The Graduates
It’s nearing 9 p.m. on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend and a party is being thrown by a pair of city kids north of the highway in Bridgehampton. A big white tent has been set up in the backyard of a sprawling, immaculate shingled house on a cul-de-sac where the corn and potato fields used to be, and more than 100 teenagers are already inside the tent while dozens more are standing in the lane, trying to get past security. Most of the kids have driven out from Manhattan — some a day or two before, with their parents, others with friends that same evening.
Three burly bodyguards stand at the end of a long, weaving driveway of light beige gravel, illuminated with landscape lighting, swiftly scanning through a guest list to confirm if each kid who walks up has been invited. The mother of the teenage party hosts, who are siblings, paces back and forth in the driveway, armed crossed with anxiety over her cardigan sweater, looking to and from the bouncers and the new arrivals, hoping for reassurance as the men slap neon-pink wristbands on those who have been accepted to enter. Word goes up and down the line as more kids approach out of the dark, hoping to be let in: The party is nearing max capacity, according to the numbers the mom had put down on the mass-gathering permit, and she is freaking out and about to pull the plug.
Girls in jean jackets and lacy white tops, still waiting, nervously text their friends inside, asking for updates. You can hear their fingernails tapping on their iPhone screens.. A queue of silent black S.U.V.s waits in the cul-de-sac, where the drivers stay at their posts for hours. These are the Uber Blacks, hired for the entire night: hulking Chevrolets, GMCs, and Lincolns looming in larger numbers as the party grows bigger and the music gets louder.
Once admitted with the hot-pink wristband, the guests discover that the winding driveway is actually really long and the walk takes about seven minutes to finally reach the tent at the back of the house. It has been a wet weekend, and the endless rain has left the ground so sodden that everyone’s jeans look like they have been dyed ombre to the knees. Inside the tent are dozens and dozens of kids — ages mostly 17 and 18, some 19 — from New York City’s top private schools: Collegiate, Poly Prep, Brearley, Chapin, Dalton, Spence, Riverdale, Fieldston, Horace Mann. Some are high school seniors a week or two away from graduation; others graduated last year, high on the vibes of successfully completing freshman year, most of them at one of the so-called “T20” colleges (that is, “top 20,” as defined by the rankings in U.S. News and World Report) or maybe one of the places well-educated rich kids go when their grades aren’t top of the class (Southern Methodist University, St. Andrews in Scotland, High Point University). They all know one another, if not from school and in person, through Snapchat and Instagram and the web of private-school interconnection that will morph, eventually, into the precious commodity known as “connections.” The party is a chance for highly pressured kids to let loose. It is the blastoff to their Hamptons summer. And, for the local East End kids who made the cut with the bouncers back at the foot of the driveway — locals who are in a tiny minority — it is proof that they, too, can make the grade. They are pretty enough or connected enough to be inside the tent.
Approached after sunset, with the party lights illuminating the tent and making it glow, all that can be seen before you dip inside is a keg stand parked in the right corner and a multitude of trendy cowboy boots (this year’s “cute” boot) stepping, kicking, and swinging up into the air: The smell of mud, beer, and Maison Francis Kurkdjian Baccarat Rouge 540 — the scent worn by the popular girls at private schools up and down the East Coast — escapes the tent and fills the dark yard. Inside, Champagne Supernova blasts on the Sonos and the only way to be heard by the person to your left or right is to scream.
The atmosphere over the Bridgehampton horse paddocks is foggy, thick with humidity and threatening more rain, while the sons and daughters of Wall Street have the time of their lives. Or try hard to have the time of their lives, or to look like it in the TikToks they are making by holding their iPhones high above the dancing crowd. These kids feel the pressure to see and be seen; they are keenly aware of the teenage mythology surrounding summer in the Hamptons, and the legends that are meant to be made on the summer before college begins, and they are performing for each other. Although never spoken, small gestures are picked up and thrown down. Someone mentions a prestigious summer internship at Goldman Sachs, another a classmate who arrived at the party in a Porsche S.U.V. with windows ostentatiously blacked out. Of course, mention is made — at screaming volume, it’s hard to be casual over the din — of the name of the college they’re attending and their family’s long legacy there.
It is now after 11 p.m. and something softer is emerging. Old friends from rival high schools, Horace Mann and Riverdale, are seen exchanging a prolonged hug. Bro, what is a high school rivalry, after all? Girls sitting in clusters cross-legged on the wet grass with their heels and cowboy boots abandoned next to them laugh at the top of their lungs, not faking the laughter this time. Maybe it’s the beer, but it’s also real emotion. Teenagers are sentimental by nature. Boys reminisce, bringing up humorous memories from the past four years: Someone beat someone else in an Ivy Preparatory School League basketball championship.
By now, the mother of the hosts has retreated into the sanctuary of her big house. The sound system is turned off, leaving the kids alone with their conversation. Around midnight, the fleet of Uber Blacks circles back around the cul-de-sac to collect their passengers, many of whom are off to the next party, a quieter but possibly wilder one at a friend’s house on Gin Lane or Aquebogue. By morning, the tent will be deflated by the team hired by the family, and the teenagers’ Hamptons summer, already absolutely Instagrammed to death, has only just begun.