32. The Shot
“Did something else happen?” Dru-Ann asks Caroline as they walk toward the house. “Am I being called to testify before Congress?”
“No, no,” Caroline says. “I just want to talk to you about your friendship with my mom and film it, if that’s okay?” She leads Dru-Ann inside and down to a home theater in the basement.
“Nobody’s going to see this but us, right?” Dru-Ann says. After watching the video of herself at Gypsy, the last thing she wants to do is sit in front of a camera. Thanks a lot, SexyBexxx. The video probably has a million views by now.
“In theory, this is for my mom’s website,” Caroline says. “But I’m starting to think it might turn into something else? I’m doing an internship with Isaac Opoku—”
“I know his work,” Dru-Ann says. “He was interested in making a film about an Egyptian ultramarathoner I represented.”
“Isaac is a genius,” Caroline says. “He’s the most intelligent, sensitive person I’ve ever met.”
“Uh-oh,” Dru-Ann says. “Sounds like somebody has a crush.”
The word crush irks Caroline; she’s not twelve years old. “I…” Is she really going to spill this? It’s been agonizing keeping it to herself, and Dru- Ann is her godmother. Isn’t this what godmothers are for?
“You… what?” Dru-Ann says, her eyebrows lifting. “You’re getting with Isaac Opoku?”
Caroline deflates a little. She has to use the past tense. “I was,” she says.
“We were together for a couple of weeks while his girlfriend was on a modeling job in Sweden.”
“By girlfriend, I assume you mean Sofia Desmione?” Dru-Ann says. “I do read People magazine, you know.”
“Yes, Sofia. When she got back to New York, the affair ended, and I came here.”
“So we’re talking fresh heartbreak,” Dru-Ann says. “You should have told me sooner, sugar.”
“It seemed like you had a lot on your plate.”
“Who, me?” Dru-Ann says and they both laugh.
“Isaac lent me his equipment, including his drone. At first I thought, Whatever, I’ll just get the requisite shots of you guys and the food and the camaraderie—”
“Has there been camaraderie?” Dru-Ann asks, deadpan. She smiles. “I’m kidding.”
“There’s some tension too, I can feel it,” Caroline says. “This weekend is revealing things about my mom that I never knew. So I just want to ask you some questions about your friendship.”
Caroline’s phone starts buzzing but she ignores it. “That I can handle,”
Dru-Ann says. She’s feeling calm and present. She’s in a soundproof home theater on Squam Road on the island of Nantucket where the internet can’t find her. She isn’t going to talk about golf or mental health or cancel culture.
She’s going to talk about Hollis.
Caroline says, “How did you and my mom become friends?”
There’s a song that Dru-Ann’s male colleagues listened to back in the mid-aughts called “I Love College” by Asher Roth. The song has a distinct white-frat-boy vibe—it’s about drinking, idolizing the basketball stars of the day, and getting girls naked. But Dru-Ann secretly found the song catchy and she certainly agreed with its thesis statement: I wanna go to college for the rest of my life.
Dru-Ann is fresh out of Mother McAuley, an all-girls Catholic school in Chicago. The instant she sets foot on the UNC Chapel Hill campus, she feels like she’s home. She was a basketball star in high school and is a sports geek in general thanks to her dad and three older brothers. She’s knowledgeable on topics from the 1984–1985 Bears season to the depth of the Bulls bench.
She’s a Michael Jordan fan, and she doesn’t care if that’s a cliché; she is such a fan that it’s been her dream to attend UNC so that she might walk on the same ground that MJ did.
Her freshman roommate is a white girl named Hollis Shaw from
Nantucket, Massachusetts. All Dru-Ann knows of Nantucket is Moby-Dick and the lewd limerick. She has a vague idea that it’s a summer playground for rich people, maybe not so different from Petoskey, Michigan, where Dru- Ann’s parents have a second home on the lake. Hollis is a WASPy name, but instead of being put off by the idea of having some East Coast elite for a roommate, Dru-Ann is intrigued. Dru-Ann is something of a snob; her father is a bigwig at the Merc and her mother is the in-house counsel for Grant Thornton, and they live in an Oak Park home filled with Stickley furniture.
Dru-Ann has known about Stickley furniture since she was eight years old.
Dru-Ann’s first impression of Hollis is favorable and she can tell Hollis’s impression of her is as well; there’s a chemistry and an easy agreement about the particulars of the room. Both of Dru-Ann’s parents help her move in, but only Hollis’s father has come and he’s not at all what Dru-Ann expects. In fact, when Dru-Ann first sees Tom Shaw in jeans and a T-shirt advertising a place called Steamboat Pizza, she thinks he’s been sent by maintenance to fix something in the room. He has a thick Boston accent; he shakes hands with both of Dru-Ann’s parents, but he seems very uncomfortable and he asks Hollis three separate times, “All set, then?” He has to hit the road, he says.
He’s driving through the night to catch the first ferry back the next day.
Hollis says she’ll walk him back to the van to say goodbye, which makes Dru-Ann think there might be some crying. Dru-Ann’s parting from her parents is unsentimental. The elder Joneses have gone through this three times before with her brothers at Bowling Green, Michigan, and Colgate, respectively. Dru-Ann loves her parents but she’s been ready for college since seventh grade.
When Hollis returns to the room looking a little weepy, Dru-Ann asks her about her mother. “Are your parents divorced, or—”
“No!” Hollis says. She opens the packaging of a set of extra-long twin sheets that Dru-Ann can see came from a place called Ocean State Job Lot.
“She’s back at the hotel. My dad is going to pick her up.”
“But she didn’t want to come?” Dru-Ann says, and Hollis shakes her head.
To Caroline, Dru-Ann says, “Your mother and I became real friends at the final bid party for Beta Beta Beta.” (This isn’t the sorority’s real name, but
Dru-Ann isn’t about to say the real name on camera; with the luck she’s having, they’ll probably file a lawsuit.)
It’s safe to say that neither Dru-Ann from Chicago nor Hollis from Nantucket fully understands what rushing a sorority at a Southern university entails. But the siren call is too alluring to ignore. Junior and senior girls come through the dorms with flyers for rush events, all of which sound like fun. There are teas, luncheons, crab boils, picnics with real Carolina barbecue. Dru-Ann and Hollis decide they’ll attend as many events as they can to figure out where they belong. They agree from the start that they might decide to pledge different houses. Dru-Ann, for example, is considering going Alpha Kappa Alpha, a historically Black sorority.
The intensity of the experience unnerves them both. Other girls in Old East wake up at three a.m. to set their hair in hot rollers and put on a “full face.” Everyone—except Dru-Ann and Hollis—wears panty hose and heels.
Dru-Ann wears designer pieces that she bought at Vintage Underground in Wicker Park, while Hollis wears one of her two skirts—a pinkish-red miniskirt or a khaki A-line skirt that she pairs with boat shoes—and either a white or navy alligator shirt. Neither girl wears makeup and they both pull their hair back into ponytails (it’s a thousand degrees in Chapel Hill in September).
By chance, they both decide the only sorority they would consider is Beta Beta Beta. Beta strikes a balance between girls from the North and those from the South; it feels like the most laid-back sorority (they host a pajama-party event), and they have a robust philanthropic program that focuses on childhood hunger. Beta is popular with a lot of other girls as well. The sorority house is the most tasteful and has the best food, and a group of senior sisters throw Sunday-afternoon pool parties at their rental on Rosemary Street.
Dru-Ann is confident she’ll get a bid—she receives a lot of attention from the upperclasswomen (the word fawning comes to mind)—but she has doubts about Hollis. The final bid party is a formal affair. Dru-Ann wears a 1960s pink Chanel suit, and Hollis wears her khaki skirt with a pink oxford button- down and a pair of black pumps that belong on a middle-aged civil servant.
Dru-Ann offers to let Hollis wear anything in her closet—Take the Pucci!—
but Hollis says she’s fine as she is.
At the party, the sorority president, Stacia Starmack, pulls Dru-Ann aside and says, “We’re definitely offering you a bid. The other girls aren’t sure Hollis is polished enough to be a Beta, but I’m willing to go to bat for her on your behalf.” She squeezes Dru-Ann’s arm. “We need girls like you.”
“When Stacia used the word need,” Dru-Ann tells the camera now, “a light came on. Beta wanted me because I was Black. Now, was I being racially sensitive? Could Stacia have meant that the sorority needed someone with my sophistication and sense of style? Maybe, but I also didn’t love what she said about Hollis. Because what she meant by not ‘polished enough’ was that Hollis didn’t have enough money. So I grabbed Hollis and we left the party without saying goodbye. She never asked me what happened, though maybe she suspected. But on that night, Hollis told me that her mother, Charlotte, who was a kindergarten teacher, always maintained that a child would be just fine as long as she had one good friend. So we decided to be a sorority of two.” Dru-Ann feels her eyes mist up. “And from that moment on, we were.”
There are things about this story that make Caroline cringe, but that’s the beauty of it. Find the chink in the armor. Caroline tries to picture her mother —who Caroline thought had always been popular and well liked, even before she became internet-famous—wearing the wrong shoes and not getting into a sorority.
“So the two of you were best friends all through college?” Caroline says.
“We were,” Dru-Ann says. “We lived together all four years. Senior year, there was no stopping us.”
In their senior year, Dru-Ann and Hollis were both twenty-one—and this meant Franklin Street was theirs for the taking! Wednesday nights they went to Goodfellows; Thursdays meant the Cave because of the cute guitar player.
Fridays and Saturdays they went to He’s Not Here, which they referred to as “She’s Not Here,” and they drank Coors Light from blue cups. Sunday nights were pizza at IP3.
“We had traditions,” Dru-Ann says to Caroline. “On our birthdays, we went to the Flying Burrito. And every night before we went out, we listened to Stephanie Mills singing ‘Never Knew Love Like This Before.’”
Caroline’s eyebrows shoot up. “So that was your song, then? Did you
guys coordinate a dance to it, like my mom and Tatum?”
Dru-Ann scoffs. “No dance. That’s strictly high-school stuff.” Dru-Ann sighs. “Chapel Hill was a Carolina-blue bubble. We never wanted to leave.”
“Did you two ever argue?” Caroline asks. “Were there any bumps in the road?”
“Well,” Dru-Ann says. “That’s an interesting question. For that, I have to back up.”
Sophomore year, Hollis asks Dru-Ann if she can spend Christmas in Chicago with her.
“Won’t your parents miss you?” Dru-Ann asks. Hollis seldom speaks about her family. All Dru-Ann knows is that Hollis’s mother teaches kindergarten, her father is a plumber, and she has no siblings.
Hollis shrugs and says, “I’ll call them.” Hollis has made it clear that Nantucket is a place she wants to leave behind, and Dru-Ann can’t blame her.
The island is four miles wide, thirteen miles long, and thirty miles off the coast; it’s overrun with tourists and billionaires in the summer and cold, windy, and desolate in the winter. It sounds like a nightmare.
So Hollis spends the holidays with the Joneses in Oak Park. Dru-Ann is able to appreciate her family and their traditions anew through Hollis’s eyes —the twelve-foot Christmas tree, the cocoa Dru-Ann’s mother makes with Ghirardelli chocolate, Christmas Eve dinner at the Phoenix in Chinatown.
Hollis is as wide-eyed as a child; their days are gilded by her sense of wonder.
On Christmas morning, after present opening and eggs Benedict, Hollis calls home. “I’ll be quick,” she tells Mrs. Jones. “I don’t want to run up your phone bill.” She uses the phone in Dru-Ann’s bedroom, and who knows what gut instinct drives Dru-Ann to pick up the extension in her parents’ room and listen in, but she does. She hears Hollis say, “I’m sorry you have to spend Christmas alone, Daddy.”
Tom Shaw says, “It’s not so bad. I’m going to put a wreath on your mother’s grave, then meet some of the guys at the Anglers Club.”
Ever so quietly, Dru-Ann presses down the button to disconnect, then lowers the handset into the cradle. Your mother’s grave. For a year and a half, Dru-Ann has believed that Charlotte Shaw is alive and well, teaching finger-
painting and assuring kids that they need only one good friend.
Does Dru-Ann storm down the hall to confront Hollis? She does not. It’s Christmas; Mrs. Jones has roasted a goose, and the relatives are on their way over, among them Dru-Ann’s uncle Jimmy, who will play carols on the piano while the rest of them sing. So Dru-Ann keeps quiet, but she smolders with this new knowledge. It’s more than a secret Hollis kept; it’s a deception.
Dru-Ann says nothing the next few days. On New Year’s Eve, Dru-Ann’s parents go to a party and her brothers head downtown to the bars. Hollis and Dru-Ann stay home, order Italian beef sandwiches, and turn on Dick Clark.
Dru-Ann has a “New Year’s tradition” she wants to share—a bottle of something called Jeppson’s Malört Liqueur. It’s the foulest-tasting liquid ever invented, but Dru-Ann assures Hollis that drinking it is a Chicago rite of passage. They each do one shot chased by a beer, then a second shot. After the inevitable grimace, Hollis visibly relaxes and Dru-Ann thinks, Now— now, while it’s still 1988 and not yet 1989. If Dru-Ann doesn’t ask now, the lie might fester right up until graduation, when Hollis will have to explain why her mother isn’t coming to the ceremony. It’s too awful for Dru-Ann to
contemplate.
“Your mother is dead,” Dru-Ann says.
Hollis claps a hand over her mouth and runs for the bathroom. Dru-Ann follows and holds her hair back.
In the final hour of the year, Hollis spills it all. “My mother died when I was a baby. I couldn’t tell you the day we moved in, I was already too emotional, I had never been away from home and I’d never met anyone who didn’t already know my mother was dead. I didn’t have the words. And then once I lied about it, I wasn’t sure how to tell the truth. I’m so sorry, Dru-Ann, the most fundamental fact about me is that I’ve never had a mother. I was raised by my dad and a bunch of other people who pitched in. But I never wanted you to see me as someone who was defective, by which I mean I didn’t want to think of myself that way. College allowed me to start fresh, and I guess I thought I could just change the parts of me that I didn’t like.”
Dru-Ann considers her options. For days, she has been ready to be infuriated and indignant. You lied to me for a year and a half! A major lie, Hollis! This, she suspects, is what anyone else in her position would do. But the truth is, her time in Chapel Hill has been the happiest of her life for one reason only, and that’s the sniffling girl who smells like Jeppson’s sitting on
the floor of the Joneses’ downstairs powder room right now.
“It must have been hard for you,” Dru-Ann says. “And I hope that you feel lighter now that you’ve told me the truth.”
“I do,” Hollis says.
“And I’m sorry you had to grow up without a mom. I’m sure that sucked.”
Hollis shrugs. “It’s the only way I knew. But there have been lots of times when I could have used a mom.”
Yes, Dru-Ann thinks, remembering the outfits Hollis wore during rush.
“Did your mother really say that a kid would be okay as long as she had one
true friend?”
“That’s what I was always told.”
Dru-Ann helps Hollis to her feet. The girl needs a shower. “Well, then, it looks like we’re going to be okay.”
Caroline has to wipe away tears. “Wow,” she says. “I don’t mean to get all emo, but I never knew any of this.”
“Yeah, well,” Dru-Ann says. “We didn’t talk about it much after that. We moved on.” She takes a deep breath. “This has been a fun stumble down memory lane.” She’s being a smart-ass, but she means it. For the past forty minutes, she has been transported to the Chapel Hill of decades ago. What an unexpected gift. “But I should get back upstairs and get ready for dinner.”
“Yes,” Caroline says. “Thank you for this.”
Dru-Ann heads upstairs and Caroline takes some time to compose herself.
Is she having an aha moment about her mother? She has always known that Hollis’s mother died when Hollis was a baby. But it’s only now that Caroline realizes Hollis didn’t have… a Hollis of her own. She had to borrow Tatum’s mother—and once she left Nantucket, she had to figure things out by herself.
Caroline has romanticized the memories of her father because he’s gone.
But Hollis was the one who showed up with Caroline’s forgotten flute case; Hollis was the one with a regular spot at Sprague Fields during Caroline’s soccer games. Hollis took Caroline on her college visits and spent six hours at Copley Place helping Caroline shop for a cotillion dress. Hollis kept up with the friend drama, the boy drama, the academic drama. Hollis was her every day. Hollis was her unconditional. How had Hollis known how to be a mom? Thinking about it now, Caroline finds it sort of amazing.
Caroline is yanked from her feelings by the buzzing of her phone.
She checks the screen. It’s Isaac.
