Monica and her husband, who were celebrating their thirteenth wedding anniversary the night before school started, had a seven o’clock reservation at Mission Oak. You’ll never guess who was coming out as they were going in. Well, you might guess. It was Rebecca, Daniel Bennett, and . . . Morgan Coleman! Daniel was holding open the door for Rebecca and Morgan, and Morgan appeared to be giggling at something Daniel Bennett had said.
We had also heard, from Brooke, via Monica, who heard it from Dawn, who heard it directly from Gina, that Gina was in the process of breaking off her friendship with Daniel’s ex-wife, Veronica the Cheater, out of loyalty to Rebecca.
On the first day of the new school year the girls had all planned to walk to school together, those who weren’t on the bus route, which is how they’ve always done it. Always. Naturally Morgan was part of this plan. After the dressing-down at Brooke’s party, Katie was too. We made sure of it.
Then! Early on the first day of school something surprising happened! Morgan texted the rest of the girls on their group chat and said that she and Katie wouldn’t be walking with them after all. No explanation.
Esther had driven Audrey in from Plum Island. The buses are sometimes late on the first day, getting used to new routes, and Audrey didn’t want to take the chance of being tardy at the beginning of middle school, when there were so many new things to figure out: homerooms and lockers and the changing of classes and all of that. So it was Esther who told us that Alexa drove Morgan and Katie to school in her Jeep. And she didn’t leave them at the drop-off on Low Street the way parents were supposed to. No. She parked in the parking lot and she walked them to the front door of the school, in full view of everyone.
We had heard that Alexa had deferred Colby because she was so heartbroken about Cam. We had also heard that she’d never gotten into Colby in the first place. We’d heard that she’d been signed by a talent agent and was moving to L.A., and also that she was moving to New York City, and also that she was reapplying to colleges in the Midwest to get away from it all. We’d also heard she might be buying the Cottage with her Silk Stockings money and would be staying local to run it.
It was reported by Gina, who works for the upper elementary in the same building and was helping to usher the students off the buses, that Alexa said, really pretty loudly, to the girls, “Take care, bitches. You go kill it in sixth grade, okay?” Then the three of them did some sort of complicated secret handshake which Gina, when pressed, could not re-create.
And off Alexa went into her future, glowing with youth and beauty and vitality and fame, and something more complicated but somehow also beautiful—something that had to do with grief. She left in her wake a bunch of scrawny, clumsy middle school boys, fresh off the school bus, whose bar for beautiful women had been radically and irrevocably set very, very, very high.