The Tailgate by Elin Hilderbrand

Author:Elin Hilderbrand
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2014-05-06T04:00:00+00:00

It was almost a disappointment to head into the stadium. Dabney had managed to eat one chicken salad sandwich and grab a few bites of the onion dip before the bowl was licked clean. Everything she had brought had been devoured. So there! Dabney thought.

Harvard 1, Yale 0.

Dabney saw Jocelyn again inside the Yale Bowl. She was sitting three rows ahead of Clen and Dabney and five seats to their left. She was with a girl with curly blond hair and two guys/boys/men, one of whom was wearing a white cardigan sweater with a blue Y that looked like it had been rescued from a 1952 time capsule, and the other of whom wore a plain gray T-shirt and a baseball hat and seemed like he had just rolled out of bed.

Dabney prayed that either Letter Sweater or Boy Who Just Woke Up was Jocelyn’s boyfriend.

There was a lot of fanfare before the game began. The Class of 1935 ran out onto the field—seventeen men remaining, more than double that killed in World War II, a moment of silence. The presentation of Handsome Dan, the bulldog, wild applause. Then, the Spizzwinks sang the national anthem; the Spizzwinks were the underclassman version of the Whiffenpoofs. The person who named these groups must have been smoking opium with Lewis Carroll, Dabney thought.

Then…kickoff! The crowd went bananas. Dabney and Clen stood up along with the rest of the stadium and cheered.

Jocelyn turned around and appeared to be searching for someone sitting behind them. She was wearing brown cat’s-eye sunglasses.

The kickoff returner for Harvard was tackled on the twenty-five-yard line, and the crowd sat down.

Clen turned to Dabney. “Do you want anything?”

She said, “Nope, I’m good.”

He fidgeted in his seat. For all his enthusiasm about the game, Clen didn’t really like to watch football, or any other sport. Dabney was much better at it. She had been the head of the Pep Squad at Nantucket High School and the editor of the yearbook, she had played tennis and sailed at the Nantucket Yacht Club, and she had surfed every beach on Nantucket that could possibly be surfed. She had fished for stripers off the tip of Great Point, and she had hunted for ducks on Tuckernuck with her father. She had written her college essay about the duck hunting, actually, tying it into her relationship with her father, which was important and special since her mother had left when Dabney was eight years old.

Abandoned her.

Half the crowd was cheering, the red half. Harvard’s quarterback, Blood Dellman, had completed a seventeen-yard pass for the first down. Dabney bowed her head. Something was still off. Why this gnawing sense of insecurity? Why did she feel the need to mentally list all of her accomplishments and reassure herself of her own value? And why, at this particular moment, when she and Clen were finally together, did the memory of her mother leaving have to steal in—the one thing certain to make her feel worthless? Goddamn it—tears were now blurring her eyes.

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