Текст книги "Since You've Been Gone"

Автор книги: Morgan Matson

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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

But it was addressed to me. And it was in Sloane’s handwriting.

JUNE

One Year Earlier

“You sent me a list?” I asked. Sloane looked over at me sharply, almost dropping the sunglasses—oversize green frames—that she’d just picked up.

I held out the paper in my hands, the letter I’d seen propped up by the microwave as I headed down that morning, on my way to pick her up and drive us to the latest flea market she’d found, an hour and change outside of Stanwich. Though there hadn’t been a return address—just a heart—I’d recognized Sloane’s handwriting immediately, a distinctive mix of block letters and cursive. “It’s what happens when you go to three different schools for third grade,” she’d explained to me once. “Everyone is learning this at different stages and you never get the fundamentals.” Sloane and her parents lived the kind of peripatetic existence—picking up and moving when they felt like it, or when they just wanted a new adventure—that I’d seen in movies, but hadn’t known actually existed in real life.

I’d learned by now that Sloane used this excuse when it suited her, not just for handwriting, but also for her inability to comprehend algebra, climb a rope in PE, or drive. She was the only person our age I knew who didn’t have a license. She claimed that in all her moves, she’d never quite been the right age for a permit where they were, but I also had a feeling that Milly and Anderson had been occupied with more exciting things than bringing her to driver’s ed and then quizzing her every night over dinner, geeking out on traffic regulations and the points system, like my dad had done. Whenever I brought up the fact that she lived in Stanwich now, and could get a Connecticut license without a problem, Sloane waved it away. “I know the fundamentals of driving,” she’d say. “If I’m ever on a bus that gets hijacked on the freeway, I can take over when the driver gets shot. No problem.” And since Sloane liked to walk whenever possible—a habit she’d picked up living in cities for much of her life, and not just places like Manhattan and Boston, but London and Paris and Copenhagen—she didn’t seem to mind that much. I liked to drive and was happy to drive us everywhere, Sloane sitting shotgun, the DJ and navigator, always on top of telling me when our snacks were running low.

An older woman, determined to check out the selection of tarnished cufflinks, jostled me out of the way, and I stepped aside. This flea market was similar to many that I’d been to, always with Sloane. We were technically here looking for boots for her, but as soon as we’d paid our two dollars apiece and entered the middle school parking lot that had been converted, for the weekend, into a land of potential treasure, she had made a beeline to this stall, which seemed to be mostly sunglasses and jewelry. Since I’d picked up the letter, I’d been waiting for the right moment to ask her, when I’d have her full attention, and the drive had been the wrong time—there was music to sing along to and things to discuss and directions to follow.

Sloane smiled at me, even as she put on the terrible green sunglasses, hiding her eyes, and I wondered for a moment if she was embarrassed, which I’d almost never seen. “You weren’t supposed to get that until tomorrow,” she said as she bent down to look at her reflection in the tiny standing mirror. “I was hoping it would be there right before you guys left for the airport. The mail here is too efficient.”

“But what is it?” I asked, flipping through the pages. Emily Goes to Scotland!was written across the top.

1. Try haggis.

2. Call at least three people “lassie.”

3. Say, at least once, “You can take my life, but you’ll never take my freedom!”

(Say this out loud and in public.)

The list continued on, over to the next page, filled with things—like fly-fishing and asking people if they knew where I could find J.K. Rowling—that I did not intend to do, and not just because I would only be gone five days. One of my parents’ plays was going into rehearsals for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and they had decided it would be the perfect opportunity to take a family trip. I suddenly noticed that at the very bottom of the list, in tiny letters, she’d written, When you finish this list, find me and tell me all about it.I looked up at Sloane, who had set the green pair down and was now turning over a pair of rounded cat-eye frames.

“It’s stuff for you to do in Scotland!” she said. She frowned at the sunglasses and held up the frames to me, and I knew she was asking my opinion. I shook my head, and she nodded and set them down. “I wanted to make sure you got the most of your experience.”

“Well, I’m not sure how many of these I’ll actually do,” I said as I carefully folded the letter and placed it back in the envelope. “But this is awesome of you. Thanks so much.”

She gave me a tiny wink, then continued to look through the sunglasses, clearly searching for something specific. She had spent most of the spring channeling Audrey Hepburn—lots of winged black eyeliner and stripes, skinny black pants and aflats—but was currently transitioning into what she was calling “seventies California,” and referencing people like Marianne Faithfull and Anita Pallenberg, who I’d never heard of, and Penny Lane in Almost Famous,who I had. Today, she was wearing a flowing vintage maxi dress and sandals that tied around her ankles, her wavy dark-blond hair spilling over her shoulders and down her back. Before I’d met Sloane, I didn’t know that it was possible to dress the way she did, that anyone not heading to a photo shoot dressed with that much style. My own wardrobe had improved immeasurably since we’d become friends, mostly stuff she’d picked for me, but some things I’d found myself and felt brave enough to wear when I was with her, knowing that she would appreciate it.

She picked up a pair of gold-rimmed aviators, only slightly bent, and slipped them on, turning to me for my opinion. I nodded and then noticed a guy, who looked a few years younger than us, staring at Sloane. He was absently holding a macramé necklace, and I was pretty sure that he had no idea that he’d picked it up and would have been mortified to realize it. But that was my best friend, the kind of girl your eyes went to in a crowd. While she was beautiful—wavy hair, bright blue eyes, perfect skin dotted with freckles—this didn’t fully explain it. It was like she knew a secret, a good one, and if you got close enough, maybe she’d tell you, too.

“Yes,” I said definitively, looking away from the guy and his necklace. “They’re great.”

She grinned. “I think so too. Hate them for me?”

“Sure,” I said easily as I walked a few steps away from her, making my way up toward the register, pretending to be interested in a truly hideous pair of earrings that seemed to be made out of some kind of tinsel. In my peripheral vision, I saw Sloane pick up another pair of sunglasses—black ones—and look at them for a moment before also taking them to the register, where the middle-aged guy behind it was reading a comic book.

“How much for the aviators?” Sloane asked as I edged closer, looking up as if I’d just noticed what she’d picked up.

“Twenty-five,” the guy said, not even looking up from his comic.

“Ugh,” I said, shaking my head. “So not worth it. Look, they’re all dented.”

Sloane gave me a tiny smile before putting her game face back on. I knew she’d been surprised, when we’d first started this bargaining technique, that I’d been able to roll with it. But when you grew up in the theater, you learned to handle impromptu improv. “Oh, you’re right,” she said, looking at them closely.

“They’re not that dented,” the guy said, putting his comic– Super Friends—down. “Those are vintage.”

I shrugged. “I wouldn’t pay more than fifteen for them,” I said, and saw, a moment too late, Sloane widen her eyes at me. “I mean ten!” I said quickly. “Not more than ten.”

“Yeah,” she said, setting them down in front of the guy, along with the square-framed black ones I’d seen her pick up. “Also, we just got here. We should look around.”

“Yes, we should,” I said, trying to make it look like I was heading toward the exit without actually leaving.

“Wait!” the guy said quickly. “I can let you have them for fifteen. Final offer.”

“Both of these for twenty,” Sloane said, looking him right in the eye.

“Twenty-one,” the guy bargained lamely, but Sloane just smiled and dug in her pocket for her cash.

A minute later, we were heading out of the stall, Sloane wearing her new aviators. “Nicely done,” she said.

“Sorry for going too high,” I said, as I stepped around a guy carrying an enormous kitten portrait. “I should have started at ten.”

She shrugged. “If you start too low, you sometimes lose the whole thing,” she said. “Here.” She handed me the black sunglasses, and I saw now that they were vintage RayBans. “For you.”

“Really?” I slipped them on and, with no mirror around, turned to Sloane for her opinion.

She look a step back, hands on hips, her face serious, like she was studying me critically, then broke into a smile. “You look great,” she said, digging in her bag. She emerged with one of her ever-present disposable cameras, and snapped a picture of me before I could hold my hand up in front of my face or stop her. Despite having a smartphone, Sloane always carried a disposable camera with her—sometimes two. She had panoramic ones, black-and-white ones, waterproof ones. Last week, we’d taken our first beach swim of the summer, and Sloane had snapped pictures of us underwater, emerging triumphant and holding the camera over her head. “Can your phone do this?” she’d asked, dragging the camera over the surface of the water. “Can it?”

“They look okay?” I asked, though of course I believed her.

She nodded. “They’re very you.” She dropped her camera back in her bag and started wandering through the stalls. I followed as she led us into a vintage clothing stall and headed back to look at the boots. I ducked to see my reflection in the mirror, then checked to make sure her letter was secure in my bag.

“Hey,” I said, coming to join her in the back, where she was sitting on the ground, already surrounded by options, untying her sandals. I held up the list. “Why did you mail this to me? Why not give it to me in person?” I looked down at the envelope in my hands, at the stamp and postmark and all the work that had gone into it. “And why mail anything at all? Why not just tell me?”

Sloane looked up at me and smiled, a flash of her bright, slightly crooked teeth. “But where’s the fun in that?”

1. Kiss a stranger.

2. Go skinny-dipping.

3. Steal something.

4. Break something.

5. Penelope.

6. Ride a dern horse, ya cowpoke.

7. 55 S. Ave. Ask for Mona.

8. The backless dress. And somewhere to wear it.

9. Dance until dawn.

10. Share some secrets in the dark.

11. Hug a Jamie.

12. Apple picking at night.

13. Sleep under the stars.

I sat on my bed, gripping this new list in my hands so tightly, I could see the tips of my fingers turning white.

I wasn’t sure what it meant, but it was something. It was from Sloane. Sloane had sent me a list.

As soon as I’d taken it out of the envelope, I’d just stared at it, my brain not yet turning the symbols into words, into things I could parse. In that moment, it had been enough to know that she had sent me something, that she wasn’t just going to disappear and leave me with nothing but questions and memories. There was more to it than that, and it made me feel like the fog I’d been walking around in for the past two weeks had cleared to let in some sunlight.

Like the others she’d sent—one appearing every time I went away, even if it was just for a few days—there was no explanation. Like the others, it was a list of outlandish things, all outside my comfort zone, all things I would never normally do. The lists had become something of a running joke with us, and before every trip I’d wonder what she was going to come up with. The last one, when I’d gone to New Haven with my mom for a long weekend, had included things like stealing the bulldog mascot, named Handsome Dan, and making out with a Whiffenpoof (I later found out Anderson had gone to Yale, so she’d been able to include lots of specifics). Over the years, I’d managed to check off the occasional item on a trip, and always told her about it, but she always wanted to know why I hadn’t done more, why I hadn’t checked off every single one.

I looked down at the list again, and saw that something about this one was different. There were some truly scary things here—like skinny-dipping and having to deal with my lifelong fear of horses, the very thought of which was making my palms sweat—but some of them didn’t seem so bad. A few of them were almost doable.

And as I read the list over again, I realized these weren’t the random items that had accompanied my travels to California and Austin and Edinburgh. While many of them still didn’t make sense to me—why did she want me to hug someone named Jamie?—I recognized the reasoning behind some of them. They were things I’d backed away from, usually because I was scared. It was like she was giving me the opportunity to do some things over again, and differently this time. This made the list seem less like a tossed-off series of items, and more like a test. Or a challenge.

I turned the paper over, but there was nothing on the other side of it. I picked up the envelope, noted her usual drawing where most people just wrote their addresses—this time she’d drawn a palm tree and a backward moon—and that the postmark was too smudged for me to make out a zip code in it. I looked down at the list again, at Sloane’s careful, unmistakable handwriting, and thought about what was sometimes at the bottom of these– When you finish this list, find me and tell me all about it.I could feel my heart beating hard as I realized that this list—that doing these terrifying things—might be the way I would find her again. I wasn’t sure how, exactly, that was going to happen, but for the first time since I’d called her number and just gotten voice mail, it was like I knew what to do with myself. Sloane had left me a map, and maybe—hopefully—it would lead me to her.

I read through the items, over and over again, trying to find one that wasn’t the most terrifying thing I had ever done, something that I could do right now, today, because I wanted to begin immediately. This list was going to somehow bring me back to Sloane, and I needed to get started.

S. Avein number seven had to mean Stanwich Avenue, the main commercial street in town. I could show up there and ask for Mona. I could do that. I had no idea what 55 Stanwich Avenue was, but it was the easiest thing on the list, by far. Feeling like I had a plan, some direction, for the first time in two weeks, I pushed myself off my bed and headed for the door.

“Emily?”

“ Ohmy god!” I yelled this as I jumped involuntarily. My brother was in my doorway—but not just leaning against the doorframe like a normal person. He was at the very top of the frame, his legs pressed against one side of it, his back against the other. It was his newest thing, after he’d seen it done in some ninja movie. He’d terrified us all at first, and now I just habitually looked up before entering a room. To say Beckett had no fear of heights was an understatement. He’d figured out how to scale the roof of our house when he was five, and if we were trying to find him, we all started by looking up.

“Sorry,” Beckett said, not sounding sorry, shrugging down at me.

“How long have you been there?” I asked, realizing that while I’d been absorbed in my letter, my brother had come into my room and climbed to the top of my doorframe, all without me noticing.

He shrugged again. “I thought you saw me,” he said. “Can you drive me somewhere?”

“I’m about to go out,” I said. I glanced back at Sloane’s list, and then realized I had just left it sitting out on my bed. Our cat was only in the house about half the time, but he seemed to have a preternatural ability to know what was important, and he always destroyed those things first. I picked up the letter and placed it carefully back into the envelope, then tucked it into my top dresser drawer, where I kept my most important things—childhood mementos, pictures, notes Sloane had slipped into my hand between classes or through the slats of my locker.

“Where?” Beckett asked, still from above me.

“Stanwich Avenue,” I said. I craned my neck back to see him, and suddenly wondered if that was why he did this—so that we’d all have to look up at him for a change, instead of the other way around.

“Can you take me to IndoorXtreme?” he asked, his voice getting higher, the way it did when he was excited about something. “Annabel told me about it. It’s awesome. Bikes and ropes courses and paintball.”

I was about to tell my brother sorry, that I was busy, but there was something in his expression that stopped me, and I knew that if I went without him, I’d spend the whole time feeling guilty. “Are you going to want to spend a lot of time there?” I asked. “If I drop you off at this Extreme place? Because I have somewhere I need to go.”

Beckett grinned. “Hours,” he said. “Like, all afternoon.” I nodded, and Beckett lifted his foot and did basically a free fall down the doorframe, stopping himself before he hit the ground and jumping to his feet. “Meet you at the car!” He raced out of my room, and I glanced back to my dresser.

I caught my reflection in the mirror above it, and I ran a brush though my hair quickly, hoping that Mona—whoever she was—wouldn’t be someone that I needed to impress. I was wearing a vintage T-shirt Sloane had insisted I buy, and a pair of jean cutoffs. I was tall—I had a good four inches on Sloane, unless she was in one of her heel phases—and the only really interesting thing about me were my eyes, which were two different colors. One was brown, and one was brown and blue, and Sloane had freaked out the first time she’d noticed it, trying out all sorts of different eye shadow combinations, trying to see if she could get them to turn the same color. My hair was brown, pin-straight, and long, hitting halfway down my back, but anytime I’d talked about cutting it, Sloane had protested. “You have such princess hair,” she’d said. “Anyone can have short hair.”

I tucked my hair behind my ears, then pulled open my top drawer to make sure the list and the envelope were still safe. When I was sure they were, I headed downstairs, turning over and over in my head what I was about to do– 55 S. Ave. Ask for Mona.

2

APPLE PICKING AT NIGHT

Beckett was already sitting in the passenger seat of my car when I made it outside. I drove an old green Volvo that my dad had bought off a student who was transferring to a school in California. I had never met the student, but I felt like I knew a lot about him despite that, because the car was covered in bumper stickers. Save the Whales, Who Doesn’t Love Purple Martins?, This Car Climbed Mount Washington.  Along the back windshield was a deconstructed school sticker that read Unichusetts of Massaversity, but there wasn’t, among all of them, a Stanwich College sticker, which pretty much made it clear why the owner of the car had transferred. I had tried to get them off, but they had proved almost impossible to remove, and so now I was just used to them, and to the occasional honks of anger—or solidarity—I got when other drivers thought they were reading my opinion. The left rear door was jammed, it took a long time for the heat to get going in the winter, and the gas gauge was broken—it was permanently stuck in the center, showing half a tank even when I was running on fumes. I’d learned, over time, just to be aware of when I’d last filled up and how much I’d driven. It was an inexact science, but since I’d never actually run out of gas, it seemed to be working.

The biggest issue with the car, however, was that the roof was always open. The panel that closed the sunroof had been long gone when my dad bought the Volvo, and I just hoped it had been there when the car climbed Mount Washington. I had a tarp I could put over it for when it was raining in the summer, and my parents had gotten the set construction guys to cut a piece of wood that fit inside and made it nearly airtight in the winter. Sloane had loved this part of the car, and had never wanted the roof covered, even when we had to crank the heat and bundle up in blankets. She was always stretching her hand out to let the wind run through her fingers, and leaning forward into the sunlight that spilled down onto the seats.

“All set?” I asked as I slipped on my black Ray-Bans and slammed my door. I’d asked out of habit more than anything else, since Beckett was clearly ready to go. I started the car and pulled out of the driveway, after making sure that there were no strollers or runners heading our way.

“Who’s Tesla?” Beckett asked as I started to head toward downtown. I’d looked up IndoorXtreme’s address on my way downstairs, wanting to minimize any and all delays that I was sure would be caused by expecting Beckett to know where we were going. And despite the fact that when I was his age, I’d mastered the New York subway system—or at least the stops in Brooklyn—my brother and I had had very different childhoods. I’d been the child of two struggling playwrights, moving wherever my parents were workshopping a play, or where they’d managed to land adjunct professor or writer-in-residence gigs. We lived in Brooklyn, in San Francisco, in Portlands both Maine and Oregon. I was usually sleeping on the couch in the apartments we were subletting, and if I did happen to have my own bedroom, I never hung up my boy-band posters or keepsakes, since I knew I wouldn’t be there for long. But everything changed with Bug Juice. My miserable summer at camp had led to a Broadway play, a subsequent terrible movie, and then countless community theater and school productions, the play taking on a life of its own, my parents an overnight success after ten years of struggle. But most importantly, the play led to my parents securing two tenure-track positions at the same school, which even then I’d known was a big deal. And so we’d moved to Stanwich, and while my brother claimed to remember our early, horrible apartments, for the most part, he’d never known anything but security, his posters hung firmly on his walls.

“What?” I asked, glancing up from the directions on my phone, weighing whether Beckett could be trusted to read them to me, or if he’d lose interest and start playing SpaceHog.

“Tesla,” Beckett said carefully, like he was trying out the word. “The play they’re writing?”

“Oh,” I said. I had no idea who that was, but at the moment, didn’t really care. My parents’ play was not my priority—Sloane’s list was. “I’m not sure,” I said. “Want to look it up?” I handed over my phone, and Beckett took it, but a moment later, I heard the SpaceHogtheme music.

I was about to tell him to try and pay some attention to the directions, when he said, his voice quiet, “You think this one’s going to last?”

“The play?” I asked, and Beckett nodded without looking up from the game, his curls bobbing. I took after my dad, with my straight hair and tallness, and Beckett was like a mini version of our mother—her curly hair, her blue eyes. “I don’t know,” I said honestly. It seemed like it would, but they had certainly had false starts before.

“Just ’cause Dad and I were supposed to go camping,” Beckett said, punching the screen of my phone hard, making me wince. “We had a whole plan and everything. We were going to eat fish we caught for dinner and sleep outside.”

“You don’t even like fish,” I pointed out, only to get a withering look in return.

“That’s the whole pointof camping—to do stuff you wouldn’t normally do.”

“I’m sure it’ll still happen,” I said, crossing my fingers under the steering wheel, hoping it would be true. Beckett looked over at me, then smiled.

“Cool,” he said. “Because—” He stopped and sat up straight, pointing out the window. “There it is.”

I made the left into the half-filled parking lot of a huge building; I was pretty sure it had once been a warehouse. I put the car in park, but while the engine was still running, Beckett unbuckled his seat belt and got out, racing for the entrance without waiting for me. Under other circumstances, this might have bothered me, but today, I was thrilled to see it, since it seemed to prove that he wouldn’t care that I left him there while I headed off to Stanwich Avenue. As I got out of the car, I glanced at my gas gauge, even though this was pointless, and realized I probably needed to fill up soon—yet another reason to drop Beckett off and go. I followed my brother across the parking lot and inside, heaving open a heavy steel door, the handle shaped like a mountain peak.

IndoorXtreme was big—a huge, open space with ceilings that might have just been the tallest I had ever seen. There was a counter with a register, and shoe and equipment rentals, but the rest of the space seemed devoted to all the ways you could injure yourself in air-conditioned comfort. There was a half-pipe with skateboarders flying down one side and up the other, a bike course with jumps, and, along the back, a vertical climbing wall, with climbers making their way up or rappelling down. The wall had hand– and footholds along it, and it stretched up almost to the top of the ceiling. The whole place seemed to be made of steel and granite, and was painted mostly gray, with the occasional splash of red. It was cold, and the low hum of the industrial air conditioner mixed with the shouts from the skateboarders and the just-louder-than-background-music techno.

Beckett was waiting for me by the counter, having hoisted himself up to see the options, his feet dangling off the ground. He informed me that he wanted the all-inclusive kids’ pass, which included everything except paintball, and even though I winced at the price, I got it for him, figuring that the longer Beckett was occupied, the more items on Sloane’s list I might be able to accomplish. I’d just planned on the one, but maybe I could even do two. Maybe, if I somehow figured out how to do the really frightening ones, I could have this thing done inside of a week.

I paid the bored-looking guy behind the counter, whose name tag read Dougand who picked up a thick paperback the second we walked away, leaning his elbows on the counter to read. Then Beckett ran over to a bench carved to look like a boulder—or maybe it actually wasa boulder—and started putting on the climbing shoes that Doug had swapped for his sneakers. “So are you all set?” I asked, not even sitting down. I was already planning out my route to Stanwich Avenue. If I didn’t stop for gas, I could be there in ten minutes. “I told you, I have those . . . errands to run.”

“I’m good,” Beckett said, Velcroing his shoes and jumping to his feet. “See you in a couple hours?”

“Great,” I said, and Beckett gave me a grin and ran off toward the climbing wall. As I looked around, I realized that this was actually the perfect place to leave him. I had no doubt my brother would be occupied all afternoon. I decided to wait just a minute more, so I wouldn’t feel like the worst sister in the world, and watched Beckett take his place in line for the climbing wall, hopping from foot to foot the way he did when he was really excited about something.

“Eight?” I turned and saw two things, neither of which made sense. Frank Porter was standing in front of me, and he was holding out a pair of shoes.

I knew who he was because everyone knew Frank Porter, one of the undisputed stars of Stanwich High School. He was never off the High Honor roll, he was a National Merit Scholar, he’d been sophomore and junior class president. He seemed to actively be trying to make the world—or at least our school—a better place, constantly circling petitions and founding clubs and organizations, always trying to save a program or monument or bird. He would be a lock for valedictorian if it weren’t for his girlfriend, Lissa Young, who was just as disciplined and dedicated as he was. They’d been together since something like ninth grade, but they weren’t one of the couples constantly making out against the lockers or having screaming fights in the parking lot. They just seemed like a unit, like even their relationship was focused and properly directed. I had heard that they went off every summer together to an academic enrichment program—so I didn’t understand why Frank Porter was currently standing in front of me. He was one of the few guys in our class who seemed totally comfortable when there were formal events and he had to wear a suit and tie, which was why it was a little jarring to see him now, wearing a gray T-shirt with Xtreme Attitude!written across it, in a font that looked like graffiti. Frank, his name tag read, just in case I had any doubt this was him.

The shoes that were extended to me drooped a little, and Frank tilted his head to the side. “Emily?”

I nodded, a little surprised, even though we’d been in the same school for three years. Since Sloane had come to town, I’d happily existed by her side. People called out to her by name and waved at me, and I had a feeling that the majority of my class would, like the landscaping guy, identify me as “That girl who’s always with Sloane Williams” or something along those lines. And I never minded—even just being Sloane’s friend made me much more interesting than I ever would have been on my own.

“Hi,” Frank Porter said, giving me a quick smile. “How are you?” Despite the T-shirt, Frank looked the same as he did during the school year. He was tall, maybe six-two, and lanky. He had reddish-blond hair that was cut short and neatly combed, and curled just slightly at the nape of his neck. His eyes were a light brown, and his skin was freckled. Even in his T-shirt and holding a pair of rentable shoes, Frank somehow radiated authority. It was like you could see him moving beyond the world of Stanwich High, with no doubt he would succeed wildly—running for office, chairing a board, inventing something tiny and electronic and essential. He just had that air about him—competent and trustworthy and, especially, wholesome. If he hadn’t clearly had grander ambitions, I could have seen him in ads for peanut butter and heart-healthy breakfast cereals. When Sloane had first come to Stanwich High, she had looked him up and down and asked, not unappreciatively, “Who’s the Boy Scout?”