Snark and Stage Fright (Snark and Circumstance Book 5)

by Wardrop, Stephanie

  Megan pointed out the bathroom in between this room and the next and talked to me through the door as I changed into my bathing suit.

  “This house is really amazing,” I said as I wiggled into my Old Navy tank suit.

  “My dad designed it.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “People photograph it all the time.”

  “That must be weird,” I said when I walked out of the room, but she wrinkled her brow in confusion and asked, “Why?”

  As we walked across the terrace and down the stairs to the path to the beach, I was so struck by how beautiful the beach was that I stopped worrying that my Williams College T-shirt didn’t look too ratty or failed to cover my butt. It was wonderfully sandy compared to most of the rocky ones I’d been to since we moved east from Colorado two years ago. Maybe Michael’s aunt and uncle had had the servants haul all of the rocks off the beach so it would be softer and nicer to lie around on.

  Michael took my hand and we dove together into the first big wave that came and let it wash us, laughing, back to the shore. We played around in the waves for a while and then I looked for sea glass with Megan until it was time to go back up to the house, which had been transformed in our absence. Grills had been set up on the edge of the lawn and there were several white-covered tables and white-covered chairs and chefs in white hats and a team of people in purple polo shirts and black pants setting the tables with napkins and Mason jars with tiny roses overflowing their rims. This was not exactly my family’s idea of an outdoor barbecue; at home, cookouts usually involved paper plates and plastic utensils no one would have to wash and my dad arguing with my mom about how much lighter fluid to put on the charcoal. I was pretty sure there wasn’t a hot dog within miles of the Glass Boat.

  I took a long time getting dressed for dinner because I was convinced that my red-striped cotton sundress would be hopelessly déclassé for the occasion and regretted that I hadn’t bothered to bring a blow dryer because my hair was sticking out in weird little wings. I was trying to pat it down with a flat hand but it kept springing back up, when Michael knocked on the door.

  “What are you doing?” He laughed as I tried to knock a particularly recalcitrant clump into submission with the back of a hairbrush. “Giving yourself a concussion will not excuse you from dinner, you know.”

  I turned and took him in. His own hair was curling again after being towel-dried and he had a soft tan that made his eyes and hair look even darker. He was wearing a brick-red polo shirt and khaki Bermuda shorts without a crease in them, and the sun had kissed a soft pink glow along the tops of his cheekbones. I wanted to trace them with my finger so much I reached my hand out but asked instead, “How do you pack to stay so wrinkle free? I feel like a mess. Is this dress okay?”

  “You look great. Are you ready now? I made sure my aunt seated you next to my grandmother.” He laughed, and I must have looked suitably horrified because he shook his head and offered me his bent arm like we were in the nineteenth century and walking into some drawing room to hear an accomplished young lady play the pianoforte. “Come on.” I took his elbow and we went back out to the terrace filled with people. I met his cousin Rose, the bride-to-be, who seemed distracted but nice enough, as well as more cousins and second cousins, and when we were standing on the lawn talking to one of the many relatives I noticed a man in a seersucker jacket off in the distance, holding a shot glass and saying something to Michael’s uncle Don that made him laugh.

  “Oh my God,” I whispered to Michael. “Is that Forrest Ritter? The writer?”

  Michael craned his neck slightly to see and nodded. “Yeah. He has a house down the road and plays golf with my dad and uncle. Have you read his stuff?”

  “Some of it. I admit I only understood about twenty percent of it. It’s like, really experimental, isn’t it?” His books are weird and confusing, a mash-up of cartoons and German legends and particle physics. My dad, a Brit lit professor, says it’s “postmodern” but actually likes it. He thinks Forrest Ritter is about the only decent writer to live since Queen Victoria died. “My dad would be so stoked if he were here, yards away from a great writer.”

  Michael took my hand and said, “So let’s go say hello to him,” and I almost choked on my stuffed cherry tomato.

  “No! No … I won’t have anything to say to him and I’ll sound like an idiot.”

  He frowned slightly and urged, “Come on, George, I’ve known him since I was about five. He taught me how to play Texas Hold ’Em.”

  One of the things I love about Michael is that he always surprises me. Yet somehow the idea that he was taught to play poker by a certified literary lion didn’t make me feel better. It made me feel that the gulf between us was even wider than I had once feared. Back in Longbourne, with all the days of summer lying before us like an unexplored and verdant landscape, nothing else and no one else had mattered, and I had forgotten, before he’d invited me to the Cape, how different we are. Here in the Glass Boat, I felt the difference more keenly.

  “I’ll introduce you later,” he promised, and I nodded.

  There were other famous people there under the twinkle lights and paper lanterns strung between the trees: a senator or two and some football player I vaguely recognized from a cereal box, and a newsperson from Boston. But I kind of kept an eye on Forrest Ritter without meaning to. He was so striking, handsome in an odd sort of way, with craggy features and weathered skin and hair that was graying at the temples. When he talked, he moved his hands a lot, and they were big, strong hands that looked like they’d spent their sixty or so years baling hay or roping cattle, not pecking at the keys of a laptop.

  We ate dinner at a table with Megan and some other cousins and Cook had “been informed,” apparently, because one of the caterers brought over a grilled Portobello mushroom burger for me after serving everyone else big, fleshy burgers made out of some unfortunate animal. At least they appeared to be charred well done—I can’t stand it when blood drips out, the way my dad eats them. Over dinner, Michael and his cousin Clark, an investment banker with a bald spot, argued about the Occupy Wall Street movement and whether it had made any difference in society or had just inconvenienced people like Clark, but I held my tongue because I didn’t want to upset anybody after I had already insulted his grandmother so publicly. I wasn’t about to accuse Michael’s cousin of sucking the lifeblood out of homeless people or beating the poor with shovels. When I excused myself to visit the bathroom, Michael caught my hand for a second and squeezed it like he knew and appreciated it.

  After my visit to a bathroom whose opulence rivaled any room in any home I had been in before the Glass Boat, I stood on the edge of the terrace, watching Michael below as he was talking to the football player, when a deep male voice behind me declaimed, “`How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank.’”

  I turned to see Forrest Ritter, drink in hand, bowing slightly like a courtier before a queen. I blushed and blurted out, “Shakespeare, right?” before I could stop myself.

  The man grinned, downed the rest of his drink and said, “It’s the only line I know,” before accepting another drink from a passing waiter. “Can you bring anything for this young lady to drink?” he asked the waiter, looking at me with the most intense blue eyes I have ever seen on a human being. They were like a wolf’s, wise and feral at the same time. “Something pink and fruity, with an umbrella, perhaps?” he suggested.

  I nodded vaguely because I didn’t know what else to do, especially when Forrest Ritter planted his hands on the railing and stood right next to me, taking in the scene, as if he planned to set up camp for the night by my side.

  “Um, I bet that’s not the only line you know from Shakespeare,” I said to my immediate regret because it sounded so coy and stupid. Of course he knew more than one line. He was a freaking literary genius.

  He looked at me quizzically as he lit a cigarette and the little flame from his silver cigarette lighter illuminated one side of his face. It was c
inematic, really, with the little flame and the moonlight, and it made my legs wobble. I feared I would launch myself off that deck again.

  “No, I suppose not,” he said. “But who wants to be the middle-aged pedant quoting Shakespeare to pretty young women?”

  I think I blushed again and stumbled over, “I just meant that everybody knows the ‘to be or not to be’ line, or ‘Romeo Romeo’ … ”

  “And what else do you know, Miss … ?”

  “Barrett. Well, Georgia—that’s my name. Georgiana, actually … ”

  “That’s a beautiful name,” he said, looking at me with those hypnotic eyes. “It suits you.”

  Just then the waiter was thrusting a pink drink forward as Forrest Ritter grabbed from the tray another glass of something darker and no doubt stronger.

  “Sip it,” he directed, so I did. “Is it a Shirley Temple?” he asked with a crooked smile.

  “No, there’s definitely alcohol in it.”

  He bent over my drink and sniffed it, then nodded sagely.

  “Sea breeze. Vodka, cranberry juice, and grapefruit juice.”

  “It’s good.”

  “Could be just what you need,” he said, and I looked at him carefully because I had no idea what that could mean or why this famously brilliant man was talking to me in the first place. “What school do you go to, Georgia? Let me guess. One of the Seven Sisters—you’re a feminist and a traditionalist. Or Columbia, maybe, because you’re a metropolitan kind of girl.”

  “Actually, I’m still in high school. And I would need to earn some serious scholarship money to pay for those places. That and raise my math scores exponentially when I retake the SAT.”

  “Forget math. Just get yourself a good accountant when you make your first million.”

  “Oh, I don’t want to make a million dollars. What would I do with it?”

  He laughed and rested his hand very close to mine, then rubbed my thumb with one of his knuckles.

  “You could buy a house as ostentatious as this and invite all of your ostentatious friends over for drinks,” he said. “But better that you not make that million or two. In my experience, most millionaires are insufferable idiots.” He drained his glass again and waved vaguely at the assembled guests. “Present company excepted.”

  This was starting to get a little too weird for me, so I was glad when Michael came up the steps, grinning at the sight of me casually knocking back a drink with his old pal, the literary genius.

  “Michael, good to see you!” Ritter declared, holding out his hand, and gripping Michael’s for a moment before shaking it. “This charming young lady and I were discussing Shakespeare. And millionaires.”

  Michael put a hand on my shoulder, looked at me, and asked him, “Did she tell you that she thinks Hamlet is a total asshole?”

  I almost croaked in shock because Michael doesn’t swear, for one thing, and for another, I really didn’t need him revealing my lack of literary sophistication to Forrest Ritter. I was doing a fine job of that on my own.

  “No, she had not.” Ritter laughed. “But I am not surprised. She is a lady of uncommon insight and erudition. Tell me, Georgiana Barrett,” he said, leaning so close to me I could smell the whiskey on his breath, “what other wisdom can you share on the great works of early modern England?”

  “None whatsoever,” I assured him, and Michael laughed.

  “She is as modest as she is lovely,” Ritter told him.

  “Do you want to go down to the beach again?” Michael asked me quietly, and I nodded. He turned back to Ritter and said, “I promised my cousins we would meet them, so I’m going to steal Georgia from you for now.”

  Ritter nodded, took my hand, and kissed the back of it.

  “I hope to catch up with you later,” he said, and as I turned away, I felt a hand stroke my backside, and it wasn’t Michael’s because he was in front of me.

  “What?” Michael laughed as I hurried past him down the steps.

  “I think Forrest Ritter just grabbed my butt,” I whispered, and Michael smirked.

  “Really?” He took my hand and stopped me before we started down the stepping stones to the beach. “Maybe his hand just slipped?” he suggested as he side-tossed a flat, black stone into a crashing wave, skipping it three times.

  I dropped the stone I had been trying to aim as skillfully as he had and looked around to make sure Charlie and Megan were not in hearing range. I said, “This was not a casual brush. There was … pressure applied. A squeeze.”

  Michael frowned and shook his head. Even in the last dregs of daylight I could recognize that old superior look cross his face, that almost literal looking-down-his-nose in skepticism that used to drive me crazy.

  “Hey, I’m sorry, but your idol-slash-poker-coach is a groper,” I shot back.

  His frown deepened and he looked out at the waves for a moment, then turned and reached for my hand.

  “Well, even if Forrest Ritter isn’t my idol anymore,” he began as he stepped one foot back and dropped his eyes to my backside, “he has excellent taste in booty.”

  I snorted in shock.

  “I’d be willing to bet the value of this entire estate that you are the first person on this property ever to utter the word booty,” I said.

  “You mean when not referring to pirate treasure? Yes, probably.” He put one hand on each of my hips and dipped his head so that our brows touched. “I’m sorry he did that. Most of the other guests, I can assure you, will be uptight preppies.”

  I kissed his nose and he kissed my lips and we were about to explore the fabled romantic possibilities of a moonlit beach when Charlie appeared, dragging a half acre of washed up kelp behind him like he was hauling a boat into the dock. Middle-aged female voices called for Michael from the not-so-distant porch.

  “See what I mean about privacy?” he groaned.

  As we walked back to the Glass Boat, hand in hand, I decided I would avoid both the literary genius and the family matriarch as much as possible and focus instead on the good-night kiss I was about to receive at the door to Megan’s room.

  That was worth just about anything, including braving judgmental matriarchs and grabby literary lions.

  3 Ghost of Girlfriends Past

  The next morning, Michael and I snuck away from the family crowd to lie on a beach towel the size of Lichtenstein, watch the gulls circle overhead, and play a game I had just invented: spelling out words on each other’s bodies.

  “What is it? Mustard?” he guessed as I traced the word “luscious” with my index finger, very slowly, over his shoulder and down the hard plane of his chest as he shivered with pleasure.

  “No,” I admonished, kissing his shoulder and then demanding, “Concentrate,” before writing the word again with my fingertips. He caught my hand in his before I could finish it, asked, “Are you trying to torture me?” and pulled me in his arms.

  Game over.

  We kissed and ran our hands over each other with the gulls screeching overhead—though I didn’t really hear them because I was so busy kissing and concentrating on a way to make this moment last for the rest of my entire life. But since my brain never really shuts off completely, the thought that any one of his family members could pop up at any second over the edge of the sandy bluff made me sit up, albeit dazedly. I figured that if Charlie wasn’t away at sailing camp again today he would probably vomit up his Cheerios at the sight of such unbridled PDA and the last thing I wanted was to have Michael’s grandmother pull me off of her grandson and beat me with her cane.

  I was soon glad I looked up because I saw a figure coming down the beach to our right. Whoever it was waved to us. Michael groaned and dropped back onto the towel.

  “Who is it?” he asked.

  I had no idea. But I could see now that she was gorgeous: lithe and long-limbed and wearing a white bikini, a white floppy sunhat with a bright fuchsia flower on it, and oversized black sunglasses.

  “A leggy supermodel,” I told him, and h
e sat up again to look.

  Whoever she was, she was calling his name now and waving like she really needed to hail a cab or she’d miss her plane. I was pretty sure she wasn’t a newly arrived relative. When Michael scrambled to his feet and walked a few steps toward her, she broke into a little hop-run and grabbed his hands and planted a kiss right on his mouth.

  Definitely not a relative.

  I stood up.

  “Hi, Catalina! Nice to see you,” he said to her, turning toward me to say, “Georgia, this is Catalina Osborne. Her parents own the house right around the bend in the beach there. And Catalina,” he said, taking my hand, “this is Georgiana Barrett.”

  “Oh. Oh.” She gaped at me for half a second before she could fix the smile back on her face. She raised her sunglasses; I could see she had very bright green almond-shaped eyes and strawberry blond hair and even though I was pretty sure I would remember it, I had the weird feeling that I had seen her before. “Well, it’s nice to meet you, Georgiana,” she said.

  “You, too. And everyone calls me Georgia.”

  Catalina smiled mischievously and tugged on Michael’s arm for an instant, asking me, “Are you summering here, too, Georgia?”

  Michael gestured toward the beach blanket with one hand and Catalina scampered over and took a seat as he said, “Georgia’s staying with us.”

  “I was wondering when you would get out here,” she groused as she helped herself to one of the bottles of water from the woven bag we had brought down. “Except for that weekend in July you haven’t been here at all.”

  I raised my eyebrows at Michael because he hadn’t mentioned spending that weekend in the company of a very beautiful and very friendly summer neighbor.

  “I’ve been here most of the time since graduation,” she said as she struggled to loosen the water bottle cap and then gave up and just handed it to Michael, who unscrewed it without much effort. There was something so natural, even intimate, in the automatic way she had handed him the bottle and he had handed it back that as they spoke, I found myself staring at the stupid bottle like a genie was about to emerge with some very bad news for me.