sisters who’d so faithfully guarded her virtue at Minerva? All of Greenwich, Connecticut? He knew what they were doing would have serious consequences for him, but until now it hadn’t fully registered that Jacy was turning her back on her entire world.
“I need your word, Mick.”
“You have it.”
When he rose from his chair, she said, “Can it wait until morning?”
“Sure,” he said, sitting back down. “I guess.”
“Good. Because tonight I need to tell you about my father.” When he remained silent, she said, “Nobody knows about this. You’ll be the first to hear it.”
“I don’t understand. You mean Donald? Of Don and Viv?”
She blew a raspberry. “Who said anything about him?”
* * *
—
IT PROBABLY SHOULDN’T HAVE come as a surprise. After all, she didn’t look anything like tall, sandy-haired Donald Calloway, who’d always referred to her as “our little Gypsy” because of her dark, curly hair and olive complexion. She was a kid, though, and what kid doubts what her parents tell her? But then eighth grade happened, with all its casual cruelty, its constant, roiling fluctuations of social capital. And boys. There was this one, Todd, that she’d liked because he was funny, always clowning around. She had to warn him not to when she introduced him to her parents, especially her father, who was aggressively humorless and thought she was too young to go out on dates. The kid managed to behave himself in their home, but once they were out the door he said, “Wow! How old were you?” When she asked what he was talking about, he said, “You know, when you were adopted?”
She told herself it was just one of his jokes, but she remembered feeling sick to her stomach and wasn’t able to laugh it off. They’d gone to play miniature golf, and Todd paid, which he seemed to think gave him the right to continue teasing her even after she begged him to cut it out. Had she been adopted from an agency, or did she just get left on her parents’ doorstep? Or was she found floating down the Connecticut River in a basket?
The most difficult hole was the Volcano, where you had to putt up a steep slope at the top of which was a tiny, shallow crater. If you misjudged your speed or didn’t hit the center of the cup, the ball would rim out and roll all the way back down the mountainside, then you’d have to start all over again. Rattled by Todd’s teasing, Jacy couldn’t seem to get the hang of it, rimming out one shot after another. By rule, ten was the maximum score for any one hole, but Todd refused to move on until she sank the putt. When she finally did, she burst into tears and refused to continue, demanding he take her home. There, she crawled straight into bed, but it was impossible, even with the covers pulled over her head, to compose herself. The boy had opened a door into the part of her brain where riddles were stored. Things that had long puzzled her now began to make sense. How many times had she entered a room full of her mother’s friends, only to have them all stop talking at once and regard her guiltily? And what about her father’s cryptic remarks when he and her mother discussed some disagreeable habit of Jacy’s (“Well, Viv, she certainly doesn’t get that from me”).
The following morning Todd called to apologize, claiming he hadn’t meant anything. Lots of kids didn’t look like their parents until later in life. He’d even asked her out the following weekend to make it up to her, but she said no. Her father, suspecting that something must’ve happened, insisted that she tell him what the boy had done, because he’d fucking kill the little prick, but Jacy said only that he’d made fun of her when she couldn’t sink her putt on the Volcano hole. She could tell he didn’t believe her.
It took Jacy a month to work up the courage to broach the subject with her mother. She expected her to go ballistic, but instead she went into the master bedroom and came back with the metal box where important documents were kept. It contained Jacy’s birth certificate, and of course there she was: a baby girl, Justine, six pounds, eleven ounces, born to Vivian Calloway. Seeing this, thirteen-year-old Jacy once again began to sob, this time tears of relief. She was who she’d always been,