Page 47 of The Academy
During dinner, Karen asks questions:Tell me about math. What’s the new English teacher like? Which class is your favorite?She’s warming up to the big one, which she finally broaches once they have demolished their sandwiches (Dub eats three) and are splitting a brownie sundae. “How’s it been?” Karen pauses. “Without her?”
Dub digs his spoon into the sundae so that he gets a good ratio of brownie to ice cream to hot fudge to whipped cream. But before he eats, he flicks his eyes at her, exhales, and says, “If I tell you something, do you promise to keep it secret?”
“Of course.”
Dub tells her about a computer file that Cinnamon sent him before she died.DO NOT OPEN THIS FILE UNTIL THE MORNING OF OUR GRADUATION.
Karen feels like she’s been plopped right into the middle of a teen drama on TV. “You haven’t opened it?”
“I have not.”
“What do you think it is?”
“I don’t know, Mom.” When he looks at her, she takes in his handsome face, cheekbones and eyelashes any girl would kill for, thesquare jaw replicated in her two older sons, the pimples that remind her he’s still a kid—but what kid has the willpower to obey such a request? Karen isn’t sure she’d be able to do it herself.
“There’s something else,” Dub says, and he sets down his spoon, sundae suddenly irrelevant.Here it comes,she thinks. He’s finally going to tell her.
She waits. And waits. She wills herself not to force it out of him but she can’t help saying, “I’m a safe place, Dub. My love is unconditional.”
These feel like the right words, but it’s as if she’s poked a turtle with a stick. He retracts back into his shell.
“Whatever.” He resumes his careful excavation of the sundae. “I’m going to honor her wishes.”
In the end, Karen thinks, it wasn’t abadweekend. The Thoroughbreds won the game (it amused her how little the other Tiffin parents knew about football) and she left without a six-hundred-dollar charge from the Wooden Duck on her Visa. But she had hoped for better. She had hoped Dub would finally tell her the truth.
Vikram Banerjee, Father of Davi
Vikram Banerjee is many things, but an idiot isn’t one of them.
His wife, Ruby, tried to persuade him, back when Saylem first entered their lives, that Davi “wouldn’t bat an eye” at the new arrangement.
“I’m sure she’s experimented herself,” Ruby said. “She goes to boarding school, darling.”
Was that what they were paying for at Tiffin? Vikram asked his wife. Davi’s sexual experimentation?
“It’s part of growing up,” Ruby said. What Ruby meant was that ithad been part ofhergrowing up while she was a student at King’s School, Canterbury. When Vik and Ruby first met, stories about Ruby’s exploration with the girls in her house were fuel for the already considerable desire Vik felt for Ruby. Not once in twenty years has Vik felt jealous of those long-ago school friends, nor of any other woman in his wife’s orbit.
Saylem, however, is different.
Ruby brought Saylem home from the Portobello Road Market one Saturday in late summer as though she were a silk scarf or vintage mirror. Davi was off in Ibiza and Vikram was on the phone with China, trying to find a reasonably priced cotton vendor for Out of Office’s new line of cropped tees, and he didn’t have the bandwidth to wonder who the young woman in their kitchen was. When he finally hung up to make himself a cup of tea, Ruby introduced him to “our new friend, Saylem.”Our new friend?Vik thought. Curious choice of words. Before he could even put on the kettle, Ruby and Saylem started kissing, Saylem’s hands traveled up inside Ruby’s blouse, and a moment later, they pulled Vik in.
He couldn’t pretend to becompletelysurprised; he and Ruby had recently discussed the idea of a third in order to spice up their sex life. Vik had been thinking of a late-night tryst at a good hotel, preferably in a foreign city—Rome, Marrakesh, New York—after several bottles of champagne were consumed. Not a middle-of-the-day sober situation in their family home.
Ruby and the stranger from Portobello Road lured Vik to the master suite, where he came so quickly and so explosively in Saylem’s mouth that he spent the remainder of the interlude watching Saylem and Ruby fondle and tongue each other, which was captivating certainly, though his mind eventually wandered back to his Chinese vendors.
He expected Saylem would leave before dinner, never to be seen or heard from again. He and Ruby would open a bottle of coldSancerre and toast to checking that particular adventure off their list.
But Ruby wanted Saylem to stay—not just overnight, but indefinitely. Saylem moved her things—which all seemed to fit in one roller bag—into their guest room, though she spent every night in bed with them. Vik went along with it because Davi was due home from Ibiza, at which point, he was certain, the fantasy would end.
“You’ll have to leave tomorrow,” Vik told Saylem over an improbably domestic scene of toast soldiers and fried eggs. “Our daughter is coming home.”
Saylem sucked on her vape and looked to Ruby. Vikram pulled a twenty-pound note from his pocket and said, “Would you run to the shops, please, and get us a dozen oranges? I’ll make juice.”
Saylem blinked as if to say she wasn’t there to run errands, though who knew? She’d spoken very little since arriving.
“Thank you,” Vik said, to put a point on it.
Once Saylem left, Vik asked Ruby what the hell she was thinking, Saylem wasn’t a new puppy to show Davi, she was a human being. How were they going to explain a third person to their sixteen-year-old daughter?
