The Underwriting (12 page)

Her eyebrows lifted as her confidence rebounded. “Well, I could give you my number and we could go out some time and—”

“The thing is, I'm on this insane deal. I wish I could tell you about it, but it's all confidential. And I am literally working around the clock for the next two months. And I just know by then you'll be taken.” He shook his head. “Girls like you never stay on the market long.”

She hesitated, thinking. “Tonight, then?” she said.

“Oh, I—” He looked down, falsely sheepish, then back up. “Are you serious? I don't usually—”

“Me, either,” she interrupted, giggling but committing to the idea. “But there's a first time for everything, right?”

A cab ride, an hour, and a mediocre blow job later, Todd passed out on his pillow, no longer thinking about Tara.

CHARLIE

W
EDNESDAY
, M
ARCH
12; P
ALO
A
LTO
, C
ALIFORNIA

Charlie parked the car behind Memorial Church, and a woman in black robes ushered him into the church's alcove. He felt his eyes get hot when he saw his mother, hunched in a chair, her little body folded into itself as his father stood, helpless, beside her.

“Hey,” he said, gently touching her shoulder. The sight of him made her sobs start anew, and he wrapped her in his arms.

He'd arrived from Istanbul this morning and come straight to Stanford's campus for Kelly's memorial service. Raj had told him to leave on Friday when he got the news, but Charlie had insisted on staying to hand off his work. He just wasn't ready to face the truth.

He'd learned that Kelly died of a drug overdose. She'd taken Molly at the concert she'd told him about last Wednesday when they Skyped, then come home and passed out in her bed. Charlie didn't even know you could die from Molly, but Kelly's RA had found her unconscious the next morning. He'd taken her to the hospital, but it was too late: she was pronounced dead of a heart attack from heatstroke caused by the Molly that saturated her lifeless veins.

He'd accepted the story but he still didn't believe it. He and Kelly were as close as anyone: he'd have known if she were getting into drugs. Wouldn't he?

Or had he pushed her away with his disapproval? He'd been furious last year when she told him she was interning at L.Cecil, but he'd been certain the summer would dispel any fascination she had with it. She'd meet the worthless guys he'd hated in college—the ones who thought wearing a suit made you a man—and she'd understand what a waste it would be to give her talent to them. She hadn't seen that, though, and he'd felt sick when she'd told him she'd decided to return after graduation.

And so his last experience of the sister he loved more than anyone else in the world had been one of disappointment. He collected that failure and focused on it, knowing anger with himself was easier to manage than the thought that she was really gone.

The church bells rang and the chaplain opened the doors to the sanctuary, overflowing with people. The sound of the organ mixed with murmured weeping, and he felt his mother start to shake into tears, covering her face with her hands. Charlie and his father kept her from falling and led her to the front pew.

The service was a two-hour parade of classmates tearfully recounting stories of Kelly's energy and warmth as her framed portrait smiled out into the congregation.

The chaplain said the final prayer, one of the campus's a cappella groups sang “Amazing Grace,” and the crowd slowly emptied the church to go to various support groups that had been organized around campus.

“Come this way,” the woman who had read the scripture said quietly but firmly to Charlie, leading the family through a side door.

“What's going on?” Charlie whispered.

“The press is here,” she said apologetically. “We tried to keep them out, but Stanford is an open campus.”

“Why is the press here?” he asked.

“The Carl Camp thing?” she said, then bit her lip, realizing he didn't know. “Carl Camp—the congressman—he's using Kelly's story as a reason to clamp back down on drug policies.”

“I haven't been watching the news,” he admitted. It hadn't even occurred to him anyone would cover Kelly: weren't they all more worried about Syria?

“I'm sure it'll all blow over,” she said unconvincingly, “but for now drive up Serra Street. They won't see you.”

His parents climbed into the backseat, too overcome with grief to realize what was going on, and Charlie edged the car out onto the road. He heard someone pounding on the trunk and slammed on the brakes as a girl came around to his window, tears streaming down her face.

He rolled down the window.

“I'm so sorry,” the girl bellowed. Her chest was heaving. “I'm so, so, so, so sorry.”

Charlie put the car in park and got out. “I'll be right back,” he told his father.

The girl's thin shoulders were hunched over, shaking with the damp cold and her sobbing. He led her under the cover of the walkway that circled the quad and gripped her arms, her distress causing him to temporarily shut down his own. “What's going on? Are you okay?”

“No.” She shook her head, sniffling. “No. It's all my fault.”

“What's all your fault?” He shifted into reporting mode.

“Kelly. I killed her.” She coughed out sobs as she said it, her pretty face contorting as mascara streamed down her cheeks.

“I don't think that's true,” Charlie said as calmly as he could. “Tell me what happened.”

“I told her it was okay,” the girl said. “She asked me if she should try it and I told her she deserved to have a little fun. And she wasn't sure, but I said I'd watch out for her. And I did.” She looked up, her blue eyes big and innocent. “I promise I did. I was with her the whole time and she only took one hit. Really, she only did a little.” She looked hopefully at Charlie, like he could make it go away. He recognized her now: she was Kelly's friend Renee, the rich sorority sister whose father had gotten Kelly the internship at L.Cecil.

“Then what happened?” Charlie asked steadily. “After she took the hit?”

“She was definitely high—I mean, she was being even more sweet and energetic than she usually was, just telling everyone how much she loved them and talking about how happy she was and how excited she was about New York and L.Cecil. Literally, all the way home, she was totally with it. And I gave her some water—but not too much, I swear! And she put on her pajamas and brushed her teeth and I put her to bed and waited until she fell asleep and then locked the door behind me and she was fine, I promise she was. But I should have.” Another sob burst through the girl's open mouth. “I should have stayed with her.”

“It's not your fault,” Charlie said, knowing it wasn't. “You couldn't have known.”

“But how . . . I just don't understand how it happened. It took us an hour and a half to get back—if she'd taken more when we were at the concert it would have kicked in before I left her alone.” Her eyebrows were squeezed together. “Right?”

“Charlie, can we please go home?” His father opened the car door. “Your mother needs to—”

“You're Renee, right?” Charlie said.

“Yeah. Renee Schultz. We were in the same pledge class. We were going to live together in New York.”

“Thank you, Renee, for telling me.”

“I'm so sorry,” she sniffed.

He drove back to the hotel and dropped his parents off before checking in himself. The student dean had delivered a box of Kelly's belongings, and he looked at it cautiously as he sat on the bed, not sure he wanted to know what was inside.

Kelly hadn't told him she would live with Renee in New York. What else hadn't she told him?

He picked up the keys and went back out to the car, following the signs to Stanford Hospital.

—

“S
HE
WAS
DEAD
when she got here,” the doctor, a short, round woman with frizzy red hair, said without looking up from a patient's chart as she headed to her next appointment.

Charlie followed, offended by her tone. “But her RA said she still had a pulse.”

“Her RA should have gotten a DUI for driving her here,” the doctor said impatiently. “You could smell the booze on his breath. I assure you, by the time that girl got to me she was gone. There was nothing I could do.” The doctor turned to the door.

“I'm not accusing you of anything,” Charlie said, “I'm just trying to figure out what happened.”

“What happened?” The woman turned back and lifted her eyebrows as if he were stupid. “She took a huge amount of drugs, she had sex, and she died. Don't overthink it.”

“She'd had sex?”

“Yes. We could tell from the autopsy.”

“Did they run the DNA?”

“No. She didn't die of sex, she died of drugs.”

“I just don't understand how she could have overdosed,” he pressed the doctor.

“By taking a gram of Molly and a punch of dextromethorphan, on top of a diet pill, an Adderall and six Advil. No heart could have survived that.”

“A gram? Her friend said she took one hit,” Charlie said. Why was she taking diet pills?

“Then her friend is lying,” the doctor said, then finally paused and said, more softly, “Why do you care so much?”

“I'm her brother.”

The woman sighed heavily, adopting the sympathetic voice her med school hadn't done a good enough job teaching her. “Listen, I get that it's hard to accept the truth about people you're close to, but don't make this more complicated than it is.”

“You don't know a damn thing about my sister,” he snapped.

—

H
IS
HEART
was still racing when he got back to the hotel. None of this made sense. If it had been a massacre in the Middle East he'd be thinking clearly, looking at the facts and uncovering the story. But it wasn't. It was
Kelly
, and all his brain could see was a deep, dark hole.

He looked at the box the dean had delivered again.

He drank a little bottle of whiskey from the hotel's minibar in one gulp as he tried to decide whether he was ready to go through it. He drank the vodka, too, then started in.

He removed her books—copies of Henry James and Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen and, at the bottom of the pile, the worn copy of
Man's Search for Meaning
, the book she knew was his favorite. The spine was broken and the pages covered in highlights. He felt a lump in his throat, realizing how much time she'd spent with it, and another when he saw a picture fall out.

He knew the photo before he turned it over: it showed the two of them together on the day of her high school graduation. She was wearing her cap and gown, her enormous grin matched only by his beaming next to it. He'd just been staffed permanently in Tunisia and she'd written him a long e-mail saying she understood that he couldn't make it back for her big day. He remembered how he'd laughed when he got it—the AP could have offered him a Nobel Prize–worthy assignment and he wouldn't have taken it—there was no way he was missing his little sister as valedictorian. He'd booked a ticket without telling her, and she'd spotted him at the end of her speech, laughing on stage, and running down into the auditorium to give him a hug, ignoring the administrator's horror at the interruption to the ceremony. He couldn't remember the last time he'd been so happy.

He put the book down and looked through the photos she'd framed of herself with her sorority sisters—he was biased, but she was the prettiest one. He flipped through her binders, full of old tests and papers organized by semester. He found her laptop and her iPhone and two water bottles with the L.Cecil logo, which made Charlie roll his eyes: was one not enough?

He saw a yellow book at the bottom of the box, and his chest clenched again when he recognized the journal he'd sent her the day she left for college. He gently undid the string and read the first entry:

Thursday, September 16, 2010

How to begin this journal? I feel like I need to write something really significant, like I need to say something profound to mark this moment. I'm on a plane from JFK to SFO. How cool to write that? S-F-O. And to know it's just the first of lots of flights to SFO. Oh! It gives me chills just thinking about it. I can't believe this is happening. I can't believe I'm going to California and to Stanford and that everything is about to change. Charlie gave me this journal. The only problem with California is that it's so far from Tunisia, but he swears we'll Skype all the time. We better—the only thing that makes me not nervous about college is knowing I can talk to him about anything. I love that he gave me a journal. Like, a real journal. I think it's harder to write the truth when you're typing. I think you need a pen and paper sometimes, to get to the underneath of things. Is that profound? Or will I look back on this in four years and laugh at my now-self and think how silly I was thinking I was intellectual at seventeen. Sigh! Who am I going to be four years from now? What
will I know? Will I have a boyfriend? I hope so. Will I have a job? Don't think about that. I wonder who my roommate will be? I hope I don't embarrass her. I hope I'm not the stupidest person there.

Charlie looked up at the ceiling to ward off the unfamiliar feeling of tears forming.

“I can't do this,” he said aloud.

He turned on the television and flipped to CNN, grateful to find a report about another roadside bombing that put his tragedy back into perspective. But then the reporter cut to new coverage from California. Charlie's throat burned when he saw Kelly's photo.

“Students gathered today for the memorial service of Kelly Jacobson, the Stanford senior found dead of a drug overdose last week, just three months before the girl was scheduled to graduate and go work for the investment bank, L.Cecil. The conservative pundit Rush Limbaugh was quick to opine, criticizing the university for honoring a girl he says represents the irresponsibility of the millennial generation and the moral decline of the nation—”