A Classic Blunder

Chapter 2-2

“You think they sat us like this on purpose?” Mila leaned in close to Beau and whispered in his ear. Vin’s half-sister wore a floral pencil skirt, eye-searing orange high heels, and a turquoise top that went with neither and yet happened to look good on her. Forever 21 all the way. Beau himself was getting great use out of the sports jacket Vin had bought during Beau’s freshman year, and one of the business shirts he’d picked up on his soon-to-be-employer’s tab. It was hot as hell for May and he was sweating under the jacket; the pale blue shirt was stippled with moisture and stuck to his back.

“We’re the Switzerland of the family,” Beau whispered back. True enough. The college’s rules around distribution of tickets had been in place long before split families became the norm. He wondered how many fist-fights broke out after the fact, with the rules forcing families to sit together if they wanted to go at all. Six tickets per graduate would put ex-husbands and their trophy wives together with still-single moms. Depressed dads would be forced to sit near ex-wives and their sugar daddies. Probably made for tensions the like of which weren’t usually seen outside of awkward wedding toasts and drunken reception parties.

“The kids,” meaning Beau and Mila, had been dropped unceremoniously in the middle, with Vin’s grandmother to Beau’s left and Vin’s step-mother on Mila’s right. Lionel Reyes was seated as far as possible from Jonah Hughes, Vin’s father. Theoretically reconciled or not, the two men were determined that the other would be the one to break the wall of silence first.

If only the emotional ice cooled off the air, Beau thought.

“Also because if we’re in the middle, we can’t sneak off when this gets too boring,” Mila said. “And it will be ungodly boring.”

“Now, now,” Beau said, “look at it this way. Vin’ll have to get you a really nice graduation present for putting up with this bullshit.”

Mila squirmed in her seat a bit, wiggling her closed fists together in a tiny cheer. “Yay!”

“Ow. Your sarcasm is getting a bit sharp, kiddo.” Beau honestly liked Vin’s sister, and not just because she’d taken Lisa under her wing as her brand-new best friend. Lisa needed a friend, desperately. She hadn’t had any that stuck with her through the scandal of her pregnancy.

“You are kidding, right? You know your boyfriend,” Mila said. “Even if I booed him and threw eggs, he’d probably buy me a Mercedes.”

“I think your father nixed the car as a gift option.”

“Vacation to Hawaii? I’d rather do Los Angeles or something. I’m not much into the beach. Oh! Or Disney! That’d be killer! You’ll tell him that, right?”

Beau grimaced. “You are shameless.” Like hell Beau was going to suggest to Vin he give his little sister a Disney vacation; Vin would have all of them on a plane before he could blink. The scales were so out of whack already, with Vin fronting cash for Lisa’s tutoring.

Mila leaned against him, conspiratorially. “Don’t tell me you don’t want to go to Disney, Beau. You’d be lying. It’d be fun. We should definitely do it.”

It would be fun, Beau mused, and that was exactly the problem. “Well, you’re not graduating until next year anyway.”

“Don’t remind me. Senior year. Ugh. Prom. Hideous. Someone should stab me now.” Mila flomped, loose and overly dramatic, into his lap, flinging one arm over her head. “Woe, woe is me.”

“Watch your hands, Lady Macbeth, or Switzerland’s going to be voiding its neutrality.” Vin’s grandmother wasn’t quite glaring at them, she was too proper for that, but Beau recognized the thin, pinch-lipped expression.

“Is she actually listening to the speech?” Mila hissed. Commencement had been going on for quite some time and was likely to continue for another half-hour at least, but neither he nor Mila had been listening. There had been no spotting Vin at all in the hundreds of gowned and capped graduates. The speakers were tedious, giving lectures about what real life was like outside of college and how college had prepared them for this moment, on and on, and use sunscreen. Blah, blah, blah. Nothing about student loans or the impossibility of finding a job these days, or even, perhaps, Beau’s right to marry whomever he wanted; in short, nothing that was going to affect him. And nothing that was going to affect Vin, either, who had a job already lined up as a Board of Directors member on one—or more—of his grandfather’s companies. If Vin had even decided to do that. They hadn’t talked about it.

There was so much, Beau thought, raising his hand to the diamond stud in his ear, that he and Vin didn’t talk about.

The speaker wrapped up her ersatz motivational speech and everyone applauded, more from relief than actual enthusiasm. The dean of something-or-other-microphone-feedback got up and read off the list of colleges people were graduating from. Thank God they didn’t have to sit through an individual stage-march with the fake smiles and hand-offs of diplomas. Vin and his grandparents had gone to the Math department’s ceremony that morning while Beau accompanied Jonah’s family to a late brunch.

Mila stood up almost immediately. “One thousand and seven graduates, times six family members each, equals when the f**k am I going to get to eat lunch?”

“Mila!”

Beau hastily disguised a laugh as a cough, fooling absolutely no one. Mila grinned ear to ear and ducked around him to escape her step-mother’s swat.

“You are decidedly Vin’s sister,” he said to her, putting an arm around her shoulders conspiratorially. “He does that weird math thing, too.”

“Don’t be a hater,” Mila said. Vin’s grandparents didn’t wait, slipping between the crowd by virtue of not acknowledging that other people existed. Beau had learned that skill in high school, how to look without seeing, and other people would get out of the way. He’d largely given it up, but back in Tennessee, it had worked wonders for keeping people at enough of a distance so they didn’t ask uncomfortable questions.

They eventually made it out of the surging crowds and gathered over by the statue of Charles Lindgren, a famous Chicagoan—a Merchant Mariner or something. It was an ugly statue, and during finals week it often had feather boas draped all over it, a tradition that was lost in the annals of school mythology. Ann-Marie Darland was already there by virtue of some good old-fashioned pushing and shoving. She already removed her black cap and gown and had bunched it up under her arm. She had not, Beau noticed, followed the recommended “appropriate attire” underneath, wearing her typical jeans and wife-beater-style tank top. Her high heels were her only concession to fashion and she had already kicked them off onto the sidewalk. Her toenails were painted baby pink, something that Beau thought about commenting on and then decided it might be safer not to.

“What a pompous windbag,” she exclaimed, shaking her hair free from the cap. “Here. Be careful with that, I need to return it.”

“Not sure I understand why you bothered to march,” Beau said. He wasn’t planning on it—no family was going to come and see him, except maybe his cousin Kate, and only if she didn’t have filming obligations. Why waste the money and time on a ceremony? Ann-Marie had been likewise disowned by her family for being a lesbian, and she only spoke to her little brother when her mom wasn’t around to prevent it.

She shrugged and squeezed the bridge of her nose. “Had to sign up in order to get the tickets. Which I sold. There’s enough graduates with big families around here that I scored five hundred dollars a ticket. That’ll give me enough to put a deposit on my apartment and get some cheap furniture. And not have to work until teacher orientation in July.”

“I thought teachers had the summer off,” Mila piped up. She kept bobbing around on her toes, looking for Vin.

“Ha ha, dream on, little girl,” Ann-Marie said. “You’ll find out that being an adult sucks.”

“Hear, hear,” Vin said, finally reaching them through the crowds.

“Congratulations, big brother.” Mila hugged Vin, snatched the stupid flat cap away from him, and threw it into the air like a pinwheel. On the way down, it smacked her in the forehead, leaving a small red mark. She yelped, rubbed at it, and handed it back to Vin. “Traitorous thing.”

“Well done,” Jonah said, clapping a hand on Vin’s shoulder. Vin and his father still avoided much in the way of hugs or gestures of overt familiarity. The relationship was a work in progress. Vin made up for it by hugging the stuffing out of both Ann-Marie and Beau.

“Honestly,” Vin said, “I’m shocked I got here. Last year was…trying. I thought I’d be in summer school for sure.”

Lionel Reyes sniffed. “That would be appalling, Vinyl.”

“As appalling as not going to one of your preppy schools back east, or about as appalling as my failing fifth grade?” Vin asked. His eyes sparkled, bright and hard, and there was an edge to his smile that spelled trouble to anyone who knew him.

“You had a decent excuse then,” Lionel said. “Now, you do not. And you chose, not I, to come to this…little public college.”

“Granddad still thinks he could have bought my way into Princeton or something,” Vin confided to his father. “Wouldn’t that have been great? His grandson, who couldn’t even read until he was eleven years old? Trying to cut it at some Ivy League college? Yeah, I think that would have gone over really well. But, of course, poor Vin, he was traumatized after losing his mother. He didn’t talk and he didn’t learn. So maybe, just maybe, he might have wanted to earn something, for a change.”

“Awkward,” Mila singsonged, just behind Beau. Beau agreed. He laced his hand with Vin’s.

“Did you forget to eat breakfast this morning?” he asked. He steered Vin in a wide circle, avoiding looking at anyone’s eyes. “Come on, Ann-Marie, let me treat y’all to a cup of coffee or somethin’.” He leaned in closer to Vin. “Who pissed in your Wheaties this morning, honey?”

Vin let Beau drag him away, Ann-Marie and Mila tagging along behind them. Beau headed in the direction where they’d left David—Vin’s driver—and the Escalade. “I don’t know, I just…God damn, you’d think he could say something nice for once, but he’s been a bleeding hernia since I got in touch with my dad. And it’s not like…gah! Seriously. This is bullshit. It’s bullshit, is what it is. I worked for this degree.”

“I know you did, honey,” Beau said, squeezing Vin closer to his side.

“Vin, honestly, you’re being a d**k. And not like a big ol’ swinging c**k, either, but an actual d**k,” Ann-Marie said. She didn’t pull punches, either the literal or the verbal sort. “What is up with that? Stop throwing away family.”

Vin shook off Beau’s arm and glared. “Just because they don’t care who I like to f**k doesn’t mean that they accept me. I spent all morning listening to my grandfather make snide remarks about how useful advanced mathematics won’t be in the boardroom. Just tired of his bullshit.”

“Yeah, I was gathering that,” Ann-Marie said.

“That being said, you did leave Dad and Angela alone with the crazy rich old folks,” Mila pointed out.

“If they kill each other, it’s not my problem,” Vin said. “Look, I’ll apologize later. Just…I need a beer. And since I can’t have that, a coffee’s going to have to do.”