When Barrett asked her out that summer, however, for a picnic, she said yes without hesitating. Her main impetus, she had to admit, was that Tate so ardently loved Barrett. It was irresistible, at nineteen, to go on a date just to upset Tate. And, too, Chess was bored. There was nothing to do on Tuckernuck but read and play backgammon with her parents. Going on a picnic with Barrett was, at least, something different.
She drank too much; this was accidental. It was hot out on the water, Chess was thirsty, the beer was icy cold, and one beer begat the desire for another beer. The sickness caught her off-guard. It rolled over her like a wave. The ham sandwich Barrett had offered her had tasted funny, but she had eaten it to be polite. The spoiled sandwich and the diesel fumes and the motion of the boat and the beer had a cumulative effect: the nausea slapped her and she puked off the back of the boat. Barrett gave her a bottle of water to rinse her mouth and offered her a Life Saver. He initially seemed grossed out, though he quickly recovered and said something to the effect of, “Happens to the best of us.” But this didn’t help. Chess was ashamed. She had put on a mortifying show when all along she had considered herself superior to Barrett Lee. It was awful. She wanted off that boat.
Chess and her family departed from Tuckernuck when their two weeks were up, and at the end of August, Chess returned to Colchester. She would never forget the day that Barrett showed up out of the blue: October 18. It was the Platonic ideal of a Saturday in October in the state of Vermont. The sun was out, and the sky was a clear, piercing blue. It was sweater and apple-cider weather. Chess and her sorority sisters were selling beers and brats at the Colchester versus Colgate football tailgate. The tailgate was held on the field outside the stadium, which was ringed by maples and oaks that were ablaze with color. The field was swarming with drunk alumni and students from both universities, and young families from Burlington with their golden retrievers and towheaded toddlers.
Chad Miner, a minor god in SigEp, was the first one to tell Chess. “Somebody’s looking for you,” he said. “Some dude.”
“Really?” Chess said. She wanted Chad Miner to be the one looking for her. “Who is it?”
“Don’t know him,” Chad said. “He doesn’t go here.”
Next was Marcy Mills, from Chess’s expository writing class. She bought a sausage from Chess, then said, “Oh, by the way, there’s a guy wandering around here looking for you.”
“Who?” Chess said.
Marcy shrugged and zigzagged her brat with bright yellow mustard. “I didn’t know him. But I heard him asking someone else if he knew Chess Cousins. So I told him I knew you, and he asked if I knew where you were, and I said no. Because look at all these people!”
“Yeah,” Chess said. She moved the sausages perfunctorily along the grill, making sure they were browned. “What did he look like?”
“Blond,” Marcy said. “Cute.”
“Send him my way!” said Alison Bellafaqua, who was standing next to Chess at the keg, filling plastic cups with foamy Budweiser.
Chess still didn’t think that much about it. If she was thinking at all, it was of Luke Arvey, a guy she’d gone to high school with who now went to Colgate-but Luke was neither blond nor cute. Chess also had a second cousin on her father’s side-a Cousins cousin-who went to Colgate, but she hadn’t seen him since a family reunion the summer she was nine years old. She wouldn’t be able to pick him out of a crowd of two.
Then Ellie Grumbel and Veronica Upton approached Chess-they were both drunk already-and they said, in singsongy chorus, “Someone is looking for you!”
Now Chess was annoyed. “Who is it? Did he tell you his name?”
Alison Bellafaqua said, “Pull those babies off.” Meaning the brats. “The game starts in ten minutes and we have to get the cash box back…”
Her voice was drowned out by the marching band passing through the middle of the field, on its way to the stadium. The students from both schools were meant to follow it into the stands. Although it was hokey, Chess loved following the band into the game. She, like her mother, was a helpless rah-rah and a sucker for any kind of tradition. But she couldn’t follow the band today because of her beer-and-brat duties. Alison was right: They needed to shut the stand down and take the cash box back to the sorority house. They needed to hurry or they were going to miss kickoff.
Ellie Grumbel, Chess realized, was still standing there, swaying, threatening to fall over. She said, “I think he said his name was Bennett.”
Chess looked up in alarm. She got a bad feeling.
“He said he was from Nantucket,” Veronica said. “A friend of yours from Nantucket?”
“Is it Barrett?” Chess said. “Barrett Lee?”
She didn’t have to wait for a response because at the instant Chess said his name, she saw him through an opening in the crowd. Barrett Lee. Chess’s heart plummeted. He was wearing a navy turtleneck and a striped cotton sweater and jeans-it was weird, she thought, to see him in real clothes instead of a bathing suit and a T-shirt. He was alone as far as Chess could tell. He was scanning the crowd-for her-and what struck Chess was how utterly out of place he looked, despite his attempt at preppy college attire. What struck Chess was how pathetic it was that he had shown up-here, at her college!-without warning. She wanted to hide. She felt threatened. Not physically threatened, certainly; it was her way of life that seemed to be in danger. She wanted to watch the game; she wanted to participate in some postgame tailgating and catch up on the fun she had missed while stuck at the sorority sausage station. She wanted to change into her new jeans and her new top from J.Crew (purchased with a surprise hundred-dollar check from her father) and try again with Chad Miner at the twelve-keg SigEp party later. And she had a shitload of studying to do the next day and a paper to write, not to mention her standing Sunday night pizza date with her best friends, the two Kathleens. That was her weekend; it was perfect in its symmetry and balance between the social and the studious. She didn’t want-indeed, couldn’t handle-a disruption by the surprise appearance of Barrett Lee from Nantucket.
Her mother would be horrified; Chess knew this even as she was acting, and she prayed (a) for forgiveness and (b) that the heinous act she was about to commit would never be discovered.
She grabbed the cash box. “I’ll take this back to the house,” she told Alison.
“But wait,” Alison said. Alison was heavy and had long, thick black hair and fearsome eyebrows. “You’re leaving me to clean all this up?”
Chess was already yards away. “Can you?” she called over her shoulder. And with that, she was gone. She weaved and bobbed. There were too many people to flat-out run, but she was hurrying. Then she spied an opening. She ran with the cash box under her arm, around parked cars, over spread-out blankets weighted down with potato salad and six-foot subs. She thought of Jim Cross, the star running back for Colchester’s football team. She was Jim Cross! She thought, Barrett Lee! Why? What for? How? It was a glorious autumn Saturday. Summertime-Tuckernuck, the beach, bonfires, the fateful picnic-was long forgotten. Those things belonged in another season.
What was he doing here?