Read Online The Inseparables by Stuart Nadler - Free Book Online Page A

lined with photographs of the graduated students who had gone on to become things like Navy SEALs or television hosts. Electric fragrance fountains dispensed fake spruce into the air, and the whole place smelled like a shopping mall at Christmas. The tiny leather chair she occupied was clearly meant for a small child. Hartwell took students as young as six, taught them Mandarin, Shakespeare, and computer coding, and spat them back out into the world as currency traders or diplomats or white-collar criminals. Lydia was the rare thing here: a recent exile from a normal public education.
    She snuck her phone from her back pocket, expecting the usual torrent of misery. This was how it had been this last week. They came every hour at least, a few dozen in total, all from anonymous addresses, nearly everyone with an obnoxious retort. Fuck girl, why aren’t you in my shower? Or: Please let me fuck you. Or else photos of their dicks. In the outside world this wouldn’t have been a blip. Pictures like this multiplied every hour, she knew, but at Hartwell, even the most timid prurience earned the biggest scandal. Some of the messages were surprisingly earnest. I think you’re really pretty. Or: I love natural breasts. She had tried, in those first panicked hours, to stanch the bleeding, writing every single person back. Please stop sharing this. Please delete this. The moment she realized that there wasn’t a soul at Hartwell who had not seen her topless, she was sick all over her bed.
    At the end of the corridor a set of doors swung open, and Lydia saw her mother coming down the hallway. Beside her was the headmistress. Lydia’s first instinct was to run to her mother. It surprised her to feel this. Boarding school was supposed to inculcate independence. Accelerate her becoming an adult. Separate her from her mother as painlessly as possible. She had pleaded to be allowed to come here. In Crestview, sending your child to boarding school was tantamount to admitting that you had stopped loving her enough to keep her around. It was not something you could readily confess at a dinner party. Lydia had lobbied hard, bombarded her mother with brochures. Look! The happy-looking people! The cavernous library! The grand-looking buildings! Appealing to her mother’s vanity, Lydia had shown off the statistic claiming that Hartwell produced an inordinate number of physicians. I could be just like you! As her mother got closer, Lydia fought to keep herself from crying. She had her phone hidden against the waistline of her pants. She worried about it buzzing, because every buzz, she knew, corresponded with another message from someone here. She began to shake. Mom, she managed. Mommy.
    The headmistress went directly past Lydia and toward her office without making eye contact. For a brief moment they were in the hallway together, Lydia and her mother, looking at each other, waiting for the office door at the end of the hall to close so that they could hug. The last time they’d seen each other was a month ago, on a visitors’ weekend. Lydia had taken the bus to Aveline and they’d eaten takeout Korean food by the fireplace. For the first time, Lydia had a vision of her future—a future in which she and her mother were adults together, something almost close to friends. After dinner her mother had tried to explain the status of her marriage, speaking in euphemisms about the difficulty of marital togetherness and about spousal cooperation and about the myth of matrimonial compromise and about Gwyneth Paltrow. Before Lydia left for school, they’d agreed to talk every night. Then, when that hadn’t worked out, they agreed on every third day, and then every weekend. She wasn’t sure why they had stopped talking. She wondered sometimes whether a daughter’s innate desire to admire her mother was like a kind of addiction you needed to break eventually. Or whether you got to a certain age and began simply to replace your mother with a