With her cheap shoes crushing her toes, she stalked out of the bar.

12

The Play

Gabe sat next to his wife in the darkened auditorium. Onstage, his eighteen-year-old daughter, Violet, was performing a play she had written. It was undeniably terrible. The theme, Violet had told him, was intersectionality, but the six teens onstage appeared to be embroiled in a dance-off. Silently, he cursed the day he’d allowed his only child to transfer to this alternative school from Chapin, the tony private school on the Upper East Side. Violet had been running wild in Manhattan, hanging with a crowd of hedonistic, entitled teens with money for drugs, booze, and clubs. When a boy was accidentally shot at a party Violet was attending, Celeste had panicked. Already fragile from her illness, his spouse had scooped up their daughter and retreated to the Hamptons full-time.

It was an overreaction (the kid had been shot in the foot), but Gabe had gone along with it. The move would get Violet “back on track,” Celeste had insisted. The Fairhaven School was just a short drive from their Sagaponack home and would be a great fit for their freethinking, creative child.

“They foster multidisciplinary global thinking and engagement,” Celeste had said, like it wasn’t just a mission statement concocted by some communications firm. Gabe had given in, and now his daughter had become a far-left, political thespian with minimal talent. Perfect.

He glanced over at Celeste. She was smiling, holding her phone, filming the performance for posterity. Perhaps his wife understood the play better as a woman, as a person of color, as someone who’d suffered a serious illness. Celeste had always been more liberal, more open-minded than Gabe was. Though it was an unpopular opinion to voice in his circles, he felt the world was tilting too far to the left, pushing the boundaries of common sense. This opinion was never more solidified than when he spent time with his daughter. Violet had become a social-justice warrior (though he’d never use that pejorative term around her). Since her move from the city at fourteen, the girl had been championing the rights of the marginalized: women, animals, the disabled, indigenous peoples, the LGBTQ community, immigrants, people of color, vertically challenged flight attendants, mimes with Tourette’s . . .

Celeste had always been supportive. “She’s passionate and curious, with a strong moral compass. We should be proud of that.”

Gabe would have been a hell of a lot prouder if Violet had taken an interest in finance or engineering or the law—something that would lead to a career, a salary, a way to pay her own way in life. His only child seemed destined to become a playwright, a poet, or a professional activist, leaching off her parents while she indulged her passions. Celeste might find that path worthy of pride, but Gabe did not. He still hoped Violet would attend his alma mater, but a degree in gender and sexuality studies, even from Princeton, wouldn’t take her far.