Jonathan Dee - The Privileges

Once in a while, when Robin was still living there, when the two of them were up late and couldn’t get to sleep, they used to lie side by side on April’s bed with their laptops and go into these chat rooms that were obviously full of older guys. It was hilarious, because you could say absolutely anything to them with no repercussions because they could have been anywhere in the world, and so, for that matter, could the girls themselves. The guys were just glad you weren’t cops, probably. They would masturbate pathetically while April and Robin, lying on their backs with their laptops on their stomachs, typed the most ridiculous porn and then tilted their screens toward each other to read, trying to outdo themselves until they both laughed so hard they hurt. It would always end with the loser asking to meet you. He didn’t care where you were; he’d travel anywhere to meet Bobbi or Sammi or whatever name they’d given each other that night. They were safe because they lied about everything. Though it wasn’t the same, April still did it sometimes by herself when she was bored.

Now on most weekends it was just the four of them. One Friday April’s mother announced that they were all going to the Hamptons the next morning to look at houses. This was a bit of a surprise; though they visited people out there all the time, her dad in particular had resisted joining the general migration for years, saying that it never changed and there had to be some more interesting place in the world to see. They would spend the next several weekends on the East End looking if they needed to, Cynthia said, but the kids exchanged an eye-roll at that one because once their mother had made up her mind to purchase something, she usually got what she wanted in the first hour. Their dad drove them out to Amagansett in the morning and, sure enough, maybe the third place they saw had their mom hooked. It was really nice, April had to admit — about a hundred feet from the beach — and just being out here at all would bring her closer to a lot of her friends on the weekends. Another home to fill up with stuff. Her mom would be in heaven for the next few months.

Back in the city a few nights later she was in her room alone writing to one of the deviants in the chat room and, when he asked her her name, she thoughtlessly typed April. She had a moment of total panic until she remembered that there were a million Aprils in the world. But after that night, whenever she would log on, amid all the lying and the fake porn-star affect there would be this one voice on the screen that would sometimes pop up and say, April? Is that you? His name, or so he said, was Neil, and he lived in Connecticut. Far from the city? she wrote, and he said, Not far at all. Why? He asked for a picture, and she said no way. He sent her one of himself. A little old, maybe, but not a complete gimp, that is if it was really a picture of him at all. There was no way to know, or rather there was only one way to know. That’s all the Internet was, lies gone wild, and it only made you dizzy if you tried to sort it out.

He was really clever about it. He didn’t say, Do you want to meet? Do you want to meet? He said, I will be at the Starbucks on 41st and Seventh at 2:00 PM on Wednesday June 18th. I really hope you’ll be brave enough to be there too. You’ll recognize me from the photo.

She didn’t breathe a word to Robin about it, nor to anyone else. On the other hand, even though it was a secret, there was no question she was doing it for an audience, even if that audience was, in a strange way, made up. People would be in awe of her if they knew: even if they said they thought it was an incredibly stupid thing to do, they would be in awe of her fearlessness, whether it turned out there was something to fear there or not. She would be the badass, the damaged one. If, in a given activity, there was a next step to be taken — a taller cliff to dive from, purer drugs to try, something bigger and more difficult to steal — someone, at some point, was going to take that step, it was like a law of nature, and so let the record reflect that that someone was her.

She saw him right away, and he smiled at her, but she made a big show of getting a Venti Americano first before joining him. “I cannot believe,” he said first thing, “how beautiful you are,” and she realized then how the very same thing that might sound desperate and pathetic when you saw it in type on your laptop screen might be, in other, more direct circumstances, a very powerful thing to hear. She didn’t give away any details, not her last name or the name of her school or her address, or what her parents did; he seemed to understand, though, what was difficult about all this for her, even to anticipate it sometimes, and so he helped her relax by talking a lot about himself. He was, he said, a private investor (“So’s my dad,” she wanted to say but didn’t) who worked at home but had managed to make a lot of money—“not as much money as you have, though, I bet,” he said. She wondered how he could tell that about her, how it showed. He’d grown up in Greenwich and had inherited his own house after his parents died. Living in your hometown was cool, but it was hard to meet new people. She really wanted to ask him how old he was — she couldn’t tell the difference between thirty and fifty, it all looked the same to her at her age — but she was afraid of appearing too interested in him. She hardly moved except to lift the coffee to her mouth.

“So I won’t ask you where you live, April,” he said, smiling, like it was some kind of coyness that kept her silent, “but how did you get down here today? Subway?”

She’d taken a cab, but she nodded yes. Any lie, even a pointless one, seemed like a good idea. Then, clearing her throat first, she said, “You? Do you take the train in or what?”

His smile broadened. “I drove,” he said. “It’s really a short drive. You’d love my car. It’s a convertible. But then if you get stuck in traffic or the rain or whatever, you put up the top and I’ve got a killer sound system in there — you just plug your iPod in and blast it. You’ve got an iPod, right? Everyone does these days. I’d even let you drive it if you wanted. Or maybe you’re not old enough for a permit yet?”

She stared at him. She wondered why they weren’t drawing more attention from everyone else in there, an older guy and a high-school girl in a Starbucks in the middle of the day. But maybe it didn’t seem that unusual to people.

“Well,” Neil said, “even if you aren’t old enough to drive, that could be our little secret.”

She realized then that, whatever outcome she had been pointing this toward — one-upping Robin, getting her mother’s attention again, whatever subconscious wish some shrink would probably say she was acting on right now — it was all contingent on the idea that someone would see her, that she would get caught. The idea that she would not get caught had never really hit her before now.

“Do you want to go outside and see it?” Neil said.

In the end she got as far as the car itself but she didn’t get inside it. He wasn’t angry with her at all. He knew how to be patient. He wrote down his cell number for her, said he looked forward to seeing her again, and he gave her a long hug.

Nine days later, the phone rang at the Moreys; it was Robin, and she asked, for some reason, for Cynthia. Cynthia held the phone to her ear and didn’t say anything for half a minute; her expression was perfectly flat. Then she hung up and stood and walked straight into her bedroom and shut the door, but when she brushed past April in the hallway she was already crying. Robin’s mother had cut her wrists in the bathtub the night before last and was dead. Adam was out of the country on business, and Cynthia, disappointingly, wasn’t even able to pull herself together and at least make a show of strength for Robin’s sake; so April wound up being the one Morey to go to the funeral. The whole class went. They sat together in the back pews from which they could easily see Robin and her father up front, but what difference did that make, April realized — Robin was a million miles away. They might as well have been watching her on TV. The gulf between them was so terrible that they were all too scared to say or do anything to try to traverse it.