Jonathan Dee - The Privileges

April’s own circle had contracted a bit after eighth grade when a dozen or so kids went off to boarding school. Just like that they were gone from your social life, though occasionally in between classes some kid would immodestly flash a text or a camera-phone photo from a departed peer. The move didn’t always work out for them; there was always some story circulating about someone who had gotten himself expelled from one of these places and been forced to return home, not to Dalton but to the kind of second-tier private school that still had openings mid year. Still, an air of sophistication attached itself even to those of them who failed. April had no desire to go live in a regimented compound in some picturesque New England village where there was nothing to do at night and you weren’t allowed out anyway, but she felt a touch of envy all the same. They were her age but, just by virtue of leaving, they seemed older.

Of course they did come back in relative triumph for a few days at Thanksgiving and then for longer at Christmas. Their homecoming for any vacation was pretext enough for a series of parties. On one of the first really warm nights of the spring, April went to one at a townhouse in the East Fifties, thrown by some girl they didn’t even know — she’d been at Spence and was now home from St. Paul’s — but dotted with enough Dalton kids to make her presence there plausible. She even ran into Robin on the street outside. The townhouse itself was phenomenal, a real old-money museum, and its trashing had a terrible inevitability. It was like the reign of Pol Pot, when legions of ten-year-olds were handed carbines and put in charge of national security. On the first floor was the kitchen and living room, speakers hidden somewhere in the walls blasting Jay-Z, every surface already sticky to the touch. April saw a Matisse on the wall, one of those paintings where figures danced in a circle, and she almost asked someone if it was real but then realized what a stupid question that was. It was hot inside, even with all the windows thrown wide open, and bodies were everywhere. A girl named Julie from April’s Spanish class was lying on her back on top of the piano. She opened her mouth, and a guy in a hockey jersey poured streams of lime juice and vodka from two bottles he held up about a foot above her head. He put the bottles down, placed his hands on either side of Julie’s head, and shook it. When he was done, Julie sat up and opened her mouth to show she’d swallowed it all. She bowed in triumph, but no one was looking.

April thought she’d just stick to beer for now. Robin was scanning the crowd for some guy named Calvin who was probably home from Andover and whom she’d hooked up with one night over Thanksgiving break. She staked out a spot halfway up the front-hall steps and said she’d promise to wait there if April would bring her a beer. April asked some strange girl where the keg was (you never asked a strange guy a question like that unless you were hitting on him, because that’s how he’d interpret it anyway) and found it in the bathtub off the maid’s room, behind the kitchen. She saw that some people had opened up the drawers in there and were trying on some clothes that belonged to the maid or the cook or whoever had been given the night off. Unreal. But low-rent shit like that went on at every party, though usually not this early. People continued to throw parties even though they always went bad in this way, every single time. Strangers showed up, fights broke out, cops came, shit got ruined. They were allowed to do whatever they wanted.

Naturally by the time April made it back to the front hall, struggling not to let the two beers she was carrying get dumped all over her, Robin was gone. There was no way April was going back through that mob again, so she kept going, out to the stoop, where some guys were smoking and where it was at least not so sweltering — a little chilly, in fact. She didn’t recognize any of them, but one was wearing an Andover sweatshirt. She asked him if he knew a guy named Calvin. He nodded, and smiled broadly, apparently at the very thought of Calvin. He was either stoned or else just one of those guys who always appeared stoned.

“Haven’t seen him, though,” he said. “Want to get high?”

She did want to get high, being at this stupid party where she didn’t really know anybody made it seem imperative to get high, but she didn’t like the looks of the guy: his interest in her, for all his glazed affect, was too obvious. Her cell phone started buzzing in the back pocket of her jeans. She saw the caller ID and scowled and smiled at the same time. “Where the fuck are you?” she said.

“I’m at this party,” Robin said. “Where the fuck are you?”

“Outside on the stoop,” April said, taking a couple of steps away from the stoner, who shrugged. “I looked everywhere for you.”

“I think not,” Robin said, giggling. She was already wasted and April felt a flash of resentment. “We’re up on the third floor.”

“There’s a third floor?” April said, looking up.

She got there eventually, picking her way past a group of boys who had found a silver tea tray and were trying to surf down the stairs. Robin, red-eyed, hugged her for a good thirty seconds, which told April that it was X. But the X was now all gone, supposedly. They were all in some kind of den or study or something; this house was a trip, one of those houses that even this crowd couldn’t quite believe somebody they knew lived in. The room itself, as a place to hang out, was tolerable — only about ten of them, the music reaching them as a kind of modulating throb — but the downside was that they were now so far away from the beer that there was no question of convincing anyone to make the trip. Someone passed April a warm bottle of Grey Goose and she did the best she could with it.

Two guys sitting about ten feet apart were texting each other and collapsing in laughter, and someone else was making a big show of checking out all the books on the shelves. Robin was talking with her eyes closed. Not the best sign. April was sitting in a club chair that was so comfortable she could have slept in it, even though it smelled like beer. Who would invite strangers in here, she thought? Who was this chick from St. Paul’s, and where had her parents gone without her? April didn’t understand some families. Most families, actually. Just then, as if on cue, her cell phone vibrated in her pocket again; it was Cynthia. April tried to think quickly. She was a little fucked up, but if she didn’t answer now her mother would just keep calling, and she wasn’t likely to get any less fucked up as the evening progressed. She walked out to the landing and answered. She was able to keep it short on account of the noise. A minute later she returned and they were all staring at her.

“Your mom, right?” Robin said. Her eyes were like little mail slots.

“And you answered?” one of the guys said.

“Shut up,” Robin said. “Her mom is so cool. April, I think it’s so cool that your mom is so cool.”

“Ah,” the guy said. “The Cool Mom.”

“Also totally smoking hot,” Robin said. “Seriously. Have you ever seen her?”

“I have!” said some random guy. “I saw her in some magazine! A total babe. She looks like, what the fuck is the name of that actress, the one who plays the mom—”

It should have made her feel weird, April thought, that they were all on the borderline of getting crude about her mom, but it didn’t. She wasn’t even sure they were all talking about the same person anyway. Besides, her mom was gorgeous, she’d been onto that long before any of them. “Hey,” she said to the guy who was still struggling to remember the name of the actress, “are you Calvin?”