The Trouble with Lexie (2 page)

I
T WAS THE LAST DAY OF PARENTS' WEEKEND AND LEXIE WAS think
ing about sex. She didn't necessarily want to be thinking about sex, but the startlingly handsome father who was only one table away was staring at her in a way that rang a bell inside her that tolled
sex, sex, sex.
In the end, we're just a bunch of monkeys, Lexie thought as she noted, uncomfortably, how a simple gaze could set her off like this. Lexie looked away. Why encourage him? She was almost angry at the intrusion into her mindspace—mad that he was sending out pheromones that were clicking against her like hail on a copper roof.

Lexie wasn't sure whose father the handsome man was, as the seat to his right was currently empty. To his left was Nic Patel (who was a photocopy of his father beside him). On the other side of the empty seat was an elegant blond woman who appeared to be texting or emailing on her cell phone. Was this distracted woman his wife? Lexie focused on the space where the table met the man's torso—she was waiting for his left hand to emerge in order to spot the ring
finger. Alas, no movement. The staring man stretched his right arm out, spanning it atop the vacant chair like a pin-striped wing. His shoulders were so broad it looked like he had a lacrosse stick stuck in his suit. There were flecks of gray in his black hair, but only around the temples. Lexie's guess was that he was fifty, an age Lexie, at seventeen years younger than that, thought of as
too old
, even when you looked as good as this guy did. She turned her face away again.

More than once, Lexie had been mistaken for a student. She didn't really look high-school-aged, but if you blurred your eyes a bit and took in only the loose, long, honey-blond hair and her slenderness, she might pass for nineteen. Lexie hoped this guy wasn't some perv who thought she was a student. Without meaning to do so, she looked back at him. He was still staring at her. She looked away and dropped her head so he couldn't see that she was flattered, smiling.
Don't look again
, Lexie told herself, and she forced her focus on the boy seated next to her, Bruno. With self-conscious deliberation, Lexie moved Bruno's water glass out of the way as if he were a two-year-old who might knock it over.

As the school counselor, Lexie was seated with a group of kids whose parents didn't, or couldn't, make it to Parents' Weekend. There were quite a few; plenty of people in Europe and Asia shipped their kids off to The Ruxton Academy in the hope that it would set them up—like a stone in a catapult—for admission into the Ivy League. Lexie looked around her table: Bruno Carrera, Xu Li, Grace Pak, Magnus Skaarsgard, Allison Delury, Piet Cowenberg, and Liam Walsh. With the exception of Magnus, who was pushing six-three, they all looked young, making Lexie easily identifiable as the adult. At least the staring father couldn't think she was a student.

Ruxton's headmaster, Don McClear, was speaking at a podium
while the first course—green salad—was being served. Don was saying something about character, community, the integration of these boarding school kids into the small Massachusetts town surrounding the school (where the average income was certainly less than a year's tuition at Ruxton). Lexie had heard it all before. Don was sincere in his passion for Habitat for Humanity and the Clean Woods Project. Every kid at Ruxton (grades nine through twelve) did forty hours of service a year. But Lexie couldn't summon any interest in all that. She was distracted, edgy, feeling a little vulnerable. If students and faculty weren't strictly forbidden from using their phones in the dining hall, she'd have had hers out thirty minutes ago with a game of Yahtzee going full swing. Firmly, Lexie kept her back to the black-haired, square-jawed man with the powerful shoulders.

Peter, Lexie's fiancé, had no shoulders of note. Yes, he was fit. Yes, he was attractive—a biker who managed to wear skintight spandex shorts and not look like a character out of a
Saturday Night Live
skit. Peter was a kind soul, a dreamer. He would never, even if he were single, be so bold as to visually eat up a stranger while spraying great gusts of hormones into the atmosphere.

Lexie had insinuated herself into Peter's mind after meeting him at a friend's wedding. Over the four hours of the reception, she kept one eye on him while trying to act cool, nonchalant, disinterested. In truth, she had felt an intensity toward him that gave her the tunnel vision of a drill. She had known from their mutual friend that Peter was an accomplished musician, a classical guitarist, who had trained as a luthier and had a workshop where he made guitars, violins, and other stringed instruments for world-class musicians, famous and unknown. Lexie had never met anyone who did anything like that. She was impressed.

Tonight, Lexie thought, Peter would be the beneficiary of the lust being propagated from the neighboring table. Not that her and Peter's sex life needed any help; they'd been together only a year and a half. In three months they would be married.

Lexie searched the room for her best friend, Amy Hagan, the school nurse. She found her near the front at one of the other orphan tables (as the teachers privately called them). Amy, who unlike Lexie could sit firm as a turtle through hours-long meetings, was actively listening to Don McClear, her head tilted to one side, her lips parted into a sweet, Southern smile. No matter how much Lexie thought-shouted her name—
Amy! Amy! Amy! Amy!—
Amy could not be deterred from obedience.

Lexie turned to the back of the room and caught the wickedly, sly eye of the first friend she'd made at Ruxton, the eighty-year-old English teacher, Dot Harrison. Dot, like Lexie, could barely contain herself in her skin through meetings, lectures, and speeches. In her advanced age, she had grown tired of formalities and intolerant of meaningless obligations. Dot liked to put on her tap shoes and dance at parties. She cursed so much among faculty that Lexie thought it had to be a mild case of Tourette's.

With her puckered eyes honed into Lexie's, Dot lifted her right hand, extended her middle
fuck-you
finger, and false-casually scratched the barely perceptible wisps of hair on her head. It was a gesture intended to make Lexie laugh, and it did. Silently. She looked away before Dot did something even more outrageous, and then caught the caustic glare of Janet Irwin seated at an Honor Society table. Janet had been at Ruxton for thirty-five years and might as well have been running the place. She lived on campus, had never married, didn't appear to date or leave the campus for
any reason, and never spoke of anything that wasn't school-related. Janet gave the single, swift nod of her head that never failed to make Lexie feel small, ridiculous, and adolescent. Lexie smiled at her, the smile wasn't returned, and Lexie looked away.

Ethan Waite, a senior Lexie had been counseling every Wednesday afternoon, loped across the dining hall. Where had he been all this time? Lexie watched as Ethan took the empty seat beside the wolf-eyed man. So her pursuer was his father. Daniel Waite. Lexie had heard much about Daniel Waite during her three years at Ruxton; he was one of the school's biggest donors. But because she didn't deal with that stuff—the schmoozing, the check collecting—Lexie had never before seen this particular famous alumnus. Lexie assumed that the texting woman seated on the other side of Ethan was Mrs. Waite.

As far as she knew from her sessions with Ethan, his parents were married.
Married.
Something she would be, soon enough, if she could only work out the final details of the wedding. Lexie needed chairs. Seventeen elegant chairs for the seventeen musicians who were to play at her December 12 wedding. Lexie examined the old-fashioned wooden chairs beside her . . . nah, too schoolroom-looking.

Lexie flicked her eyes over to Mr. Waite and damn if he wasn't still staring straight at her. She startled a bit and he laughed and winked. She quiet-laughed, too. Was this flirting? Was she actually flirting with this probably-married man? Since the day she first met Peter, Lexie hadn't flirted with anyone. The romance had been so easy, so fun, that she had ceased to think about, or even notice, any of the other attractive people in the world. Lexie had been so convinced of the perfection of their pairing that she moved in with
Peter after only five weeks of dating. Sometimes Lexie stood in the center of his cottagey two-bedroom house (her house, once they were married), thought of Peter, and wondered how she was so lucky that she had ended up here.

When she was a kid living on the second floor of a rickety apartment building with open-air hallways in San Leandro, California, Lexie had never dreamed she'd have the life she had now. After school, she often sat on the living room couch, avoiding the tiny craters left by her father's fallen cigarettes, and flip through catalogues, imagining that the rooms she saw were rooms she lived in. That the people she saw were people she knew. That the life they appeared to be living was her life. It seemed impossible that anyone could exist in a world that tidy, organized, and lovely.

Don McClear's speech had come to an end. People clapped and shifted in their seats. Many of the parents pulled out their cell phones; chins and necks accordianed inward, shoulders slumped toward tiny screens. Lexie tried to ignore the married Mr. Waite. Why even make eyes at someone like that when what she had already was so beautifully ideal. Who wanted anything to do with a man who was sleazy enough to flirt while his wife sat right beside him? Lexie took the salad she hadn't eaten and slid it to Magnus who was known on campus as the Human Garbage Disposal. She refused to look at Mr. Waite again.

Until an hour and a half later when he stopped her on the great lawn. It was seconds after the sun had dipped below the horizon and everything was cast with a sumptuous orangey light.

“Miss James,” he said. “Daniel Waite.”

“Are you Ethan's dad?” Lexie asked disingenuously. She put out her hand to shake. Mr. Waite held on, forcing Lexie to pull away.

“Yes, Ethan pointed you out to me in the dining hall. You're the only person at this school my son finds worthy of a mention.” Daniel Waite winked as if there were some hidden meaning Lexie should understand.

“Really? Why?” Ethan had loads of great teachers this semester. He was taking English from Dot who, on the first day of every class, promised to tap-dance to any poem written by a student in perfect iambic pentameter.

“I think he's honestly grateful for your help with the college application mess. I'm grateful, too.” Daniel Waite put one hand on his heart as if Lexie had done more than simply counsel the boy.

“It's my job and he's a pleasure.” Lexie thought it was mentally ill the way these students and their parents put so much effort and money into chasing college admission. Some of the kids ended up at UNH, UVM, or even Framingham, all fine schools, but they could have made it there without the SAT tutors, honors calculus, and college application coaches costing thousands. And the ones who went to MIT, Dartmouth, Harvard, and Yale, well, you could bet they'd have made it into those schools without the booster system set up by their overanxious parents. In Lexie's mind, it came down to this: Overachievers overachieved no matter how you backed them up. And no matter how hard you tried, you couldn't create an overachiever out of someone who'd rather snowboard than study for an exam. Even when you sent that child to Ruxton.

Mitzy, Lexie's mother, could never remember the name of the school where Lexie got her master's degree: Tufts. Toots, her mother called it once during Lexie's weekly phone call. They both laughed at the time and Lexie didn't bother to set her straight. Mitzy quickly moved on to a story about the other waitresses at
Heidi Pies, where Mitzy had worked for as long as Lexie was alive, and the fuss people were making over the new menu.

“Well, I appreciate it,” Mr. Waite said. “And I have to admit I'm glad he's anxious enough to get an early start.” He took a step closer to Lexie. His square face was the color of caramel in the dimming light.

“Yeah, it's always good to start early.” Was this really what Mr. Waite wanted to talk about? He was staring like he wanted to eat her. And although Lexie felt the thrill of being desired, she couldn't help but think of Mrs. Waite somewhere on the lawn, probably looking for her husband. While Peter sat at home waiting for Lexie.

“Do you and Mr. James live on campus?”

“Mr. James?” Lexie thought of her father, the only Mr. James she'd ever known. Her friends had called him that the rare times he was home and awake when they were over. If anyone called her mother Mrs. James, Mitzy pointed out that she and Lexie's father had never married and her last name was Smith. The embarrassment of this dimmed each year as Lexie got older and more and more friends came from two-name families.

“Your husband.”

“Oh!” Lexie laughed. “Mr. James is my father.”

Mr. Waite laughed, too. “So you're not married?” His head dropped slightly, his blue eyes dialed into Lexie's.

“Engaged.” Lexie held up her left hand with the antique silver scrollwork ring that had belonged to Peter's grandmother. It suddenly felt puny and cheap.

“Congratulations.”

“Thank you.” Lexie shifted her weight. “How long have you and Mrs. Waite been married?”

“Mrs. Waite and I are no longer married.” Daniel Waite's ringed left hand flickered against his thigh like a cat's twitching tail.

“Ethan never mentioned you were divorced,” Lexie said, carefully. The school made it their business to know the standard goings-on in each student's home. As far as Lexie knew, Ethan Waite's file contained no news of this sort.

“Separated. It's currently a little undercover. We're waiting until Ethan goes off to college before we let him in on everything.”

“Oh, I see.” Lexie tried to suppress the smile that instinct insisted was the correct response to someone who was smiling at her the way Mr. Waite was now.