Claire watches her brother get drunk. He’s gulping from a tall glass of champagne mixed with one of the coppery liquids that their dad keeps in crystal, loudly lamenting its grotesqueness. He is complaining with a kind of pride, the way frat boys boast about being hazed.
He’s being careless. Even Claire, who herself is only allowed to have a glass of wine tonight, knows that if their dad sees him, there won’t be a drunken thrill in the world to make it worth the consequences. But their dad is nowhere to be found.
Claire is sitting on a stool at the kitchen island, sort of watching Alex scan the room for something more worth her time. Whenever she takes a sip of wine, she has to put tremendous effort into not wincing at the taste, and the tart burns in her throat when she swallows. She wants to look as at ease as all of the adults around her, even though none of them is talking to her, which is why she is stuck with Alex and his roommate from Georgetown Prep, a British exchange student named Matthew whose parents are spending the holiday in India. He had elected not to join them.
The two boys are talking over each other, neither of them particularly bothered by the fact that the other isn’t listening. Claire is sort of fascinated. Matthew is talking very fast, punctuating long breathless sentences (he got deferred from Harvard, Claire gathers, because they want to give out more financial aid this year) with dry sniffles, dragging his hand underneath his nose, the skin above his lip raw and ruddy. Alex is shouting over him at a pair of their dad’s employees who are talking quietly at the dining table, the words round and thick in his mouth. He’s telling them about a club he and Matthew went to last night, bragging that fake IDs got them in. Everything he is saying takes a long time because he pauses for long, unpredictable stretches. The men at the table tolerate this because he’s their boss’s son. It is like watching the end of an infomercial—Matthew, talking too fast and in convoluted vocabulary about something no one is inclined to listen to, Alex, incandescent and gaudy, drawing big movements with his arms, hard to look away from. Nothing they are saying lands.
Claire, having had enough of this strange two-man performance, clicks her phone on.
Wyd, Dominic has texted her.
Dominic is not her boyfriend, but that’s mostly a technicality, one that she hopes will be remanded when they go back to Exeter after the break. Claire purses her lips, then, realizing that threatens her lipstick, stops. She slides off of the stool and slips out of the kitchen.
“Claire!” Her mother’s voice assaults her as she makes her way into the living room, where most of the party has gathered. “There you are!”
Claire’s mother puts an arm over her shoulder and steers her towards the group of women she was talking to. Claire recognizes two of four of them.
“That’s your first glass, right?” says her mother. Claire takes a hard breath. Her mother, mildly drunk, has slipped into a role that baffles her.
“Yes,” Claire says.
Her mom laughs a high, breathless noise that sounds nothing like anyone’s laugh, let alone hers. “Claire,” she says, “Angela was just telling us about her new dachshund puppies.”
“That’s nice,” Claire says, in the vague direction of the two women who could be Angela.
“Claire’s a sophomore, she goes to Exeter,” her mother tells them, “but if she was home, she’d be begging us for puppies.”
The women laugh; four identical sounds.
Claire does not tell her mom that she doesn’t even really like dogs, she definitely would not want the stress of having a puppy around, pissing on an antique rug or eating one of her parents’ Louboutins. She says, “Excuse me,” and twists herself from her mother’s side, slipping down the shortest hallway, past the linen closets and one of the half-baths and into the back staircase that is off limits to non-residents, into her bedroom. She exhales.
Claire sits on the edge of her bed, her dress billowing around her. The elegance of it pleases her, so she rises and settles again. She gulps back the rest of the wine, not bothering to hide her grimace anymore. She takes a long exhale, bringing her index and middle fingers to touch her lips—lightly, remembering the lipstick—then pulls them away, pretending to blow out cigarette smoke. Her anxiety and irritation appeased, she pulls her phone out and texts Dominic back.
family Christmas party lol.
Lmao, Dominic writes back right away, can you at least drink.
lmao yeah. Everyone here is drooling after—she hesitates, then deletes drooling and writes—creaming their pants for my dad’s attention so I can do whatever I want.
Nice. Claire frowns, unsure how to hold his attention. Then he writes, So what are you wearing?
She is wearing a pink chiffon dress that goes past her knees, bought for her last week by her mother. They had argued over it: her mom had said it was low cut, and Claire told her she was being old-fashioned and anti-feminist, and what was she expecting, that the people being invited to their home by her mother and father were going to be perverts staring down her dress? Her mom had closed her eyes for exactly ten seconds, no doubt counting in her head, and then said fine, get the dress.
Before the party started, Claire had taken photos of herself in the mirror. She has never loved a dress as much as this one. She feels graceful and grown, pleased by the way the sash sits on her hips and the low cut that she’d fought for. She did her own makeup with a new lipstick her roommate at school had helped her pick out. Delighted by the excuse to show Dominic, she selects her favorite photo and sends it to him.
A shadow clouds the doorframe, and Claire clicks her phone off before her dad’s figure crowds the doorway. She lifts her gaze to him and gives him a smile, unsure if that is the right greeting: his body is backlit by the hallway overheads, his face in complete darkness.
“Sorry,” says Claire, a hot, tight constriction in her chest. “Just needed a break for a second.”
“Sure,” says her father. “Me, too.” She eases back a bit. He angles himself away from her, so she can see his expression, a slight, tired smirk.
“Mom’s drunk,” says Claire.
Her dad laughs. The hard knot in her chest cools and uncoils in her chest, the relief like the last few big gulps of wine, which has started to taste more tolerable as she’s finished the glass.
“She’s gonna wake up tomorrow and have made brunch plans with seven different women and not know any of their names,” says her father.
“As long as we don’t have to be there.”
He laughs again. He reaches his hand out and rests it, affectionately, on the top of her head, his thumb brushing her hairline. She ducks away.
“Don’t mess up my hair,” she says.
“You and your mother,” her father says, with a faint, faint sneer. “Take it easy on the wine, by the way. I’ve got to go listen to people beg me to take their money.” He leaves her sitting in the dark on the stairs. The spot in her chest decalcifies, throbbing.
Her phone lights up again. Dominic has texted her a string of emoji heart-eyes. Then he texted, what about underneath that dress?
Claire moves her tongue over her teeth, her mouth thick like she’s sucking on a marble. What an unoriginal way to phrase it, she thinks, and feels briefly dizzy with rage that he has let her down like this.
Hmm 🙂, Claire writes, not ready yet to decide what kind of degradation she will subject herself to tonight. If she refuses, Dominic will call her a prude, a tease—it will be said in the boy’s dorms, texted to his group chat of friends who will hiss it to others during lulls in class and pep rallies. Or else she will humor him, stand in front of her bathroom mirror and contort herself into something desirable (she has practiced, parted lips, chin raised, stomach sucked in and angled away from the mirror). She doesn’t want to do that, but I don’t feel like it is a pathetic answer.
Flushed, Claire sticks her phone back into her pocket (her beloved dress has pockets) and turns down the hallway. A caterer in a stiff blue shirt holding a tray of champagne flutes does not react when she stops him and takes one. Her parents are nowhere to be seen. She drinks it very fast, and the room shudders momentarily. When she recalibrates herself in space, the noise has ebbed, and her dad is standing on a coffee table. Everyone waits for him, Claire included. She glances across the room at her mother, who has a hand clasped around the gem on her necklace.
“Well.” Her dad opens his arms, smiling around at the people below him, like a carnival barker or a cult leader. “I have to thank all you lovely people for being here and enjoying my home and my alcohol” —faint laughter— “so please, thank my wife for putting this together.” He raises his glass in her direction, and she lifts her head and looks around like she’s watching a bird fly through an airport. “I know we all know it’s been one of the worst years in our industry, but hey, we’re having a better holiday than the Madoffs, huh?”
Real laughter. Claire has only the vaguest idea of what he’s talking about. It was a big headache for her dad, she gathered.
“Sorry, too soon?” her dad says, raising his voice. “Well. I’ll just say to those of you who’ve invested with me, I haven’t made off with your life savings.”
Everyone laughs harder. Claire snorts. She doubts her dad wrote that line. Someone applauds and a few others join in. A girl who lived on her floor at Exeter had gone home three days early for break, and Claire heard it was because her dad had lost all his money with Madoff and jumped off their balcony.
She glances across the room. Alex is leaning against a doorframe, unsteady.
“Anyway, thank you for coming. And if you wanna thank me for not only not stealing your money but making you fucking rich, well, you’re welcome.” He grins out at the cheers. He meets Claire’s eye for a moment, and she registers the barest tick of an eyebrow.
Her dad steps down from his soapbox and vanishes from her sight into a group of men who all look like him. Claire, forgetting that she’d been avoiding her messages, looks at her phone. Three new messages from Dominic.
Aww c’mon.
Here I’ll start.
Then, he sent a photo that makes her feel like someone has seized her insides at random and pulled her hard. She clicks her phone off and closes her eyes briefly. She wants to laugh, but she doesn’t want to laugh alone; she considers texting Ingrid, her closest friend at school, but she feels fatigued just imagining explaining the evening to her. Claire leans against the wall, her body thrumming with— not power because there is a faint edge of something unsavory, but incredulity, a kind of welcome chaos, like her life is about to tip towards something white-hot, exciting but treacherous.
Claire’s mouth feels very dry; she swigs the rest of her champagne. She threads through the crowd unseen, upstairs. She is heading back towards her bedroom to figure out what to do with the porn she now possesses, but she stops partway down the hall at a bathroom. The door left slightly ajar, and a thin band of light cleaves through the hallway. In the bathroom, breathless retching.
“You, um, okay?” Claire calls.
A moment of dead air, like it’s taking some serious effort for this person to reply. “Claire?” she hears Alex say. His voice is wrecked.
Claire pushes the door open. Alex is slumped against the wall, his body torpid, head lolling back. The toilet seat is up.
“Jesus,” says Claire. “What happened?”
Alex speaks with no emotion on his face like it would hurt to work the muscles there. “I just—just went a little hard, I guess.”
Claire catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror. She looks severe, her eye makeup especially dramatic, which she is momentarily glad for: she is masking her uncertainty well.
“You shouldn’t have drunk so much.”
“I don’t know. Different kinds of alcohol, that’s the problem.” As if to demonstrate, Alex heaves himself over the toilet seat and gets sick again. Claire purses her lips and turns away. “And we smoked a little. And I haven’t eaten.”
“Okay,” Claire says. She bites the inside of her cheek until the soft skin there feels gamy and painful. “Do you want me to do anything?”
“Water,” Alex says, waving a hand at the sink.
Claire obliges, filling a tiny paper cup and handing it to him. She does this with as much distance between them as possible, but their fingers still brush. She wants to leave, but that seems like overkill cruelty, like kicking a dog that’s already coiled up in shame.
“Claire,” says Alex, with the cup halfway to his lips. “Don’t tell Dad.” His face grows sallower, as much as that’s possible. “Please.”
“Yeah,” says Claire. “Obviously.”
His shoulders move in an impression of a half-laugh. Claire passes him another cup and watches him drink from it.
“Where’s Matthew?”
“Outside, I think.” Alex tilts his head back again and closes his eyes. She can see his veins across his eyelids, and it makes her think of the thin blue strokes of rivers across a map. “God. The water’s helping.”
They both hear the noise in the hallway at the same moment and try uselessly to compose themselves. When their father pushes the door open, Alex looks away, but Claire brings her gaze between his eyes, where she cannot be accused of not looking at him while he’s talking.
“What the hell is this?” her dad asks. It’s rhetorical. Neither of them moves. “Claire,” he says, “Out, please.”
She ducks past him, not looking at Alex. She’ll think of that all the time, later in her life. As far as family drama goes, the night has been pretty mild, but she will remember it as a time she abandoned him.
She goes back downstairs, and this time she heads outside. The heat lamps are lit on the wraparound balcony, so she walks past a group of women who work with her dad and turns the corner, where she expected to stand alone, looking out over the glittering windows below her, the diamond coruscation along the Hudson. Instead, she finds Matthew.
He is standing alone, smoking a cigarette with a lot of ease for an eighteen-year-old being hosted by someone else’s family. He nods to her, with more warmth than she usually gets from him.
“Sorry,” says Claire.
“It’s your house.” He blows a cloud of smoke out above the building tops. Claire watches the ruby tip of the cigarette bobbing between his fingers. “You smoke?”
“Sometimes,” Claire says, lying.
He grins in a way that makes her feel like he can tell. “You want?”
“Okay.”
She expects him to offer her a new one and light it, but he just passes her the one that had been in his mouth.
Claire takes it. She steels her whole body against coughing and still fails. Matthew watches her with mild interest.
“You’re a sophomore, right?” he asks. It sounds unfamiliar because he has never asked her a single thing about herself.
“Yeah,” Claire tells him.
“How’s Exeter? I hear the food’s good.”
“It’s not bad. They’re strict. You know, boarding schools.”
Matthew laughs, and Claire feels like she just swallowed a warm drink very fast.
“Do I ever.” He takes a drag, then says, “They don’t want us to have any fun.” Claire makes an indistinguishable noise of agreement, and he continues. “You know I’ve gotten laid in a janitor’s closet?” He grins at her. His teeth are perfectly straight and white.
“Wow,” says Claire. She laughs in a way that sounds, to her, high and uneasy, but she hopes he doesn’t hear it like that.
“Yep. The girl, she was this princess, I think she imagined, like, rose petals, and there she is, her fucking hair’s getting caught in the fucking bristles on a broom..”
Claire fixes her gaze on a window of a condo a few stories below them. The TV inside glows with the news, a man in a suit announcing a tragedy. No one is watching.
“I thought Georgetown Prep was a boy’s school,” she says.
Matthew is quiet for just long enough that she glances over at him. He’s smiling. “We’ve got a sister school,” he says. There is the slightest catch in his voice, but it’s gone when he speaks again. “How about you? Exeter’s co-ed, right? Where do you guys go to get some?”
“I don’t know,” Claire says. She feels short of breath like the building has risen another quarter mile into the sky in the time that Matthew has been talking to her.
“No? You ought to figure that out soon.”
Claire gathers a handful of the skirt of her dress in her palm and squeezes until she worries it might tear on her nails, but even then, she does not let up. She swallows against the sensation of wet sand beneath her tongue.
“You know,” Matthew goes on, “You’re beautiful, Claire. You don’t look like a thirteen-year-old.”
“I’m fifteen,” Claire says, inexplicably.
“You don’t look fifteen.”
When he puts his hand on her shoulder, she feels everything she drank tonight lapping in her chest. She keeps looking forward and down into the window and imagines whoever lives there is kind and competent, and if she were to have grown up there, the thing that feels like it’s rotting would never have arisen inside her. He slips his thumb under the fabric below her collarbone, and she scoffs in a way intended as spite, but that sounds like a cry.
“Claire.”
They both wheel around, Matthew retracting his hand. Her dad walks towards them and puts himself between them.
“Mr. Connover,” Matthew says. He manages an uneasy laugh.
“You need to go to bed,” Claire’s dad tells him. “We invited you to our home and you drank, and got my son drunk. You can stay here tonight and figure out where to go for the rest of your break tomorrow.”
Matthew scrubs his thumb across his nose. “I’m sorry,” he says, “I really—I didn’t mean—”
Her dad sneers; Matthew shuts up. Leaning in, her father says something into Matthew’s ear that Claire can’t hear, but she watches his eyes glass over, and then he turns to depart without a word. Her father shoves him once, and he staggers.
Claire does not watch Matthew leave, or turn to her father. She lifts her gaze up and follows an airplane across the velvet sky, wishing she was there, wanting to be one of the people either leaving or arriving home.
“I knew he was a little prick,” her father says.
Claire makes a noise resembling a laugh, and then something clicks hard and fast in her chest and she chokes back a sob. She doesn’t cry often, not in front of people, certainly not in front of her dad, and the humiliation makes her shiver.
Her dad puts his arms around her. She leans into his chest with her head turned away, conscious of not smearing makeup across his shirt. He moves his thumb lightly across her back.
She will think back on this night, months and years from now when Dominic and a girl she knows from class are both kicked out for “obscene exchanges.” When she hears from Alex that Matthew has been kicked out of Dartmouth after he date-raped a girl. When six women, some of whom are at the party with them that night, describe to the world what Claire’s father did to them, how they all thought they were alone, that no one would believe them.
But now, her dad, providing rare and cold comfort to her, his attempt at tenderness excruciating. She stays still until he releases her.