The Secret Runners Read online

  It was the final period of the day on a Friday in mid-November, and nobody wanted to be there.

  Mrs. Hoynes was discussing Pride and Prejudice (which I liked), but Hattie, Verity, and Misty, huddled at the back of the classroom, were talking. Sitting a few desks in front of them, I could hear what they were talking about: fashion and boys.

  It was clearly getting on Mrs. Hoynes’s nerves. Her eyes kept darting toward them until finally she snapped and said, “Miss Brewster, Miss Keeley, Miss Collins. Have you no interest at all in what we are studying today?”

  “Not really,” Verity retorted tartly. “It’s just a stupid book.”

  Mrs. Hoynes froze.

  The rest of the class fell silent. A line had been crossed.

  Mrs. Hoynes said, “You don’t think you might learn anything that will help you later in life?”

  Verity snorted. “I’m absolutely certain of that, ma’am.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Ma’am, I plan to marry a young man with name value and a whopping great trust fund, punch out a couple of munchkins for him, hire a full-time nanny, drive a big BMW SUV, and lunch in the city every day. Reading books doesn’t feature in that plan at all.”

  Hattie high-fived Verity. “And there you go.”

  Mrs. Hoynes—young, energetic, and hopeful—just stood at the head of the class and her mouth fell open.

  * * *

  —

  As the days got colder, Central Park became grayer.

  The trees became more skeletal, the paths got muddier, and our morning walk across it became more of a stoic trudge.

  Every day, Misty would be met by her chauffeur-driven Escalade. If we emerged from the lobby at the same time, I would subtly wave or nod to her.

  I also saw her brother.

  His name was Oscar, but everybody called him Oz. He was fifteen, a sophomore at Monmouth, and even though he was a year younger than Misty, he stood a head taller.

  He was also kinda weird.

  Oz had ruddy red cheeks and a buzz cut, and if he was outdoors, whatever the weather, he always wore a gray beanie. A little overweight, he stood with a hunched-over stance, as if trying to minimize his height. Whenever I saw him, he was bent over his cell phone. I thought he was guaranteed to have neck problems later in life.

  On the rare occasions when he looked up from his precious phone, I noted that he had the same droopy eyes as Misty. One morning, as we passed on the sidewalk, he glanced up and I smiled at him and said, “Hey, Oz,” but he just ducked his head and didn’t utter a word.

  I mentioned it to Jenny.

  “Misty’s a bitch, but Oz is just plain odd,” she said. “I heard he’s got ADHD so bad that he’s on the highest possible dose of Ritalin. Word is, when he was thirteen, his mom found a bunch of dirty searches on his smartphone, so she sent him off to military camp for the summer. Misty told everyone about it. Ah, the three Collins kids, Chastity, Misty, and Oz: loose, bad, and mad.”

  * * *

  —

  I had one other interesting encounter with Oz Collins.

  It was just after the school’s annual talent show. You know the kind of event, every school has one: students volunteer to perform in front of the entire student body and their parents. It’s either a moment of wonder when you discover that one of your classmates has an up-till-then unknown God-given talent…or some poor soul gets humiliated when they discover they’re not as talented as they thought they were.

  The Monmouth School’s annual talent show followed that pattern: one cute freshman girl named Jeanne Black had a voice like Adele, a couple of juniors could rap pretty well, two sophomore pranksters got halfway through a striptease before they were yanked off the stage, and Oz Collins performed a magic act.

  The thing was, it was great.

  Dressed in a full Mandrake the Magician outfit (black-and-red satin cape, top hat), young Oz performed his act flawlessly: a couple of linking rings tricks, one disappearing rabbit, and then some exceptional card tricks, including a final one that involved getting Ms. Briggman to sign a card which he then magically reproduced. (It was also the first time I actually heard him speak, and I noticed he had a slight lisp.)

  I thought his act was excellent.

  The problem was, it wasn’t edgy enough to satisfy an auditorium of jaded teenagers. It was too PG-13.

  The tepid applause that followed was cruel.

  Someone called out, “Boring!”

  The next morning, as I was walking down a corridor, I saw a couple of big sophomore boys shove Oz against his locker. “Hey, Collins. Loved your Dracula costume. Do you wear it to Homos Anonymous meetings?”

  His back to his locker, Oz bowed his head and averted his eyes. But he was trapped.

  The two callow youths moved in for the kill when—

  “I thought his outfit looked hot,” I said loudly.

  The two bullies stopped and turned. Oz snapped up in shock.

  “And it was Mandrake, not Dracula.” I looked the two thugs up and down. “Let me give you a tip, boys: girls like a man who’s good with his hands, and last night this guy showed that he’s got the touch. Maybe instead of dissing him, you should be asking him for pointers.”

  I nodded at Oz. “Loved the act.” And then I did my best twirl-and-depart.

  Even as I did all this, I was surprised at myself. Why was I doing it? And why now? I hadn’t stepped in to help Winnie, and yet here I was intervening on behalf of Oz. But then, I thought, maybe it was because I hadn’t helped Winnie. I think a quiet fury at the fact that I had let this shit go before had been building up inside me.

  As I strode away, out of the corner of my eye I saw the two bullies skulk off, and I have to say I felt pretty good about myself.

  * * *

  —

  Somewhere around that time, preseason training for lacrosse began. At first it made me sad because it meant seeing less of Red, but it turned out to have an entirely unexpected and very pleasant consequence.

  The boys’ team trained after school at an indoor facility on the Upper West Side, and sometimes, invited by Red, a group of them would come back to our apartment after training, sweaty and parched, to hang out.

  Now, let me get this out of the way up front: lacrosse uniforms, with their shoulder pads and helmets, are hot.

  I always made sure I was home on training days because when Bo Bradford and Dane Summerhays came in, it was a sight to behold.

  Of course, I also ensured I appeared entirely absorbed in something else when they arrived: homework, study, watching TV, or flicking through a magazine. (I think Red knew what I was doing, but if he did, he never let on. What a great brother.)

  But I always sneaked a peek at them or “accidentally” arrived at the fruit bowl in the kitchen at the same time Bo did, causing a brief but always thrilling conversation. My greatest artifice was creating some reason to enter Red’s bedroom while they were all hanging there. (Delivering his clean laundry to him was my all-time best excuse; I’d never done that before.)

  Red’s room, I should add, was the embodiment of my brother: a carefree mix of weird stuff and pop culture arcana that he somehow made cool.

  It started with his bedroom door. On it hung a thin wooden shield that supposedly came from some tribe of headhunters in Borneo. Carved into it was the snarling face of a supernatural demon. It looked like a bad souvenir from Waikiki Beach to me.

  It got better inside his room. It was a man-boy’s nirvana, from the life-sized R2-D2 droid from Star Wars that was actually a refrigerator, and the cherry-red couch made out of the winged tail of a 1950s Cadillac (the brake lights worked, bathing the room in a soft red glow), to his pride and joy: a bronze-colored “Graceland” baseball emblazoned with a picture of Elvis.

  That baseball was, Red said, the cheesiest thing in the
world, which was why he loved it so much. (There might have been another reason: my dad had bought it for him during a visit to Graceland when we were six; Red had cherished it ever since.)

  Whenever they hung out there, the guys variously sat on the car couch or on the bed, while Red relaxed in front of the window in the large Balinese rope hammock he’d brought back from a tropical vacation. It was suspended from hooks in the ceiling.

  It was on one of those occasions—as I approached Red’s room from the hallway with some fantastic new excuse—that I heard them talking and I stopped to listen just outside the open door.

  Bo said, “So, Red. How’s it going with Verity Keeley?”

  Verity Keeley? I thought.

  Red said, “She’s cool. Got a little overly friendly the other night at Dane’s.”

  Dane had held a party the previous weekend while his parents had been away at St. Barts. Red had been invited. I hadn’t.

  “She’s got a smoking-hot body, dude,” Dane said. “Chick works out. And Tony says she’s great for a little mmm-hmm in a dark corner of a party, if you know what I mean.”

  And she’s a bitch, I thought. Didn’t guys see these things? Didn’t Red?

  I was also thinking about Verity’s stated goal in that English class of finding a young man with a good name and money. I wondered if my brother fit that bill. Given our stepfather’s sizable name value and wealth, he probably did.

  Having said all that, if I was to be brutally honest, I was probably more hurt than concerned: hurt that Red hadn’t told me about any of this.

  Even though we still walked to and from school together most days, I hadn’t known he’d had any interactions—amorous or otherwise—with Verity Keeley. I’d always felt we were close and that Red would share something like this with me. It made me sad that perhaps we were growing apart.

  Red said, “A gentleman never tells, guys.”

  Over the following month, Red and Verity became official, and Red started hanging out with her and the cool kids on the East Side after school, leaving me to walk home alone. (It’s funny, around this time, I noticed that he’d started smoking pot; I could smell it on his clothes and detected it in his stare some nights when he came home. He had even gone out and bought a new Zippo lighter to enhance the experience. Not that I’m judging or anything.)

  It was strange for me to see Red rolling with the in-crowd, especially having once been there myself. I found myself wondering if this was my future: destined to be separate, an outsider looking in.

  But ultimately I was happy for him, in my bitter and abandoned kind of way.

  Beloved, cool, and enlightened as he was, I had to accept that Red was still a sixteen-year-old human male—and thus beholden to all the hormones, desires, and stupid decision making (like smoking weed) that went with that. So I wished him all the female attention he could get, even if it came from Verity Keeley, and even if it meant that I had to walk home by myself across Central Park in the chill of a New York winter.

  I suppose I just missed my brother.

  But then, as November became December, the girls in the common room and the boys at their after-training hangouts began talking about one topic above all else.

  The Season.

  THE SEASON

  The debutante ball season.

  Growing up in Memphis, I had been dimly aware of debutante balls. They were high-end formal events in which young girls between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one were “presented” to polite society.

  In the old days, it had been about rich families putting their daughters on display for potential suitors, hence the virginal white bridal dresses and the elbow-length white silk gloves. But in the gauche, anyone-can-get-rich world of the 1980s and ’90s, such balls fell out of fashion.

  And then, in the twenty-first century, something happened to change all that.

  Social media.

  In this Instagram-fueled era of conspicuous consumption—or, more importantly, conspicuous displays of status—debutante balls came roaring back.

  They became the hottest tickets in town.

  They became so exclusive that the modern ball was less about presenting bright young women to polite society than it was about who got an invitation and which designer they got to make their bespoke dress.

  It carried so much weight in the social milieu of The Monmouth School that Chastity Collins had mentioned it in her opening-day speech, when she had highlighted the fact that Misty would be debuting at not one but two balls at only sixteen.

  The marvel of Misty’s feat was that few girls debuted at such a young age, let alone at two separate balls. That only happened if the girl in question came from a seriously powerful family.

  (Apparently, the linguistic anomaly of debuting twice was lost on just about everyone in New York society. Rather than an oxymoron, it was considered an achievement.)

  And lest you shed a tear for those poor modern maidens who did not garner an invitation to any ball, fear not. Most of the balls had pre-parties, rehearsal dinners, after-parties, and after-after-parties that friends, acquaintances, and boyfriends could happily attend. (A girl’s escort at a ball—her cavalier—was not necessarily her boyfriend.) Arguably, with all the booze, cocaine, and Molly available, these additional parties were considered far more fun than the parent-chaperoned balls themselves.

  In any case, the gossip about the Season began around mid-November.

  It started when Bo Bradford flew off to Paris to escort the daughter of a prominent Viennese family with Habsburg roots to Le Bal des Débutantes.

  “Le Bal is cool, but it used to be better,” Misty said in the common room, surrounded by Hattie, Verity, Dane, and Red. I sat a short distance away, ostensibly studying but in truth listening.

  “It used to be discreet royal families like the Ludovisis, the Bourbon-Parmas, and the Auersperg-Breunners. And the cavaliers were gorgeous young counts and marquises. But somewhere along the way, the organizers started allowing rich Arabs and Chinese to essentially buy tickets for their daughters. Now any nouveau bourgeois who can afford to buy his little girl a Dior haute couture dress can get in. And once you let them in, it defeats the purpose of the ball altogether.”

  “And what is that purpose?” Jenny asked from nearby. It appeared that she, too, was listening.

  Misty smiled that wan, indulgent smile of hers.

  “To establish who is polite society and who is not,” she said. “To establish, publicly and clearly, the social strata of a given country or region.”

  Jenny cocked her head in disbelief. “Seriously? You honestly think that those people who attend deb balls are being announced as the leaders of society?”

  “You wouldn’t understand,” Misty said. “Because you’ll never go to one.”

  * * *

  —

  The French ball had started the chatter, but it heated up significantly when the Season officially commenced at home with the National Debutante Cotillion and Thanksgiving Ball in Washington, D.C.

  A senior from Monmouth—Grace Carmody—debuted at that one alongside the niece of the vice president.

  But the talk reached fever pitch when Misty started dress shopping for her first coming-out ball, the International Debutante Ball to be held at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in late December.

  Having spent the better part of October sitting with her girlfriends in the common room flipping through bridal magazines looking for a gown (the virgin-white debutante dress is basically the same as a bridal gown, so they are created by the same designers), in early November she began meeting with designers.

  She had one stipulation. Misty’s dress, I heard her tell her friends, had to complement her necklace.

  Her necklace.

  Because of Monmouth’s strict no-jewelry policy, I didn’t see Misty’s necklace until I began running int
o her randomly around the San Remo on weekends.

  It was actually one of two. Misty and her mother wore identical necklaces: a gold necklace from which hung a gorgeous figure-eight-shaped pendant with a striking amber-colored gem embedded in the middle of it.

  It was beautiful by any standard, and clearly old, too.

  I complimented Misty on it one Sunday.

  She fingered it delicately. “Why, thank you. It’s a family heirloom and very precious to me.”

  With this condition in mind, Misty met with Zac Posen, Sarah Burton, and Stella McCartney (she flew to London on a weekend to meet the last two). She settled on Sarah Burton: “She did Kate Middleton’s—sorry, Duchess Catherine’s—dress for her wedding to Prince William.”

  Misty’s made-to-measure, one-of-a-kind dress—featuring English lace, an antique white silk gazar skirt, and subtle gold thread to match the necklace—would cost $86,000 plus tax.

  I saw a sketch of it. It was stunning. It was the most beautiful dress I’d ever seen. Any bride would’ve died to wear it on her wedding day and every other day of her life.

  Misty would wear it once.

  She was already looking for another dress to wear at her second debut at the East Side Cotillion in early March because, she said, “It’d be so embarrassing to wear the same dress to two deb balls.”

  After-school fittings were arranged. Misty and her friends would hurry out the school gates, slide into her black Escalade, and be whisked away.

  And Misty hit the gym. Hard. On the night of the ball, she would be sewn into her dress, so she had to maintain both her weight and her body shape. Well, okay, she didn’t actually go to a gym. She hired a personal trainer to bust her chops on her parents’ home treadmill and in their weight room. In any case, she was getting visibly slimmer.

  But even when slim, she still looked severe. Skinniness couldn’t alter that dead-eyed stare.

  I watched it all with a kind of detached fascination.