The next morning, he woke up ready to go again, but Rachel was out of bed before he could reach for her, giving him the kind of kiss he imagined long-married wives gave their husbands when they left for work. Andy made the bed, did his workout, showered and changed, and got one of Rachel’s friends to wave him into the dining hall, which had a vaulted ceiling, marble floors, and long, heavy wooden tables where the students ate, or didn’t eat (he’d once dined with some of Rachel’s sisters and had spent thirty minutes watching them shift salad around their plates).
Andy had pancakes and turkey bacon, then sneaked into the library, which was lovely, like an old mansion full of books, all carved dark wood, gleaming brass lamps, and rows and rows of carrels. Andy found himself a nook with a big chair that overlooked the quad, and did his homework: Sociology of the Family, Abnormal Psychology, and a grueling plod through twenty pages of Aristotle for his philosophy seminar. Most of his teammates were educational foundation majors—gym teachers in training, in other words. A few of the even less academically inclined studied geology, commonly known as Rocks for Jocks, where the professors would pass you as long as you didn’t fall asleep and snore too disruptively in their classrooms. Andy hadn’t decided yet between comp lit and political science. He liked reading about how the world worked, about why people did what they did.
Homework took him until one in the afternoon. Beaumont had a two-block downtown with a cheese shop that sold sandwiches, a Chinese restaurant, and a fancy French place, where parents took their kids when they came for graduation. Counting his pocket change to pay for two bagels with cream cheese, Andy saw some smooth-looking, wide-bodied guy in a leather jacket smirking at him before paying for his own lunch with a credit card—probably, Andy thought, one where parents got the bills. He stood at a narrow counter, munching his bagel, as the wide boy climbed into a BMW with a Beaumont sticker on the back window.
Beaumont kids were assholes. He and Rachel had been fighting about it for a year, and had finally reached a kind of détente, where he agreed to acknowledge, at least privately, that it was impossible for every single kid who went there to be a jerk, and Rachel admitted—again, only in private—that plenty of them, including her beloved sorors, were the kind of blinkered, privileged, entitled assholes who’d go sailing through life, assuming that their hard work, not their privilege, was what ensured them their good jobs, good schools, nice houses, and pricy vacations. Born on third base and think they hit a triple, his mom used to say, and Andy found himself thinking that almost constantly when he walked around Beaumont, where Rachel tried so hard to fit in. He knew, because he’d asked her, that she’d never told anyone at college about her heart condition or all of her hospitalizations. The scar she’d explained away by saying she’d had an operation—operation, singular—to correct a birth defect. She kept her portable oxygen tank in a suitcase in the back of her closet; she kept her nails painted so no one could see her fingertips’ bluish tinge, and the one time he’d heard someone ask her to go running, she’d made an excuse about cramps.
“Isn’t it pretty here?” Rachel would ask . . . and it was; like a postcard, like the picture you’d get in your head when you thought college, the kind of place made to appear on brochures. In the fall, students would gather on the quad for class, sitting underneath oak and maple trees with their leaves glowing gold and scarlet, and in the spring the kids who looked like they’d been selected for their good looks would play Frisbee on the beautifully tended grass.
Twice a week, Rachel and her sorority sisters took a van downtown to tutor kids who went to the public elementary school. Rachel had been working with Keila, a soft-spoken sixth-grader with bright brown eyes who called Rachel Miss Rachel and looked at her like she’d invented MTV. At least once a month, they’d go to the zoo or the park or the movies or to the fancy restaurant in town for tea. “I wish I could do more,” Rachel would say, and would daydream out loud about adopting Keila once she graduated, as if Keila didn’t have a mother already.
“I just don’t get it,” Rachel would say when Keila would casually mention that Mommy’s new boyfriend had borrowed her duffel bag, the pink, monogrammed one that Rachel had bought her for her birthday, and hadn’t ever brought it back. “Why would she let a guy like that anywhere near her children?” Andy wanted to tell her that it was easy to make good choices when you had a web of people supporting you, not to mention money as a safety net when everyone else in your family did the right thing, went to college, held down a job. “She’s doing the best she can,” he’d say, and Rachel would sigh, and repeat, “I just don’t understand.” Andy understood, even if he could never quite make Rachel get it.