Chapter One Caroline narrowed her eyes, focused on the last red cup on the opposite side of the Ping-Pong table, and exhaled to steady her hand. She lofted the little plastic ball into the air and watched it land in the perfect center of her opponent's cup. She allowed herself only a tiny, fleeting smile of victory when he sighed and chugged the final beer in front of him. "Good game," she told her business school classmate, hoping he'd respond. He didn't. Caroline had attempted to shake hands at the end of the first match, but that was apparently not done in beer pong. She'd thought it was like a tennis match or business deal, but her classmate had stared at her outstretched hand until she pulled it back and pretended to have been stretching. "Are you still mad that I called your pants pink?" she asked him. "They're Nantucket reds," he stiffly replied. "I was trying to give you a compliment," Caroline said, desperate to salvage the single social interaction she'd enjoyed at the party. She'd liked the color of his pants, not to mention how they fit him. She'd liked the idea that he was a little different too, because everyone else was in jeans or chinos. Caroline wore a sundress from an Old Navy outlet she'd passed on the trip into Boston, but she felt overdressed. "Oh, thanks," he said, putting his hands on his hips and swiveling to scan the yard behind her. Maybe it wasn't the pants. Maybe he was upset she'd beat him in straight sets. That would usually do it. It was her first time playing beer pong, but it seemed like she was good at it. It was her third round, and she'd only lost a couple of throws. The hardest part had been figuring out the rules; everyone else seemed to have learned in undergrad, but Caroline's tennis coach had forbidden his players to attend parties where alcohol was served during tennis season. Not that she'd been invited to many. The rules of beer pong weren't complex, but they were counterintuitive: the person who lost a point had to drink the beer, even though everyone seemed to be at this party just to drink beer. Maybe it was a penalty because the beer had someone's dirty Ping-Pong ball in it? But if that was the case, why didn't the winner get clean beer? These questions remained unanswered, but the action was close enough to tennis that Caroline had figured it out after watching a few matches from the back patio. "Can someone else take a turn now?" her opponent asked as he reracked and refilled his cups, voice pitched in that fake-nice tone that usually meant Caroline had annoyed someone. He'd given her his name when they met, but she'd immediately forgotten it in her haze of anxiety, and now it seemed awkward to ask. "I didn't realize anyone was waiting," Caroline said. The weather was pleasant in Boston's September, and people were sitting in lawn chairs under the string lights crisscrossing the packed-dirt yard, but nobody was especially near the table. She'd thought the rule was that she got to keep playing until she was defeated, but she must have been wrong about that. "I was going to grab my girlfriend from inside," her classmate said, pointing his chin at the interior of the row house. "See if she wants to play with me." "You have a girlfriend?" Caroline blurted out, surprised. She'd been certain he was flirting with her before they started playing, but possibly she'd been wrong about that too. Her stomach sank; she'd already started telling herself a story about how she met this cute guy at the beer-pong table and he introduced her to all his friends. Nantucket Reds hesitated and rubbed the back of his neck as though the existence of his girlfriend was potentially subject to dispute. A contingency that might not make it onto the audited financial statements. "Yeah, I mean . . . unless you wanted to get out of here?" he suggested, lifting his eyebrows. "You seemed pretty dead set on the game. But we could head back to my place if you wanted to." [AQ: Is there an extra space here? If so, delete] Caroline glared at him. She'd toyed with the idea that she might go back to someone's house from the party, but in that fantasy, they'd wanted more from her than five to ten minutes of potentially adulterous sexual contact. If Nantucket Reds had a contingent girlfriend, he probably wasn't going to make brunch plans with Caroline. She shook her head. Slinking back to the outdoor couch where she'd spent the first hour of the party, she took a longneck from a cooler by the wall. The couch smelled like piss and spilled beer, and most of the tattered surface was taken up by a sleepy Labrador retriever, but the dog obligingly shifted her paws to make some room as Caroline squeezed in at one end. "I won three games in a row," she told the dog after a few minutes of watching the next match. "Good job, me." She tried and failed to convince herself that this was a significant achievement, and the evening had been a success. A Friday night in college would have been spent at a budget motel on the way to a tennis tournament, if it was tennis season, or watching TV with her grandmother, if it wasn't, and she would have enjoyed either of those activities more than going to a party and not meeting anyone new. Thinking of her grandmother made Caroline cringe. I know you haven't been happy, she'd written in the letter attached to her revised will, even though Caroline had never complained. I'm leaving you everything, even though Caroline had only asked about the SUV. Go live a big life, even though Caroline's stated ambitions had been limited to moving out of her parents' house. However unexpected that last vague command had been, Caroline had initially considered it a natural consequence of getting the hell out of Templeton. Everything else was supposed to follow naturally. In her headlong dash for freedom, Caroline felt as though she'd run straight into a screen door. Whatever she'd meant by a big life, Gam had probably not intended for Caroline to spend her time petting someone else's dog and watching strangers play beer pong. Caroline's plan had been very modest: she'd save a couple thousand dollars for business school applications, somehow acquire a car, and when she moved away to the other side of the country, she'd get to quit doing exactly what her father told her to do every minute of the day. The kind of life she'd have was very hazy in her mind, but she'd populated it with friends, a boyfriend, even, and she'd imagined all sorts of new experiences. She'd go on dates and ski trips and cosmopolitan adventures. She'd meet interesting new people who were funny and kind. Gam's will shouldn't have changed anything about the plan, but somehow it had. Caroline couldn't say which had been the bigger shock-the number of digits on her grandmother's brokerage account balance or the furor that erupted when the rest of her family learned that it would all go to Caroline. Two million dollars! That ought to have let her do whatever she wanted. It ought to have convinced her family that there would be plenty left over for them once she was done with business school. But instead, Caroline had managed only a few stilted conversations about classes with the other people here, she'd scarcely left her apartment since arriving in Boston, and most of her family weren't speaking to her. Caroline shredded the last bit of the label on her beer bottle and sighed at the pile of scraps in her lap. Her older sister had once told her that beer was an acquired taste, but Caroline hadn't managed to acquire it yet. "The guy in the pink pants didn't really have a girlfriend, I bet," she said to the Lab. "He was just insecure about his beer pong skills and weak grasp of color theory." The dog didn't lift her head, but Caroline sensed her agreement with those propositions. Caroline nodded as though the dog had replied. "I should probably go home and let him recover from his defeats." It was still early, and the party showed no signs of abating, but Caroline had exhausted the few opening gambits she knew for interacting with strangers. She wasn't going to meet anyone else here. "You have a good night," she began to advise the dog. "But don't take drinks from men you don't know. And don't stay out too late." The Lab blinked, wetly exhaled, and closed her eyes. Caroline took that as a dismissal. After patting the dog's head in farewell, Caroline wove through the crowd of much drunker people on her way to the front door, stepping around couples dancing or making out in dark corners. She found her SUV on the street outside and turned off the music to match her mood. Graduate students mostly lived in the wooden Victorian houses that ringed the university, but Caroline's apartment was in a high-rise a little farther away, down Commonwealth Avenue. Not a lot of the students drove to campus, but she was still not comfortable walking alone at night in the city, if she was supposed to get comfortable with that. She parked in the underground garage and dragged her feet to the elevator. Some packages were stacked neatly on her doormat in her third-floor hallway; she'd ordered a new cake pan and the dried currants she couldn't get at the grocery store down the block. She tried and failed to get excited about spending Saturday baking. She didn't have anything else on her calendar for the next day. She'd hoped the party would change that. Caroline gritted her teeth and tossed her keys in the cereal bowl on her countertop, where her keys and sunglasses went. Talking to strangers was a thing she was not good at, unlike beer pong. It was as if everyone else was speaking a different language, one she'd never learned. Her classmates stared at her as though they couldn't understand what she was saying if she tried to have a conversation with them about anything more personal than Excel shortcuts, and she didn't think her Texas accent was at fault. She had nothing to connect with them over. She was boring, probably, compared to her classmates. Unlike them, she'd never really done anything-except get pretty good at tennis. And nobody wanted to hear about tennis. Even Caroline's college teammates hadn't wanted to talk with her about tennis. And what else was there to her? What else could she say? Good evening, did you know the fast-food milkshake machines are only broken because nobody wants to spend four hours cleaning out all the fermenting dairy bits from the dispenser nozzles? Hey, stop walking away! I'm fun. Caroline hung her dress back up in the closet and changed into sleep clothes. In her favorite tangerine tank top and matching underwear, she flopped onto her bed, not bothering to turn on the overhead lights. She grabbed her laptop where it was charging on her nightstand, then clicked over to a dating website. Caroline had signed up two months ago, upon her arrival in Boston, but without any success so far. While several people in her area were very eager to send her photos of their genitalia, she had yet to field a proposal to meet anyone in person under a scenario more elaborate than hang out at my place and see where the night takes us. She knew better than that, at least. Even if she didn't already suspect that sex, like beer, was overhyped by advertising agencies, she knew that getting naked with someone was not a viable launch strategy for a friendship or a relationship. In the six months since her grandmother's passing, Caroline had discovered that some problems could be solved with money. She'd applied to MBA programs and not worried about the tuition. She'd moved into an apartment that her father didn't have a key to, and she had every confidence the doorman wouldn't let him in if he somehow discovered the address and drove up to confront her. She remembered the wonderful day she'd discovered that she had enough money to order anything over the Internet. She'd bought some good stuff. The exact beehive-shaped cake pan used by the Barefoot Contessa. Custom women's size 10-12 socks with Irish setters printed on them. Netflix and Disney+. But her life, if anything, felt smaller than it had before. Before, she'd had tennis and her family, at least, and if the limits those two groups put on her had sometimes felt so constricting that Caroline had wanted to scream and kick and flail against them, at least they'd kept her too busy to be lonely. Caroline grabbed her pillow to her chest and rolled over, staring at the bare walls of her apartment. The unstructured expanse of the weekend loomed ahead of her like a minefield. Every time she screwed something up, even if it was just a baba au rhum cake or the deadline to join a study group, she heard her father's voice in her head: You can't possibly handle this much money. This is just going to get you into trouble. I don't know what the hell my mother was thinking. What had her grandmother thought she was going to do with two million dollars? The things Caroline wanted weren't really available for Amazon Prime delivery. It wasn't as though she could go on Etsy to order a sophisticated boyfriend and an exciting social life to be drop-shipped to Boston by Ukrainian artisans. Her father's insistence that she spend most waking moments of her previous two decades with a racket in her hand was a much bigger obstacle to her goals than her lack of funds had ever been. While everyone else had figured out how to elegantly segue from the Black-Scholes model to windsurfing and dinner parties (if that was what her classmates were doing on the weekends-she didn't actually know), she'd been mastering a backhand smash. Tucking her fists under her chin, she decided to be rigorous about it. Perhaps she could Six Sigma her social life and transition from a person who had to sit with the dog at parties to a person with exciting plans on her calendar. So what if she'd made no inroads with her classmates? She couldn't dwell on sunk costs. This was a strategic development problem at base, and she was enrolled in a prestigious MBA program devoted to teaching her methods of solving it. It was only a matter of applying the principles she'd studied and following the program those rules dictated: if she was keeping too much cash in reserve to meet her growth targets, the accepted solution was to make capital investments. There was no reason not to start living that big life as soon as possible. Excerpted from Sweeten the Deal by Katie Shepard All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
