Scandalous

Chapter 3

The alarm went off at six-fifteen and Shae was already awake.

She had been awake for twenty minutes, in fact, lying on her back in the center of a bed that was too large for one person and staring at the ceiling the way she did most mornings — not thinking about anything specific, just existing in the particular pre-dawn quiet of the house, which was the loudest kind of quiet there was. The kind that came with dimensions. The kind you could measure yourself against.

She reached over and silenced the alarm before the second pulse and lay still for another moment.

Then she got up.

The Madison house — though house was not quite the right word for it, had never been quite the right word for it — sat at the end of a long private drive that wound through half a mile of oak and eucalyptus before arriving at a set of iron gates that opened on a keypad code Shae had known since she was thirteen. Beyond the gates, another quarter mile of drive, bordered by stone walls low enough to step over, and then the house itself: a four-thousand-square-foot Spanish Colonial set back into the hillside like it had grown there, all pale stucco and terracotta and wide arched windows that looked out over the tree line toward a view of the valley that was especially good in the early morning, when the mist sat low and the city hadn't started being loud yet.

Her uncle called it a retreat. He had bought it ten years ago for reasons Shae had never fully been given and visited it approximately six times a year, usually for long weekends, usually with people Shae didn't know and wasn't introduced to. The rest of the time it belonged to her in the way that large empty things belong to whoever is left inside them — by default, by absence, by the understanding that no one else was coming.

The account he'd set up transferred funds on the first of every month. More than enough. More than she needed. She had never once been given a reason to be grateful for this and had never once failed to be, which was the particular emotional math of a person who has learned not to expect warmth but has never managed to stop registering its absence.

She padded down the hallway to the bathroom — her bathroom, though every bathroom in the house was technically hers — and turned the shower on hot.

Shae Madison was seventeen years old and looked, depending on the light and the company, somewhere between younger than that and much older.

She was not tall — five-four, on a generous day — but she carried herself with the kind of stillness that made height irrelevant, the way a person moves when they've spent a lot of time alone and have long since stopped performing for an audience. Her hair was dark — not simply brown but the kind of black-brown that absorbed light rather than reflecting it, the kind that changed in the sun to something warmer, almost mahogany at the ends, though she rarely stood in direct sun long enough for anyone to notice. It fell past her shoulders in loose, natural waves that she did very little to manage and nothing to style, because it didn't require it.

Her eyes were green. Not subtly green, not hazel-adjacent — genuinely, unambiguously green, the kind of color that looked unusual on a face as pale as hers and that people sometimes clocked and then looked away from, as if they'd accidentally seen something too directly. She had dark brows that were fuller than current fashion preferred and that she had no intention of doing anything about. Her features were sharp in the way that faces are sharp when the person behind them is thinking about something they're not saying — a jaw with presence, a nose that turned slightly at the end, a mouth that was fuller than the rest of her face suggested it would be, naturally dark at the lips in a way that the wine-red lipstick she wore most days simply underscored rather than created.

She was pale. Not unhealthily so, just the natural pallor of someone who spent more time in libraries than outdoors and whose idea of a good weekend did not involve a pool. She was lean in the way that people are lean when they move through the world at their own pace and don't think about it much. Her hands were her most distinctive feature, she privately thought — long-fingered, quick, always moving slightly even when the rest of her was still, reaching for a pen or turning a page or tracing a line of text with the habitual attention of a person who has been reading seriously since she was old enough to understand that books were the one place no one could follow you unless you invited them.

In the mirror above the bathroom sink she looked, this Monday morning, exactly like herself: dark circles she hadn't bothered to conceal, hair still damp at the ends from the shower, the familiar unremarkable face of a person in the process of becoming someone and not yet knowing what.

She brushed her teeth. Applied eyeliner with the practiced efficiency of a daily ritual — thin, precise, black — and pressed the wine-red lipstick into place. She looked at the result for half a second, decided it would do, and left the bathroom.

The uniform was, as it had been every morning for two years, a negotiation.

Crestwood Academy required: white button-down blouse, dark skirt, appropriate footwear. Crestwood Academy got: white button-down blouse, dark skirt, black tights, and the black ankle boots she wore because no written policy specifically prohibited them and she had checked. She left the top button of the blouse undone because she always did, rolled the sleeves to the elbow because the mornings were not as cool as they used to be, and did not tuck the blouse in because tucking it in felt like a concession she wasn't prepared to make.

She pulled on her jacket — dark, oversized, hers in the way that worn things become yours — grabbed her bag from the hook by her bedroom door, and went downstairs to the kitchen.

Breakfast was the meal she was best at, which was not saying very much. She made coffee first — real coffee, black, in the French press she'd bought herself last spring because the drip machine her uncle had left in the kitchen produced something she could only describe as beige — and while it steeped she made toast and sliced an apple and stood at the kitchen island eating both while she read.

She was reading Giovanni's Room. She had been reading it since Thursday, working through it slowly, the way she worked through things she wanted to actually keep rather than just consume. She had a pencil in her hand — she always had a pencil — and she made notes in the margins in her small, angular handwriting that was slightly too neat to be spontaneous and slightly too idiosyncratic to be learned.

The kitchen was large and quiet around her. Morning light came through the window above the sink in a wide, flat band, illuminating the countertop in a way that would have been photographable if anyone had been there to photograph it. No one was. It was seven-fifteen on a Monday morning and the house contained exactly one person, as it had for the majority of Shae's time in it.

She tried to remember the last time she'd actually seen her uncle. Not a phone call — those happened, briefly, monthly, the brief transactional check-ins of a man discharging a responsibility rather than maintaining a relationship. Actually seen him. The physical presence of him, in this house, occupying a chair or a room or a hallway.

March, she thought. Maybe February. He had come for a long weekend with two people she didn't know and hadn't been introduced to, and she had made herself scarce in the way she'd learned to make herself scarce over the years, and then on Sunday evening his car had pulled out of the drive and the gate had closed and the house had gone back to being what it usually was.

That was seven months ago. Maybe eight.

She finished her coffee, rinsed the cup, put it on the drying rack. She closed Giovanni's Room on her pencil, tucked it into the front pocket of her bag, and went to the hall to collect her things.

The weekend had been uneventful in the specific way that Shae's weekends tended to be uneventful, which was to say it had been entirely predictable and she had not minded it, exactly, but had been aware of its weight.

She had texted Claire on Saturday morning — you free today? — and waited through three hours of intermittent hope before Claire had replied with a voice note that was mostly background noise and the information that her cousin from San Diego was visiting and they were doing family things all weekend, sorry, love you, next weekend for sure. Claire had sent a string of heart emojis after this. Shae had sent one back and put her phone face-down on the library table.

She had spent Saturday in the house's library — a long, east-facing room on the second floor that was, genuinely, the only room in the house she felt any attachment to. Floor-to-ceiling shelves, a window seat wide enough to lie down on, a reading lamp with a warm bulb that her uncle had never touched. She had populated the shelves herself over two years with the money from the account — paperbacks and hardcovers and a few things she'd found in the secondhand shop on Walnut Street that smelled like time and required no apology. She knew exactly where everything was. She could navigate the room in the dark.

She had read for six hours Saturday, pausing only to make herself lunch, and then had turned to the essay.

The new English teacher — Mr. Kingston — had assigned it on Friday. Two pages, minimum, on Fitzgerald's use of color as psychological landscape in The Great Gatsby. He had said it with the particular calm of someone who knew exactly what he was asking and wasn't particularly moved by the possibility that it might be difficult. She had written four pages by ten o'clock Saturday night, revised them on Sunday morning, and decided they were done.

She had no particular feelings about this, except a faint satisfaction of the kind that comes from doing a thing correctly before it needs to be done. Claire would finish hers on Thursday night. Shae had learned not to comment on this.

She left the house at seven thirty-five.

The morning air hit her at the front door with the particular clarity of early California autumn — cool enough to warrant the jacket, warm enough that she'd be glad she didn't add a layer. The drive was quiet, the trees on either side moving faintly in whatever passed for a breeze at this hour. She walked the half-mile to the road at a pace that was entirely her own, not hurried, not dawdling, the pace of someone who has timed this exactly and sees no reason to adjust it.

At the end of the drive she turned not left, toward the road that wound down the hill and into the suburban grid of Pasadena, but right — along the shoulder for a hundred yards, then through the gap in the low stone wall where the trailhead began. Most people didn't know it was there. She had found it her first autumn at the house, on an aimless walk that had become a habit that had become, over time, the part of the day she was most reluctant to give up.

The shortcut through the woods cut her commute from five miles to something closer to two and a half. More importantly, it was entirely silent.

This was not nothing. This was, in fact, a considerable thing, to a person who lived with a great deal of silence and had learned, over time, to distinguish between the silences. The silence of the house was the silence of absence — rooms that were large because they were empty, not because they breathed. The silence of the library was the silence of attention. The silence of the woods was different from both — it was full, layered, the accumulated quiet of things that had been there longer than she had and didn't require her participation to continue.

She moved through it with the ease of the familiar, her boots on the packed-dirt path, her bag settled on one shoulder, her breath visible in the early-morning cool. Oaks on either side, their canopies thinning toward autumn, the light coming through in pieces rather than whole. Somewhere ahead a bird was doing something insistent and rhythmic and eventually stopped. The path dipped through a dry creek bed — stone and packed earth, easy footing — and climbed again through a section where the trees grew closer and the light went grey-green and the city, already muted, disappeared entirely.

She stopped here sometimes, in the grey-green section. Not for long. Just long enough to stand in it.

She did it this morning, too. Set her feet, let her bag slide to the crook of her elbow, stood in the quiet of the trees and breathed for a moment like a person remembering how.

She thought about the essay. She thought about Giovanni's Room and the difference between the way Baldwin wrote loneliness and the way Fitzgerald wrote longing and whether they were even the same thing or just adjacent. She thought about Claire's voice note and the sound of someone else's family in the background of it. She thought about the English teacher — Mr. Kingston — and the way he had said go on to her on Friday without inflection, without performance, the flat invitation of a person who was actually listening rather than managing a classroom dynamic.

She had not expected that. She had not expected to be heard, particularly. She was used to teachers who found her useful in the way that a hand-raiser in the back row is useful — occasional, ornamental — without being especially interested in what she was actually saying.

He had been interested. Or he had seemed to be. Or she was reading too much into a two-word response from a man who was almost certainly just doing his job.

She picked up her bag, adjusted the strap, and kept walking.

The trees opened up a quarter mile from the school's east fence, spitting her out onto the residential street that ran along the property line. From there it was three minutes on pavement to the side gate that technically required a student ID to open but that had been broken for long enough that everyone knew to just push it.

She pushed it open, stepped through, and Crestwood Academy closed around her like a hand she hadn't offered.

Monday had begun.