One Hot Fall Term (Yardley College Chronicles Book1) Page 6

  Last night, I dreamed I went to Manderley again…

  The opening line of Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier echoes in my head. I am a complete book worm. My mother shared many books she loved with me, even though, in those days, she didn’t know I had anything I needed to escape.

  At this moment I feel like the girl in Rebecca, the girl who cleverly has no name. She is the reader’s eyes as she follows the drive, waiting to see the famous Manderley, filled with trepidation, nerves, and feelings of inadequacy—three feelings with which I am very familiar.

  We follow more twists and turns.

  “We’re here,” Lara announces, finishing her champagne in one quick tip of the glass.

  The limo smoothly purrs around a last curve, and the drive opens onto something breathtaking and sparkling.

  There is so much glass it is as if there is no house there at all. Deep in my heart, I wish we’d rounded the corner and found Manderley, but as an Architecture student, I am awed by Jonathon’s sprawling, severe modern house. It glows with light, and the twilight sky is purple behind it, making the house appear to be made of pure gold.

  People are everywhere. Hundreds mill outside on the huge lawn, and inside there are dozens more, revealed by the windows which put almost every inch of the house on show. The drive makes a sweeping semi-circle in front of the door. Our driver pulls in, gets out and opens the car door for Lara and I.

  He tips his cap to her, I thank him—I mean I know it’s his job, but I like to be polite.

  Then we are whisked inside with other arrivals and we step not into Manderley, but into a different world. This one, I think, is the Great Gatsby. Gatsby in the modern world, in a house made of glass, white maple, tile, and granite.

  The foyer soars above us, three stories tall, and it faces south, so it is deliciously warm. Music flows through the house, and it looks as if the entire student population of Yardley is here, making for a crowd you have to squeeze through.

  Lara takes my hand. “This way,” she says.

  I can’t quite believe a college guy—even one who should have graduated two years ago, and is therefore an actual adult—has a house like this. Maids in uniform move through the rooms, and I spot a bald man in a bowtie and a jacket with tails. He stands with arch correctness.

  “Is that—” It can’t be, can it? “A butler?”

  She looks. “Yes. That’s Carleton.”

  I let out a whistle. Jonathon has a staff.

  “I’m starved,” Lara says. I’m too busy staring in astonishment at everything to think about food. The living room is four times larger than my mother’s entire bungalow. Two-storey glass windows display a breathtaking view of the golden and red leaves, the mountains, and the deep blue lake nestled in the valley.

  Lara points. “It’s a private lake, owned by Jonathon.”

  I move to the window, drawn by the water. It’s not a huge lake, but really—a private lake? Jet skis whizz around on it. I make out colorful blobby things floating on it, and realize they are inflatable rafts and trampolines. A long silver dock juts out, like a needle lying on blue satin.

  The dock makes me think of Ryan. I’d love to be attending this party with him. This house is an adventure and I want to share all my adventures with him.

  I find myself drifting through the party, like Nick Carraway in the Great Gatsby, an observer who is not part of the wild action. The music comes from a live band, who are playing in an enormous room that Lara calls the ‘gallery’. Gleaming pale maple hardwood provides the floor on which fifty couples are dancing. I don’t know the group, but Lara informs me that Jonathon hires up-and-coming bands to play his parties, who are then signed by the indie record label that Jonathon helped finance.

  I begin to see why Jonathon sees no need to finish school. According to the guests, who gossip freely about him, Jonathon has used his allowance to invest in bands, tech start-ups, bars, and restaurants. Technically all of these should have drained him dry, yet from the babble of conversation I learn that on each venture he has made money. He’s accumulated his own personal fortune of twenty million dollars.

  Intriguing. He shouldn’t be going to college. He should be teaching at it.

  Like Gatsby’s parties, this one is a live thing in itself. It is sumptuous and decadent.

  Lara takes me to the dining room. A table, long enough to fit the entire Royal family, runs down the center of the room. The dining room is separated from the rest of the house by French doors with stained-glass panels. The feel of the room is unique. Instead of modern glass, this room has a row of arched windows, beautiful mouldings, scrollwork along the edge of the ceiling. Brilliant colors above my head catch my eyes and I peer upward. Painted on the ceiling—the entire hundred foot length of it—is a mural of an autumn woodland scene, with a brook winding through red maples, all done in impressionist style.

  Lara is halfway down the table, so I grab a plate, a huge piece of square china which undulates like the waves on the lake. It looks far too graceful for food. Already, a woman in a uniform is sweeping up the shards of a broken plate, while a drunk-looking boy is being led out of the room by friends.

  I balance the plate carefully.

  There are tiers of oysters, all bearing labels that describe exotic sauces. Trays of meat—carved roast beef, chicken breasts, quails, a roasted pig that is being served by a chef wearing a white toque. There are warming dishes of vegetables—broccoli, asparagus, baby carrots, and exotic things I don’t recognize—along with more pastas than I’ve seen on Italian menus. One is orzo, colored black with squid ink. Another is fettuccini with lush, pink shrimp. There are a dozen types of salad—from Caesar with silvers of fresh parmesan to a spicy Thai salad that smells heavenly.

  Another table placed opposite the windows contains plates of cake and other desserts. Edible silver gleams on some of the cakes. There is a dainty silver creation that holds six different cheesecakes, and there are trays filled with chocolate truffles.

  I don’t want to eat very much. I know it’s dangerous, since I’ve already drunk champagne and I should eat to soak up alcohol, but there is too much to see. I’m filled with the sense that I have to hurry and see everything, even though I know I’ll have the entire night to experience this.

  After we eat, Lara and I go back to the gallery and we join a group of girls who are dancing, their purses piled on the floor in the middle of their circle.

  “Aren’t you going to find Jonathon?” I shout to her, over the music. The pounding bass makes the floor vibrate.

  She shrugs. “He’ll have me found soon. He doesn’t spend much time at his party. He said he had something important he had to talk to me about tonight.”

  Like Gatsby, throwing a party that didn’t interest him for an agenda of his own? I’m curious. Gatsby’s desire was to impress Daisy, the rich ‘nice girl’, and win her heart. What’s Jonathon’s motivation?

  ***

  After dancing and sucking back mineral water to fend off dehydration, I really need a bathroom. Jonathon’s butler had approached Lara and took her away to see the man himself, which is so Gatsby-esque that I rolled my eyes.

  There are six washrooms in Jonathon’s house and all of them are locked tight. Giggling comes out of some of them, moans out of others. I finally pound on one door, shouting, “Really? Have you seen how many bedrooms there are in this place?”

  The door opens and a girl slips out past me, red-faced with embarrassment. The guy sashays to the threshold, where he hold my gaze and zips up his pants slowly, like he’s making a whole testosterone-induced sexual threat.

  I really have to go. “Get out,” I say, and I grab his shirt sleeve and pull him out in mid-zip. He yelps, but I feel no sympathy. I dart in and shut the door. Unlike the other bathroom occupants, I am done in five minutes.

  When I come out, I see Lara running down the corridor toward the stairs. She’s muttering something and she grabs the bannister so she can take the steps three at a time. She brushes a
t her cheek, and her hair is streaming behind her. Obviously, she’s running away from Jonathon.

  What happened?

  I follow, but lose her in the mass of people. I almost run face-first into the chest of a older guy with long grey hair, who I suspect is a professor. He is bringing an armload of drinks to a group of pretty female students. I dark around him and chase after Lara.

  I can’t find her anywhere on the main floor, nor on the terraces or the lawns. I end up in a small room with a table that is a sheet of thick glass. A computer screen sits on it, with black wireless keyboard. There’s a black leather couch and a painting above the couch. The painting is an impressionist view of a Parisian café in the rain. I’m drawn to it. It’s real paint, not a print. The signature is strong and black, but not a name I know.

  There’s another picture at my feet, leaning against the wall, not mounted on it. It’s in a heavy black metal frame. I tilt it away from the wall, curious. It’s a woman with dark hair, wearing a man’s white shirt over a black bikini. It’s a black and white photograph, which makes the woman look like a blend of Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn, but I think the picture is more modern than that. She’s laughing in front of the ocean, blowing a kiss at the photographer. Carefully, I put the picture back.

  There’s a door leading out from this room and it’s the only one I haven’t tried. Wondering what lies behind, I open it.

  It takes me into a small garden, one surrounded by a stone wall. It’s perfectly square, with a square stone walkway, and a small statue in the middle. A stone satyr…

  It’s the garden off the morning room at Manderley.

  From the description in the book, this is just the way I would envision that garden.

  Who designed this place? This is the kind of house I would design, if I had the money to do it. Except my house would not have as much glass.

  I walk outside, and I quickly have the creepy feeling I’m being watched. Whirling, I find no one in the doorway. I can’t see anyone in the small computer room.

  I look up. There’s a terrace above me with a glass railing. Jonathon is standing there, leaning on the railing, a glass dangling from his hand. He wears jeans, a dress shirt, and I can see a pattern of blue ink on his forearm near his wrist—a tattoo. Was he looking down at me? He’s not now. Jonathon is looking toward the lake, looking out over the crowd who are laughing, drinking, dancing, and playing touch football on the lawns.

  Watching Jonathon lean over the railing, surveying his crowd while he stays solitary and distant makes me think of that moment when Nick sees Gatsby at the end of his dock, alone, washed in moonlight looking at the light across the bay.

  I had assumed he’d broken up with Lara, or she’d caught him cheating on her because of the anger in her stride. But Jonathon exudes a sense of deep unhappiness.

  Suddenly he looks down at me. Like the Girl in Rebecca, I am tempted to look away and pretend I did not notice him and walk back inside.

  But I don’t do that. I look at him levelly, with an expression of disapproval. He crooks his finger, motioning me to come upstairs.

  ***

  When I find Lara, she is getting supremely drunk. A bar has been set up in front of a wall of windows in the living room. A white cloth covers tables, and behind them, there are tiers of glass liquor bottles and wine bottles, along with a dozen plastic coolers that must be filled with beer. All the bottles refract and reflect the sunlight, which makes the multi-colored liquids inside them glow. The rear of the bar looks like an enormous stained glass window.

  Lara is propped on her elbows on the white-topped bar, sucking on a piece of lime, while a good-looking bartender with gorgeous tattoos and a shaved head shakes up a drink. He pours it in a long stream into a margarita glass, never taking his eyes off her. Then he slides it to her. His eyes meet mine and he mouths two words. Last one. That is worrying since she hasn’t been there that long.

  Lara skewers the margarita glass between the V of her fingers and scoops it up. Half of it disappears in the time it takes her to turn away from the bar. We are underage—most of the crowd must be less than twenty-one—but like in high school, that isn’t stopping anyone and the bartenders have obviously been paid enough not to care. However, they aren’t completely turning a blind eye. This one is looking out for Lara.

  She totters toward the windows on her platform sandals. “I don’t care if he thinks this is the last one. It’s not. I. Am. Getting. Blitzed.”

  Considering Lara won’t eat meat, agonizes over the healthiest vending machine decisions, and worries about how well the cafeteria washes its lettuce, I know something is seriously wrong for her to be drinking so much.

  She weaves through the crowd, her drink sloshing here and there. Until she finds a bathroom, a different one than the one I used. There’s a couple in it, making out, who didn’t bother to lock the door. She says, “God, get a bedroom. Some of us have to pee.”

  The couple stop and I’m pretty certain the guy intends to say something rude until he looks at Lara. She looks so upset the guy shrugs and leads his partner outside. Lara grabs my wrist and hauls me in.

  “Uh, I don’t have to go,” I say.

  “I don’t either. I wanted somewhere to talk. In private. You have to promise not to tell anyone. Jonathon made me do that—at least he didn’t ask me to sign some sicko contract.”

  Not tell anyone? “What happened? I saw Jonathon from the terrace. He was on an upstairs balcony, looking out over the lake and the mountains as if he’d lost his soul.”

  “He lost that a long time ago,” Lara mutters.

  I pull the drink out of her hand and set it on the edge of a bathtub—one I could swim in. I put the lid down on the toilet and make her sit there. “What did he do to you?”

  She looks longingly at her drink. “What would you do if you found the perfect guy and he turned out to be a perverted creep? Or do I mean creepy pervert? God, I feel like I’ve walked into Fifty Shades of Grey, except there is no way I’d ever let any guy go within fifty feet of me with a whip.”

  I blink. “A what?”

  “He has this room, Mia. His domination room, filled with all sorts of wacked-out, kinky things. That’s what he likes, what he wants, and there is no way I am ever going there. Not with him. Not with anyone.”

  Jonathon is into BDSM. In my head—based on books—I imagine the room. Various images flit through my head. Red leather benches for spankings and whippings and a rack for tying up a woman. A selection of whips on the wall. A décor of red and black to make the room look hellish and wicked. Or maybe the room would be sleekly white and silver. Or filled with heavy dark wood, illuminated with flickering candles, featuring medieval torture instruments…

  Wait. That one is probably devil worship, not BDSM.

  “Maybe he was presenting it as a suggestion. He was hopeful you would say yes,” I say.

  “It wasn’t a suggestion. It was an obligation.”

  “Oh. Maybe you can come to an arrangement where he doesn’t do that stuff with you.”

  She gets up and grabs her drink, downing it. Then she sinks back onto the toilet lid. “So he does it with someone else while he’s dating me. Then we get married and he does kinky stuff on the side with trashy women? That’s not my idea of happily ever after. I wasn’t into him for his money. I liked him, and now I find out that I was totally wrong about him. I guess everything I thought I saw in him was totally fake, since he’s really a perverted, self-centered creep.”

  I can’t really argue with that.

  Lara drops her face into her hands. “I was really falling for him.”

  “It happens, Lara. It was just a mistake.”

  She looks up at me, agony in her expression. “I can’t do that kind of stuff, Mia. You don’t hurt someone if you love them. I don’t believe that crap at all. I don’t believe it’s just some fantasy. When my parents broke up, my mom remarried. My stepdad used to hit her. She was in denial for years, but no matter what bullshit
she told herself, I tried to make her understand that hitting does not equate to love. Finally, I confronted him, because she wouldn’t do anything to stop it. She told me, seriously, that if she could just be more perfect, he wouldn’t get angry. She stopped working because he asked her to. She turned herself into a brainless Stepford wife for him. How could she believe that crap?”

  Lara gets up off the john, impassioned. “What is this whole ‘take away your choices, your strength, your decisions’ crap? Oh yeah, I’ve seen how great it is. Every dime my mom got she had to ask my stepfather for. Yeah, he was so generous at first. Then he refused to spend any money on her at all. Women who aren’t independent are idiots.”

  Her mother’s story is much like mine, except without the physical abuse.

  “You are very wise.” I mean it sincerely, honestly, and with a huge degree of awe for her positive strength. I wish I’d had so much strength. Lara looks like such a…golden girl. I never pictured her as having a tough past involving abuse or pain.

  I always saw my flaws and screw-ups as an obvious manifestation of my past. I wore my fucked-up psyche every day. I fought it, determine to act like I’m normal. Do I look as convincing as Lara?

  But she looks at me warily, as if she’s not sure what I mean by what I said. “I am so impressed by you,” I explain. “I know how hard it can be to recognize that you don’t have to be a victim and then stand up for yourself. You did both.” Then I ask, “What happened when you confronted your stepfather?” I’m curious, since I never had the courage to do it.

  “He hit me across the face, so I threw him to the floor and pinned his arms. The advantages of judo training. After that, I walked out the door and went to live with my sister. Until my mom kicks the asshole to the curb, I am not going back.”

  Tears spring into Lara’s eyes. “It’s been so hard, but she won’t do it. She chose him over me. Now I find out that Jonathon wants to control women sexually. Abuse is all about control.”