The Secret Runners Read online

The San Remo is twenty-eight stories tall, but at the eighteenth floor its lower podium divides into two towers, the north and the south. Each tower is capped by a weird multi-stepped pagan-like temple like the one in that movie Ghostbusters. I have to admit they’re pretty cool—but, so far as I’ve seen, there are no sexy female gods dressed in bubble wrap up there; you can, however, host a kick-ass outdoor party with awesome park views on them.

  My family lived on the twentieth floor of the north tower—average price: $19 million—while Misty lived on the twenty-first floor of the south tower, where the prices were slightly higher since the apartments there were larger and received more sun.

  Misty’s friend Hattie Brewster also lived in the building—hence their long friendship—but in the lower “podium” section: a grand address by anyone else’s reckoning, but a step down in the building’s pecking order…peck, peck, peck.

  In short, the San Remo is one of the most sought-after addresses in New York. It boasts residents like Steven Spielberg and Donna Karan, and the popular but fiery right-wing radio host Manny Wannemaker, whom my mother loved. Manny waltzed around the atrium, his obese frame draped in his signature black overcoat with purple sleeves, pontificating to anyone who stopped to listen.

  More recently, to my mother’s disgust, a few Saudi princes had bought apartments high up in the towers. They hadn’t even bothered to negotiate.

  (“Saudis,” she said derisively. “No class, no culture, just vulgar. They’ve never actually built anything, you know. If they didn’t have oil in the ground, they’d all be beggars on the street.”)

  It was interesting that my mother would say this, given that it was not she who had worked to acquire the money to buy our apartment in the Remo (as the cool kids called it). It was my stepfather, Todd Allen, Wall Street titan and a prominent figure in New York business circles. My mother had never worked a day in her life, unless you counted the hours she spent working out and glamming herself up in the mirror every day, which I think she did count.

  One final thing.

  While Red and I walked to school, Misty didn’t. Every day at the tick of eight o’clock, she swept out of the south lobby—trailed by her younger brother and often accompanied by Hattie—and dove into the back of a waiting black Escalade to be whisked off to school eight hundred yards away on the other side of the park.

  American royalty.

  MISTY

  It was in the juniors’ common room that Misty reigned.

  While the seniors had a common room up on the top floor of the school, the juniors had to make do with one in the basement. With a small kitchen, an espresso machine, and our own personal server named Ramona, it would have been any high school girl’s seventh heaven if it weren’t for the general atmosphere of fear, judgment, and contempt.

  Misty and her lieutenants, Hattie and Verity, had their own booth by the door—everyone learned very quickly that you didn’t sit in it, even if they weren’t there—and it was from here that they issued their judgments: on the hairstyles, makeup, skin-care regimens, or just general appearance of all the girls who entered. (Boys were usually greeted with hair-twirling coos of “Hi, Hunter…” or “Hey, Palmer…”)

  I was not exempt from their evaluations, especially after my tumble at the assembly.

  “Morning, Memphis,” Hattie said one day as I arrived during a free period. “Managing to keep it upright today?”

  “That was so embarrassing,” Verity said in a low voice that I could hear clearly.

  Misty was sitting with them, reading something on her laptop. (She had stuck a Louis Vuitton sticker over the Apple logo.) She looked up at the comment.

  “Come on, ladies, give the girl a break. It was her first day,” she said, smiling at me. “Besides, she’s my neighbor. Lives on the other side of the Remo.”

  She nodded to me, and I nodded back in thanks and kept walking. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this act of social rescue. Yes, it was nice, but somehow it wasn’t. It felt like there was something behind it: having Hattie and Verity say something nasty allowed Misty to step in and look sweet and friendly. Of course, maybe I was overthinking all of this. Maybe she was just hedging her bets until she sized me up and figured me out.

  This is how it usually went: a girl would walk in with, say, a new Birkin bag.

  “That’s cool,” Misty would comment.

  Or a giant zit.

  “Did you see her face? How embarrassing,” Hattie would whisper.

  Or the time one girl came in with a huge swollen jaw after a trip to the dentist.

  “Oh, God, like, mortification,” Verity said.

  Or if one dared to show enthusiasm for something, especially something geeky, quirky, or retro. Like the day Jenny said to one of her friends that she’d bought tickets to an ABBA tribute-band concert.

  “Lame,” Verity said.

  After a time, I began to see the pattern. Any act or thing could be judged with one of three adjectives: cool, lame, or embarrassing. (That said, I never saw Misty use the word lame. She was liberal with cool and selective with embarrassing. Again, this confused me. If she was the good cop, she was still allowing this to happen. Except on rare occasions—like mine—she didn’t stop the other two from saying the horrible things they did.)

  Having said that, as I watched these one-word judgments occur over and over during those first few months, I started to see it less as mean-girl cruelty and more as a sign of a lack of vocabulary. Misty was smart, but Hattie and Verity—who were not that attentive in class to begin with—literally didn’t have any other words to describe things.

  When they talked about their own lives, it ranged from the superficial to the downright nasty. One day, Verity turned sideways as she looked in her handheld mirror, assessing her nose. “Oh, I hate my nose. My mom has said I can get surgery on it next summer. Yay!”

  Hattie complained constantly about her household staff. “They are so fucking lazy. Consuela never cleans my bathroom properly; the toilet is always filthy. My mom hates her, too—gives her hell, makes her start all over again. But then, last week, Consuela found my stash of weed in my dresser and told my dad. He grounded me for the whole weekend. Fucking cow.”

  Often they were joined in their booth by a male student named Griffin O’Dea.

  The son of a well-known theater producer, Griff had the build of a linebacker: six feet tall, stocky but not fat, strong but not muscly. He had a mop of frizzy orange hair that tested the boundaries of Monmouth’s male grooming policy.

  He was gregarious in the extreme, the life of the party, or maybe he just had ADHD. Whether he was in the gym bench-pressing with the jocks or in the common room with Misty and her entourage, he was always going a thousand miles an hour. He’d been friends with Misty since elementary school. Word was, he had been to rehab twice, but for what exactly I didn’t know.

  In the common room, Griff happily joined in the judging and name-calling with Misty and her gang.

  His pronouncements on the boys entering the common room included: “Hey, Cameron, how’s life in the closet, dude?” “Morning, Thatcher, love those new glasses. No, really, I do.” Or one whispered recommendation: “Girls, make a mental note of Roland. I saw him in the locker room yesterday: he is hung. It’s always the quiet ones.” Then he’d laugh uproariously.

  * * *

  —

  The cruelest thing I ever saw Misty’s friends do in the common room involved a shy, chubby girl named Winnie Simms.

  It was lunchtime on a rainy day and the common room was full when Winifred Simms entered, only to have Verity guffaw, “Winnie! I saw you naked in gym class yesterday. For the love of God, please wax. You need a Weed Whacker down there, it’s so bushy! Damn, you traumatized me. I cannot unsee what I saw.”

  Winnie’s face went beet red, and my heart went out to her. She was a quiet and studious girl. I also happened to know she was an only child who lived with her father. Older sisters and shallow moms help a girl in this department. Winnie had probably never even contemplated this kind of personal grooming. She scurried out of the room.

  Anger surged through me, and for a moment I thought of standing up and saying something, but then I had a flashing memory of my incident back in Memphis.

  And I bit my tongue.

  I can’t say I was proud of myself, but I’d been burned before. Badly.

  A few minutes later, I saw Misty approach Winnie in the corridor and place a comforting arm around her shoulder—again, the others tee up the meanness, and she follows through with the niceness—and I convinced myself that it was all okay.

  * * *

  —

  In the end, I guess you’d say that my first couple of months at Monmouth were pretty standard for a new kid: stay under the radar, try not to anger the mean girls or stray too close to the orbits of the weirdos, and make a few tentative connections, like I did with Jenny Johnson.

  Jenny and I had several classes together: math, physics, and English lit. If the world didn’t end, Jenny wanted to be a computer programmer and app designer, while I harbored desires of becoming an engineer, so we both worked hard on math and physics, often getting together to work on homework problems.

  I told her about the Winnie incident.

  “That’s Misty’s genius,” Jenny said. “She never says a bad word about anyone. Her two bitches do it. Then she sidles in after and acts all nicey-nicey. It’s brilliant passive-aggressive shit. But don’t be fooled, she can drop the ax with the best of them. She was friends for a while with that sophomore who went missing a couple of years ago, the first one, the smart one, Trina Mille
r.

  “But then just after Christmas, around the time Trina started tutoring Bo Bradford, Misty barred her completely, just stopped talking to her, froze her out. Trina became persona non grata around here. A few months later, she was gone. Disappeared. I think she just couldn’t take it anymore.”

  “Is that right? Frozen out?” I knew all about that.

  Jenny said, “I heard that the FBI investigator even questioned Misty about Trina’s disappearance, but nothing came of it.”

  “Are Misty and Bo Bradford a thing?” I asked.

  “She seems to think so, but I’m not sure he does.”

  I looked at Jenny. “You really don’t like them, do you?”

  “I don’t like their attitudes,” she said. “This school is already white enough. But those girls, they’re white on the outside and the inside, their blank minds completely untouched by the real world. They think that just because they are rich, they’re better than everybody else.

  “Yet their parents’ wealth has actually hurt them. It has deprived them of any kind of ambition or direction. Any hunger. They’re modern dilettantes, like those party-girl heiresses you see on Snapchat going out to nightclubs every weekend.

  “I don’t know what your stepdad’s like, but my dad’s old-school. He’s got more money than God, yet he doesn’t even give me an allowance. That’s why I got a job. ‘I have to let the world rough you up a little,’ he told me.”

  For the record, my stepdad, Todd, gave my mother a six-figure monthly allowance, and out of that she gave Red and me a couple of hundred bucks in cash to cover standard teenage incidentals (back in Memphis, I’d topped it up with the odd babysitting gig). I seriously doubted Todd even knew how much she gave us. He was a strange guy, Todd—smart for sure, but quiet, detached. There was nothing mean about him, but it was like he was surprised whenever he saw Red and me in his home. We were simply the baggage that came with our hot mom.

  Jenny went on. “But those girls, their dads give them black Amex cards and limo rides to school, so all they do is gossip and shop, gossip and shop. And if you asked them what they’re going to do with their lives, they’ll tell you: gossip and shop. Find out for yourself. Next time you’re chatting with them, ask them what they plan to do when they finish school. See what they say.”

  “All right,” I said. “I will.”

  BOYS AND BEEMERS

  As November came around and the days turned colder, I was feeling pretty good about myself and Monmouth. The place was starting to feel a little less alien.

  And then came the day when Ms. Vandermeer, the school counselor, politely interrupted my physics class and asked to see me in her office.

  Feeling every eye in the class zero in on me, I rose from my desk and hurried out after her.

  “So, Skye,” she said when we had both sat down in her office. “How are you settling in?”

  Ms. Vandermeer was an older woman with a soothing voice and no discernible interest in fashion whatsoever except for the pair of bright red reading glasses that she wore perched on the end of her nose and which she peered over to look at you.

  I gazed around her office. There was a poster on the wall behind her desk: COOL KIDS DON’T SMOKE. It looked like it came from 1992; the kids in it appeared to be about forty, and they did not seem in any way cool.

  “Okay, I guess.” I shrugged.

  Ms. Vandermeer assessed me over her red reading glasses, as if searching for signs of discomfort or distress.

  She held up a manila file with my name on it. “Skye, as school counselor, I’ve been privy to your medical history, so I know about the…incident…when you tried to harm yourself.”

  So that was it.

  I rolled my eyes. “Ms. Vandermeer, I swear, I’m fine now. School is fine. Life is fine. I do not feel like hurting myself. I haven’t since that day.”

  I could hear the testiness in my voice and I took a breath, trying to calm down.

  Fuck. A suicide attempt was like a scarlet letter on your record and it followed you everywhere.

  Ms. Vandermeer flicked through the file. “These notes from your old school in Memphis mention that the…self-harm…stemmed from a falling-out you had with the class president there. How are you getting on socially here?”

  “Good,” I said tightly. “I mean, so far so good.”

  “Well.” She smiled kindly. “I’m glad things are going okay. If you ever feel down or just need someone to talk to, my door is always open.”

  “Thanks,” I said through gritted teeth, and I got out of there as fast as I could.

  * * *

  —

  Truth be told, I was doing well in my classes: in math and physics, of course, but also, to my surprise, in English.

  I liked our English teacher, Mrs. Hoynes. She was young, bespectacled, and newly married to a cute male teacher at a nearby school. Fresh out of Columbia, she was also enthusiastic, and idealistic. She spoke a lot about “taking on the world” and “being our best selves.”

  One day, as she was handing back some stories we had written, she asked me and Dane Summerhays to stay behind.

  So when the class ended, as the other students dispersed, I waited with Dane. Handsome and carefree, with the wavy blond hair of a California surfer, Dane Summerhays looked like he’d stepped out of an Abercrombie & Fitch ad. I imagined that, outside of school, he probably wore boat shoes a lot.

  Even in the short time I’d known him—which included his snide remark about Ms. Briggman at the opening assembly—I’d noticed that Dane had a habit of checking himself out in mirrors or windows, always a quick admiring glance. He was on the lacrosse team with Red and Bo. Girls swooned over him. High school was heaven for guys like Dane Summerhays.

  When all the other students had gone, Mrs. Hoynes said, “Skye, Dane. I thought your stories were simply marvelous work. Dane, I felt your piece about a day at the polo showed real insight.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Dane said, grinning.

  “And Skye,” she said, “a ghost story. I thought it was fabulous, genuinely frightening. Where did you learn to write like that? Did you do a course at your school back in Tennessee?”

  I shrugged. I’d never done any kind of writing course. “I just enjoy reading novels, I guess.”

  She smiled knowingly. “I see. Edgar Allan Poe? Or did I detect some Mary Shelley in there?”

  “Er, Stephen King, ma’am. I’ve kinda read all his books. He’s my favorite author.”

  I didn’t say that he was my absolute favorite author. I had all his books on my shelf, arranged in order of publication.

  “Oh,” Mrs. Hoynes said. “Well, with your permission, I’d like to post both of your stories on the school’s internal website and include them in the yearbook. What do you say?”

  Dane nodded casually. “Sure. Why not? Cool.”

  Mrs. Hoynes turned to me. “How about you, Skye?”

  I stood there frozen, unable to speak.

  The school website. And the yearbook. It terrified me beyond words to even contemplate having my story published openly. What if people hated it? What if they thought it was just the silly, juvenile work of a teenage girl?

  I looked at Dane. I envied his calm acceptance of Mrs. Hoynes’s invitation. How did boys do this? And so easily? Write something, accept praise for it, and just happily put it out there for all the world to see? Was it a boy/girl thing? Boys didn’t seem to fear failure or any kind of humiliation or embarrassment.

  Yet that was all I could think of.

  “Skye?” Mrs. Hoynes said. “Earth to Skye. What do you say?”

  I shook my head quickly. “No, no, I don’t think so. I don’t think I could do that.”

  I could hear myself as I said it, and I died a little on the inside. I sounded like my father.

  “Okay,” Mrs. Hoynes said, disappointed. “I guess I thought—well, no problem.”

  I left the classroom, hating myself.

  * * *

  —

  There was one other incident with Mrs. Hoynes worth mentioning, if only because it saved me from following up on Jenny’s challenge.