Nothing to See Here Page 2

  And then one of Madison’s beautiful friends—the least beautiful of the six of them, if you want to be cruel—got upset at a joke that Madison had made, a moment when Madison’s weirdness had spilled out beyond the confines of our dorm room, and so the girl told the dorm parent that Madison had a bag of coke in her desk drawer. The dorm parent checked, and there it was. Iron Mountain was a place for rich people, and it depended on those rich people, so Madison hoped, in bed with me one night as we talked it over, that the school would go easy on her. But I was not rich, and what I understood was that sometimes a place like Iron Mountain made an example of one rich person in order to gain the trust of a bunch of other rich people. It was almost the end of the year, just a few weeks till final exams, and the headmaster of the school, no longer some British dude but a Southern woman named Ms. Lipton with a white shell of a hairstyle and a maroon pantsuit, called Madison and her parents to meet with her in her office, the invitation sent on official letterhead. Ms. Lipton called everyone “daughter” but had never married.

  Madison’s father drove up the night before; her mother was unable to come, “so overwhelmed with disappointment,” Mr. Billings told Madison over the phone. He wanted to take us out to dinner, a kind of farewell for Madison and me, although I thought that seemed weird. He picked us up in a brand-new Jaguar. He was older than I’d expected, and he looked like Andy Griffith, with that winking way of acknowledging you. “Hello, girls,” he said, opening the door to the car. Madison just grunted and hopped in, but Mr. Billings took my hand and kissed it. “Madison has told me so much about you, Miss Lillian,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said. I was still unsteady with adults. I thought maybe he wanted to sleep with me.

  We drove to a steakhouse and there was a table reserved for us, though Mr. Billings said it was for four. And then I saw my mom, dressed up for her, but not dressed up enough for this place. She looked at me with this kind of what the fuck have you done look on her face, but she then quickly smiled at Mr. Billings, who introduced himself and then kissed her hand, which my mother was so jazzed about, clearly.

  “A drink, ma’am?” he asked my mom, who ordered a gin and tonic. He ordered a bourbon, neat. It felt like we had instantly become a new family. I kept looking at Madison for some kind of clue as to whether she was freaked out, too, but she wouldn’t even look at me, just kept running her eyes up and down the menu.

  “I’m happy you two could join Madison and myself on this night,” Mr. Billings said after we ordered. My mother had chosen a filet that was listed at twenty-five dollars, but I got chicken fettuccine, which was the cheapest thing on the menu. As much as I try to remember, I have no idea what Madison and her dad ordered.

  “Thank you for inviting me,” my mom said. She had lived a hard life, smoked too much, but she had been a cheerleader and a beauty queen in high school. She was still beautiful, I had to admit, a beauty that she’d not passed on to me, and I could see how she just might, in this setting, seduce Mr. Billings for a night.

  “I’m afraid the reason for our gathering is not so happy,” he said, looking at Madison, who was now staring at the tablecloth in front of her. “I’m afraid Madison has gotten herself into some trouble, because she is headstrong. I have five children, but Madison is the youngest and she is more trouble than the other four put together.”

  “Four boys,” Madison said, a little flash of anger.

  “Anyway, Madison has made a mistake and she is going to be punished for it. Or that seems to be what awaits us tomorrow morning. And that is why I wanted to talk to you and Lillian here.”

  “Dad—” Madison began, but he froze her with a hard stare.

  “Did Lillian do something wrong?” my mom asked. She already had her second gin and tonic.

  “No, my dear,” Mr. Billings continued. “Lillian has been an exemplary woman while at Iron Mountain. I’m sure you’re quite proud of her.”

  “I am,” my mother said, but it sounded like a question.

  “Well, here’s the situation. I’m a businessman, and as such, I’m always looking at things from a different angle, seeing all the possibilities. Now, my wife refused to come here; she thinks that Madison needs to accept her punishment and aspire to do better with what’s left to her. But my wife, though I love her, hasn’t fully considered the ramifications of Madison’s expulsion. The effect it would have on her future is more than I can state.”

  “Well, kids make mistakes,” my mother said. “That’s how they learn.”

  Mr. Billings’s smile slipped for the briefest of moments. Then he recovered. “That’s right,” he said. “They learn. They make a mistake and then they learn never to do it again. But in Madison’s case, it won’t matter that she won’t ever do it again. Her fate has been sealed. And so I come to you with an offer.”

  And I knew. I fucking knew right then. And I was so angry that I hadn’t known it hours before. I looked at Madison, and of course she wouldn’t look at me. I grabbed her arm under the table and squeezed the shit out of it, but she didn’t even flinch.

  “What’s the offer?” my mom said, slightly drunk, very interested.

  “I believe that the headmistress would be more forgiving if the student were someone other than Madison,” he said. “I think if, for instance, it were your daughter, a virtuous girl who has made so much of herself while dealing with such hardship, the headmistress would offer only a cursory punishment, at most a semester’s suspension.”

  “Why?” my mother asked, and I wanted to kick her in the face. I wanted to sober her up, but I knew it wouldn’t matter.

  “It’s complicated, ma’am,” Mr. Billings said. “But I do believe this. I believe that if you and Lillian marched into that woman’s office tomorrow morning and told her that the drugs were actually Lillian’s, the punishment would be quite lenient.”

  “That’s a big maybe,” my mother said. Maybe she wasn’t as drunk as I thought.

  “Well, it is a risk, I admit that. Which is why I would be willing to reimburse you for your troubles. In fact, I have a check, made out to you, Ms. Breaker, for ten thousand dollars. I believe that would help toward Miss Lillian’s continuing education. I believe there’s enough in that gift to cover some of your own expenses.”

  “Ten thousand dollars?” my mom repeated.

  “That’s correct.”

  “Mom,” I said, just as Madison was saying, “Dad,” but they both shut us up. Right then, Madison looked at me. Her eyes were so blue, even in the dim light of this shitty steakhouse. It was such a strange feeling, to hate someone and yet love them at the same time. I wondered if this was normal for adults.

  Mr. Billings and my mom kept talking; the food came, and Madison and I didn’t eat a single bite of our dishes. I stopped listening to anything. Madison grabbed my hand under the table and held on to it right up until her father paid the bill and escorted us out of the restaurant, his check in my mom’s purse.

  That night, after he’d dropped us off at our dorm and we’d signed ourselves back in, Madison asked if she could sleep in my bed with me, but I told her to fuck off. I brushed my teeth and then, while she sat in her bed and read Shakespeare for some paper she had to write, since she wasn’t going to be expelled after all, I packed up my duffel bag. How in the world did it hold less than it had when I arrived? What was my life? I got into bed and shut off my light. A few minutes later, Madison turned off her light and we both sat there in the dark, not saying anything. I don’t know how long it took, but she finally crept over to my side of the room and stood over me. She was my only friend. I scooted over, and she crawled into my bed. She wrapped her arms around me and I could feel her chest press against my back. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Madison” was all I could manage. I’d wanted something, and I didn’t get it. Or it was going to be harder to get it when I got another chance.

  “You’re my best friend,” she said, but I couldn’t say anything else. I lay there until I fell asleep, and when
the dorm parent knocked on our door in the morning to say that my mother was outside waiting for me, I realized that, sometime in the night, Madison had gone back to her own bed.

  The headmistress seemed to know that I was lying; she tried several times to get me to alter my story, but my mother kept butting in, saying how hard my life had been. And then Ms. Lipton expelled me. My mother didn’t even seem that shocked. I’d never even smoked one of my mom’s cigarettes at this point, and I was kicked out of school for drugs. I felt like I’d been good for nothing.

  When I went to the room to get my duffel bag, Madison was gone. On the drive back to the valley, my mother said that she would set aside money for my college tuition, but I knew that money was already gone. It had vaporized the moment it touched her hands.

  Four months later, I got a letter from Madison. She told me about her summer vacation in Maine. She told me how awful the last weeks of school had been without me there, and how she so badly wanted me to come visit her in Atlanta. There was no mention of what had happened to me, what I’d done for her. She told me about a boy she’d met in Maine and how much stuff she’d let him do. I could hear her voice in the letter. It was a pretty voice. I wrote back, and I didn’t mention the awful shit between us. We became pen pals.

  I went back to my awful public high school, which felt like returning to sea level after spending a year on the highest mountain peak. All the teachers and students, everyone in the town, had heard about my expulsion, the cocaine, the fact that I had fucked up my one chance to improve my circumstances. They invented little twists on the basic story to make it seem even worse. And they blamed me. They were so angry, like, fuck, why had they ever thought that someone like me could have handled such an experience? And so they gave up on me, stopped talking about college, about scholarships. I turned into a ghost, this story that lived in the town, a cautionary tale, but who would it scare? Who would listen?

  Everything was so easy, and nobody cared, and I lost interest. I started working after school, helping my mom clean houses. I started hanging out with idiot boys and girls who had access to weed and pills, and I’d stay with them as long as they didn’t expect anything from me. Then, when they did expect things, I just bought weed myself and smoked joints on the back porch of my house all alone, feeling the world flatten out. I started to care less about the future. I cared more about making the present tolerable. And time passed. And that was my life.

  As we neared the estate, all I could see were green pastures and what felt like miles and miles of white fence. I couldn’t understand what the fence was there for, because it wouldn’t keep anything in or out. It was purely ornamental, and then, like, duh, I realized that if you had this much money, you could make gestures that were purely ornamental. I reminded myself to be smarter. I was smart. I just had a thick layer of stupid that had settled on top of me. But I was still wild when I needed to be. I’d get smarter. Whatever Madison had, I’d get it easily.

  The fucking driveway felt like it was a mile long, and it looked like it would lead you straight to the gates of heaven, that’s how perfectly maintained it was. It could have ended at a run-down pizza joint with bars on the windows and you’d still be so thrilled.

  “Almost there,” Carl said.

  “What’s the mail situation like?” I said.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “Do they have to walk all the way to the end of this driveway just to get the mail? Or do they have, like, a golf cart? Or does someone get it for them?” I didn’t ask if he was the one who got the mail for them, but I feel like maybe he knew that I was wondering.

  “Well, the postman just brings it to the door,” he said.

  “Oh, okay,” I said. I thought about Madison sitting on her porch, drinking sweet tea and waiting patiently while the postman crept up the driveway, bearing a letter from me about my ideas for a tattoo on my ankle.

  I had often fantasized about Madison’s home. It seemed weird to ask her for a photo of the mansion, like, Hey, I could live without another photo of your teddy bear son but please send me pictures of every single one of the bathrooms in your mansion. When she sent photos, I could make out parts of the house, expensive and well maintained. Maybe if I’d cut them into pieces and reassembled them, I could have seen the whole mansion. Sometimes it was simpler to just believe that Madison lived in the White House. That made sense to me at the time. Madison lived in the fucking White House.

  Now, as we pulled up to the estate, I felt this diamond form in my throat, and I almost grabbed Carl’s hand for support. The house was three stories, maybe more. I couldn’t crane my neck enough to see the top of it; for all I knew at that moment, it went all the way up to space. It was blindingly white, not one trace of mold or dirt, a house that you build in your dreams. There was a huge porch that seemed to wrap around the entire structure; it must have been a mile if you walked it. I had been prepared for wealth, but clearly my life had left me ill prepared for what wealth could be. And was Madison’s husband even really all that rich? He hadn’t invented computers or owned a fast-food empire. And yet his level of wealth had given him this house. It had given him Madison, who suddenly appeared in the front doorway, and she was waving, so beautiful that I knew I’d take her over the house every single time I had a choice.

  Carl pulled the car around the fountain in the middle of the driveway and stopped right at the front door of the house. While the car idled, he swiftly ducked out of his seat and came around to open my door. I couldn’t get up. I couldn’t make my legs work. Madison suddenly walked down the stairs and held out her arms for an embrace. But I couldn’t meet her. I felt like if I moved one muscle, the whole thing would evaporate and I would wake up back on my futon, the A/C broken again. Carl finally had to haul me up, rag-dolling me as if I were a gift for Madison’s birthday, and then I fell into her arms. She was so tall, so strong, that she held me until I smelled the scent of her, until I remembered her, the two of us in bed in that dorm room, and everything was tangible again. It was real. I straightened up, and there I was, standing there. It was the first time in almost fifteen years that I’d seen Madison, but she looked the same. She’d just gotten a little tanner and filled out in a way that suggested adulthood. She didn’t look like a robot. She didn’t look soulless.

  “You look so beautiful,” she said, and I believed her.

  “Well, you look like a supermodel,” I replied.

  “I wish I were a supermodel,” she said. “I wish I had a calendar that was nothing but me.” And like that, it was the two of us again, me being weird and her revealing that, by god, she was weird, too.

  Carl checked his watch, did this little bow, and then hopped back in the car and drove away. We could have spent the rest of the day watching him drive away. I kind of wanted to. I kept waiting for his car to turn into some dumb gourd and him to turn into a mouse. I waited for magic, and I didn’t think I would be disappointed.

  “It’s so hot out here,” she said. “Come inside.”

  “This is your house?” I asked.

  Madison smiled. “It’s one of them,” she said, and her nose wrinkled and her eyes got all twinkly. She couldn’t talk like this with her husband, none of the other women who lived in luxury. This was good. She couldn’t believe her good fortune, either.

  Inside the house, I don’t know what I’d expected, but it was pretty plain. There wasn’t a lot of crazy art on the walls, and I guess I thought maybe there would be space-age furniture, but this was the kind of wealth where things were so plain that you didn’t realize how expensive they were until you touched them or got closer and saw how they were made with great care and with super-fancy materials. In the hallway was a huge portrait of Madison and her husband from their wedding. She looked like she’d just been crowned Miss America and he looked like the emcee who had once been famous. I couldn’t tell if it was love, but I also knew that I was no real judge of love, having never experienced it or even witnessed it a single time in
my life.

  Madison had met Senator Jasper Roberts when she’d worked on his reelection campaign right after she’d graduated from Vanderbilt University with a degree in political science. She’d started at the lowest rung, brought on because the normally untouchable senator had recently left his wife and two kids and started dating one of his biggest donors, some heiress who was obsessed with horses and wore crazy hats. They wanted to get a woman’s perspective on things, I guess. The dudes at the top, who had the senator’s ear, had told him that he had to be super dignified about it and never talk about it and harrumph like a Muppet if anyone even brought it up. I remember her letter to me around this time. Jesus, these guys are so stupid, she wrote. It’s like they’ve never followed up on a single stupid-ass thing they’ve ever done so they could just fix it. Because Madison was brilliant and because she had that slightly skewed way of saying things in a straightforward manner that broke you in half, the senator ended up putting her in charge of the campaign. And, of course, he did this because he was falling in love with her, like everyone did, and because the heiress wouldn’t shut the fuck up about some horse that she wanted to buy.

  Madison made him conciliatory. She wrote his speeches, every single one. He confessed to his failings, that his desire to make his constituency prosperous, to help every single person he represented, had caused him to lose sight of what made his own family happy. And now that he’d lost that family, he could not lose his larger family, the voters of the great state of Tennessee. It wasn’t that hard. He was a political legacy, generations of Roberts men running things, so much wealth that people just assumed they had to vote for him. He merely had to show that he was aware that he’d done a fucked-up thing.