“Sorry,” she said. “I’m babbling. I do that sometimes when I’m nervous.”
“Why are you nervous?”
She made a face, like the answer was painfully obvious.
“It’s just kinda weird, right? Trying to make a new friend at our age? It’s like a job interview or something.”
“Please don’t say that,” I told her. “The last thing I need right now is another job interview.”
“See?” She smiled sadly. “I already messed up.”
She brought me to the den, and we sat on the couch in front of a cozy fire. The room seemed so much bigger than it had at the party; it felt cavernous, a little desolate. The wineglass she handed me was thick stemmed, strangely heavy, with a faint, greenish tint to the glass. She saw me studying it.
“I didn’t grow up like this,” she said. “My dad drove a truck. I lived in a tiny house with a tiny yard. My sister and I shared a bedroom until she left for college.”
“I didn’t have any siblings,” I told her. “It was just me and my mom.”
“That must have been tough for you.” She gave me a sympathetic frown. “When your mom…”
“It was a long time ago,” I said. “But you never really get over it.”
Kyle Dorfman
“So, Kyle,” Buzz said. “Something interesting happened this week.”
“Very interesting,” Charisse confirmed. “A potential game-changer.”
“Totally out of the blue,” Ricky added.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m listening.”
Buzz looked at Ricky. Ricky looked at Charisse. Charisse looked at me.
“We need a new football coach,” she said. “You would agree with that statement, wouldn’t you?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “One hundred percent.”
They seemed relieved to hear it.
“So here’s the thing,” Ricky said. “I’ve been sniffing around, trying to see who’s available, but it’s just the usual suspects. I got kinda frustrated, so I called Larry Holleran to see if he had any suggestions, and you know what he said?”
I had no idea, so Charisse answered for me.
“He wants to come back.” Her face broke into a delighted smile. “To Green Meadow. Can you believe that?”
“Not really,” I said. “I thought he loved it out there.”
“He did,” Ricky replied. “But Birchfield College is in deep financial trouble. They just abolished their entire athletic program, football included. Larry’s a free agent. He’s ours for the taking.”
“Great,” I said. “Let’s make it happen.”
“There’s one condition,” Buzz told me. “And I’m not sure you’re gonna like it.”
Tracy Flick
We took the elevator up to the rooftop deck—yes, they had an elevator—and went straight to the sauna, a cozy cedar shack tucked between the covered patio and the hot tub.
We didn’t wear bathing suits, just these thin white towels wrapped around our chests. Marissa said it was better that way, healthier and less constricting. The heat was pretty intense at first—almost lung searing—but I got used to it after a minute or two and started to breathe more easily.
When we were downstairs, I’d asked how she and Kyle had met, and she’d told me the whole saga. She was a few years out of college, living in San Francisco, trying to get a foothold in the tech world. Her best friend, Suki, started dating a coding genius named Vijay, who happened to be Kyle’s college roommate. Suki introduced Marissa to Kyle, and they hit it off right away. The two couples became inseparable—they even shared a house for a while—and they got married just a few months apart. By that point Kyle and Vijay had formed the start-up that developed the Barky app, and it had taken off beyond their wildest projections.
“So what happened?” I asked, once we got settled in the sauna. “After they sold the company?”
“I don’t want to bore you.” She smoothed the towel over her stomach. “Let’s talk about something else.”
“It’s not boring. It’s like a dream come true.”
“Yeah.” She nodded thoughtfully. “That was what it felt like. Until it all turned to shit.”
Once the money started pouring in, Vijay went a little nuts. He left Suki and their baby, moved to Hawaii with a new girlfriend, and started doing lots of drugs. The partnership dissolved, and Kyle went into business on his own, determined to prove himself to the doubters, all the people who believed that Vijay was the superstar and he was just a lucky appendage, a nobody who’d won the dorm room lottery.
“Was that true?” I asked. “About him and Vijay?”
“I don’t know.” She seemed pained on her husband’s behalf. “It’s hard to say. They were a good team, though.”
“So how did Kyle manage on his own?”
The question made her smile.
“Not great,” she said, as if that was an understatement. Her towel had slipped a little, so she hoisted it up and wrapped it tighter. “I should have seen it coming, Tracy. He was working all the time, and I was home with the twins—I mean, we had a nanny, but it was still pretty grueling. And then his assistant quit, and he hired a new one, this young woman fresh out of Stanford, and she was really cute, and I had a bad feeling about it, but what could I do? She was totally qualified for the job. And I’m a feminist. I’m not gonna say, Veronika’s too pretty. You’re not allowed to hire her. How does that help women?”
I nodded and a drop of sweat fell from the tip of my nose. It landed between my feet with an audible plop.
“It was so predictable.” Marissa wiped the back of her hand across her brow. “He was traveling a lot for work, and it turned out she was going with him, and they were having a grand old time together, while I was home changing diapers. I wouldn’t have even found out, except one day I stopped by Kyle’s office to say hi to an old friend, and I noticed Veronika’s desk was empty. I asked where she was, and my friend was like, Oh, she’s in Boston with your husband. Didn’t you know?”
“Ouch,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
She shrugged. It happened; they’d survived.
“I confronted him, and he admitted it right away. He broke up with her the next day and fired her a couple of weeks later. She sued the company, and it turned into a huge mess. Kyle had to step down, and we decided to change our lives, and here we are.”
“What happened to Veronika?”
“Oh, she’s fine, believe me. She made a lot of money from the settlement. A lot of money. I’m not allowed to say how much.” She gave me a look, like it was just us girls up here. “I mean, I don’t know about you, Tracy, but I slept with a married man in my twenties, and no one gave me one point eight million dollars.”
Kyle Dorfman
I thought it was a joke at first.
“Come on,” I said. “Larry Holleran doesn’t want to be Principal.”
“Oh yes, he does,” Ricky insisted. “He got really excited when he heard that Jack was stepping down.”