Jennifer DuBois - Cartwheel

The way CJ and Byron played Cool or Crazy was straightforwardly, unimaginatively sarcastic: guessing Cool for a muttering, emaciated woman with meth-brown teeth, Crazy for a college boy with expensive jeans and exquisitely mussed hair. But Sebastien had never played that way; instead, he’d always picked less obvious targets and designations. A middle-aged woman in a gray sweatshirt drinking straight from a two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew was deemed Cool, a well-muscled young man wearing a Puka shell necklace was pronounced Crazy. Sebastien never tired of how nervous these pronouncements made CJ and The Box; when they asked for explanations, Sebastien always told them that the game was an art, not a science, and that he had the soul of an artist, and that that’s why he always won.

And now here was his beautiful, idiot game, all grown up and online. Sebastien liked to check on it sometimes, in much the same way he liked to check on the Facebook profiles of half-remembered classmates from grade school; he liked to know that it was basically doing okay. It was, after all, his brainchild—in a more reductive and palatable form, admittedly, though was this not the universal fate of the ideas of great thinkers? Truly, Sebastien had always had his finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist. He laughed again and hiccupped and got up to pour himself another drink. When he sat back down at the computer he found that he was once again, somehow, on Lily Hayes’s Facebook page.

Sebastien stared at her sandals, her toes. This girl. What would become of her? He hovered his mouse again over the message box. This girl. Were people really this open? Were their lives really this lucky? He opened the message box. He hesitated. But then: really. What did he have to lose? He had literally nothing to lose. Few people experienced the pure liberation of having absolutely nothing to lose, but Sebastien had the particular blessing and curse of this kind of freedom—he had zero claims on the attention of anyone, anywhere; he had the totally unsullied indifference of the universe. He could crawl into the bathtub and slit his wrists and nobody would care. He could torch this entire house and all of its treasures and nobody would care. He could certainly message this girl and confidently expect that nobody would care about that, either.

“Gilded Lily,” he began.

January

The day after the dinner, a message from Sebastien LeCompte popped up in Lily’s in-box. “Gilded Lily,” it began, and things went downhill from there.

Lily was surprised. Sebastien LeCompte was not the kind of boy—Lily could not think of him as a “man,” really, and certainly not as a garden-variety “guy”—who usually liked her. Over dinner, it had become clear that Sebastien had lived in that mansion for most of his life, that his parents had been American diplomats (this explained the accent) who died in a plane crash when he was seventeen, and that he was fabulously wealthy. He didn’t say this last part, but it was apparent: There were references to playing polo, attending Harvard, summering in the Alps—things that Lily had never fully realized that actual people actually did out in the actual world. If Sebastien was going to like anyone, Lily figured it would have been Katy. He’d spent several minutes talking to her on the porch after dinner, when he’d only passed Lily a business card—an actual business card!—that read SEBASTIEN LECOMPTE, SLOTH, in both English and Spanish.

“Are you going to write him back?” said Katy, while Lily was brushing her barely adequate teeth.

“Maybe.”

“Even though he lives next door?”

“Maybe. Do you think his parents really were diplomats?”

“Sure,” said Katy. “Why not?” There was a minty bubble at the corner of her mouth, which somehow made Lily feel inordinately relieved.

“I don’t know,” said Lily. “The plane crash sort of makes you wonder.”

“What?”

“If they were CIA.”

“You’re so conspiracy minded.”

“I get it from my dad,” said Lily. “Anyway, I have never in my life even heard of a real person playing polo. Shouldn’t he be at Oxford by now, or something?”

“Well,” said Katy, sounding doubtful. “I guess you would sort of think.”

Lily waited three days to write back. When she did, she tried to ape Sebastien’s tone and style: employing absurdly inflated language she never used in real life, invoking belabored extended metaphors. Sebastien responded by inserting random French phrases into his emails, so Lily started doing the same—though he had to know that this did not count as sophistication, since, of course, you could Google anything you wanted to say. He moved on to Italian; she saw his Italian, and raised him Hungarian—the one phrase she actually did know: Nem beszelek magyarul , I do not speak Hungarian—but this, it seemed, was enough. He asked her to dinner.

“You have a date already?” said Katy.

“What do you mean, ‘already’?” Lily was wearing a ruched floral shirt that she’d decided communicated a sense of general fun, and plastering makeup on her face with both hands. She was afraid that her emails might have given Sebastien the wrong idea.

“Well,” said Katy. “I just mean, we just got here.”

“We’ve been here two weeks.”

“I just wonder if it’s going to be a problem with Carlos and Beatriz.”

“It’s a host family, not a juvenile detention center.”

“They’re conservative, I think.”

Lily leaned toward the mirror and embarked on the project of eyeliner. “I don’t think we can assume that. Carlos seems to know how to have a good time, at least.”

“There are crosses everywhere.”

“It’s dinner. Does the Vatican have a policy on dinner?”

“Don’t be sarcastic.”

“No, I am actually asking. I mean, they actually really might, for all I know.”

Katy climbed into her bed then and began to read. She’d managed to enroll in the only rigorous class on offer—something about economics in the post-Peronist era—and it seemed to require a vast amount of studying and note-taking and highlighting with markers in three different colors.

“I think it’s so cool that you’re taking a real class here,” said Lily, to apologize. “Everyone else has basically just dropped out of school for the semester.”

Katy studied her for a moment to see if she was serious, then seemed to decide she was. “I just think it makes sense to learn a little bit about the country we’re in, you know?”

Lily nodded vigorously. “Totally.”

Katy smiled. “You look nice. Don’t be nervous.”

“Thanks,” said Lily. “I’m not.”

At five past eight Lily once again walked up the winding path to Sebastien LeCompte’s mansion, which, in the falling light, suddenly looked dilapidated and underwhelming. Lily had told Katy she wasn’t nervous. But she was. For one thing, she was nervously wondering if she should have brought a condom. She didn’t know if that would have projected some kind of unsexy premeditation, or else some kind of unattractive feminine wiliness, or else some kind of massively inflated sense of her own charms. She then remembered that she wasn’t supposed to care. Her parents had given her an enormous box of Trojans before she came here, alongside an earnest discussion about making smart choices . Poor old Andrew had blinked compulsively throughout the entire conversation; he’d poked himself in the eye (actually poked himself in the eye!) once, and his eyeball, he reminded everyone all the time, had simply never been the same. The condom box they’d given Lily was appalling, mortifying, industrial-sized—for cults, maybe, or university women’s centers. Lily was vaguely flattered, and then vaguely insulted, when she thought of how much sex her parents must think she was having. She was then vaguely disgusted to think that her parents thought about this at all.