When they finally break apart, Leland is dizzy, dazzled.
“I’ll grab more beers,” Fray says. He hoists himself out of the tub and Leland watches him leave wet footprints on the rec room floor. When he disappears from view, she gets a crazy idea, then talks herself out of it, then decides to just go for it. Tonight is the night her life changes.
She takes off her bikini top.
Fray reappears, holding a six-pack by the plastic rings. Leland raises her bare breasts above the water line. Her nipples are instantly hard.
“Whoa,” Fray says. He leaves the beer to the side and starts kissing Leland again. One of his hands finds her nipple and he rubs it back and forth, a feeling so exquisite that Leland feels like she’s going to dissolve. Then he lowers his mouth to her nipple and gently sucks. She can see his erection poking up in his trunks. She wants to touch it but doesn’t, because her mother has given her all kinds of instructions about what can happen if you lead a boy along too far. She will hold Fray at second base tonight. Second base with Frazier Dooley. It’s so crazy, Leland can hardly believe it.
A few weeks after Leland and Fray start dating, Coop and Fray are invited to a high school party thrown by a friend of Alana Bratton’s whose parents are away. It will be mostly Bryn Mawr girls and Calvert Hall boys—Leland and Mallory go to Garrison Forest, so they won’t know anyone—but Leland wheedles them an invite anyway. Once they get to the house—a mansion on Roland Park Drive—Coop and Fray disappear to do beer bongs, leaving Leland and Mallory to fend for themselves in the kitchen. The good news is that Alana spots them and takes them under her beautiful blond wing. She gets the girls glasses of real champagne, Mo?t et Chandon, that someone has lifted from the wine fridge.
“I’ll introduce you around,” Alana says.
“I should probably go find Fray,” Leland says.
Alana laughs. “Let him come find you.”
Which is exactly what happens an hour later. Leland and Mallory are in the library playing a drinking game called Three-Man with two Calvert Hall seniors. One of them, a kid named Penn Porter, drapes his arm over Leland’s shoulders just as Fray walks in.
“Get your hands off her, Porter,” Fray says.
Leland jumps to her feet. “We weren’t doing anything,” she says. She’s so drunk her words are slurred, and Mallory is slumped over on the green velvet sofa, eyes at half-mast. Fray storms out of the library. Leland wants to chase after him but she can’t leave Mallory drunk and alone with two senior boys; that’s how date rape happens.
She appeals to Penn Porter. “Can you help me get her to her feet? She’s Cooper Blessing’s sister.”
Penn rolls his eyes but obliges. He and Leland ease Mallory up. “Are you dating Frazier Dooley? That guy has issues. Seems to me you can do better.”
Leland leads Mallory through the house. She finds Fray in the kitchen, swilling from a bottle of Jim Beam.
“We’re ready to go,” Leland says.
“Great,” Fray says, his eyes flashing with what Leland understands then are his “issues”—rage, jealousy, alcohol. “Ask your buddy Penn to get you home.”
“Fray,” Leland says. “We weren’t doing anything.”
“He had his arm around you,” Fray says, swigging from the bottle again. Just the smell is enough to make the room spin. “I didn’t see you fighting him off.”
“You left me by myself for over an hour!” Leland says. “What did you think would happen?”
He shrugs. “Just goes to show I can’t trust you.”
Leland would like to say that this is an isolated incident, but the entire three years that Leland and Fray date are marked with similar explosions, like firecrackers on a string. She becomes only too used to what she comes to think of as Fray’s “white-hot sulk.”
But there is love too, real love, desperate love, Frazier clinging to Leland, pressing his face into her neck and murmuring, Please, baby, don’t ever leave me.
Now, as Cooper turns down the no-name road that leads to Mallory’s cottage and she sees the ocean glittering in the distance, Leland marvels at how much time has passed—and how much has happened. Leland went on to have a decade-long relationship with a woman. Fray became a billionaire. （A billionaire! What must Penn Porter think about that?） Leland’s father, Steve Gladstone, went on to divorce Leland’s mother and marry Fray’s mother, Sloane Dooley. Technically, now Leland and Fray are step-siblings! These are the kinds of things that only happen in novels. In fact, Fifi wanted to write about it—but Leland put her foot down.