No, Tabitha thinks.
She ascends the stairs stealthily, thinking she would like to appraise the situation before anyone realizes she’s home. She grips the handrail as the thocking continues, then stops, then starts again. The song ends. There are a few seconds of silence during which Tabitha freezes. Then Meghan Trainor starts singing that song from the previous summer: “My name is no…” Tabitha congratulates herself for recognizing her daughter’s music, then she thinks: My name is no. No no no no no no no.
She peers between the spindles of the banister at the top of the stairs to see at least a dozen kids smoking cigarettes, smoking weed, drinking cans of PBR, and, yes—the source of that sickening sound—kids playing beer pong on her Stephen Swift table.
“No,” Tabitha says. She steps into the room and wonders which transgression to address first. She wants to turn off the music, but she is drawn over to the beautiful table, her prize piece of furniture. She grabs the paddle out of the young man’s hand on his backswing, and he is so stunned that he accidentally knocks over one of the cups of beer on the table. An amber lake spreads across the sumptuous polished cherry.
“Whoa,” he says. It’s Ainsley’s friend BC. He’s cute, dark-haired, wearing a T-shirt from Young’s Bicycle Shop. Tabitha has the urge to beat him with the paddle.
She races to the kitchen for a towel, and she finds Ainsley’s phone hooked up to the iPod dock. Tabitha yanks it off, and the music stops. Tabitha is so angry that she dumps Ainsley’s phone into one of the cups of beer on the kitchen counter.
Someone from the living room calls out, “Music!”
Another voice says, “Her mom is home.”
“Yes,” Tabitha says. “Her mom is home.”
“Hey, Tabitha,” Emma says when Tabitha comes back into the living room to mop up the beer. Emma is slit-eyed, high as a kite, sitting on the Gervin—Tabitha’s excellent turquoise tweed midcentury-style sofa—between two boys.
“Emma,” Tabitha says. Tabitha hates that Emma calls her by her first name, but back when Ainsley was small, Tabitha had been so young that she couldn’t fathom being called Ms. Frost, and she had never married Wyatt, so she wasn’t able to use the name Mrs. Cruise. Eleanor had always insisted that Tabitha’s and Harper’s friends call her Mrs. Roxie-Frost, which was another reason why Tabitha didn’t want to call herself Ms. Frost. It was so pointlessly formal! But what Tabitha realizes now is that a title inspires respect. If Tabitha had long ago trained Emma and Ainsley’s other friends to call her Ms. Frost, maybe they would have thought twice before playing beer pong on her dining-room table and infusing the tweed of her sofa with the smell of marijuana smoke.
“Emma,” Tabitha says. “Where is Ainsley?”
“Um?” Emma says.
Then Tabitha figures it out: she’s downstairs with Teddy.
Tabitha surveys the mess. The other kids are standing in a posture of tense observation, waiting to see how she’ll react. Friend or foe? they must be wondering. Will Tabitha be the cool mom or will she call their parents?
She wants to order them all out of the house. She wants them gone. But the specter of a lawsuit lingers. Emma is not okay to drive.
“Is anyone here sober?” Tabitha asks. She herself isn’t sober, not by a long shot. She had four glasses of champagne on the Belle, then the Nauti Dog and Captain Peter’s beer. She can’t offer to drive any of these kids home. So what does that mean? They’ll spend the night? Unthinkable. She’ll have to call the parents.
“I’m sober,” a voice says. Tabitha turns: it’s Candace Beasley. Tabitha nearly smiles. Ainsley and Candace were friends years and years ago—best, best friends. Until one day—in middle school, if Tabitha remembers correctly—they weren’t. Ainsley had grown up and moved on to snarkier, faster girls like Emma. Candace’s mother, Stephanie, had been a great friend of Tabitha’s, but they drifted apart when the girls did. Part of this was circumstance; part was by design. Tabitha felt extremely uncomfortable when she bumped into Steph at the grocery store or the dry cleaner and Steph said, Candace really misses Ainsley. How was Tabitha to respond to that? She tried, They’re girls. Their moods change like the weather. I’m sure they’ll be close again before we know it.
And look! Candace is here at the party! And she is sober! Of course she’s sober; she has been raised with love, attention, and, most important, boundaries. She’s obedient by nature. She and her mother have the kind of relationship in which they’re best friends but Candace still knows who’s boss.
“Candace,” Tabitha says. “Hi.” Just looking at Candace, with her grosgrain-ribbon headband and her coltish legs, makes Tabitha feel, like ten thousand straight pins to the heart, the ways she has failed as a parent. “Can you make sure nobody leaves, please? I need to find Ainsley.”
Candace nods; her expression tells Tabitha that she is used to being the responsible one among her peers. Is it wrong to treat Candace as a second adult? Probably, but Tabitha can’t fret about that now. She races down the stairs.
The door to Ainsley’s room is open, putting her unmade rat’s nest of a bed on display along with the piles of clothes—many of them Eleanor Roxie-Frost originals—strewn all over the floor. At first Tabitha thinks Ainsley has run away, and Tabitha panics. Then Tabitha notices the closed door of her own bedroom. She tries the knob: locked.
No, Tabitha thinks. This is not happening.
She pounds on the door with the flat of her hand. “Ainsley!” she screams. “Ainsley!” She places her ear against the door. She can’t tell if she hears rustling or if the noise is simply her brain scrambling for purchase. Would it not be bad enough if Ainsley and Teddy were having sex in Ainsley’s room? Does it have to be the horror show of them screwing in Tabitha’s room? In Tabitha’s bed, which hasn’t been used for carnal purposes since Valentine’s Day, which was the last time Tabitha slept with Ramsay?
She pounds again, then the door opens, and Tabitha nearly slaps her hand against Teddy’s face.
“Ms. Frost,” he says in his country-and-western-star accent. He looks shocked. “I thought you were Emma.”
Teddy is bare-chested, but he has jeans on, and Tabitha can see the waistband of his boxers sticking out of the top of his jeans. His red hair is messy, and he’s flushed. He has clearly just had his way with Tabitha’s daughter, but Tabitha can’t hate him. Teddy is sweet; Teddy is polite—she notices that he called her Ms. Frost—and Teddy is the victim of some pretty tough circumstances. He and his parents lived in Oklahoma City, but there was a fire at the Nestlé Purina factory, and Teddy’s father, a captain with the OCFD, was killed.