Blue Bloods

CHAPTER 4

The Duchesne School was housed in the former Flood mansion on Madison Avenue and Ninety-first Street, on prep-school row, across from Dalton and next to Sacred Heart. It was the former home of Rose Elizabeth Flood, widow of Captain Armstrong Flood, who had founded the Flood Oil Company. Rose's three daughters were educated by Marguerite Duchesne, a Belgian governess, and when all three were lost during the unfortunate sinking of the SS Endeavor during an Atlantic crossing, a heartbroken Rose returned to the Midwest and bequeathed her home to Mademoiselle Duchesne to found her dream institution.

Little had been done to transform the home into a school: among the prerequisites of the behest was that all the original finishes and furniture were to be carefully maintained, which made entering the building akin to walking backward in time. A life-size John Singer Sargent portrait of the three Flood heiresses still hung above the marble staircase, welcoming visitors into the magnificent double-height entryway. A Baroque crystal chandelier hung in the glass-windowed ballroom that overlooked Central Park, and Chesterfield ottomans and antique reading desks were arranged in the foyer. The shiny brass sconces were now wired for electricity, and the creaky Pullman elevator still worked (although only faculty were allowed to use it). The attic, a charming garret room, was transformed into an art center, complete with a printing press and a lithograph machine, and the downstairs drawing rooms housed a fully equipped theater, gym, and cafeteria. Metal lockers now lined the fleur-de-lis wallpapered hallways, and the upper bedrooms housed the humanities classrooms. Generations of students swore that the ghost of Mrs. Duchesne haunted the third landing.

Photographs of each graduating class lined the hallway to the library. Since The Duchesne School was formerly an all-girls institution, the first class of 1869 showed a group of six dour-faced maidens in white ball gowns, their names gracefully etched in calligraphy. As the years progressed, the daguerreotypes of nineteenth-century debutantes gave way to the black-and-white photographs of bouffant-haired swans of the 1950s, to the cheerful addition of long-haired gentlemen in the mid- 60s, when Duchesne finally went coed, leading to bright color photographs of winsome young women and handsome young men from the current crop.

Because, really, not much changed. The girls still graduated in white tea dresses from Saks and white gloves from Bergdorf's, and were presented with garlands of twined ivy on their heads as well as the requisite bouquet of red roses along with their diplomas, while the boys wore proper morning suits, complete with pearl-tipped pins on their gray ascots.

The gray tartan uniforms were long gone, but at Duchesne, bad news still arrived in the form of a canceled first-period class, followed by an announcement made over rustling static on the antiquated sound system: "Emergency chapel meeting. All students asked to report to the chapel at once."

Schuyler met Oliver in the hallway outside Music Hum. They hadn't seen each other since Friday night. Neither of them had broached the subject of encountering Jack Force outside The Bank, which was highly unusual, since the two of them dissected every social situation they experienced down to the minute detail. There was a studied coolness in Oliver's tone when he saw Schuyler that morning. But Schuyler was oblivious to his aloofness—she ran up to him immediately and linked her arm in his.

"What's going on?" she asked, tucking her head against his shoulder.

"Hell if I know." He shrugged.

"You always know," Schuyler pressed.

"All right—but don't say anything." Oliver melted, enjoying the feel of her hair against his neck. Schuyler was looking particularly pretty that day. She was wearing her long hair down for once, and she looked like a pixie in her oversized Navy peacoat, faded jeans, and broken-in black cowboy boots. He looked around nervously. "I think it has something to do with the crowd that was at Block 122 this weekend."

Schuyler raised her eyebrows. "Mimi and her people? Why? Are they getting expelled?"

"Maybe," Oliver said, savoring the thought.

Last year almost the entire crew team had been banished for illicit behavior on school grounds. To celebrate a win at the Head of the Charles, they had come back to school that evening and trashed the second-floor classrooms, leaving graffiti'd expletives on the walls and proof of their night— broken beer bottles, piles of cigarette stubs and several cocaine-laced dollar bills—to be found by the janitors the next morning. Parents petitioned the administration to change their decision (some thought expulsion too harsh, while others wanted nothing less than criminal charges filed). That the ringleader, a toothy Harvard-bound senior, was the Headmistress's nephew only added to the fire. (Harvard promptly recalled his admission, and the expelled coxswain was currently yelling himself hoarse at Duke.)

Somehow Schuyler didn't think that a simple case of bad behavior over the weekend was the reason the entire upper school was being called into the chapel that morning.

As there were only forty students in each class, the entire student body fit comfortably inside the room, taking their respective seats organized by grade: seniors and freshman in the front section separated by the aisle, juniors and sophomores respectively behind them.

The Dean of Students stood patiently by the podium in front of the altar. Schuyler and Oliver found Dylan in the back, at their usual perch. He had dark circles under his eyes, like he hadn't slept, and there was an ugly red stain on his button-down shirt and a hole in his black jeans. He was wearing his signature white silk Jimi Hendrix—style scarf around his neck. The other kids in the pew gave him a wide berth. He beckoned Schuyler and Oliver to his side.

"What's going on?" Schuyler asked, sliding into the pew.

Dylan shrugged, putting a finger to his lips.

Dean Cecile Molloy tapped the microphone. While she wasn't a Duchesne alum, like the headmistress, the head librarian, and almost the entire female faculty—and it was rumored that she'd been the recipient of a public school education—she had quickly acquired the velvet headband, knee-length corduroy skirts, and rounded vowels that marked the true Duchesne girl. Dean Molloy was a very adequate facsimile, and hence was very popular with the board of directors.

"Attention, please. Settle down, boys and girls. I have something very sad to share with you this morning." The dean inhaled sharply. "I am very sorry to inform you that one of our students, Aggie Carondolet, passed away this weekend."

There was a shocked silence, followed by a confused buzzing.

The dean cleared her throat. "Aggie had been a student at Duchesne since pre-kindergarten. There will be no classes tomorrow. Instead, there will be a funeral service in the chapel tomorrow morning. Everyone is invited to attend. Afterward, there will be a burial at Forest Hills in Queens, and a shuttle bus will be provided to take students who would like to attend, to the cemetery. We ask that you think of her family at this difficult time."

Another throat clearing.

"We have grief counselors on hand to assist those who need it. School will conclude at noon, your parents have already been informed of the early dismissal. After this meeting, please return to your second-period classes."

After a short invocation (Duchesne was nondenominational), and a devotion from the Book of Common Prayer, as well as a verse from the Koran and a passage from Khalil Gibran were read by the Head Boy and Head Girl, students streamed out with quiet trepidation, a low feeling of excitement mixed with nausea and real sympathy for the Carondolets. Nothing like this had ever happened at Duchesne before. Sure, they'd heard of other schools' problems—drunk driving accidents, child-molesting soccer coaches, senior boys date-raping freshmen girls, trenchcoat—wearing freaks wielding machine guns and gunning down half the student body, but those happened at other schools—on television, in the suburbs, or in public schools, with their metal detectors and clear vinyl backpacks. Nothing terrible was ever allowed to happen at Duchesne. It was practically a rule.

The worst thing that could ever happen to a student at Duchesne would be a broken leg skiing in Aspen or a painful sunburn from St. Barth's over spring break. So the fact that Aggie Carondolet had died—in the city no less just shy of her sixteenth birthday, was almost unfathomable.

Aggie Carondolet? Schuyler felt a twinge of sadness, but she didn't know Aggie, who had been one of the tall, pinched-looking blond girls who surrounded Mimi Force, like courtiers around their queen.

"You okay?" Oliver asked, squeezing Schuyler's shoulder. Schuyler nodded.

"Wow, that's heavy, man. I just saw her Friday night," Dylan said, shaking his head.

"You saw Aggie?" Schuyler asked. "Where?"

"Friday. At The Bank."

"Aggie Carondolet was at The Bank?" Schuyler asked skeptically. That made as much sense as Mimi Force being spotted shopping at J.C. Penney. "Are you sure?"

"Well, I mean, she wasn't technically at The Bank, but outside, you know, where everyone smokes downstairs, in the alley next to Block 122," Dylan explained.

"What happened to you?" Schuyler said. "We never saw you again after midnight."

"I, uh, met somebody," Dylan admitted, with a sheepish grin. "It's no big deal."

Schuyler nodded and didn't pry.

They walked out of the chapel, past Mimi Force, who was standing in the middle of a sympathetic circle of friends. "She'd just gone out for a smoke …" they overheard Mimi say, dabbing at her eyes. "Then she disappeared… We still don't know how it happened."

"What are you looking at?" Mimi spat, noticing Schuyler staring at her.

"Nothing—I…"

Mimi flicked her hair over her shoulder and snorted in annoyance. Then she deliberately turned her back on the three of them and went back to reliving Friday night.

"Hey," Dylan said, passing the tall Texan girl in their class, who was part of the huddle. "Sorry about your friend." He put a light hand on her arm.

But Bliss didn't even acknowledge that she'd heard him. Schuyler thought that was odd. How did Dylan know Bliss Llewellyn? The Texan girl was practically Mimi's best friend. And Mimi despised Dylan Ward. Schuyler had heard her calling him a «vagrant» and a «wastoid» to his face when he refused to give up his seat in the cafeteria. She and Oliver had warned him when he'd sat down, but he wouldn't listen. "But this is our table," Mimi had hissed, holding a tray that contained a paper plate of dry lettuce leaves surrounding an undercooked hamburger. Schuyler and Oliver had immediately grabbed their trays, but Dylan had refused to budge, which had instantly endeared him to them.

"It was a drug overdose," Dylan whispered, walking between Schuyler and Oliver.

"How do you know?" Oliver asked.

"It's the only thing that makes sense. She passed out at Block 122. What else could it be?"

Schuyler thought: aneurysm, heart attack, diabetic seizure. There were so many things that could cause a person's untimely demise. She'd read about them. She knew. She'd lost her father in her infancy, and her mother was stuck in a coma. Life was more fragile than anyone ever realized.

One minute, you could be getting a smoke in the alley on the Lower East Side with your friends, having drinks and dancing on tables in a popular night club. And the next minute, you could be dead.