At least that’s what the two of them are until Sheriff Hardy saunters past then slows as if he’s just smelled something but doesn’t exactly want to turn around, see what it might be—see if Clate Rodgers is actually daring to show his face in Proofrock after all these years.
Tab lifts his coozied can to Hardy, daring him to check if it’s beer or not, Clate snickers and rubs his nose with the whole side of his index finger, and with that they slope away to some less public place. Jade, pretending not to have clocked this sad but typical interaction, lets her eyes keep roving across the crowd, up into the bleachers.
The way graduation usually works is that the thirty-odd seniors’ parents get to the football field early enough to stake out the middle seats with blankets and thermoses of coffee, but this morning was different. Some of the construction grunts were already there, and had been there since before dawn, or so Jade gathers from all the grumbling. But there’s some awe there too, isn’t there? So far the incoming residents of Terra Nova have just been a golf cap moving down an aisle at the drugstore, a tanned and Rolex’d forearm at the diner, an Aston Martin nosed into a slot down by the banks—all sightings have been one at a time, but never all of them together. Even the newspaper articles just had them in their own frames, not grouped together like some superhero team.
Word now, though, is that the construction grunts still staking out the center seats up in the bleachers aren’t there for themselves, don’t have any graduates in this particular race yet, are just holding these seats, are just yellow-vested harbingers of the fable about to unfold at this graduation.
Because of that, the buzz and whisper is different. Both more hushed and more thrilled, like a formation of Oprah Winfreys are about to parachute down through the clouds, giving cars out to you, and you, and also you.
Jade tells herself that, should that happen, she won’t be one of those simpletons grubbing for outflung pennies, but, at the same time, she one hundred percent knows that it’s easy to be aloof when those pennies aren’t in play yet.
Where she’s seated is front row behind the low stage, and what she’s wearing underneath her gown are her custodian coveralls, because she’s on-duty right after this. It’s stupid that real life is having to start the moment all this so-called magic is over, but, at the same time, it’s like she’s in a music video too, isn’t it? The kind where you walk fast away from graduation into a montage of what’s waiting for you next, the bassline charting your steps: unmopped hallways, horrorshow restrooms, chalkboards needing a good Etch A Sketch shaking, to be blank for the next round of students.
Jade bobs her head two or three times, starring in that video, but then stops when she clocks the line of Bentleys rolling into the parking lot.
“Oh, shit,” she says.
“What?” Greta Dimmons asks, touching her hair, her hat, and her shoulders all in fast succession.
Jade doesn’t answer, has already turned away from the Bentleys, to who they’ll matter the most to: Mr. Holmes, up on stage.
“Well, fuck,” he says loud enough for even the row behind Jade to pick it up, judging by the snickers. Judging by how Principal Manx’s back straightens, it was loud enough for him, too.
Fuck is the only response, though. The Terra Novans are finally showing their faces in town. Jade hates it, but her back is sort of straightening too, to see better, to not miss a thing.
The Bentleys ease up to the gate and the tycoons and magnates step out in their languorous way. The women aren’t wearing gowns, but hip-hugging skirts and trim little blazers, effortless heels. The men aren’t wearing tuxes, but suits tailored and then tailored again, sunglasses that ride just low enough to look casual, accidental. The packed dirt path wending from the gate to the bleachers is a red carpet for them to pick down, hand in hand.
First is Mars Baker, the founding partner of some storied law firm in Boston, whose legal maneuvering is, according to the papers, what carved Terra Nova out from the national forest. He’s mid-fifties like all of them, mostly bald, and beaming, his severe wife, Macy Todd, holding his arm— the Macy Todd, who skated on a tabloid murder back in the nineties, then married the brilliant lawyer who’d gotten her off. Their twin girls Cinn and Ginny, twelve or thirteen if Jade remembers right from the profile in the newspaper, are tagging along, wearing matching flower-girl-looking dresses, though there are no flowers.
After them is tall gangly Ross Pangborne, with all his Bill Gates awkwardness and matching boyish charm. Also bald, Jade notes, and wonders if hair-burning testosterone and financial domination are somehow related. In the profile she read of him at the drugstore, instead of carrying a phone that can keep him up to date on the social media juggernaut he started for kicks and grins, he carries a simple flip phone, and sometimes not even that. His wife Donna is the female version of him. They look like brother and sister more than husband and wife, but Jade suspects maybe it’s just the same way a dog will come to look like its owner after enough years. Not that she can tell which of them is that dog. Their ten-year-old daughter, Galatea, whose name means something fancy, Jade can’t remember, is slouching behind in blue jeans and a sweater, probably the most formal they could convince her to get. Good for you, girl, Jade sends across the bouncy red track.