Eleven

Yale University
New Haven, Connecticut
April, 2001


The phone rang in Madison Davidson's dorm room. Maddy could hear it at the other end of the hall, but by the time she got back to her room, the caller had hung up. The message light was on, so Maddy played the message back, only to learn it was her sister calling. Miki had said that Maddy must have still been in class and that she'd call back later if she got a chance.

"Damn!" Maddy said under her breath.

She hated to miss calls from Miki, because calling long distance was an expense both sisters could do well without.

Maddy hadn't seen her sister since she left Massachusetts the previous August to attend college at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Miki had contracted the flu before Christmas and wasn't able to come home; and because Miki's Spring Break occurred after Maddy's did, Maddy didn't get to see Miki when she did get home to Massachusetts to visit their mom.

The fates are conspiring against me, Maddy thought. She and Miki were passing each other like two ships in the night, with their mother's home in Andover, Massachusetts as the port of call.

Maddy thought that one of these days soon, her schedule and her sister's were going to converge somewhere. In the meantime, she had to get back to studying.

Maddy Davidson was an Education major. Her dream since fifth grade was to teach at-risk elementary and middle school students. Maddy and her fraternal twin sister had been fortunate to grow up in a home where their mother placed a great importance on education. Maddy thought it was incredible that her mother did all that by herself, without help from their father, from whom their mother was divorced.

She recognized that there were some kids in single-parent homes that would never have the advantages that she and Miki had. Those were the kids Maddy wanted to teach. She wanted to reach them and encourage them to go farther in their education, that they can achieve any goal they set for themselves.

Maddy was taking the classes that would help her achieve her goals. She excelled academically and made the Dean's list for the first term. She managed this while maintaining a healthy social life, not requiring the near isolation her sister seemed to need to excel.

Maddy had been dating a fellow student since the second month of school. He was good looking, smart, and helpful. One of the things that Bradley Kilcommon wasn't was compassionate. Brad could be mean and nasty, but had not been to Maddy. He treated Maddy like a princess, but it was all a charade.

Brad was two faced, a Jekyll and Hyde personality. He was one person in Maddy's presence, and a completely different person when he was with his friends. That side of his personality badmouthed "that gold digging bitch" at every opportunity. Brad had somehow convinced himself, and his buddies, that Maddy was only after the Kilcommon millions.

Maddy could've cared less about Brad's family fortunes. It wasn't about his family's net worth, or a seat on the Stock Exchange, or a partnership in the family law firm. Maddy dated Brad because she was led to believe that they had much in common.

Brad, unbeknownst to Maddy, looked down on her for her public school education, the fact that she was raised in a single parent home, and that her father was in prison. Brad and his "posse" had the best private schools, the best prep schools, the best of everything that money could buy. Brad told people that he was "slumming" by dating Maddy.

When he was with Maddy, he treated her like he thought she wanted to be treated. But, now, he was getting tired of spending money on her all the time. Maddy made no demands of him, and Brad knew it. He was raised to believe that the "lower classes had to be put in their place," and Brad considered Maddy lower class. He thought he was doing Maddy, and others like her, a favor by being seen with him.

Brad knew that Maddy cared for him a great deal, but he struggled with how their relationship looked to others. He thought he cared for her, too, but the signals he was getting from his peers is that Maddy must have an ulterior motive for dating him. He knew it was useless to argue with anyone who thought that way, because in reality, Brad Kilcommon had no backbone. He got his opinions from his family, and his father always maintained that he was right.

Martin Kilcommon impressed upon his oldest son that any woman he dated in college that didn't have what he called a "pedigree" was only after his money. Brad tried to argue that Madison wasn't like that, that his money meant nothing to her, but his father was firm: the girl called Madison was not good enough to date a Kilcommon male. Martin Kilcommon bullied his son into believing he was right, because he recognized that his son was a wimp.

Brad lived in fear that Maddy would figure out that he was weak willed, so he began to bully her. Subtly, at first, but it would become all out war. The losers in this mind game would be both Brad and Maddy, but neither realized it.



Brad picked Maddy up for a date. Movies and dinner was something Brad thought Maddy would like. And, she did like it. She liked spending time with him, and she thought he felt the same. At least, that's what he told her.

After the movie, Brad asked Maddy where she wanted to go have a bite to eat. Maddy really had no preference, that she liked all the placed Brad took her to. That made Brad's decisions easier, because Maddy was not someone who cared about where was the "right" placed to be seen. If Maddy did have a preference, she usually made that known to him at the beginning of any outing they took.

Brad thought he was falling in love with Maddy, but his father's words were always there in the back of his mind: that Maddy was not good enough to date him. Brad had gotten the message that he would lose his trust fund if his relationship Maddy became serious. His father wasn't about to accept the girl into his family.

Brad kept these feelings to himself. He just wanted to be with Maddy.



One afternoon, after her psychology class, Maddy sat in the library reading one of the books that was on the course reading list. The book addressed how wealthy people have this grandiose vision of themselves, that they had to have just the right "whatever", had to marry just the right mate. A lot of them were really ordinary people with lots of money and little or no self esteem.

Maddy thought this was interesting, since she was dating the scion of a prominent legal family. She didn't recognize the things she read about in Brad, so perhaps he wasn't affected by these shortcomings.

Maddy didn't give a rat's ass about his money. She didn't care that he was wealthy, and she had been told enough times by people she went to school with that he was. Maddy did have to concede that she was probably a bit naïve. She took everything at face value, and it would take a major change for her to think differently.

She knew, for example, that her father was an awful man. She was on the lookout for men who displayed the same kinds of behaviors her father did. She had been lucky so far in that neither the boy she dated in high school or, so far, Brad, had not been mean and abusive like her father.

She remembered hating her sister, because her father would tell her everyday that Miki would always be useless and that Maddy would be the more popular one. Almost from the time they were old enough to understand, Maddy and Miki were subjected to the verbal abuse that their father heaped upon their mother. Then he turned on the twins, and heard the same things coming from their father's mouth that he said to their mother.

Maddy knew her father was bad when she was eight years old when she saw her father repeatedly kick the cat that she and Miki loved. Maddy begged her father not to hurt Earnhardt, but he didn't listen. Maddy found Earnhardt lying in a corner and she thought he was dead. She picked him up and found that he was still alive, but was badly hurt. Risking her father's anger, Maddy managed to put Earnhardt into the basket attached to her bicycle handlebars and rode her bike to the vet to get help for her cat. The vet called Maddy's mother and told her that Earnhardt had broken ribs and internal injuries, but he would make it.

Later that night, Maddy told Miki what daddy did to Earnhardt, and Miki didn't seem surprised. She was upset, thought, because if daddy could do that to their cat, he could do it to mommy, or to them.

Their mother finally got them away from their father and moved to Massachusetts. They had to talk to a nice lady about why they didn't like each other, and that the way that their father treated them wasn't right.

Maddy tried not to think about her father anymore. He was in prison for trying to kill someone and no longer a part of her life. He had to live with all the terrible things he had done to people who cared about him. She wasn't his little girl any more. He was nobody to her.

Thinking about her childhood still depressed her, so Maddy sought out the mental health clinic on campus. It made her feel better to talk to someone about her feelings. Maddy was distancing herself further and further from her childhood. The only people in her life who mattered were Miki and her mother.

And Brad, of course.




While Maddy excelled at her studies, Brad was in constant danger of flunking out. His classes bored him, he didn't pay attention, and frankly didn't care about attending Yale. He was only there because his father and uncles pulled a lot of strings and called in favors to get the underachieving boy into a good school. His SAT scores were abysmal. Brad had undiagnosed cases of dyslexia and attention deficit disorder. Tutors were hired to do Brad's schoolwork and homework for him. His father thought he was hopeless, which he made no secret of, thereby sinking the boy's self-esteem into the gutter. Martin Kilcommon was just as bad, if not worse, than Christopher Davidson. Only wealth and entitlements separated them.

Martin Kilcommon knew that Madison Davidson was a very intelligent girl; too intelligent to be dating his moronic oldest son. So he convinced Brad into thinking Maddy was not good enough to date him, when in fact, it was Maddy who was too good for Brad.

Kilcommon discreetly checked into Madison's background: he found that she was a fraternal twin, her mother was an editor at an award winning newspaper in Massachusetts, that her sister attended college in Louisiana and was just as smart, if not more so, than Maddy herself, and that her father was imprisoned for attempted murder for hire. The Davidsons were, with the exception of their felon ex-husband and father, a modern American success story. Madison was the kind of girl he'd welcome into the family, if she were dating Brad's younger brother, Benjamin, instead. Benjamin wouldn't be going to college for three more years, however.

Somehow, Brad managed to get passing grades and remained at Yale. The only thing keeping him there that interested him was Maddy.

Maddy, like her sister, Miki, had no idea how beautiful she was. With shoulder length dark brown hair and crystal blue eyes, she was a stunner. She was excited when the wealthy (said her friends) Brad Kilcommon asked her out. Maddy didn't care about his wealth. She cared about the man inside the handsome body, about his soul. He seemed to care about her, too, and they soon became an item.

Her friends, however, recognized something in Brad they thought Maddy should know, and that was his mean streak. Maddy blew it off, because she didn't see that side of Brad, and she certainly didn't hear the things he said about her when he wasn't with her. She only knew that he was kind and gentle to her, and that's all she cared about for the time being.

That, and her studies. Her studies always came first, and that was what started Brad's deterioration from a nice guy, to a mean son of a bitch. He would never admit that he was jealous of her work ethic, her dedication to her academic goals, her desire to teach at-risk kids. All he saw was that Maddy's studies took time away from him.

It was a road that Maddy's mother had been down before, and had Coley knew what her daughter was getting into, she would have put a stop to it.

It was going to be a long, winding, and painful road, and one that Maddy's mother would have given her life to prevent Maddy from making the very same mistakes.

Had she known about it, of course.