by Jenn Bennett
“What? That’s not what people are saying!”
Is it … ?
“And now she wants to talk to little ol’ me? Oh wow. Just wow … This is the most exciting day of my life.” He snaps his fingers. “Dammit. And I forgot my autograph book.”
“Lucky, please!” I beg.
He gives me a withering look before glancing over his shoulder, checking to make sure his father isn’t nearby, I think. When he finds the coast clear, he pats the ladder. “Permission to come aboard, Miss Saint-Martin. Escape your adoring fans on the S.S. Fun N Sun—not to be confused with the Sun and Fun, which overheated last week.”
“You want me to come up there?”
“Did you develop a fear of heights over the last few years?”
“No. I just mean … it’s on blocks. Is it safe? Is this, like, a dead boat or something? It doesn’t drive?”
He laughs. “Pilot. You pilot a boat and drive a car.”
“Oh, yeah. I forgot.” When we were kids, we spent most of our time in the apartment above the bookshop or running around town. The Karrases’ old boat-repair place was a lot smaller, and it was the last place we wanted to be. This boatyard here? It’s huge. And obviously way more successful. This is new territory for me.
Lucky taps the side of the boat. “This here is what we in the boat-repair biz like to call a floating death trap out on the water. But right here, it’s perfectly fine. It’s been sitting on blocks for about a month because the cheapskate who owns it won’t pay for the repairs. I come up here every day. It’s not going anywhere, I assure you.”
“Fine,” I tell him. “I’ll come up.”
“Whoa, watch your step. Rickety ladder and seagull shit are a dangerous combo.”
“You just said it was safe!” I complain, stumbling as I clear the edge of the deck.
“Safe-ish. Sit down before you break your neck and I get blamed for that, too.” He gestures to an empty spot next to him on a built-in seat, moving a paperback out of the way.
Jesus. This is not how I thought this would go. My stomach clenches, and I feel a little sick and terrified. Gosh, it’s tight quarters up here. “Lucky …”
“Josie.” He leans back against the boat, legs sprawled, arms tightly crossed over his chest, and he stares at me from under a curved lock of dark hair that’s fallen across his brow.
I twist in my seat and try to focus on why I’m here. “What happened at the arraignment?”
He lifts one shoulder, lets it drop, and looks off into the harbor. “Eh, it was bullshit. Whatever. My dad has a lawyer he uses for the boatyard, so she told me what to say—that the whole thing was an accident. That I never intended to break the window or was even aiming for Summers & Co, because I would never do anything to hurt my father’s best client.”
“Oh God,” I whisper.
“So I said it ricocheted and hit the glass. Just a stupid mistake. Said I’m sorry, yadda-yadda-yadda. And my dad apologized. And my mom apologized. It was a disgusting suck-up fest of epic proportions, and Levi Summers said, ‘No problem. I won’t press charges—’ ”
“Oh, thank God!” I say.
“ ‘—if Lucky pays for the window to be replaced.’ ”
“O-o-oh.”
“Oh yeah,” Lucky says with a tight smile. “Richest man in town. But he didn’t get that way by giving it away, right? Oh no. He watches every penny. And he wants me to pay every penny back. Guess how many pennies that is?”
He tells me. I nearly pass out.
“That’s …” I do a quick calculation in my head. “It would take me a year to earn that at the bookshop, working part-time.” Even with my Photo Funder subscriber donations, which are down to an all-time low of sixty-five dollars this month. Guess I’m not providing enough new content for my subscribers, because a couple of them bailed. Or maybe they don’t like all my new photos of signs around Beauty.
Maybe I should’ve given them actual nudes, like Adrian said.
“Well,” Lucky says, “your cheap-ass mom needs to give you a raise, because it will take me about six months to pay it off, working for my dad. Our lawyer negotiated that I pay for the glass itself and work off the cost of the repair labor by doing some tasks around the department store. Like tomorrow, I go in before the store opens to vacuum out the window display. I’ve already done it once, but the store manager wants me to go over it again, just to make sure. And I get to do other helpful things like”—he ticks off a list on his fingers—“sweep up the sidewalk. Repaint the lines on the parking lot. Wash the windows using the scaffold lift. Clean seagull nests off the roof. You know, fun stuff. All summer long.”
“That’s awful.”
“Don’t worry. I didn’t have plans or anything,” he says, rancor in his tone.
“Hey!” I say, frustrated. “I didn’t ask you to do this, you know.”
“But you didn’t turn it down, did you? You didn’t argue. Not even a ‘Hey, thanks for having my back, Lucky. That was a swell thing you did for me.’ ”
“I don’t have your phone number!”
He cranes his neck and pretends to peer over the boat in the direction of the bookshop. “Golly gee. Is it just me, or do you live awfully close to our boatyard? What is it … an entire two-minute walk away?”
“My mom won’t let me see you.”
A single brow arches, the one that’s missing the tail end, making it look like an apostrophe. “Is that so?” He sounds amused. Like I’ve told a funny joke. Or a dirty one. Something improper and salacious.
I throw up my hands. “Fine. She thinks there’s something going on between us, okay? Are you happy? And I didn’t tell her I threw the rock because … I just didn’t. I was a coward. Is that what you want to hear?”
“That’s a start,” he says, a little smug.
“Well, there you go. I’m a coward. I chickened out.”
“If you tell her you threw the rock, then you’d have to tell her about other things, right? Like that you were trying to get a magazine internship so that you could impress your fancy father.”
I stare at him, practically feeling my ribs cracking under the thundering pressure of my heartbeat. In a small voice I admit, “It’s easier not to say anything. I don’t want to tell her about the photo Adrian flashed around at the party. I don’t want to tell her everything Adrian said about our family. And I don’t want to explain why I was upset at Adrian’s father before the party even started that night.…”
“No, you can’t do that,” he says, and there’s an edge to his words. As if he’s implying that everything I want—the magazine internship, Los Angeles, apprenticing with my father … a real family—is sitting on one side of a scale being measured against his worth, and I’m selfishly choosing my own needs over his.
And, okay, I am. I know I am. He knows I am.
And I wish I could change it.
“I’m not that person,” I argue. “I’m not just out for myself at whatever cost, damn it all.”
“Everyone is,” he says matter-of-factly. “Humans are selfish. It’s our nature.”
“It’s not mine. Look. I’ll fix this. I’ll go back to the police and tell them I did it.”
“No, you won’t.”
I nod, feeling more certain now. “I will.”
He leans forward until his face is inches from mine. I move away. He leans forward again to erase the distance again, insistent. The sweet scent of grape candy wafts in my direction. All the hairs on my arms stands up, and a cascade of warm chills races over my skin.
It feels nice. A little too nice.
“No.” One word. It falls from his lips, but I’ll be damned if I know what it means. He smells like candy, and for the first time in what seems like forever, I’m not filled with panic and dread, and he’s so very close.…
“Hmm?” I murmur.
“I said no.”
“No?” Snap out of it, Saint-Martin! “So … you’re telling me I can’t go to the police.”
/> “Bingo.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because I didn’t put my family through all this expense and trouble for nothing. Do you know what this did to my mom? She’s stressed out. My grandparents? They’ve got to defend my honor at church this weekend when everyone will be talking shit about me again. ‘That Lucky, nothing but trouble. Just look at him. He used to be such a sweet little boy. What a shame.’ ”
He’s talking about the fire—the one that gave him all the scars on the side of his face. I see the shadow of that pain lingering behind his eyes.
“I said I was sorry for what you went through,” I remind him.
“Yeah, I remember you saying you were sorry back then, too, right before you split town. While I was stuck in the hospital, about to get skin grafts so that I looked a little less like a monster.”
This makes something in my chest contract and ache.
“Like I had a choice about leaving?” I argue. “Even though you were still in the hospital, I know you heard what happened—surely everyone in town heard about the domestic disturbance at the Nook. The big Saint-Martin mother-daughter fight … ring any bells? I literally was in my pajamas when we left town. It was the middle of the night. I was given no warning. It was well past visiting hours, so I couldn’t drop by to tell you goodbye. And besides that, I thought my mom was going to be arrested. Or my grandma. It was a nightmare. So, you know, I’m sorry that my family is screwed up, but I was twelve, and I had no control over that, and I cried all the way out of town.”
I texted Lucky from my mom’s phone—I remember Mom allowing me to do that—because unlike him, I didn’t get my own phone until I turned thirteen. I also tried calling the hospital the next day, but the phone in his room just rang. “And once we got to Boston, I emailed you, but you never replied. Not once.”
“Pardon me for being in agony and covered in bandages.”
“Do you think I don’t remember? My best friend was stuck in the hospital with terrible burns. I was worried sick about you and came to see you in the hospital every day. Remember? I didn’t know what was going to happen with your burns, and no one was telling me anything because I was just a kid. And then when my mom and I left town, it was late at night, and I couldn’t reach you. Then you didn’t answer the next day, or the next—and I thought, okay, maybe he can’t reply because he’s having surgery or something. Maybe he’ll respond when he gets home. So I kept trying to contact you—for weeks. Weeks! But you never replied, Lucky. You just … vanished.”
“No, Josie. You vanished. I was still here. You left.”
“My mom left town and took me with her,” I repeat. “I wrote you to explain. You didn’t write back.”
My chest aches, thinking about it again, and I’m surprised how much it still hurts.
“Look, I don’t want to dig up the past,” he says, suddenly agitated and intense. “The department store window is about now. It’s about the present. It’s about pride.”
How did this get so serious, so fast? He’s mad now. Really mad.
He throws up a hand. “And you don’t get to just flounce in here and decide that you’re feeling generous today, shutterbug.”
“You don’t get to call me that,” I whisper. “You don’t know me anymore.”
“Then don’t treat me like I’m trash. Don’t demean what I did. It wasn’t disposable. I didn’t do it so you could bide your time and swoop back in to take your licks.”
Okay, now I’m upset. Angry. Scared. And something else … I don’t even know what. All I know is that if I want to fight with someone, I can do that with my mom. I don’t need Lucky 2.0, aka a complete stranger, to make me feel like I’ll never be good enough.
Every molecule of my being is vibrating with energy. “Then why?”
“Why what?”
“Why did you do it?”
He blinks at me, black lashes fluttering. He’s so close, I can see the pale network of burn scars on one side of his face. The apostrophe of his marred eyebrow. The deep hollows of his cheeks. The way his sharp eyes are scanning my face … and the hesitation behind them.
He’s hiding something; I just don’t know what.
“Got to get back to work,” he says, jaw tightening. “Juggling two jobs now, so time is a little tight.”
“Lucky,” I plead.
“Don’t want your pity, Saint-Martin. Keep it. I’m fine.”
Part of me wants to scream. He’s bitter that he’s taking the blame for something he didn’t do, yet he doesn’t want me to turn myself in to the police. He’s mad that I didn’t tell him I was grateful, but he doesn’t want my pity?
I squeeze my eyes shut and admit, “I’ve done a lot of stupid things in my life, but I’ve never screwed anything up this badly. I want to fix this. Let me fix this.”
When I open my eyes, he’s looking at me. Contemplating. Silent.
“I’ve really got to get back to work,” he says after a moment, in a gentler voice, encouraging me to stand. “And you better go before my parents see you up here and start giving me shit. You aren’t the only one who’s getting bombarded with questions about us hooking up, and ‘no girl is worth ruining your life for,’ all that.”
My cheeks grow warm. “But that’s …” I sputter something that sounds nearly like a complete word, but my brain glitches, and I can’t quite get it out. I try again. “Ridiculous.” There! Got it out. “I mean … right? No life-ruining. No hooking up. I mean, obviously.” I manage a hollow laugh, suddenly nervous. “We don’t even know each other anymore.”
Sharp and serious, his eyes dart over me from beneath a fan of dark lashes—the quickest of looks, buried in a blink.
That look makes me want something I shouldn’t want.
“Better go now,” he says. “Let’s not give them a reason to speculate any more than they already have.”
“Let’s not,” I agree. “This disaster is already large enough as it stands.”
But as I head back down the ladder and sneak across the boatyard, eager to put both physical and emotional space between me and Lucky and this whole tangled mess, his words drum in my temples along with my pounding pulse. And I realize something.
He’s lying too.
His parents don’t know that he didn’t throw that rock. They don’t know that he’s covering for me. That seems significant. I just can’t figure out why.
But I’m going to.
COAST LIFE IS THE GOOD LIFE: This etched glass sign is posted by the entrance to the lone quarterly magazine headquarters in town. The brick building also houses the local newspaper and sits on the historic town common next to Summers & Co Department Store. (Personal photo/Josephine Saint-Martin)
Chapter 7
Like most of the smaller shops on our block, the Nook traditionally closes early at noon every Wednesday for a half day—something to do with farmers back in the 1800s, I don’t know. But the Wednesday after I talk to Lucky, I’m thankful for it. If Lucky won’t let me turn myself in to the police and unburden my soul, then I’m going back to my original plan: Los Angeles or bust. I’ve just got some repair work to do. A teeny, tiny little patch.
And maybe while I’m in the process of patching, I might do a little snooping. I’ve been cooped up in the Nook too long.
I need to get out and assess the damage. And other things …
“You can use your darkroom if you need to develop any film,” Mom tells me when I clock out for the afternoon and she’s taking the till out of the register. “I won’t be receiving books in the back this afternoon.”
“That’s okay.”
“You were begging me to clear it out yesterday.”
“I’m going to … shoot some signs on the common.” Lie.
“Oh? Thought you’d snapped all those.”
“Not all of them.” Double lie. I’ve taken a million shots of every sign on the town common. “Maybe I’ll head down the Harborwalk. Need new material for my Photo Funder. Losing subscribers lef
t and right.”
“Only losers who don’t appreciate good art when they see it. You’ll get new subscribers. I don’t like you walking around town alone, though. If anyone harasses you—”
“I’ll record it.”
Which is probably what I should have done that night at the party with Adrian; then again, I’d have to look at that nude photo of my mom all the time. She still doesn’t know, which is a miracle, considering how small this town is. All I can hope is that it stays in the teen gossip circuit and doesn’t make it up to her old friends.
When I’m certain she’s taken the till into the stockroom and will be busy for a bit, I race up the rickety back steps to the above-shop apartment and scour my clothes for an outfit that screams Professional and Adult, but not Trying Too Hard: black pants, flats, white blouse. Hair in a simple French braid. Not much I can do about the splotchy freckles that make me look years younger, and after two failed tries, I give up on covering them with makeup.
Satisfied, I grab my big sunglasses and my portfolio—a black leather binder with twenty-five prints zipped up inside—and race out the door. I take the long way through the alley, to avoid being spotted by Mom or anyone else, and cut through a narrow lane with a shop that always smells like Christmas and sells hand-dipped beeswax and bayberry candles, and a darkened door with a bright red FOR RENT sign: It once housed the office of Desmond Banks, Private Investigator. Beauty only has one store that stays open twenty-four hours a day, but we had a need for a PI? Or maybe the point is that we didn’t, and that’s why he’s out of business.
Who knows. Beauty is strange.
But strange isn’t a bad thing, and it’s sunny and warm, a perfect June day without a cloud in the sky, making it easy to lie to myself and pretend that I’m not anxious. As I cross the town common, tourists shade their eyes to stare at the historic town hall and take pictures on their phones of iron hitching posts and red-and-purple pansies under massive beech trees that rich families brought here from Europe in the Gilded Age. I hurry past them, hoping no one recognizes me, and I stride down a long sidewalk to my destination.