Страница 23 из 59
Laura’s e-mails to Su
Laura also confessed to Su
Much as Su
No, he wrote back in his next long letter. You never say dumb things.
One Sunday night Laura awoke before dawn, as she often did on days when she had a big exam or presentation. She’d forgotten to turn her computer off the night before, and now noticed that Su
Su
Then, after a long beat: Laura?
How are you?
An even longer beat, then: A terrible thing has happened. My brother has been arrested.
Laura watched the blinking cursor and had just about concluded that he wasn’t going to say anything more when words started flying onto the screen in a torrent. His brother and a friend had broken into a house in Beverly Hills. A girl they’d met at a club lived there and told them no one would be home. She was angry with her parents, who’d left for Europe without her, fobbing her off on an aunt in Brentwood for a whole month. She’d given Su
Your brother has disgraced himself, not you, not your family, Laura wrote. If you leave Stanford I’ll never forgive you.
Again, she watched the blinking cursor for a long time. Finally, he came back. You are right, of course. May I tell my mother you said this?
I hope you will.
Please don’t tell Kelsey
Of course I won’t, she promised. Hey, you know what? I’m proud of you. You wrote a spontaneous message. It contained actual mistakes, a misspelling, even. You can rest easy, though. You didn’t say anything foolish.
He wrote back, The thing I wanted to write but did not… that was the foolish thing.
Laura didn’t have to ask what that thing was.
“I’ll tell you, but only if you promise not to judge me too harshly,” Su
Though not so very terrible, of course. Under cross-examination Su
“I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you at the restaurant last night,” Griffin said.
“I should’ve introduced myself,” Su
The last time Griffin had seen him was at Laura’s thirteenth birthday party. Joy had had to banish him from the kitchen, where he wanted to be put to work. “You’re a guest,” she told him. “Join the others and have fun.” The one thing the poor boy had no clue how to do.
“I wish it would get dark,” Griffin recalled telling Joy. “I can’t bear to watch this.”
As instructed, Su
In fact, watching the kid reminded Griffin of his first boy-girl party at a similar age. He should’ve known how to behave, since his parents were forever throwing parties back then, though of course those were for adults only. He was expected to make a brief appearance after the guests started arriving and then to disappear, which was why, he supposed, he never learned the requisite skills. His first junior-high party had been a nightmare. Not only did all the other kids know one another, it also seemed like they’d been going to parties like this for years. Griffin remembered positioning himself where he could see the clock and will it to move. At one point, after he and the others had filled their paper plates with food at the buffet table and eaten standing up, a few parents hovering around, everyone, it seemed, began trooping downstairs into the rec room, where music was playing on a portable record player. Griffin was still on the stairs when the lights went out. It had taken his eyes a minute or two to adjust, and when they finally did he discovered, to his mortification, that all the other kids were couples necking in the dark. One boy he knew had his hand under a girl’s shirt. “What are you doing down here?” came a voice in the dark, and he’d known with terrible certainty that he was the one being addressed.