Page 53 of Always

Anika knew he was joking, but she felt a bit sensitive. She was extremely protective of the program participants.

“There’s no expectation of what type of job they’ll get after school,” she said stiffly.

“But really, how necessary is it all anyway?” Marco asked lazily, sawing off a chunk of his filet. “Can’t they just get student loans?”

“Is that what you did?” James asked from across the table. “Graduated with a hundred and twenty K in debt and paid it back at a six percent interest rate with a forty-five-thousand-per-year job?”

“Hit a nerve, did I?” Marco said coolly. “No trust fund for the wunderkind? Well, you seem to have connected yourself anyway.” He looked over at Liam. “Did Anika set you up there? Were you one of her charity kids too?”

“Marco!” Anika said angrily.

“It’s alright,” James said. “I know it’s hard for him to imagine getting a job or starting a company without Daddy’s influence or Daddy’s money.”

“That’s quite the chip on your shoulder,” Marco said. “Especially since you’re one of the wicked one-percent yourself now. But you like to hold a grudge, don’t you?”

Anika cut across him, trying to diffuse the argument and return to the central point.

“It’s more complicated than getting a student loan,” she said. “Sixty-eight percent of the people in our program have to support one or more siblings as well as themselves. We don’t just help with tuition money, it’s also funding to cover living expenses. A lot of bright students from bad circumstances do get scholarships and grants, but they end up dropping out anyway because they get hit with too many other issues—illness in their families, abusive relationships, loss of housing—and they burn out. We try to provide support to help equalize the playing field for more than just tuition costs.”

“Very generous,” Marco said.

“It’s more just fair,” Anika said. “It’s hard to compete with your fellow students if you haven’t eaten all week.”

“You convinced me,” Marco said. “I can’t argue with someone so beautiful. If I don’t watch it, I’ll be a socialist by dessert.”

He was smiling at her in his charming way, but Anika was annoyed with him. She would have preferred to convince him with her argument, not her looks.

“I’m going to say hi to the others,” James said, pushing aside his half-eaten plate.

He walked over to the next table, to cries of welcome from Gwen, Hannah, and Calvin. Anika couldn’t help watching out of the corner of her eye to see if he pulled up a chair next to Hannah. James took the open seat on the opposite side of the table instead.

Hannah had her foot, still in its cast, propped up on an extra chair. This inconvenience hadn’t stopped her from wearing a stiletto on the other side, or from enjoying herself as much as ever from the look on her face and the glass of champagne in her hand.

Anika waved to them all. Honestly, she’d rather be sitting over there. Stella had given up on racehorses and was quizzing Marco about some resort in Palermo. Bennet was telling Aunt Molly what she ought to have done with her time in Portugal. Anika wished they wouldn’t talk so loudly, since most of the people in the room had probably hardly had a vacation in their lives, except maybe to Disneyworld.

Bennet and Stella would say she was being a martyr. But sometimes Anika felt that being born into wealth had balanced her on the blade of a knife. Every choice she made would pull her in the direction of either a spoiled, selfish, brat, or a relatively decent person. And sometimes it wasn’t obvious what direction you were going in at any given moment, or which way somebody else wanted to pull you.

The dessert course came out at last—lavender creme brûlée—and as the majority were finishing their food, Anika got up to introduce their first speaker: Rose Diaz, a woman who was one of the Red Line’s first graduates, back when Anika’s mother was still running the charity. She had since gone on to start a moving company with three locations.

Everyone clapped as Ms. Diaz took the stage and began talking about her experience growing up as the child of immigrants, and then developing Lupus in high school. Anika was annoyed to see that Marco and Stella were still talking, not listening to the speaker at all.

After Rose Diaz, they heard from Peter Walsch, who had become a chemistry teacher at a school in the Bronx. Then Anika got up once more to thank everybody for coming and asked everyone to give a final round of applause for this year’s graduates.

She called each one up on the stage in turn to receive a grab bag stuffed full of gift cards and items from local businesses, making sure to give each person plenty of time to have photos taken by family members in the audience.

As she descended the stairs of the stage for the last time, Anika felt her sapphire earring brushing against her left cheek, but not her right. Reaching up, she found only a bare lobe where her earring out to be.

A sick sense of horror washed over her. Trying to stay calm, she checked her hair and the folds of her gown to see if it had fallen and caught on any part of her person. But I t was nowhere to be found.

Frantically, Anika began to search the stage and the floor space around her table. By this point, Marco had noticed her distress.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I lost my mother’s earring,” Anika said.

Marco got down to help her search. Gwen, walking over to chat, soon joined them in their efforts, as did Hannah a moment later, hobbling around on her crutches. James enlisted the help of some of the waitstaff who were still in the process of clearing dishes and bringing refills of coffee.

Though in the end they had almost a dozen people looking, there was no luck. After an hour or more of combing the floor, after the banquet hall had cleared of guests, Anika had to resign herself to the fact that the earring would not likely be found.

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