The Cave Dwellers, Christina McDowell [ap literature book list .TXT] 📗

the fuck did you just say to me?” Billy’s mouth is so close to Marty’s face he could lick him.

“I said some of us have to actually work to get into school instead of having daddy’s last name.”

Billy grabs Marty by the arms and slams his back against the wall. “Fuck you.” Then spits on the floor, walks over, and unbolts the safe room door. Before he walks out, he turns around. “Fucking virgin.” Then slams the door on them.

Stan, Chase, and Marty look at each other for a moment in silence.

“Why is he being so fucking sensitive?” Marty asks, trying to defuse the situation.

“Dude, that was so unnecessary—you scored a twenty-four hundred on your SATs and your parents are on the board of like every fucking charity in town.”

“Vhait, Billy’s dad isn’t famous. I don’t get it,” Stan says.

“He’s about to become the new secretary of defense, asshole,” says Chase.

“Oh right, well, hope he doesn’t blow us up.”

Billy walks down the long driveway out to his Ford pickup across the street. The cold wind strikes him as if he’s been pushed into an icy pool, knocking off his baseball cap; he catches it midair when he notices a black Suburban in front of the Mexican Embassy just a few doors down, a single man watching from the driver’s seat. Paranoid, Billy pulls the baseball cap low over his eyes, jumps in his truck, and peels off.

The first snow flurries swirl above thorn bushes surrounding the frame of the Montgomerys’ house.

“Fuck.” Billy pulls into the driveway. He can see his mother rinsing a wineglass through the window above the kitchen sink but can’t see his father. Even if he tried to sneak in through the basement and take the elevator up to his room, they might hear its creaking, climbing through the walls.

Billy, instead, decides to greet her in the kitchen, praying his father isn’t home.

“Where have you been?” Carol asks, the skin on her fingertips white and shriveled, hearing Billy’s footsteps behind her. “I texted you multiple times.” She doesn’t make eye contact with him.

“I was at Chase’s studying for midterms. I thought you had an event.”

“We didn’t go to the event. There was a military emergency.” The pressure of Carol’s hand on the sponge inside the wineglass causes it to pop and shatter. It slices her hand. She stumbles back.

“Mom.” Billy goes to her.

“I’m fine, it’s just a little glass.” She wraps her finger in a white dishtowel, her back against the corner cabinet. Billy sees her teeth are purple.

“Let me look,” he says, seeing blood streaming into the garbage disposal.

“I said, I’m fine.” Carol takes a strenuous breath.

“Did Dad say what kind of emergency it was?” Billy studies his mother’s body language.

“It doesn’t matter. Your father isn’t happy, but he doesn’t have time to not be happy, or to make sure that we’re happy.…” She is beginning to ramble.

“Mom, are you okay?” He is attuned to his mother’s vulnerability for the first time—the absence of his father, the soon-to-be absence of her last son, plunging her into invisibility—and it unnerves him. Carol’s days at the library are quiet, yet the solitude seems to be dissolving into an unexpected kind of cold loneliness.

“You need to confirm you are going to West Point, the press is making inquiries. That’s all your father wanted me to say to you.”

“Mom, I haven’t received an e-mail yet,” Billy replies, as if there’s still a chance he’ll be rejected.

Carol holds herself up with both hands resting on the counter behind her, pink blood seeping through the dishtowel. She locks eyes with him. “Tomorrow,” she says, “do not push your father to the edge.”

Billy throws her look away deep down with everything else he refuses to release inside of him, and leaves the kitchen. He leaps three steps at a time up the stairwell, a portrait of his grandfather, a D-Day WWII hero and survivor of a plane crash, watching as Billy runs for his room.

Settling on top of his comforter, he taps on his e-mail app.

Dear William Montgomery,

It is with great pleasure that I write to offer you admission to New York University…

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Cate sits at her desk, two rooms over from Doug. Another mass shooting has happened since the music festival and now—and in this moment, Cate asks the young intern to change the somehow monotonous breaking news to C-SPAN’s White House press conference. She needs to observe, learn, watch, wait, judge. Despite this cozy historical (hysterical?) office’s privacy, it is public terrain, although average pedestrians often forget that anyone can come knocking. The channel switches.

A knock at the outer office door. The new, overqualified, and wealthy inheritance-survivor intern turns the brass doorknob. A young female reporter stands in Hunter rain boots. She looks overwhelmingly groomed. She probably graduated from Brown.

“Hi, I’m Anne Price with the Washington Post, I’m looking for Cate Bartholomew. Is she available?”

The intern doesn’t speak, having signed a nondisclosure agreement upon getting hired. He simply turns around and walks to Cate’s desk. “Someone is here to see you from the Post.”

“What?” Cate says.

“She’s in the doorway.”

“Okay, well, ask her what she wants.” Cate’s heart starts to pound, belying her smooth outer appearance. Did they find out about the affair?

“She wouldn’t tell me,” the intern says.

Cate glares, beyond irritated but aware she can’t appear overly irritated or it might raise a red flag. She removes herself from her written document on behalf of Walter on behalf of Doug on behalf of the committee-of-white-men hearing on the Violence against Women Act on behalf of women, stands, and steps over to the reporter, who is not much older than she is.

“Can I help you?” Cate asks.

“Hi, Cate, I’m Anne from the Washington Post, do you have a minute?”

Cate feels as if the police have arrived at her front door with some horrific news. “What is this regarding?” She looks over her right shoulder, Doug’s legislative director peering from