Chapter 61

When Paul Olson-Stone chose to go to Sarah Llewellyn College in Upstate New York, he chose it for a number of reasons. It was far enough away from Minnesota to be a little bit exotic. It was an hour outside Ithaca, the notion of which didn’t trigger his social anxiety disorder the way bigger cities like Buffalo and Saint Paul did. Also, he would be going to college and living with six of his cousins, one of whom he suspected he was already in love with.

He hadn’t anticipated that, a week after arriving, he would be in love with two more of his cousins and having a panic attack right outside the Holland Tunnel.

“Have any of you ever driven in New York City before?” He was sitting in the driver’s seat of his van in front of the pumps at a filling station and had just discovered that, every time he reached for the ignition key, his mind filled with the same overwhelming dread he felt when too many people were asking him questions at once.

“Didn’t you and Holly drive this thing all the way from Minnesota?” Artemis asked.

“We did, but we stayed on the interstates,” said Sun-hwa. Artemis was the cousin Paul had been in love with since before he’d even heard of Sarah Llewellyn College. Sun-hwa was the first cousin he’d fallen in love with this month. They’d been friends online forever, but Paul hadn’t given the idea of romance between them any serious consideration until they’d spent the first of four days on the road together. He’d always known she was whip-smart with a wicked sense of humor, but she was also a born-again Christian from an insular suburb of Saint Paul whose parents didn’t even let her use social media. Her father and Paul’s had three hour-long conversations that basically boiled down to Sun-hwa’s father refusing to believe Paul wasn’t some perverted rapist waiting to get his hands on her. Paul’s father had eventually given up in exasperation, but Sun-hwa had talked her father into letting her ride with Paul anyway.

Paul was less sure about Holly than he was about Sun-hwa even though they were the same person. As soon as they got on the campus of Sarah Llewellyn College, Sun-hwa introduced herself to everyone as Holly and everyone took her at her word that Holly was her name. Holly was outgoing and lively where Sun-hwa had been reserved and subversive. Holly was openly fun and sexy while Sun-hwa had climbed into the van in Minnesota layered up so that only her face and hands were uncovered and then taken the opportunity of their long ride to gradually reveal her beauty with each clothing change. Sun-hwa had been Paul’s friend in a unique and powerful way. Holly was friends with everybody.

When it became clear that no one else was going to speak, Artemis offered. “I could try if you like.”

“Have you driven in any city before?” Carl asked. Paul was not in love with Carl who Holly had speculated might be manic-depressive if he manifested his depression by being a self-pitying asshole.

“All over Cairo, plus little bits in Nairobi, Lagos, Rio de Janeiro, and Sao Paulo ... oh, and Riyadh, but just the once. Mom was pissed.” Artemis climbed past the other passengers in the back of the van.

Paul undid his seatbelt and slid out of the driver’s seat. “Go for it.” Once out of the van, he ran around the back and got in on the far side, moving quickly because he had an immediately irrational fear that, if he tried to make Artemis sit still for too long, she might just drive off.

In fact, she was still adjusting the mirrors and talking to Churchmouse when Paul got back in. “You’ve got the directions still?”

Churchmouse held up the printout for visual inspection. Wesley Church-Stone, known as Churchmouse in spite of being a fairly boisterous person was the other cousin Paul had fallen in love with. It was probably a platonic love in that Paul didn’t think he’d ever had romantic feelings for another man and Churchmouse seemed pretty straight himself, but Churchmouse was an odd combination of the aforementioned boisterous and considerate. Twelve years ago, Wesley had taken every penny he had or could borrow and bought a sprawling old farmhouse and turned it into the Ramshackle. Doing so had required brokering a deal between Sarah Llewellyn College and the Stone Family Foundation, both of which had started out skeptical. He had a unique blend of entrepreneurial drive and intense distaste for modern society and had yoked one in service of the other. There were several “magnet colleges” around the country where Stones attended in large numbers, but they were usually highly competitive or geared towards the needs of wealthy students. Churchmouse had recognized a demand among his lower-income and dispossessed cousins for a similar college experience.

And while that was admirable, what had made Paul fall in love with him had started the first night at Sarah Llewellyn. Driving wide around cities and a torrential downpour had delayed their arrival until nearly midnight. Not only had Churchmouse helped them get enough of their belongings for the night with a minimum of drama and soaking, he’d sat up first with them, then just with Paul, working through the slow acclimation process that usually took a half dozen meetings or more, and recognizing Paul’s condition well enough to say, “Don’t sweat it, Saint Paul. I can talk enough for any five people. Just stick by me and I’ll fill all the conversational silences.”

And he’d followed through, somehow consistently showing up at Paul’s elbow just as the first hints of a panic attack started to set in, smoothly addressing or diverting questions or sometimes just playing the clown to divert attention away while Paul regained his equilibrium. His unpredictable bursts of energy which had seemed alarming at first soon became welcome in service of Paul having a bit of breathing room.

And now, just one short week after arriving, Paul felt like his housemates were actually his friends - except maybe for Carl who didn’t seem to get along with anyone but Churchmouse.

“Are you sure about this?” Daisy leaned over and stage-whispered as Paul settled onto the bean bag couch next to her. His van was made for hauling and had no seats, so the Ramshackles had hauled a mismatched set of furniture into it and lashed it all together so that it barely shifted when the van turned.

“I’m more sure about Artemis driving than I was my own ability to manage it.” Paul shrugged.

Daisy gave him a sympathetic look. Once it came out that she was studying pharmacy science and taking adderall, Paul had opened up about his own prescriptions - just adderall now, but Xanax and eventually BuSpar for most of his teen years. Even Churchmouse hadn’t heard Paul’s diagnoses.

“Automatic transmission, cool. I can do this...” Artemis muttered in a way that carried through the van.

“Please don’t get me killed before I get to go to a party full of people who just saw Hamilton and pretend I was there,” pleaded Vanessa. When Carl made a noise of protest, she added, “If I don’t actually say I was there, it’s not lying. It’s acting.”

“You’d have better luck convincing them you were in Hamilton.” Carl grumbled. Paul had already heard Carl’s rant about how Nick’s block of seats was going to be a sea of white faces and Vanessa’s counterargument that Carl didn’t know anything about who was getting tickets apart from the fact that no one from Sarah Llewellyn was and wasn’t looking forward to hearing them argue again.

Artemis might not be looking forward to hearing them argue again either because she chose that moment to pull out of the gas station parking lot onto the eight-lane Holland Tunnel approach. She drove smoothly enough for about fifteen seconds, then said, “Hey, Saint Paul, do you have EZPass?”

“I ... don’t know what that is,” Paul admitted.

“No, no, cash lane,” said Churchmouse. When Artemis didn’t turn immediately, he pointed left. “Cash lane!”

“Cool,” Artemis jerked the wheel left, cutting across traffic. Somebody honked at them or possibly for the sheer joy of honking. With no windows in the back of the van, Paul couldn’t see what was happening, just brace for impact.

Nothing hit them and the van veered right again to get behind another car paying its toll. Artemis said, “So, about this cash toll ... who’s got the cash?”

Paul scrambled to get up from the chair which seemed determined to keep him sitting there. “Shit, I’ve got it. Coming.”

Vanessa and Holly worked together to lever Paul up out of the chair, propelling him upward quickly enough that he had to slam his hand against the van roof to avoid braining himself. He muttered another profanity and stumble-crawled far enough to hand Artemis a pile of singles. “Cash ... for the toll.”

“Cool, you want a receipt?” Artemis asked.

The question momentarily froze Paul. Churchmouse stepped in, “Get one just in case. Maybe some creative accountant will find a way to use it as a tax writeoff.”

Paul stayed on his knees in case he hadn’t given Artemis enough cash, but it proved more than enough. As they passed through the toll booth, Churchmouse gave a whoop. “New York City, here we are!”

“Just in time to pretend to go see Hamilton,” added Carl. “Unless we can convince Nick Coyle to fill some diversity quotas.”

“Carl...” Vanessa objected.

“I’m just saying, whatever he needs, we’ve got it - two black folk, two Asians...” Carl persisted.

“One and a half black folk,” Vanessa reminded him. When Paul had helped her read lines for an upcoming audition, she’d mentioned that her father was white as part of explaining why her last name was the improbably-hyphenated Stone-Blackstone.

“Whatever Artemis is...” Carl went on.

“Still Egyptian-Persian,” Artemis reminded him.

“And two white folk,” Churchmouse filled in.

“Two and a half,” Vanessa protested.

“I’m sure Nick’s got all the white people he needs,” Carl said.

To Paul, they all seemed hopelessly exotic - a word he’d learned not to use in front of Carl, but one he couldn’t help thinking when he looked around at his cousins. The farm town he’d grown up in had been close to all white and the skin tones in his graduating class had ranged from alabaster to ruddy. His most “ethnic” friend had been fourth-generation Italian-American.

He’d made the mistake of telling Carl there hadn’t been any gay people in his senior class either and Carl had gleefully explained that anyone who was gay in his little white-bread Bible-thumping cow-town would be so far in the closet, their ass would be sticking out into Narnia.

Paul spent a slowly decreasing, but still significant amount of his time worrying that he would do or say something racist, homophobic, or generally ignorant. He’d never had any bad experiences with people of other races, but he’d had so few interactions with anyone who wasn’t white, that might just be for lack of opportunity. Still, he’d initially been afraid that his difficulty in dealing with Carl had been because Carl was both black and gay. But living in the Ramshackle surrounded by some of the most beautiful and ethnically varied people he’d ever met who also seemed to have issues with Carl made him feel a little better about it.

Finding out that Sun-Hwa was beautiful had been a bit of a shock. He’d known her through the family’s internal forum for years, but the only picture of her he’d ever seen was a small avatar of a pudgy, moon-faced twelve year-old with glasses and braces. Even for the first few hours of driving, she’d been bundled into so many layers and those topped off with an ill-fitting hoodie, it had been impossible to guess what she really looked like.

They’d been halfway across Wisconsin when she announced she needed to change and, when he offered to find a rest stop, asked that he just keep his eyes forward. When she returned to her seat, she was wearing jeans and a long-sleeve white t-shirt with Korean writing and a cross surrounded by stylized flames on it, hair down around her shoulders. Even though she wasn’t revealing any more skin than she had been and the shirt hung loose on her, it was no longer possible to imagine she looked like the girl in the picture.

Each morning they got back on the road, she was dressed differently and each time, Paul found a new way she was beautiful. And the longer they drove, the more she opened up. By the time they passed into New York state, Paul wished they could skip college and keep driving like that forever, but while the Stone Family Foundation might pay for them to go to school for as long as they wanted, it had no provisions for endless road trips.

For most of the road trip, Paul had completely forgotten about the cousin Artemis with whom he had been secretly, madly in love for years. They’d barely spoken online, but like thousands of other people, Paul had followed her on Instagram since she’d been living in some remote part of Egypt with one of her mothers and when he’d suggested he might attend Sarah Llewellyn, she’d answered that he “totally should.” Still, meeting her in person had been shocking. As beautiful as she was in still pictures, they couldn’t capture the vibrant energy that poured off of her.

In an odd way, Artemis’s presence made it easier for Paul to meet his other cousins. It was practically an article of faith on the family’s internal forums that the Stones had no problem marrying across races or nationalities, but they always bred pretty. Living with Artemis and Sun-Hwa, Vanessa and Daisy seemed chosen to showcase that. Daisy was “mostly Chinese” and Vanessa had a mixed heritage that gave her kinky black hair, full lips, and freckles on mocha-colored skin. Either was beautiful enough that they would probably have struck Paul dumb if he hadn’t recently been through that with Artemis and drawn out of it by her and Churchmouse.

As they exited the Holland Tunnel into a traffic circle, Artemis called out, “Which exit? Downtown?”

“No, we’re going uptown. Exit three.” Churchmouse gestured and Artemis smoothly changed lanes, then changed again and exited the circle as quickly as she’d joined it. Soon, they were on Sixth Avenue, heading north.

“The hotel is just a straight shot up Sixth from here.” Churchmouse sat back for a second, then bounced up and turned around to look into the back of the van. “Remember, once we get to the hotel, we only have one room reserved for two people. Don’t all come running up to the counter with your luggage. Vanessa and I will check in and you can all get your stuff upstairs like one at a time.”

“Why you and Vanessa?” Carl asked.

“Because it’s my credit card and Vanessa knows how to act,” Churchmouse answered.

“What if they stop us when we’re trying to get our stuff in?” Paul asked.

Vanessa patted him on the knee. “The place is going to be packed with Stones. We could parade an elephant through there and the staff wouldn’t have time to notice.”

The notion of a lobby packed with people Paul didn’t know personally was far from reassuring. He lowered his head and forced his breathing to remain even. Sun-hwa laid a hand on his shoulder and whispered in his ear, “It’ll be all right. We can go up together.”

“We’re only supposed to bring up one sleeping bag at a time.” Paul pointed out.

“You and I can go together, I promise,” Sun-hwa smiled at him.

Paul didn’t remember that from Churchmouse’s directions, but no one corrected Sun-hwa’s words, so he chose to believe them. Besides, as soon as they reached the hotel, there was a different problem. The van was too tall for guest parking.

Before Paul could panic much, hotel security was guiding them to go around to the vendor entrance and promising to call ahead. Churchmouse and Vanessa got out to go check in and had already texted the room number by the time they’d parked. A hotel worker showed them to the freight elevator, invalidating their plan to go up individually, but also making it unnecessary. They made it to their room on the eleventh floor without incident.

Churchmouse looked around at them. “All right, just a reminder to what we agreed. Nobody can bring anybody else back here. We’re already above max capacity. If you find a hook-up, go to their place. Don’t drink so much you puke. If do you drink so much you have to puke, puke yourself out before you come back. Vanessa and I have the only room keys. We’ll hand them off if we’re not coming back tonight. If you get them and you’re not coming back tonight, find somebody else to hand it off to. If you can’t find anybody with the key and there’s nobody in the room when you’re ready to go to bed, go to the front counter and tell them you’re either Wesley or Vanessa depending on which one you look more like, but then you’ve got to stay in the room for the night or this whole thing could go pear-shaped.”

“Well, as long as that’s the only way things can go pear-shaped...” Paul said dryly.

“I don’t look like a Wesley or a Vanessa!” Carl protested.

They argued a bit over the details of the plan before Churchmouse said, “All of this is just contingency planning. I’ll probably be in here tonight and, if I’m not, I’ll give Carl the key, all right?”

Paul wasn’t sure if everyone agreed or just wanted to get to the party already, but nobody argued and soon they were loading into the normal elevator and heading downstairs.

A young, smiling blonde woman who was beautiful enough to be a Stone but turned out to only work for Nick met them as they exited. “Wesley Church-Stone?”

Churchmouse waved and said, “Churchmouse is fine.”

“All right Churchmouse, I’m Julia. Are you all students at Sarah Llewellyn College?” Julia asked.

Churchmouse considered them all just long enough to be funny, then said, “Yes, we are.”

“Great, if you’ll just hang out for a few minutes, Nick has been looking forward to meeting you. He is a little pressed for time tonight, but I can give you a half hour at the main table as soon as the current group clears out,” said Julia.

Paul was sure Carl or someone else would object, but nobody said anything until Churchmouse said, “Yeah, that’d be great.”

“I should have changed,” said Artemis as soon as Julia had stepped away.

“You look great,” Sun-hwa promised her.

“Yeah, but I’m supposed to look absolutely ravishing when I meet Nick so that he immediately proposes to me and then goes to absurd lengths to win me over when I say ‘no,’” said Artemis.

“You’re going to start saying ‘no’ now?” Daisy asked.

“Not to that, just to marrying him. A girl likes to be pursued before she puts a ring on it,” said Daisy.

Paul thought he knew what they were joking about, but Artemis was so casual about it, he started to doubt himself. He knew that people thought Nick was sleeping with a lot of people and Artemis had referred to herself as “100% pansexual,” but after asking her what that word meant, he didn’t think pansexuality necessarily included promiscuity.

Regardless, a few seconds later, Artemis was running off, “Oh my God, Jazz!” She came back with another beautiful young woman in tow. “Everybody, this is my half-sister, Jazz. Jazz, these are my housemates.” She then rattled off their names too rapid-fire for anyone to follow.

Jazz gave them a friendly, little wave that implied she was accustomed to Artemis’s approach to introductions and might actually meet them later, then turned to her half-sister. “When did you get to New York? I didn’t see anything about you coming here.”

“I didn’t post anything because I know like a million people who are going to be here this weekend and I didn’t want to steal the limelight from Nick,” said Artemis. “Have you met him?”

“Met him? He owns a chunk of my company now ... and I helped him plan his July 4th party,” said Jazz.

Artemis’s eyes widened. “Oh wow, you know him? You’ve got to introduce me!”

Julia reappeared at that moment. “Actually, if you’ll come this way, Nick would like to meet all of the Sarah Llewellyn Stones at his table.”

Artemis looked at her. “Oh, right. Jazz, after I meet him, you still need to introduce me to him so he knows we’re sisters.”

“Or you could drop it into conversation at dinner,” Jazz pointed out, but when Artemis pouted, recanted. “Fine, I’ll make sure he knows he should dance with you tomorrow, but you have to finally keep that promise to model for me.”

“I will, I promise,” Artemis said as she let herself be led towards the dining room. Paul followed closely, doing his best to stay insulated at the center of his group of friends. The conversation from the room ahead of them sounded like a near-constant roll of thunder warning of a massive storm. Paul had been to a few Stone family weddings in Minnesota and Wisconsin, but those had been for people his parents actually knew. They had been fairly staid affairs, nothing like the wild, world-changing events family scions like Nick were said to throw.

As he peeked out from behind his wall of more interesting people, Paul scanned the room for familiar faces. Ever since committing to go to Sarah Llewellyn, he’d started following the family’s tastemakers on social media in earnest. Generally speaking, the rich, powerful, and popular Stones didn’t spend a lot of time on the family’s internal forum, but did have an active presence on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

As a result, he recognized or thought he recognized a fair number of faces. In the last few months, Paul had discovered that he really enjoyed studying the pictures posted by the upper-crust members of his family. It made him feel like part of something big and important. The Stone Family weren’t just incredibly rich, they were also remarkably generous. Every day, he saw his cousins in far-flung corners of the world building bridges or immunizing people or doing something to help others. Paul could see himself doing that sort of thing, but he could also see himself resenting it. There was certainly valour in standing in a rising creek to help place sandbags around an orphanage, but you still wound up covered in mud. He was proud of the good work his family did, but suspected he might lack the charitable attitude needed to do it in the proper spirit.

The first person he recognized on sight was his cousin Jessalyn from New Orleans. Jessalyn had been a big presence on the family forums until earlier this summer when she’d headed out to Iowa to stay with Reggie and his wife Mya and become a subject of much speculation. She was also a minor Instagram celebrity who, besides being beautiful, was constantly raising money for ... something. As she rose from the main table where Nick was sitting, she seemed to recognize Paul and made a beeline for him. Paul stumbled under her gaze and was just about to speak when Jessalyn called out, “Artemis, is that you?”

It turned out that Artemis had stayed with Jessalyn for Mardi Gras the year before. Paul had known that, had even discovered Jessalyn’s Instagram account because of that trip. Of course Jessalyn hadn’t been coming to greet him. She must know like half the people here better than she did him.

That thought had barely crossed Paul’s mind when Artemis did her rapid-fire introduction of the Ramshackle Stones. Jessalyn looked around at them. “Wow, I think I know at least half of you from the family forums. I’ve been thinking about applying to Sarah Llewellyn for when I get back from the Grand Tour next year. You sound like you’re having so much fun up there.”

“You definitely should ... and the sooner the better. We don’t know how many rooms are going to be open at the Ramshackle next year. It might only be three or four.” Daisy elbowed Churchmouse, “Right?”

“Right. Even if we can’t get you a room at the house, you should definitely check the college out. Great teachers, beautiful country.” Churchmouse said. If he’d been anyone else, Paul would have thought he sounded cautiously enthusiastic, but he’d never heard Churchmouse be cautiously anything. By the puzzled looks on their faces, Daisy and Vanessa seemed to pick up on that, too. But a few seconds later, they were at the table and Churchmouse was back to his exuberant self, pumping Nick’s hand and introducing everyone as they sat.

To Paul, what was most remarkable about Nick was that he wasn’t that remarkable. If they’d gone to school together, he might have been a popular member of the track team, but he stood almost a head shorter than the blonde cowboy on his left. Before he came east, Paul couldn’t ever remember thinking of a man as beautiful, but he was starting to wonder about Carl’s suggestion that gay people in rural Minnesota would be deep in the closet. Could Paul himself be so deeply in the closet that he hadn’t known he was gay?

That thought had only a moment to settle before Verity Ferrari-Stone, Pilar Rodriguez-Stone, and Sarah Masterson-Stone introduced themselves. If Paul was gay, he wasn’t gay enough to fail to recognize the desireability of these three very different women. If he’d been on the fence about whether it was worth it to get filthy rich (and he had been - it seemed like a very exposed position), the idea that he would be surrounded by such beautiful women as Verity, Pilar, and Sarah tipped the scales.

Of course, he reflected, he was already surrounded by beautiful women. He’d come here with Artemis, Daisy, Vanessa, and Holly (who he was determined to call Holly in front of people. He might not understand the name change, but he would respect it.) Of course, being surrounded was nice, but Pilar had introduced herself as Nick’s girlfriend and Paul was pretty sure that meant Nick got to have have sex with her. He would consider himself incredibly lucky to have sex with any woman at this table considering that he had like zero experience in that department.

“I’ve really been wanting to talk to you about the Ramshackle,” Nick said once they were all sitting. “I sort of set up the Loft to be a communal living experience for me and my friends and it’s working out pretty well, but I don’t have to worry about whether it’s self-sustaining. I’d love to pick your brain about how you keep it going.”

“Uh, sure. Now?” Churchmouse sounded a bit poleaxed.

Nick seemed to take pity on Churchmouse and said, “I don’t want to ambush you the minute you guys walk in the door. If you’re willing, we can set aside a time to go through the details.”

“Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I bought the place twelve years ago for a hundred seventy-two thousand dollars and started fixing it up. We had seven rooms available by the first year. I found seven cousins to join me, so we wound up subdividing one of the rooms.” Churchmouse said more or less in one breath.

“Great, who here has been with you the longest?” Nick filled in.

Churchmouse looked around the table. “That would be ... Carl. He’s one of three returning seniors. The other two might be here, but they didn’t come with us.”

Carl held up a hand in a small wave. “Carl Blackstone. I study sociology with a focus on economic and social justice.”

Nick’s eyes widened fractionally. “It’s great to meet you. I’ve been reaching out to the Blackstone branch of the family. I don’t know a lot about the family history, but it seems like you guys have gotten the short end of a lot of sticks. I’m trying to get Mathilde Bhatt-Blackstone onto the board of my charity, but she’s got a lot on her plate in Angola and isn’t sure she wants to throw in with a bunch of white suburban dilettantes. How involved are you in family politics?”

“Probably not as much as I should be...” Carl seemed disarmed by the conversational turn. “I...”

“But you do have some opinions about Mathilde Bhatt-Blackstone, don’t you? I’m pretty sure we’ve talked about her,” said Vanessa in a too-innocent tone people only used when they were delivering a particularly juicy backstabbing.

Carl glared daggers at her “I ... think she’s doing great work on clean water in Angola, but I mostly remember her for her work with the Southern Poverty Law Center. She left a real void when she emigrated away.”

“I can imagine. What are you studying now?” Nick asked.

“We just got back from summer break, but I’ve been collecting research material for my senior thesis on lynching as a tool of white terrorists in the Jim Crow South,” said Carl.

“My first cousin Inez is a family historian. You two should probably talk,” offered Pilar.

Nick winced. “Were the Stones involved in any lynchings?”

“None ... that I’ve read about, certainly not en masse. The Patriarch was accused of selling weapons to the Confederates, but...”

“But found innocent,” Vanessa filled in.

“Of the weapons charge. He did pay a significant fine for selling them textiles. One in ten Confederate uniforms were made of cotton bought from William James Stone, buh!” The last word came out as more of an exclamation as Carl held up a hand to stop Vanessa from interrupting him. “But, that cotton was sitting in an Atlanta warehouse and it probably would have rotted or been seized if our many-times-great grandfather hadn’t sold it.”

Nick looked over at Vanessa. “Are you studying history too?”

Vanessa shook her head. “I’m studying performing arts, but Carl and I used to be ballroom dance partners and we argued about this sort of thing all the time until he decided I was too white to really understand.”