Read Online The Children by Ann Leary - Free Book Online

at night. We felt a sort of entitlement to the place, based on our family connections. Whit and his brother Aaron had attended Holden, as did their father and grandfather before them. When they were old enough, Perry and Spin also boarded, but our grandfather had retired as headmaster when we were little. Joan couldn’t afford the tuition, and Whit, while generous in spirit, didn’t believe he should pay for the education of another man’s children.
    â€œI think you’re lucky,” he confided to Sally and me as we headed off to meet the school bus one day. I was just starting my freshman year of high school. Sally was a sophomore. “I always wanted to ride a bus and go to a public school.”
    â€œI know,” Sally had said to Whit. “We are lucky.”
    Ten minutes later, when the bus stopped at the intersection in front of the Holden campus, we saw three girls leaving the school’s dining hall. One of the girls said something to her friends, and we watched as they all collapsed into one another, suddenly sodden-legged and seizing, one of them apparently suffocating with mirth. We had met some of Perry’s friends from Holden—sometimes he brought them to the lake for the weekend—and these girls were cut from the same cloth. They were “lame,” according to Sally. I agreed. They all wore skirts and navy blazers. There was something ridiculously optimistic about the way their ponytails were set, something predictable about the athletic, slightly masculine cut of their thighs.
    â€œUgh,” said Sally. “Look how stupid they all are. Wait a minute—who’s this now?”
    A tousle-haired, suntanned boy was jogging toward the girls, and Sally practically sat on my lap to get a better look at him. We were both craning our heads for a last glimpse of the boy before the bus turned the corner.
    â€œI hate preppies,” Sally said.
    â€œMe, too,” I said.
    â€œI think it would be fun to meet some of them, though,” Sally added.
    â€œMe, too.”
    It was that Friday night that we first pedaled over to the campus on our bikes.
    Our mother and Whit didn’t know what we were up to, but eventually they found out, and Whit always expressed a certain pride in our escapades.
    â€œFor over a hundred and fifty years,” he’d announce to dinner guests, years later, “Holden students have found ways to sneak off campus to find mischief. Sally and Charlotte Maynard turned this tradition on its head by sneaking onto campus.”
    He didn’t know all the details. He didn’t know that Sally engaged in a series of affairs at Holden, not just with various members of the hockey and football teams but, one year, with a thirty-five-year-old history teacher named Ed Harriman. He didn’t know that I snuck into the library at night and looked at the old yearbooks. Or that I’d go into the dean’s office to read the students’ transcripts and disciplinary reports. Sometimes I’d wander into the nurse’s office to read the medical histories of the students. Some of these kids had serious issues: A girl I knew from grammar school was now anorexic; another was a cutter. One of the boys had been caught selling cocaine. For some reason, these reports gave me satisfaction.
    It was Everett who discovered our nocturnal education at Holden. I was riding my bicycle up Town Hill Road one autumn evening and he was returning from the Pale Horse. It was late, probably close to midnight. That road is dark—there are no streetlights on any of the Harwich roads—and it’s a long, steep climb. I saw Everett’s pickup drive past. He had glanced out his window to see what kind of nut would be out riding at that time of night. I think he was pretty surprised to see that it was me.
    Everett was at UConn and hadn’t paid much attention to Sally and me in the past year or so. But he recognized me that night, even