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Chapter 20

Kennedy Carter

Boston, May 2015

Kennedy stifled her cough as the dust from Harvard’s newspaper archives coated her nose and throat. She looked around to make sure that she wasn’t disturbing any working students. She wanted to be as discreet as possible. She had secured special access to do a library search once she told admins that she was working on a gift for her father. Now, she sat cross-legged on a hard wooden chair, with several copies of printed and faded student newspapers. The internal search for Kofi Asare left her with fewer than a dozen hits. The one that she wasn’t expecting to see was his obituary. Kennedy stared at the photocopy of the tiny newspaper clipping that detailed Kofi Asare’s death and reread it, reflecting on the tragedy of his suicide. But even more importantly, the line that stood out to her most was the one that said, “He was working on completing a dream project of bringing innovation in the housing market to his beloved Ghana when he died”—a line that was especially strange since that was exactly what the Carter Corporation ended up doing.

It was then that she realized that she didn’t even know the full scope of what her father’s company was responsible for. Housing was definitely a piece of it, but by this point, there were now many complex components, a moneymaking diapason. She squinted down at the paper. Tashia’s sending her that photograph of her father and this man, Kofi, had set her hunting, and now she was confused about what she found.

The video was still incomplete, and while she was able to tack this library visit on, the real reason she was there was to see her brother. She pushed aside her thoughts about Kofi. She checked her phone and pressed his name for the sixth time that day. Asher had been dodging her again, and when she showed up on the Harvard campus and pounded on his door after being let up to his high-rise by security, she found him hungover and half-dressed.

“Your knock sounds like the police” was all he said before stepping aside to let her into the apartment.

“Nice to see you too,” Kennedy replied, trying to keep her spirits up. “Are you going to be ready to film today?”

Asher chuckled. “Do you have a hair of the dog?”

Kennedy displayed her empty palms.

Asher turned his back on her and went into the kitchen to make himself a Bloody Mary.

“Hey, I wanna ask you something,” Kennedy prompted, a chill going down her spine as she remembered her nightmare about the plane crash.

“Yeah?” Asher asked as he took a giant sip from a tall glass with red liquid, his mood already improving.

“Have you ever heard the name Kofi Asare?”

“Uh, no. Why? He’s someone you’re trying to get with?”

“He’s Dad’s old college roommate ... but ... he died, maybe by accident, or maybe by suicide.”

“Depressing,” Asher said.

“Yeah. This is his campus obituary that I found.” Kennedy offered the photocopy to her brother.

“Wow, it’s so short,” Asher said.

“I guess when you die young, that’s what happens,” Kennedy replied.

Asher shrugged. “What are you even doing with this?”

“It’s weird, but when I started talking to all Dad’s friends and everything for this video, I was trying to make it special, and so I wanted to include some stuff that no one knew about him. And then I found this, and I don’t know. It just seems weird, is all. I was wondering if you ever heard the name.”

“You think Dad wants things in a birthday video that no one knows about? Come on, Ken. Are you new here?”

“Yeah, no. I know,” Kennedy said, her cheeks heating up with embarrassment. “It’s stupid.”

Asher drained his glass and set it down on the table. “Okay, so are we doing this or what?” he said.

Kennedy moved around him to set up her camera and two chairs facing one another. She sat down and waited for Asher to face her. Her finger hovered over the record button. “Wait,” she said. “Can I ask you something off the record?”

Asher rolled his eyes dramatically. “What ‘record’?” he said, using air quotes. “This isn’t CNN!”

“Well, I know,” Kennedy said. “I was just wondering something.”

“Yeah?” he asked impatiently.

“Billionaires ...,” she started to say.

She had to think of the right way to phrase this. She thought back to the first time she was asked to consider the morality of a billion dollars and it was all because of something Tashia had said. Kennedy had been in love with a classmate her senior year. This boy, who was white, was a fit lacrosse player with hair to match the sport, a floppy shag with bangs and sides that flipped up on the ends. His name was Ollie Abbott.

Ollie Abbott was a Dalton lifer. His father was a geriatric rock star who, in his third marriage, married Ollie’s mom for a whole two years, long enough for her to bear two children. Ollie’s older brother was a stoner who ended up at Stanford. Ollie’s father was based in London, and so their fractured family, ever expanding because there was also a fourth and fifth wife, the latest with no kids, was often featured in tabloids. Ollie was traditionally handsome, his symmetrical features defiled when he took a baseball to the face in the seventh grade, shifting his nose slightly to the left.

He’d declined plastic surgery to fix it, eager to shed the pretty-boy card he’d been dealt by having a pretty mother. Ollie was pleasant and popular, striking that perfect balance between studious and athletic. He also had an atypical rebellious streak, which meant that he did things like playing the saxophone instead of something expected from the musical offspring of a rock star, like the guitar or drums. He was a jock, sure, but he wanted people to think of him as an artist, which was how he ended up in the film club with Kennedy.

His advances were innocent enough to begin with. He spent junior year sitting close to her at lunch or letting their arms brush in art class. These gestures were so subtle most of the time that Kennedy had to talk herself out of thinking it meant something more than it did. At first, she was so unsettled by his proximity because it happened so quickly, his placing himself in her orbit, but with consistency and familiarity, she developed a crush.

After several months, she worked up the courage to initiate contact. She dedicated many hours of thought per day to imagining their conversations and interactions beyond what she was actually experiencing. She found herself wanting to be carried away by the fantasy that this person, whom she had known for years, was here all along, yearning to be with her. And as for Ollie, he was a closet romantic, leaving her notes in her locker and finding opportunities for them to be together, bringing her candy after school and seeking her out at parties on the weekends.

When they became seniors and Ollie still didn’t have a girlfriend, Kennedy figured that she could soak up as much of their good time as possible. It was well known that his plans would take him to Providence next year. Ollie had asked her out on little dates, creating magical private moments all over the city for them to build a world of inside jokes and core memories. They rode the Roosevelt Island tram just because. They took the subway to the Financial District and roamed the deserted Seaport. They laughed when Ollie got pooped on by a pigeon in Washington Square Park, and they ducked under scaffolding when the skies opened up, staying there for hours talking in the rain.

“I never thought that you liked me,” Ollie had confessed. He flipped his wet hair out of his eyes.

“Really? Why not?” Kennedy closed her umbrella and faced him.

“I don’t know,” he said. “You’re very ... reserved.” Kennedy considered him. She was indeed reserved in a way, guarded even.

“Yeah, I could see that,” she said. “I guess that’s the only way I know how to be. My family is ... complicated.” Ollie waited patiently for her to continue, and after a beat, she did. “There’s a lot of attention on us, on me, sometimes, and it can be a lot. I guess I don’t want to ever give people a reason to talk about us more.”

“I get that,” Ollie responded. “Do you feel close to many people?”

Kennedy shook her head. “Not really. I mean, it’s weird, and I guess now that I’m thinking about it, maybe it’s because I don’t let anyone get that close.” In Ollie, Kennedy soon realized she’d found a willing, sensitive vessel into which she could pour her repressed desires for companionship. Her friend Tashia, however, didn’t approve of the union, telling Kennedy one day that Ollie was nothing “but a manipulative, entitled asshole. You can do better.”

But Kennedy ignored her friend’s warning because she was in love, even daring to dream that she could one day take Ollie home to her parents, though she knew there’d be some controversy. Her parents didn’t have any hard-and-fast rules about dating for their children, but they had opinions. One of those opinions was definitely that it was a bad look to be publicly fraternizing with a white boy. Her father and mother had white friends and even business partners, but romantically, optically, Blackness was the standard. It was fine to aspire to whiteness in a superficial way, just not to let it in too close. The Carters were a Black dynasty, a new one, and they desired to remain this way through as many generations as possible. This wasn’t so much explicitly communicated to their children as it was suggested, and Kennedy, ever eager to pick up on cues from her parents, generally didn’t want to rock the boat. But with Ollie, she’d take the chance.

Ollie had been with her in the library one day, softly holding her hand under an old oak table. The feeling of his thumb grazing her skin gave her goose bumps. Kennedy liked the contrast of their arms next to one another—hers warm and brown, and his pale and pink. Kennedy was trying to remain focused on her science homework but with him always felt distracted, almost dangerously so. She kept sneaking sideways glances at him after reading every few words when she realized that she was retaining nothing. The bell rang, signifying the start of the next class.

“Shit,” Ollie said, looking at his planner, gathering his books. “I have that history paper due today. I totally forgot about it.”

Kennedy and Ollie weren’t in the same history class, but because they were in the same year, they were both studying American history. “Well, don’t you have math next? Can you work on it in there?” Kennedy asked, trying to ease his panic.

Ollie cracked his neck and grabbed a little bit of his hair and tugged. “Maybe,” he said. “I just didn’t read the chapter, and I really have no idea what I can passably say about the New Deal.”

Kennedy chewed the inside of her cheek. “Well, I finished my paper. Do you want to take a look at mine, for notes only?” she said, aware that her New Deal paper had been done for a week.

“Yes, yes, yes,” Ollie said enthusiastically. “That would save my life.”

Kennedy reached into her bag and extracted a laminated folder, in which she had her own paper typed up, ready to hand in. “Okay, I need it back after lunch,” she said. He took it appreciatively and gave her a one-armed side hug before jogging off to his next class.

Later in the day, when she turned in her paper, she didn’t know that he’d copied several of her words verbatim. The most egregious offense was a careful analogy that she’d made between driving on a highway and the federal government. She had written, “The New Deal created a new operational system for the American government to interfere with the economy when necessary. It functioned like driving down a highway by establishing conditions for the government to influence the financial lives of Americans by entering and exiting in ways that would be safe and cause minimal damage.” A few days later, both Ollie and Kennedy were called in by their respective history teachers. As it turned out, the analogy was so specific that one of the history teachers had brought it up to the other, exposing their deception.

“I assume you both know why we’ve called you in here,” Kennedy’s history teacher said.

When Kennedy and Ollie said nothing, he continued. “You both have remarkably similar papers on the New Deal, and we’d like to give you the opportunity to explain.”

Kennedy stifled a gasp and fixed her face into an impassable stare, just like she’d watched her mother do over so many years. Ollie wasn’t so skilled at controlling his emotions and immediately said, “I mean, I have no idea why. Kennedy and I are study partners. I let her take a peek at my paper, but that’s it.”

Kennedy did a double take, whipping her head around to look at her boyfriend before looking back at both of their teachers. He prudently avoided eye contact with her and looked only at the teachers. “That’s not—” Kennedy began, but Ollie interrupted her.

“I don’t think it was intentional, but maybe there was some confusion,” he said.

“Confusion?” Ollie’s history teacher said, asking for clarification.

“Confusion about only using the paper for notes and not using any of the actual work. I think it’s just such a stressful time for everyone; it’s hard to keep a lot straight,” he said. Ollie looked down, contrite.

Kennedy was stunned. She couldn’t even get any words out, and as she listened to her teachers detail the “next steps,” which would include “an investigation and disciplinary action if appropriate,” she felt her lungs deflate and her chest tighten as her heart seemed to grow too big for her body. She imagined it popping like a balloon, and all the blood that it was pumping spilling, pooling all over her insides.

In the midst of her shock, she said nothing to the history teachers.

Her parents were informed by the school of this indiscretion by a conference call with both her mother and father and their legal team. The headmaster’s voice replayed in her burning ears, even years later: “Plagiarism is a violation of the school’s code of conduct. I have appealed to the board, based on your generous history with the school and her stellar record so far as a lifer, that she not be expelled but allowed to continue her education at home privately and receive her diploma separately.”

That would always stick with Kennedy as the moment that her parents had revoked their love and replaced it with disappointment. They had realized that all their funding and donations and time and energy poured into the school meant nothing at all because she made one dumb choice.

Kennedy was never officially expelled. She wasn’t even suspended from Dalton. Officially, she transitioned to a homeschooling model in order to pursue an unspecified independent study. She would graduate with her class but spent the day that she would have accepted her diploma tapping through photos of her beaming ex-classmates on social media. At her father’s urging, she withdrew her applications to colleges, citing a medical emergency, and took a gap year to work on creative projects and reapply to schools. All this was done without her input. Her father, try as he might, could not stop the speculation and gossip among their community and the press. William Carter Jr. was livid to encounter something that his money could not fix. Her parents had never even asked her if the allegations were true.

The one person who reached out to her was Tashia, and Kennedy felt a brick of guilt settle on her conscience because she hadn’t heeded her friend’s warnings. But selflessly, Tashia sat with Kennedy as she cried. As Kennedy threw herself a pity party and wallowed as everything that she thought she cared about dissolved into nothing, Tashia called to check in every day. Before William Jr. made Kennedy withdraw her applications to college, she had been applying to Harvard. That was the only place she wanted to go. She’d wanted to stake a claim at the school that had formed her father, but he, afraid that Harvard might get wind of the scandal and paranoid about how it might reflect on him, expressly forbid Kennedy from pursuing enrollment there. Despite the scandal, Kennedy tried to tell herself her academic prospects were still bright. She could already speak two languages fluently and one conversationally, and her grades, so long as she completed her coursework and sat for her AP exams, would mean that she would receive honors.

“Dishonorable honors. What use is any of this when I am not even allowed to show my face at school? I don’t think it matters on paper that I got a few awards,” Kennedy said to Tashia as Tashia braided Kennedy’s hair into neat straight back braids. Kennedy had been gone from school for a month, and the uncertainty she felt in the future was heavy.

“Your dad’s blood money can’t do anything else?” Tashia said in response.

“Blood money?” Kennedy questioned, doing a double take. Tashia had some radical views but had never so much as suggested that she thought William Carter Jr. was guilty of something nefarious.

Tashia shrugged. “Isn’t any fortune worth more than a billion dollars blood money?”

And now, years later, this was something Kennedy was constantly wondering about, thinking about Kofi Asare and the roadblocks she encountered investigating her father’s history. Now was her chance to ask Asher the same question.

“Is a billion dollars blood money?” she asked her brother, taking the tripod stand from its carrying case.

Asher looked at her confused. “What a random question,” he said. “I mean, does it matter?”

Kennedy was quiet. She didn’t know if it mattered. She just had a weird feeling that she was getting closer to finding out that a billion-dollar fortune just might be dirty in some way.

Then surprisingly out of nowhere, Asher said, “All construction businesses suffer accidents. That’s what insurance is for.”

This response wasn’t what she was expecting at all. Her brother, so obtuse, so out of touch with administrative affairs, knew about construction regulations and insurance?

“Actually, never mind,” Kennedy said in response. “Let’s get started.” She fitted the camera to her tripod and adjusted the light. Asher was looking at his phone with a bored expression, which she ignored.

Her finger hovered over the record button. “Are you good to go?” she asked him. Asher dramatically dragged his eyes from his cell phone screen before tossing it aside. Kennedy called out, “Action!” and watched him immediately straighten his spine and produce a grin that spread all the way to his canines, ready to share how proud he was to be a Carter.