There was movement behind her, and Cherie looked back to see Melissa coming through from the kitchen carrying a mug of tea. Melissa was a miracle too, in a way. They had met fifteen years ago at a summer training camp for women activists in Virginia, and everything had fallen into place so quickly that Cherie had distrusted it at first. Melissa had grown up in New York. She was used to taking control of her life and getting the things that mattered to her. This whole plan that they’d come up with—to go from school to school, to be paid for seeing the country—had been Cherie’s idea, but it had only happened because Melissa insisted.
“What are you looking at?” Melissa asked now. “Have they decided to stage a festival of spring in the snow or what?”
“You shouldn’t say things like that,” Cherie said. “That’s the kind of thing that drives people like Alice Makepeace nuts. And we want to stay.”
“We want to stay, yes,” Melissa said. She sat down in the big leather armchair and stretched out her feet. “We want to stay at least because it would be impossible to get as good an apartment anywhere near Boston for less than it would cost to lease a Porsche. But that doesn’t mean you need to be on pins and needles all the time.”
“I’ve always been on pins and needles.”
“Persecution in the Midwest. I know.”
“It wasn’t persecution,” Cherie said. “It was—” She shrugged and went back to looking out the window onto the quad. “Do you know who I saw a moment ago? Mark DeAvecca.”
“Stoned as usual, I take it. It’s Friday night.”
“You can call it stoned if you want to.”
“It’s the best way of putting it,” Melissa said. “It fits his behavior. I’ve known dozens of kids like him in my life. There’s a soft underbelly of them in every good school.”
“He’s a brilliant kid,” Cherie said. “I know a lot of people around here think he’s stupid, but it isn’t true. It comes out every once in a while when you talk to him.”
“He’d have to be a brilliant kid,” Melissa said. She curled her legs up under her. “Look, I know I make fun of this place a lot It’s hard not to make fun of it. They’re so damned self-conscious about how progressive they all are, they make political correctness look sane. But even I know that the work here is not easy. If he wasn’t a brilliant kid, he couldn’t get away with the crap he pulls without flunking out.”
“He’s not even close to flunking out. I know a dozen kids with grades worse than his.”
“Exactly. And that in spite of the fact that he doesn’t know where he is half the time. But Cherie, no matter how bright he is, there’s nothing you can do for someone like that.”
“Everybody thinks he takes drugs,” Cherie said again, feeling mulish. “His roommate takes drugs sometimes, what’s his name, Michael Feyre. You can smell it on him.”
“Well, yes,” Melissa said, “Michael Feyre is not a brilliant kid. He doesn’t hide it very well.”
“With Mark DeAvecca, it’s not like drugs. It’s like—”
“What?”
Cherie shrugged. “Senile dementia.”
“Senile dementia?” Melissa said. “The kid is sixteen, for God’s sake, and you think he’s got Alzheimer’s disease?”
“No, not really.” Cherie shook her head. “It’s not that I think he has it, it’s that that’s what it’s like. He does things. He forgets things—She’ll be sitting in class and we’ll be working out a problem, and he’ll do it. He’ll sit right there and do it. Then we’ll move on to something else, and maybe ten minutes later I’ll ask about the problem, and he won’t remember it. He won’t remember a tiling about it.”
“Drugs.”
“No,” Cherie said. “If it was drugs, he wouldn’t have been able to do the problem in the first place. There’s something going on with that kid. I wish I knew what it was.”
“Don’t bother. I mean it, Cherie, there’s no point in bothering. The kid’s got a famous mother and a rich father. A rich and famous father, come to think of it.”
“Stepfather,” Cherie said automatically. “His biological father is dead.”
“Whatever. It doesn’t matter. They won’t throw him out of here, and they won’t do anything about what’s going on because they don’t want one of the paying customers to leave, and they don’t want a lawsuit or, worse, Mama to hit the Op-Ed pages of all the best newspapers blasting them to hell.”