Chapter Twelve Naomi

Chapter Twelve

Naomi

October 2022, seven months before her death

Ben and I are passing the eating clubs on our way to Sterling when my heart tightens in warning. Up ahead, a rowdy group of guys are blocking the sidewalk, shouting and laughing, completely wasted. A lanky guy in a blazer tosses an empty bottle in the air. His friend unbuckles his pants and relieves himself into a bush. They’re the type of boys I’ve spent my entire life trying to avoid.

“Excuse us,” Ben says, making his way through them. We’re almost clear, just passing the last two, who are in the midst of a shouting match. Now that we’re closer I realize these guys are juniors in Sterling, which makes me feel better since that means Ben knows them too. Ben taps one of them on the shoulder to let him know we’re squeezing by, and when the guy turns around, Ben’s hand accidentally grazes his chin.

“My bad, Pete,” Ben says.

Pete Whitney, a junior on the lacrosse team, turns, smile fading as his eyes focus on us. He doesn’t move out of our way. Instead, his bloodshot eyes shift from Ben to me. He has red hair, narrow-set eyes, and a nose that looks like it’d been broken and healed poorly.

My shoulders tense, and suddenly I’m back in eighth grade, staring up at the boy who’d left a condom-wrapped banana in my lunch box, once again the awkward girl who’d been poked and teased.

“Not cool, man,” Pete says.

“You’re taking up the whole sidewalk,” I tell him, the familiar anger unfurling in my chest.

He raises his eyebrows, his face nearly as red as his hair. When he steps closer, the alcohol on his breath fills my nostrils. My hands curl into fists and I have the sudden urge to fight back. Ben puts up a hand, stopping Pete from getting closer.

“Don’t fucking touch me,” Pete says, the words spewing from his mouth like hate. My whole body is tense, flushed with anger and adrenaline.

“Then move, asshole,” I mutter.

I should have seen it coming, but what happens next happens fast. In one swift movement, Pete raises a hand to strike me. I anticipate the sharp blow to my cheek, the pain. But suddenly, he staggers back instead. Ben’s shoved him to the ground. Furious, he pushes himself up and shoots us a look of disgust.

“Woah.” His friend, a slightly taller and lankier version of him, grabs his arm. “Come on, Pete, take it down a notch.”

He wipes his mouth with the back of his sleeve. His face twists, lips curling in disgust, and for a second, I think he might lunge at us again, but his friend keeps a firm grasp on his shoulders.

Ben pulls me past, and I hold my breath until we’re a good distance away. When I look back, Pete looks furious; he’s muttering something to his friend, who is still holding his shoulders. Though it’s dark, I can make out his twisted expression, the veins in his neck, can practically feel his hate crawling over my skin. What he says next makes my arms go numb. “Motherfucking chinks. Go back to wherever you came from.”

—

“What an asshole,” I say, once Pete and his friends are out of earshot. My hands ache from being clenched into fists, and blood has rushed to my face.

Ben remains silent, eyes cast down as we create distance between ourselves and them. When he finally speaks, I can hear the anger in his voice. “Pete Whitney went to my high school in Manhattan, a year behind me,” he explains. “He’s disgusting. He has Confederate flag shot glasses in his room, a tattoo of one on his thigh. In high school, he got suspended for writing a racist email to a girl who’d turned him down for a date.”

“Did he get kicked out?”

Ben shakes his head. “Nope. Dad’s a billionaire. Mom’s a congresswoman and big-time donor. His parents hired a lawyer who claimed free speech. He didn’t even get suspended.”

“That’s horrible.”

“Yeah,” Ben sighs. “I’m pretty sure he spends his time commenting on conspiracy-theory subreddits and harassing people on Twitter.” I can hear the hurt in his voice, and despite how different Ben and I look, I understand our shared pain.

I think of the boy who used to bully me. The one who used accents with his friends, threw bits of gum wrapper in my hair in class, and spread horrible rumors about me.

“I can’t believe Princeton let him in.”

“Yeah,” Ben says. “It’s fucked up, the amount of racist shit he’s said. The other Sterling guys are always saying to chill, it’s not that bad, but they don’t know. They don’t see it.”

I understand what he means. To some of my friends or past partners it had seemed invisible, even though for me it was a constant presence. And the truth was, it had gotten worse since Covid.

“I tried to keep him out of Sterling,” Ben says, “but he had someone on his side.”

At Ben’s words, I look up. But I don’t mention what I know and he does not: Pete isn’t just in Sterling, he’s also in Greystone.

—

Finally we arrive at Sterling, and after a couple of beers, I forget all about Pete Whitney. On the back patio, a guy in my class is playing a set, all in Spanish, and everyone is shouting the words to his songs. My sister always told me when she was here the crowd was all preppy and white, but while there are still guys like Pete, it’s not like that anymore. Around me, there are students of all shades of brown, black, beige, and everything in between.

I’m taking a sip of my beer when I feel someone staring at me from the other side of the crowd. I look up to find Liam, his arm around a girl I don’t recognize, and quickly force my gaze away. I shouldn’t be surprised to see him; he’s a member. We’ve managed to avoid each other lately, but seeing him with someone else so shortly after we’d spent the night together still stings.

Ben notices me staring and whispers in my ear, “Is that Nobody?”

I can’t help but smile.

He tilts his head to mine conspiratorially. “Want to make him jealous?”

I raise my eyebrows as adrenaline whips through me.

On the dance floor, Ben pulls me up tight against his body, and I try to forget about Liam. But a few songs later, I open my eyes and see him on the other side of the room, dancing with the same girl he was with earlier. Now that they’re closer, I think she’s a sophomore on the field hockey team. Probably Mollie Field Hockey.

Liam looks over and meets my eyes, and then to my disbelief, he grabs her chin and kisses her. What the hell is he doing?

Flushing with anger, I force my eyes shut and press myself closer to Ben, who seems surprised at first but then wraps his arms tighter around me. We dance that way for several songs, until we’re out of breath and slick with sweat.

A half hour later, we’ve moved to the far corner of the dance floor, and when I scan the crowd for Liam, he and the girl are gone.

Ben looks down at me. “Do you want to get out of here? You could come to my place and I could show you my photography.”

I laugh. “Haven’t heard that one before.”

“No pressure,” Ben says, flushing.

I’d hooked up with a few people since Liam and I broke up—there had been Abe, the mouth breather; Gio, who was way too into role-play; Thea, who would not stop quoting Shakespeare. But this feels different.

At the same time, though, I’m not sure I’m ready to feel like this again. Everything with Liam still feels too fresh.

Over Ben’s shoulder, I see Liam standing with a beer in the hallway, watching me. With a rush of adrenaline, I turn back to Ben, thread my fingers through his belt loops, and kiss him. After a moment of surprise, Ben grins and kisses me back. I like the way his lips feel on mine, and his lack of hesitation is attractive. Without opening my eyes, I sense Liam watching us and it feels good in a kind of wicked, vengeful way.

The room is packed and sweaty, and we’re both breathing more heavily than usual. After another song, I pull back from Ben. His hair is pushed back off his forehead, shirt unbuttoned a little, and he looks kind of wild. “Okay, let’s see your photography.”

—

Ben’s room is not at all what I was expecting. it’s warm and filled with life: plants and music and abstract art. “Mind if I look around?” I ask him.

He hands me a beer. “Be my guest.”

I make my way around the space, taking in his framed black-and-white photography of people in Chinatown, an antique abacus (his grandfather’s), running my fingers over his books: G?del, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, A Brief History of Time, and The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking). I pluck through his record collection—A Tribe Called Quest, Flowdan, Japanese Breakfast.

“So why can’t you pursue photography? I mean, after we graduate,” I say without looking up. My hands stop on a Childish Gambino album, and I lift it from the case.

“Oh.” He pushes a hand through his hair. “It’s not in the cards for me.”

I set the record down and make my way over to him. “What do you mean?”

Ben shows me a picture of him and an older Asian couple I assume are his parents. “The only way for someone like me to make it is to become a doctor or a lawyer or something.”

“That’s not true,” I tell him. “Look at these photos. You’re so talented. You could make a career out of it.”

“Maybe someone raised by the St. Clairs can.” Ben looks away. “But not me.”

And now I get it. Ben’s not from money. Being an artist is a risk, a privilege he won’t consider, and to him, I’ve had this easy life with so many more opportunities because of my connection to the St. Clairs.

For a moment, I worry I’ve ruined everything, but then Ben turns toward me again and I can feel the hum of energy between us. Before I can say anything else, he leans down and kisses me.

—

Over the course of the night, I learn that not only is Ben a talented photographer, but he is talented in other areas as well.

We stay up until the sun rises, sometimes talking, sometimes listening to the rain, and deep within me, a knot loosens. He shows me portraits he’d shot of people on the streets of New York City: an elderly Chinese woman, wearing a black dress and hat, a deep sadness in her eyes. “She fled China during the Cultural Revolution. Her son was a history teacher in Beijing and someone had written an anti-Communist phrase on his chalkboard. He was sent to a pig farm, and she never saw him again,” he explains. “She teared up when she learned I went to Princeton…it was the life she would have wanted for her son. Someday I want to make a book of these photographs and their stories.”

I ask him about growing up in Singapore, and he asks me about moving from California to Greenwich. I read him the short story I wrote about my sister, about the year after our mom died, when Maya left for college and I moved in with Aunt Ella, who already had three kids of her own. The story is about how I never told Maya about the kids who teased me, the days I had to run home, or the nights I went without dinner. It feels strange, that Ben should know the things I’ve never told Maya, but as he and I lie naked under his sheets, the glow of my phone the only light in the room, I feel a knot inside my heart loosen slightly.

—

A couple of hours later, Ben slips from bed, stirring me awake. “You sleep okay?”

The rain has stopped and a cool breeze drafts in from the crack in the window. The square patch of light on the wall has turned from blue-gray to gold, and the birds are chirping outside.

“Yeah.” I push myself onto my elbow and look over at Ben, who raises a camera.

“Turn your face a little toward the light.”

I roll my eyes. “Do you take pictures of everyone you hook up with?”

“Only the ones I like.” Ben grins, and I know he’s joking. He’d been in my freshman seminar, so I knew he’d had a girlfriend who went to Harvard, I think, or Yale, for at least a couple years; he didn’t have a reputation for sleeping around.

Laughing, I push his camera away with one hand and cover my face with the other. It’s one thing to hook up with a guy, and another to let him take a photo of you first thing in the morning with caked-over drool on the side of your mouth.

Sitting up, I take in his face. His sleek black hair sticking up to one side, his deep brown eyes. Click. The shutter goes off.

“How’s this.” I sit up, letting the sheet fall off my chest, and face the window, exposing my back to him and giving him a half-joking sultry stare over my shoulder.

“Stay there.” He presses the shutter. Click. “That’s perfect.” He snaps a few more, then sets the camera down and kisses me.

—

On my walk back, I don’t care who sees me. I’m buzzing, lit up, glowing with the memory of Ben’s arms curled around me. The warmth of his bed.

I’m about to text Amy when douchebag—do not answer fills the screen. Sighing, I pick up.

“What?”

“Naomi.” I’m annoyed at how much I like the sound of his voice.

“What’s up?”

Liam sighs. “I’ve been trying to reach you.”

“Okay…”

“I wanted to talk to you last night.”

A flash of him making out with the girl sends anger whirling through me, and I tighten my grip on the phone. “Why?”

“Listen.” Liam is silent a moment, and when he speaks again his voice is low. “It’s about Theodore Hunt’s company—I thought you’d want to know, since you interned at his fund last summer.”

I stop walking and look over my shoulder to make sure no one is listening. “What are you talking about? Liam, is this because of last night?”

“No, I’m serious. Meet me at Sterling. I’ve got something to show you.”

—

When I see Liam at the far table in the Sterling Club library, I’m caught off guard. Seeing him makes me lightheaded, and as much as I want to be, I’m still not over him.

Determined not to let it show, I settle into the chair across from him. He looks up from his laptop and pushes a to-go cup of coffee toward me that says Mason. A small reminder that he still cares.

I draw my hand into my lap and refuse to touch it.

“About last night—” Liam starts, but I stop him.

“It’s fine.” I’m finding it hard to meet his eyes. They’re a murky greenish blue, the color of the bottom of a lake, and they seem to be able to see right through me. “We were both with other people.”

Liam raises an eyebrow. Good. I’d meant for that to sting.

We sit in awkward silence until I nod at the tennis racket, hoping to change the subject. “How’s the season going?”

“Could be better. It’d be nice to have my hitting partner back.” Half of his mouth curls up. Margaret St.Clair had taught me to play tennis at her country club, and I was pretty good.

On those rare free afternoons when neither of us had practice, we used to go out to the tennis courts and play until the sun set, then go back to his room to rip each other’s clothes off. It was an intense, all-consuming kind of love. The memory sends a shiver from the base of my spine up to my neck.

I soften. “That’s not a real answer.”

“We’re three and three in the Ivy League, 17–8 overall…” Liam leans back in his chair and runs a hand through his blond hair, his eyes never leaving mine. “You’re killing me, you know that?”

I roll my eyes. This is his way of flirting. “Why’s that?”

He laughs. “One minute you’re in my bed, the next you refuse to speak to me.”

I look away, feeling my cheeks warm. Liam is not the type of guy I’d normally go for. Zee teased me about how I’d have to teach him how to dance, and I was skeptical of his old-money family. Their relationship was strained, and I’d always hoped to be with someone with a big, loving family.

Sitting up straighter, I force myself to stay present. “So what’s so important?”

Liam looks over my shoulder, then dips his head low. “Professor DuPont told me there’s some stuff going down at Hunt. It’s bad, and he’s worried it’s going to affect…things.”

I lean forward, interested.

Liam runs a hand through his hair again, exposing the tattoo on his forearm, the Greystone insignia—a tattoo of which only members would know the significance.

He turns his laptop around. He shows me an article. Hunt Group Under Scrutiny for Insider Trading, Securities Fraud.

I sit back, not sure what to think. Had there been signs that I missed while I was there? Something illegal going on behind the scenes? In upper management?

“Obviously this would be bad for Greystone…financially.”

Theodore Hunt’s firm prided itself on having some of the highest-net-worth clients in the world. Many Greystone Society alumni trust them with their portfolios…as did Greystone itself.

If a scandal broke out, and their clients started to panic and pull their money, the fund could risk losing billions. Not anticipating the recent interest rate hike, they’d made risky bets and were already overleveraged…And if someone had done something illegal, Theodore or other alums at Hunt could go to prison. It would be a total shit show for Greystone…and Sterling too.

“A whistleblower leaked thousands of emails to the Times. They’re launching an internal investigation to find out who went to the press…but they’re running out of time—the SEC showed up at the office on Friday. I heard Hunt’s legal team are going to interview everyone who worked there over the summer. I wanted to warn you.”

My breath stops. “Why would they need to talk to me?”

“They think it might have been an assistant. Maybe someone recently let go. Anyway…I didn’t want you to be blindsided.”