by Zoey Dean
“Wet means you cheated,” Rose explained.
“No cheating,” I promised.
As they headed back toward the manse, I stepped out of my three-buck panties and jumped in. The water was heated, the salt gave me extra buoyancy, and my shirt was within easy reach. I could feel the tension oozing out of my muscles as I floated on my back, listening to make sure the twins weren’t returning. They weren’t. Was it possible that I was wrong? Not likely, but still—this was nice.
I used to swim in a lake near our house in New Hampshire. I’d dive down and run my hands along the mucky bottom, wondering what it was like for the frogs that my sister had explained slept down there all winter. I did a surface dive now, swimming down, down, down until I touched the rough bottom of the pool. From there, I swam underwater, pulling with my arms, kicking with my legs, wholly enjoying the exercise. Maybe I’d start swimming every day, might as well take advantage of having a pool to—
Pop. Suddenly, bright lights blinded me. I touched my goggles, my eyes adjusting to the light.
Oh, God. There were people. Lots of them. Behind a Plexiglas window in some sort of underground party room. Sage, Rose, and half-dozen others, pointing and laughing. Standing in the front row was a boy in faded jeans and a baby-blue linen shirt, just staring. And that was when I saw my own reflection: bubble-eyed, magnified by the water’s refraction, naked little ol’not-so-little me.
Allow me a moment here. When I was twelve and starting to get a figure, I had the same nightmare as a lot of girls: Running late for school, I’d dash into my seventh-grade homeroom only to realize I’d forgotten my clothes. I couldn’t move my feet; all I could do was stand there while everyone chortled and pointed.
Who knew that ten years later, I’d live out a version of that terror?
I shot to the surface and powered toward the shallow end, intent on only one thing—getting to my clothes before the twins and their friends got to me. Because sure as I was that Sage and Rose Baker didn’t know the meaning of irony, I was fully confident that they knew the meaning of cruelty.
I wasn’t fast enough.
“It’s the little mermaid!” Sage mocked. She held a champagne bottle in her right hand.
A chubby guy chugging a Stella inadvertently flashed a couple inches of belly between his red Polo and the top of his khakis. “Killer breaststroke.” He smiled.
Ew.
If the twins wanted to humiliate me, they’d succeeded. I wanted to get out of there—there being the pool, Palm Beach, and Florida in general—as fast as humanly possible, with as much dignity intact as possible. I hoisted my naked self up the rungs of the ladder. The cool night air on my wet skin turned on my anatomical headlights, so to speak.
“Oooh-la-la!” Sage squealed. “Frizzy’s face isn’t all that blushes!”
“And the hair on her head isn’t all that frizzes!” Rose added.
I glanced downward and saw a red rash of embarrassment spreading upward. Bitches.
I wanted nothing more than to grab my clothes and run—all the way back to New York, if necessary. But I wasn’t about to give these assholes the satisfaction. Charma had told me once about an acting exercise in which you try to embody a person you know in order to act out a character. Charma had embodied her ex to play the part of a completely flaming but very closeted gay guy (don’t ask). I knew who I needed to be. You don’t look like you. You look like Lily. I slapped on a casual smile and stepped up to the guy who was taking his beer belly for a walk.
“I don’t think we’ve met. I’m the twins’ tutor, Megan.” I offered my hand. “You’re . . . ?”
“Pembroke Hutchison.” His gaze traveled back to my breasts, but he managed a sweaty-palmed handshake.
“Here.” The baby-blue-shirt, front-row-seat guy held out a towel. He was looking away from me, probably stifling his own giggles.
“Thank you,” I said, wrapping it above my chest sarong-style. “I’m Megan.”
“Will,” he told me, looking up. “Phillips.”
“Nice to meet you.” Asshole, I added silently. Incredibly hot asshole—his almost navy eyes were framed with thick strawberry-blond lashes—but asshole nonetheless.
I introduced myself to the rest of the crowd. The tiny blonde was Precious Baldridge. The athletic girl with the straight raven hair tied back in a ponytail was Dionne-not-Dianne Cresswell. The brunette with obvious implants was Suzanne de Grouchy. In addition to Pembroke and Will, there was a short guy with a soul patch—Ari Goldstein.
“Well, nice to meet all of you,” I declared. “I hope you enjoyed the entertainment portion of our evening.”
“You’ve got balls, I’ll give you that.” Pembroke finished his beer and fired the empty can at a pink metal bin but missed. The can rolled into the pool. He didn’t bother to retrieve it.
I arched a brow. “If that’s what you saw, I’d lay off the Stella.”
Will let out a loud ha from behind a chaise. “Good one,” he murmured.
Um, thanks.
“Yeah, hilarious,” Sage spat, her eyes narrowing.
“Look, Sage,” I said. “I get it. It was a practical joke. I’m still good if you are.”
Sage did her patented head-shake thing. “You’re not even close to good, Frizzy.”
“Oh, this shit is rich,” Pembroke crowed, putting up his fists in an exaggerated boxer’s stance. “Catfight!”
“Shut up,” Rose told him.
“I love it when you talk dirty,” he mock-groaned. He held out his arms, edging backward toward the pool. “Come to Papa.”
Everyone laughed again. Abruptly, Rose gave him a two-handed push. He fell awkwardly into the pool with a massive splash.
“Thar she blows!” Ari bellowed as Pembroke came up sputtering.
I’d had more than enough and gathered up my clothes. “Enjoy your party, guys. Sage, Rose, I’ll see you in the morning.”
I pivoted to depart, but Sage’s voice stopped me. “Hold it, Frizzy.”
The smooth walkway pebbles felt cold on my feet. “Face it, Sage. You wanted to humiliate me. You failed. Good night.”
The twins’ friends oohed like a sitcom sound track.
“You still don’t get it,” Sage sneered. “We’ve got a really big agent, Zenith Himmelfarb. Maybe you’ve heard of her?”
“And I would care because?”
“Because we’re going to be stars,” Rose explained.
Sage smiled smugly. “Everyone in the business has seen Vanity Fair, and Zenith is fielding offers for us. Film, TV, modeling—”
“For really a lot of money,” Rose put in.
Sage folded her arms. “We’re not going to college, we don’t need Laurel’s money, and we definitely don’t need you. So why don’t you and your ugly clothes and your fat thighs waddle their way back to New York, fuck you very much?”
The only sound was the squishing of Pembroke’s clothes as he sloshed to the bar for another beer. Everyone else waited to see what I would say.
Let ’em wait. I had nothing to say to any of them. First they’d tried to be rude. When that failed, they’d come to my room to manipulate me into doing something humiliating. They’d succeeded. There hadn’t been a moment when they’d actually considered studying with me. I made sure my towel was wrapped tightly enough, put one foot in front of the other on the white pebble path, and wondered whether Laurel’s plane was still at the airport.
Fuck this.
Fuck the money.
And definitely fuck the Baker twins.
Choose the definition that most accurately describes the following word:
LIE
(a)an intentionally false statement
(b)a petite bending of the truth
(c)a totally justifiable act, in times of desperation
(d)a sin, in some circles
(e) standard operating procedure at any number of tabloid publications
Chapter Ten
Hate is not a strong enough word,” I ranted
to James, cell phone pressed hard against my ear. I’d discovered a small balcony off my den that overlooked the pool deck and the ocean, and I had gone out there to call him. The deck was now empty—only discarded champagne bottles and crushed beer cans served as evidence of my humiliation. “Detestation. Abhorrence. Loathing. Yeah. Loathing comes close.”
Even after a fifteen-minute scorching-hot shower to wash off both the salt water of the pool and the fallout of the Twins from Hell, I was still raging. I had already called the Skull to say I needed to speak with Laurel immediately, but he told me she was currently en route in her jet to France, and I could speak with her in the morning. Fine, then. I’d quit at sunup.
I’d called James immediately thereafter and told him to expect me back in New York tomorrow. “So, anyway,” I continued into the phone, “can you leave a key with your doorman? You’ll probably be at work when I get in.”
“Yeah . . . sure . . .”
Like the hesitation in his voice wasn’t obvious. This was an emergency, for God’s sake. “James? I could really use the help right now.” I hated myself for sounding both demanding and needy, but what choice did I have?
“Hey, I got it covered,” he assured me. That was more like it. “For a few days,” he added.
A few days. And then what? Move in with Lily? Head up to New Hampshire? But I’d figure that out once I was back on Planet Earth with actual humans instead of Palm Beach celebutard robots.
A breeze stirred the muggy night air, carrying the delicious aroma of orange blossoms and the ocean. Out at sea, boats bobbed, their lights flickering. I forced myself to take deep yoga breaths. I didn’t know the first thing about yoga, but fuck it. In with the good, out with the bad. In with the good . . .
“It’s so beautiful here,” I murmured, finally calm enough to settle in to one of the two wicker chairs. “And the kids with the keys to the kingdom—so gorgeous on the outside, so ugly on the inside . . .”
“Sounds like The OC on steroids,” James joked.
“Except this is real.” I stood up and leaned against the balcony wall. Les Anges’s property spread out on either side of me. I could see the rooftops of equally extravagant estates lining the beach in the distance. “You should see this place, James. It’s completely removed from anything that resembles reality. These girls and their friends . . . I mean, that Vanity Fair profile was nothing. If anyone had any idea what it was really like—” I stopped myself in midsentence. “Wait. Holy shit.”
“Wanna run that by me again?” James asked.
In the graphic-novel version of my future autobiography, this is the frame where shafts of light shoot out from around my head. What did I love to write about? Not what people saw but what was underneath. And here I was with girls so perfect on the surface and so nasty inside. The same could probably be said about Palm Beach itself. And it was all right in front of me.
“James? I changed my mind,” I told him. “I’m not coming home.”
“Wait, what? What’s going on?”
I explained my epiphany as I paced around the balcony, my mind flying with the possibilities of a Palm Beach–Baker twins exposé. “It’s the ultimate outsider-insider story. Who wouldn’t publish it?”
It wasn’t like the twins could throw me off the estate—only Laurel could do that, and she was currently en route to France, as the Skull had so haughtily put it. She’d be there for another two weeks, which basically meant I was getting paid to be on an undercover assignment for fourteen glorious sun-filled days. Of course, I’d have to leave as soon as she returned and it became immediately obvious that the twins were still brain-dead assholes, but until then . . . It was freaking genius.
“It’s great,” James enthused. “Seriously.”
Okay, so it wouldn’t be eight weeks at fifteen hundred a week. And it definitely wouldn’t be a seventy-five-thousand-dollar bonus for getting the twins in to Duke. But if I wrote a first-class, kick-ass insider piece on all things young and Palm Beach and secretly smarmy and corrupt—that could launch my writing career.
I was sitting on a journalistic gold mine. Let the excavation begin.
Choose the definition that most accurately matches the following word:
GAY
(a)a person who is sexually attracted to people of his or her own sex
(b)the best friend to have in a fashion crisis
(c) current de rigueur “accessory” for talk-show hostesses and B-list actresses
(d)safe arm candy at red-carpet events
(e)all of the above
Chapter Eleven
The next morning—despite my lack of both coffee and food (since I still had no clue how to “summon Marco”)—I awoke early and dressed in the second of my profoundly hideous Century 21 outfits on the off chance that the twins would come knocking on my door with pencils and calculators in hand.
Ten o’clock came and went with no sign of the girls, so I set off looking for them. I went down the hallway past the top of the spiral staircase, then followed the white corridor to the twins’ wing. It wasn’t hard to figure out whose door was whose. Each girl had her name spelled out in electric-pink neon tubing.
Rose first, since she was marginally less detestable. When there was no answer to my knocks, I went in, taking mental notes. Her suite was gigantic, with rooms twice the size of mine. There was a bedroom with a balcony, a kitchen, a den, a dressing room, and a bathroom whose vanity held every cosmetic and beauty product known to humankind, and not manufactured by Angel Cosmetics. Everything was furnished in stark modern white. There were fresh white roses in a white vase on the nightstand, and white gardenias in the bathroom. I was struck by two strange—okay, kind of creepy—things in her den. There was a dollhouse that was an exact-scale model of her suite, right down to the tiny fake floral arrangements. Inside that dollhouse, two identical red-haired girls played jacks together on the den floor.
When I tried Sage’s suite, I found it similarly empty, identical in layout, but completely different in decor. Her king-size bed was swathed in leopard fabric. The safari theme carried through to her den, which had a working waterfall and a six-foot stuffed parrot on a perch. Her bathroom and dressing area were as well equipped as Rose’s. I peeked into her clothes closet. Jesus. There was enough couture here to dress the state of New Hampshire.
What could it possibly be like for this to be the norm? The reality? How did you look at the rest of the world when you’d known nothing but this kind of excess?
My next stop was their pool deck. Still no girls. I decided to go up to the main house. The white gravel of the path crunched under my black loafers—at least the aroma of eau de smoke seemed to be gone. It was a perfect morning: The sky was azure, and the air was fresh, without the mugginess of the day and night before.
I was surprised to find the mansion’s door open but then remembered that it would be impossible for an intruder to get past the security gate. In the foyer, I called for Sage and Rose. Nothing. Something smelled fantastic, though—garlic and cheese—and my stomach rumbled.
My nose twitched like that of a dog picking up a familiar scent, and I followed the aroma down a hallway and into a French country kitchen. A floating island in the center of the room held an eight-burner stove. Copper pots and pans hung from ceiling hooks. There was a sturdy stone table with about twenty straight-back chairs surrounding it, as well as a six-person round table nestled in one corner. The backdrop was the ocean, glistening through a twenty-foot wall of glass.
“Ah, just in time for breakfast!” A handsome silver-haired man, wearing a white chef’s jacket over a white linen shirt and off-white trousers with a perfect knife pleat, was whisking eggs in a copper bowl.
“I was looking for the twins,” I explained. “I’m Megan Smith, their new tutor.”
“Delighted!” He flashed me a smile, then poured the eggs into a frying pan on the stove. Another pan held sizzling cloves of garlic. “I’m Marco Devine, Madame Limoges’s chef.”
Marco. Summon Marco. This was Marco.
He flipped the garlic on top of the eggs. “I thought you might be hungry. I was going to have one of the maids deliver this to your room, but now you can enjoy it here. I hope you like garlic. I’m afraid I’m entirely incapable of cooking without it.”
“I love it. And I’m starving,” I confessed, leaning against the center island. “Do you have coffee, by any chance?”
He laughed and motioned to the small round table. “Black carafe is French roast, brown carafe is Ethiopian, red carafe is Venezuelan, and white is decaf that no one in their right mind should drink.” He pulled an earthenware mug from a cupboard and handed it to me. “Help yourself.”
After I poured the French roast, Marco leaned over and popped a fresh cinnamon stick into my cup. “French roast should never be consumed without a cinnamon stick,” he explained. “They were made for each other.”
“Thank you,” I said, meaning it more than he could know. It was the best coffee I’d ever tasted. “Have the girls been here for breakfast?”
He chuckled again and moved the pan around on the stove. “They’re allergic to breakfast, darling. Actually, they’re allergic to morning entirely.”
“Well, they’re not in bed—I checked.”
“You mean they’re not in their own beds.” Marco flipped the eggs. “You’ll see them around noon. Maybe.”
Interesting. This guy seemed to know a lot about the twins. What a good place to start my research.
“Have you worked here a long time?” I asked innocently.
“Since the twins were in the terrible twelves.” His eyes glinted with good humor. “I believe that would be the terrible twos times six.”
“You must know them well, then.”
“I doubt they know themselves well yet, darling,” Marco opined as he slid the omelet onto a white china plate, then tore various fresh herbs from small pots on a ledge and sprinkled them over the omelet. Next he fanned bright green avocado slices around the plate and added a dollop of sour cream. “The twins lead what Socrates would call ‘an unexamined life.’ Sit.” He pointed to the smaller table and then put the omelet down in front of me.