The Cave Dwellers by Christina McDowell (readict books TXT) 📕

Lance arrives at the table carrying a massive tray of food; a busboy probably about Bunny’s age trails behind him and hurries to unfold the stand on which the tray will be placed.

“Thank you.” Meredith leans over, piercing the young boy with her well-intentioned eyes, and slips him a twenty-dollar bill, then winks.

Embassy Row

In the early twentieth century, Massachusetts Avenue between the vice president’s mansion and Sheridan Circle was known as Millionaires’ Row, housing the nation’s elite in gilded mansions.I But when the Great Depression hit, it forced many to put their mansions up for sale. Soon after, social institutions (exclusive clubs) and diplomats started moving in. For example, the British Embassy was built in 1930 and the Japanese Embassy by 1931, and by the 1940s the area was dubbed Embassy Row.

Today diplomats and their families who live in Washington are protected by something called diplomatic immunity.II It means the sons and daughters of ambassadors (and the ambassadors themselves) are not susceptible to lawsuits, arrest, or prosecution under American law. For example, rumors circulated around town that there was a fraternity thrown out by American University (reasons unclear). But the fraternity still continued admitting members, becoming the frat for many international students. Around 2014, after a pledge decided to drop, three frat members assaulted him in a garage. One assailant, the son of a diplomat, served no jail time and fled to his home country, while the two others each served 120 days in jail and 100 hours of community service.

I. Scott Harris, “Ten Facts You May Not Know About DuPont Circle,” DCist (website), January 30, 2017, https://dcist.com/story/17/01/30/you-know-it-as-one/.

II. United States Department of State, Office of Foreign Missions, https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/2018-DipConImm_v5_Web.pdf.

CHAPTER FOUR

From her bedroom window, Bunny watches Chuck pull in the trash cans. She listens to the familiar rhythm of the wheels rolling along their cobblestone driveway. The redbrick mansion across the street, once home to then General Ulysses S. Grant after the Civil War, is twinkling with lights, revived by a tech billionaire from Silicon Valley. Bunny’s been spying on the new family of late, no details to report yet, other than that they own a Cavalier King Charles named Steve Jobs that the maid walks every morning.

Bunny turns around to close her bedroom door, a Feel the Bern poster glued to the back of it. She hears Cate giggling on the telephone with a friend from California in the guest bedroom across the hall. She waits for the beep beep beep beep of Chuck setting the house alarm for the night—007 with an extra 0 is the code. Her backpack is zipped and filled with Bernie Sanders rolling papers and condoms she took from a trip to Planned Parenthood. Once the alarm is set, Bunny flips the lever of the lock from left to right, then slowly pulls the top half of the window open, chucking her backpack so it lands in the boxwood bushes below before climbing out. Last year when her parents were on a golfing trip to Ireland, Bunny discovered a loophole in the alarm system: pull open the top half of the window and the alarm won’t sound.

Bunny rides her bike down the uneven brick sidewalk along R Street, passing Katharine Graham’s abandoned estate on her right, Oak Hill Cemetery on her left, its black wrought iron gates chained and locked, protecting the ghosts of Washington royalty from unworthy intruders. Rats scurry behind trash cans and raccoons into the alleyways beneath the old gas streetlamps of Georgetown.

When Bunny stops at the light before Sheridan Circle, the intersection of Kalorama, Dupont, and Georgetown, she peers up at the statue of the Civil War general atop his horse posturing before it bucks, his arm stretched out behind him, an invisible sword ready to defeat the enemy—a hero before he slaughtered the Indians in the Great Plains! Bunny waits as the metropolitan police blast sirens at all exits of the circle. The vice president’s motorcade comes barreling through, one police car after another, the caravan of black Suburbans, the black limousine, American flags stuck to each side of the vehicle waving in the wind before the bomb squad trails behind them. She’s accustomed to this kind of interruption.

Kalorama is the wealthiest neighborhood in the district, the milieu of politicians (Trumps, Obamas, Clintons, Tafts, Roosevelts) who have lived or currently live there, along with Supreme Court justices, media moguls, and international royalty. It is an old neighborhood with clustered colonial mansions sitting almost on top of each other—Embassy Row is just behind it. France is twenty feet to the right. England: twenty feet to the left. Afghanistan: make a right up Wyoming Avenue. When Bunny was little, she and her friends would joke that if one of them were from, say, Albania, and committed a murder, they could run to the embassy for protection and never get arrested as long as they stayed on the foreign property. Kind of dark for eleven-year-olds to think about, but normal in Washington. Kalorama is not the kind of neighborhood where one strolls across the street to ask a neighbor to borrow some milk, not if their people committed genocide against your people just a few decades ago.

The secret service is parked on either side of the street, barricading the entrance where the former president resides. Family members of the current president reside on the block behind it, so close that a baseball could be thrown between the two homes to shatter a window. In fact, most political veterans (both Democrat and Republican) share the same neighborhood. Always have. Always will. Always remember that.

Flags with Arabic symbols and colors blow in the icy wind; the smell of burning wood lingers from some mansion nearby. Only the occasional clanking of metal can be heard as Bunny chains her bike to the green fence behind the mosque. The vice president’s mansion is a few blocks up