan feathers, whiter still against teak skin. Everyone wears lobster bibs, but Laine now sees the flesh out of the red exoskeleton as too surreal to eat, when once it was her favorite food. She dangles the rubbery meat, crudded with white paste, in her butter. And the red sugary drink is disgusting and odd as well. Thats how this last year has been: everything nor-2

mal morphing into strange.

Good luck! a friend of Christines calls to Laine across the room.

Laine thanks her, ducking her head, hating attention called to her family. My second family. Philip and his family used to sit over there, Polly and the girls and Thomas over here, when Thomas was still her husband and their father.

Now a pink neon sign blinks Second Marriage! over this table, casting a rosy sheen on her sisters cheekbones. Not like the clubhouse isnt full to bursting with third and fourth and fifth marriages, but it shouldnt have been my family.

If this werent enough, Laine is also worried about a blur of turquoise Izod shirt outside the window, careening about the club grounds. Hunter and his crew probably bribed the kitchen staff for whipped cream canisters. All summer hes courted Lainewho freezes when she hears his voice, as she does when any guy approaches, so they havent even kissed, and hes fed up.

A woman who golfs with Polly approaches the table and stage-whispers: Is she R-E-A-D-Y?

Yes, she can barely wait, Polly answers proudly.

The woman looks to Laine. Are you ready, dear? Ready for liftoff? She makes an awkwardly funny imitation of a rocket with her hands, and everyone kindly laughs at her little joke, wincing simultaneously at her martini breath, strong as gasoline.

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Im definitely ready, Laine says, craning her neck to see out the window. Im really excited.

I bet you are. The woman winks. St. Pauls is a fabulous school. My brothers all went there, way back in the day.

Polly smiles, indicating that St. Pauls would be great but this is greater: Laines going up to Wellington, actually.

AH! the woman says, clutching her heart as though Laine had won the Nobel prize, even though she thinks no differently of St. Pauls than of Wellington. Even more fabulous. That lake, my oh my, what a gorgeous little corner of the world. And youll be on the soccer team, no?

Field hockey, Philip says.

The woman lets out an extravagant sound, between laughter and self-reproach, then smiles devilishly at Laine, pauses for effect, and says quietly: I get things mixed up, dear. But one thing I know for darn sure, you are going to have the greatest experience.

The Brecks let that hang in the air, as if Laine had been ordained by a priest. The woman waddles away, clutching her beads, oblivious of white cat hairs stuck to her rump, which is sealed in black slacks and cruelly cinched with a kelly green lizard belt.

And this is what I could become if I stuck around. Thewomans name is in the next room, in gilded letters on the tennisplaque, from when she was my age. She probably fell in love 4

with the first guy she kissed, married the first guy she had sex with, got pregnant the first time she tried. She raised her family in the house where she grew up. She drinks the same way her dad drinks, smokes as much as her mom did. And now her intellect is gelatinous (she reads Danielle Steel and Dean Koontz) and her conscience provincial (she donates thousands to museums and still calls the Ecuadorian guys who mow her lawn boys).

After dinner, on their way to the door, the Breck family duly stops to talk with the Townes, the Walden-Thornes, the Crandalls. Everyone knows someone who went to Wellington: J.J. Emerson had a grand old time on the sailingteam, Esther Woodbury went from there to Harvard, and didntJonas Baker, oh, thats right, he didnt make it through, did he?

Ended up at, oh never mind. James Hill claps Philip on the shoulder and congratulates Lainehis way of communicat-ing: Youre a good man, Phil, to pony up big tuition for a relatively new stepdaughter.

Outside, under the hot domed sky, Hunter and his buddy materialize out of the dark, swaying like cobras. Up close, Laine can see that Hunters turquoise shirt is wet with beer. Ya know, Laine, you coulda called to say good-bye, we shoulda hung out tonight. A green bottle sticks out of his pocket.