by Jenn Bennett
“Oh God,” I moan. “I’m so sorry. Can you explain to your parents that you weren’t involved? Surely they can talk to the cops, and they’ll just let you go.”
“Me?” He makes a derisive noise in the back of his throat. “Have you gotten a whiff of my reputation lately? It stinks like the dumpster behind Clam Shack number thirteen before garbage pickup day.”
I groan. “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. I don’t even know why I did it. I’m not a criminal! I’ve never even gotten detention at school.”
He snorts a little laugh. “Goodie for you. I haven’t had it this month. Look, this isn’t new territory for me. I’ve been in this room before. It all worked itself out. Had to do some community service. That’s it.”
“I doubt they’re going to make me mow a lawn.” I say.
He shakes his head. “Probably not.”
I cover my face. “What was I thinking? My mom is going to murder me. Am I going to be shipped off to juvie? Will I have a record? I’ll never be able to convince them to give me another shot at that magazine internship.”
Lucky scratches his chin. “I thought you said you were trying out for it?”
“They turned me down. Levi Summers came into the meeting, and he’s a stickler about rules. He pulled my submission because I’m too young.”
He exhales, long and low. “That’s why you got so mad?”
“I needed another reason?” I say, angry tears threatening again as Adrian’s drunken face pops back up in my mind.
“No,” he agrees. “Definitely not. Sorry.”
“Oh God. I’m screwed,” I murmur. “All of my big plans … My father won’t let me move up there now. Not with a police record. I’m stuck here. I’ll probably never go to college, and I’ll end up like my mom, completely resentful about her life choices and unable to hold down a job.”
“Whoa,” Lucky says. “Back it up. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
“Maybe the Saint-Martin women don’t have a love curse. My mom’s right—this whole town is cursed.”
He squints at me. “That stupid love curse? Don’t tell me you’re buying into that now.”
“Hey, it’s just like you said—we’ve got the word ‘Siren’ plastered right above our door. Temptation, right? We’re cursed! Wanna know a secret? I’m a virgin. How’s that for irony, huh? Wild Winona’s daughter—who’s allegedly running a sordid nude subscription service online, proof provided by Adrian—is a virgin. There’s your curse, right there. Happy?”
“Jesus, Josie,” he says, looking embarrassed as he scans the corners of the room. Like maybe we’re being watched or recorded. “I didn’t—”
Well? We used to tell each other everything. Besides, he’s the one who brought up porn outside the pool house. I don’t even know what I’m saying anymore. “Know what’s funny? Between me and my mom, I’m the adult,” I tell him. “The responsible one who sits at home alone and does my homework and has to remind Mom to pay the electricity bill on time so I don’t have to sit in the dark or walk to Starbucks for Wi-Fi until she can get it turned back on again.”
“Josie,” he says. Feeling sorry for me, pleading for me to shut up … it’s hard to tell.
But it’s too late for that. I have held myself under tight, careful control for too long, not communicating with my mom, not communicating with anyone, and now the levee’s broken.
I’m awash in emotion.
“This isn’t me. I’m a good girl,” I insist, feeling tears prick the backs of my eyelids. “All I wanted was to get out of here before the time bomb exploded between Grandma and Mom when the Nepal trip ended—and for a chance for a real family with my father in LA. Now I won’t be surprised if my mom shoves me back into the Pink Panther and drags me off to some other town once she hears what I’ve done here in the portal to hell.”
“She’d really do that?” he asks, sounding shocked. “Make you leave Beauty again?”
“Maybe? I don’t know. I … I was trying to keep my head down and mind my own business. Now everyone is going to be getting their jollies looking at a photo of my mom, thinking it’s me? What is wrong with this town?”
“It was so small on Adrian’s phone screen, probably half the people in the pool house didn’t see it.”
“You looked?”
Face long, he lays his head on the table, and that only makes me more miserable.
The door to the holding room opens. An officer tells Lucky his parents are here to pick him up, and he can leave the station with them. A little panic rises in me when Lucky stands to leave. Suddenly I don’t want him to go. It’s as if the past few years have disappeared, and we’re twelve again—two geeky shy kids who bonded over books and video games and bad D&D campaigns at our secret North Star boatshed hideaway at the end of the Harborwalk. This night has turned me upside down.
“Hey,” he says to me in a low voice. “Don’t sweat. It’s going to be fine. One of the good things about Beauty is that if people here expect you to be something, it’s easy for them to continue believing it.”
“What?” I say, confused.
But he doesn’t answer. He just walks out of the room, briefly stopping to add, “By the way, there’s no such thing as curses.”
“Says you, the person with a black cat tattoo and a number thirteen on your helmet.”
“Keep your head up, okay?”
Instead of a goodbye, he gives me a little lift of his chin, and when the officer fails to shut the door, I enviously watch Lucky as he’s greeted by his parents, a wave of nostalgia hitting me right in the solar plexus when I see them. His dad, Nick Karras, friendliest man in town. His graying overlong curls hit his shoulders and gleam in the station’s harsh lights. And his mom, Kat, with her short black hair and Lucky’s chiseled cheekbones. Both of them are clearly concerned about his well-being. He doesn’t resist when his mother hugs him and floods his forehead with kisses, or when she slings her arm around his shoulder protectively, like he’s some frail and precious thing.
They both used to hug me like that. And when Kat looks up and sees me, lifting a hand to wave, I almost start crying all over again.
Then they’re all out of sight.
There’s some commotion with the officer who brought us, but I can’t hear what’s being said or see anything. Something dramatic is happening. What that is, I’m not sure.
Ten minutes later, though, I see Lucky and his parents leave.
While I’m having a minor panic attack, trying to puzzle out what’s going on, I finally spy cat-eye glasses and red lipstick coming into the station lobby and wilt in relief. When I look into Mom’s eyes, I see everything she’s feeling at once: relief that I’m in one piece, shock over my mascara-smeared face. Disappointment that I’ve disgraced myself and our tiny, proud family.
“Are you hurt?” my mother asks, concerned.
I shake my head. “Not physically.” Mentally, I’m pretty much a ten-car pileup.
Mom nods curtly. “Can she leave?” she asks the officer standing behind her.
“Just need to sign for her release. Did you bring an attorney?”
“Surely it’s not that serious.” Mom looks down her nose at him, both literally and spiritually. “It’s only a misdemeanor. A prank.”
The somber man with the somber mustache says in a low voice, “Like I told the Karrases, Summers & Co is owned by Levi Summers, ma’am. It’s a historical landmark, and that window likely will cost a pretty penny to replace. I’d strongly advise you to find a good criminal defense attorney before the arraignment.”
There’s an arraignment?
“Levi Summers is not God,” she says coolly.
“Here in Beauty? He’s close enough,” he says, hooking a thumb in his belt loop.
Mom points a finger in his face. “When my mother left me in charge of Siren’s Book Nook, I moved my daughter back here with the assumption that this was a kinder, better Beauty. I was told by the board of selectmen that I was going t
o be accepted back into the fold as a respected member of this community—”
“Ma’am,” he says impatiently.
“Don’t you ‘ma’am’ me. I’m thirty-six years old, not a decrepit spinster on her deathbed.”
“I didn’t—”
“And furthermore,” she says a little louder, speaking over him. “I’m not going to allow Levi Summers to hump my leg in a show of dominance. So you can do yourself a favor and scamper off to your master.”
“Mom,” I caution, but she’s too caught up in being my hero. This right here? This is our problem. Quick to anger, way too defensive of each other. Oh, she’ll bite my head off in private later, but she’ll never in a million years admit to another person that I did anything wrong.
“Hold up,” another officer says, striding up to the room. “She’s free to go. Karras admitted to breaking the window.”
“What?” Mom and I say in chorus.
“The Karrases said they’d get a lawyer and agreed to appear at the arraignment. It’s all settled. Your daughter is free to go with you, Ms. Saint-Martin,” he says to my mother. “Word of advice? Keep her away from Lucky. Have a good night.”
What the ever-loving hell is happening?
If people here expect you to be something, it’s easy for them to continue believing it.
People here think that Lucky 2.0 is trouble.
He told the police he threw the rock.
He saved me?
A funny kind of panic swirls around my stomach and grips my chest. I don’t understand this. No one is ever nice to me for no good reason, and Lucky doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who just goes around doing good deeds. One minute I was in the middle of a sob fest—telling him stuff I shouldn’t have told him—and the next …
He was taking the fall for me.
For me.
For me?
“Oh, thank God, thank God, thank God !” Mom says, shoulders sagging. “Of course you didn’t do this, right?”
“Uh …”
“Jesus. You scared the life out of me. Come on. Let’s go home before someone sees my car parked here,” she says with an anxious little laugh.
In a daze, I push through the front door and inhale a lungful of early summer air. Freedom, sure, only it doesn’t feel all that sweet. I glance around the parking lot, looking for Lucky and his parents, but they’re long gone.
Wired and paranoid, I climb into the creaky passenger seat of the Pink Panther and slam the heavy door shut, unsure what to say when Mom gets behind the wheel. She exhales a long breath and sits in silence, staring out the windshield.
“Where’s Evie?” I ask.
“At home. She’s freaked out that you left the party without her and wanted to come along, but I made her stay. Shutterbug?”
“Yeah?”
“Why did you send me those texts if you didn’t smash the window?”
Right. The bajillion panicked texts I sent when I was stuck at the police station. Texts like: I did a stupid thing. And: You’re going to kill me.
How do I explain those?
“I’m just confused,” Mom says. “Evie told me she had a bad fight with her ex at that party, and that he said some things that may have upset you?”
I rub my knuckles with my thumb. “He’s such a jerk, Mom. He was drunk and …” God. I don’t want to tell her about the nude photo. I just can’t. It will be humiliating for her, and I don’t want to hurt her. As mad as she makes me, I don’t want to hurt her. So I don’t. “He was just saying all kinds of shit about our family. You don’t even know.”
She taps a finger on the steering wheel, contemplating. “Oh, I can imagine. Did I not tell you this place was built on a portal to hell? Thought I was clear about that.”
“You were,” I say weakly.
“Okay, so you got upset, and you didn’t tell Evie that you were leaving the party with Lucky Karras? Since when in God’s name did you start palling around with him again?”
“I—”
“Didn’t I tell you? From the first day we got here, I said don’t mess with that kid. Everyone can see he’s trouble now, Josie. And he’s throwing rocks at windows for you? That’s a weird kind of romance—some dark Bonnie and Clyde shit. Feels super intense, and that spells serious to me. I don’t like it at all, Josie.”
Oh my God. Is that what she thinks?
I mean, what other reason would there be, given the circumstances?
This is awful. I’ve never felt so guilty in my entire life. One lie is leading to another, and they’re all jumbling up together in my stomach and breeding, and now there’s a whole litter of Lie Bunnies hopping all over the place and kicking me in the ribs. I don’t know what to say to her that isn’t just another lie, so I do the only thing I know and twist it back around on her:
“Where were you tonight?” I say accusingly.
“Excuse me?”
“I tried to call you when I first got to the station.”
“I was down in the shop.”
“Not on a date?”
Sharp eyes meet mine. “You don’t get to ask me about that.”
“You think I want to? Because I don’t. I’m just saying that you implied you’d cool it with the random hookups.”
“Hey! My love life is none of your business,” she says, slashing her hand through the air. “I’m allowed to have one, you know. I’m not a nun, and when have you ever once seen me on a date? Never. Not once. Because I may fail at motherhood sometimes, but I don’t mix home and dating. I make sure it never touches you.”
“Oh yeah? You really wanna know why all this happened, huh?” I ask her, lashing out in frustration. “Do you? All this happened because Evie’s ex called you ‘the Whore of Babylon.’ And he said I post nudes on my subscription service online because apparently, I follow in your footsteps from when you used to model for Henry. And all day long at school, people are talking about me and you, and no matter how many times I tell them to keep their mouths shut, it doesn’t matter, because how can I stop air leaking out of a balloon if you keep poking holes in it!”
I’ve shocked her. I can see it all over her face. Hurt her too. And the satisfaction that comes with that win lasts for all of one millisecond, because the thing about being this close to someone is that when you hurt them, you hurt yourself. And now I regret saying it.
“Don’t you dare blame me for your mistakes!” she snaps, riled and aggrieved. “I’m not the one who got hauled off to jail with our delinquent neighbor for throwing a damn rock at a department store window!” Her face’s long and normally graceful planes are now sharp with anger, her freckles burnished by the streetlamps that circle the police station. “I’ve done a lot of stupid things in my life, but I damn well have never been taken into police custody. Your mistake. You own it, not me. What do I always say, Josie? If you’re going to break the rules, do it the right way. Now, look me in the eyes and tell me there was anything right about destroying someone’s property.”
I want to fight her. Fight anyone. I want things to make sense again. I want to take it all back, rewind time and start over. But none of that is going to happen, is it? “You’re right. I’m sorry for everything,” I finally tell her, defeated. “For being such a disappointment.”
After a long, strained moment, anger dissipates, and silence fills the space between us. Then she gently bumps my arm with her elbow and says in a softer voice, “Hey. I’m disappointed in your choice of company, not with you.”
Eyes on my lap, I fiddle with the closure on the glove compartment, opening and closing it, over and over. “He’s the same Lucky he always was, you know.” The kind of boy who would lie to protect me, even when I didn’t deserve it.
“He’s a vandal, Josie. That window was huge and will be expensive to replace. Could be a felony charge. He’s likely going to have a criminal record for this.”
He is?
A record that should be mine.
I think I’m going to pass out.
/> “Josie? Are you okay?” She reaches over my lap and quickly rolls down the window, letting in a burst of cool air. “Breathe. Slowly. In through your nose, out through your mouth,” she says, lightly stroking the sensitive skin on the inside of my wrist with her thumb. “There you go. It’s okay. You weren’t drinking tonight, were you?”
I shake my head once. “I’m just … tired.”
“It was a stressful night.” She takes my temperature with the back of her hand on my forehead, my neck. Brushes hair away from my temples. “I’m sorry that moving back here has been … more difficult than our usual relocation. And I’m sorry I didn’t answer the phone when you needed me.”
Sorry I committed a felony and am letting someone else take the fall for me, I think. But I don’t say it out loud, because I’m a coward and an awful person.
“We’ll talk about it later. Let’s just go home right now, okay? Evie will be worried.” She squeezes my shoulder before starting up the Pink Panther. The engine roars to life, shaking the seats and the windows.
How can I hold a grudge against my mom for lying when I’m doing exactly the same thing? That makes me just as bad as her. Worse, because I’m not just hurting myself. I’m hurting Lucky, too.
What’s going to happen to him?
BEAUTY COURTHOUSE 1857: Chiseled into locally quarried marble, this sign graces the entrance of a historic municipal building on the town common. A disgruntled farmer once dragged the body of a dead sheep inside the lobby and a ship captain shot up the ceiling in protest of taxes. (Personal photo/Josephine Saint-Martin)
Chapter 5
It’s after one in the morning when we get back to the Nook and park in a designated spot tucked into a narrow side alley between us and the Revolutionary War–themed Freedom Art Gallery next door. As soon as we climb the rickety stairs to the above-shop apartment, Evie slides up to me in socks and attacks me with questions and apologies. Why did I leave the party? What was I thinking? Am I okay?
“I’m fine,” I lie.
“She wasn’t arrested,” Mom reports. “They just took her in with Lucky. He’s the one who broke the window, not Josie.”