Great

by kindle@abovethetreeline. com

  “No, it really isn’t,” Teddy agreed. Then he flashed his big white smile at me and patted me on the head. “You remind me of my sister,” he said.

  “Oh.” I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to respond to that.

  “She’s dead,” he said.

  “Oh.” I really wasn’t sure how I was supposed to respond to that. “I’m. . . I’m so sorry.”

  “Yeah, it’s really sad, but it was a long time ago,” he replied. “Thanks for understanding about this whole thing, Naomi. How ’bout I head back to the table first, and you wait a minute and then follow?” I was about to protest that I didn’t know the way back to the table, but he was already gone. I waited the Teddy-prescribed minute and then found a busboy who pointed me in the right direction.

  I sank down at the table between Jeff and my mother. Teddy, who had his arm around Delilah, was too busy teasing Mrs. Fairweather to look up. Delilah was actually giggling, as was my mother.

  “What happened?” Jeff asked quietly. “You look really pale.”

  “I am really pale,” I said.

  “Yeah, but something freaked you out.”

  “How do you know? We just met two hours ago.”

  “I can tell.” He lowered his voice even further. “Let me guess—it had something to do with Teddy being gone so long.”

  I sipped my water quickly.

  “You saw him with her, right?”

  I almost spit my water out, like they do in movies.

  “Shh!” I hissed, glancing nervously at the other part of the table. “They’ll hear you.”

  “No, they won’t,” Jeff said. “Giovanni always puts rum in Delilah’s and Teddy’s Cokes, so they’re a little drunk. Your mom and Delilah’s mom are each on their third glass of wine, so they’re definitely drunk. No one is paying any attention to us. And besides, I know about the whole thing, anyway. Teddy’s my best friend. And everybody in town knows, anyway. If Delilah doesn’t know, she’s an idiot.”

  “If he’s your best friend, then why are you talking to me about this?”

  “Because it’s interesting. It’s an interesting turn of events, to have you drawn into it. This changes the game a little bit. It’ll require a slightly altered strategy on his part.”

  “Do you always talk about people’s lives as if you’re talking about a round of golf?”

  “Usually,” he replied.

  “Great,” I said.

  “Misti’s dating the bartender,” he said. “He’s twenty-one. She’s, like, nineteen. They’re from up-island. Babylon, I think. Italian, if you couldn’t tell. Their families own a bakery together. Immigrants. The American Dream.” He chuckled to himself. I purposely turned away from him and pretended I was interested in Mrs. Fairweather’s conversation.

  “You know they love Delilah on the blogs,” she was saying to my mother.

  “On all the blogs?” Teddy asked innocently.

  “What’s that one that writes about you—the one that called you the next big modeling sensation, the return of the supermodel?” Mrs. Fairweather asked Delilah, ignoring Teddy.

  “The Wanted,” Delilah said, and even looked a little proud.

  “That’s it,” Mrs. Fairweather said. “The Wanted. All the kids are just in love with it. Of course, it’s all about them, so why wouldn’t they be?” She laughed lightly.

  “I’ve never heard of it,” I said. “Is it like Perez Hilton, or something?”

  “Sort of,” Delilah said. “It’s mostly a fashion and style blog, but it’s about people who go to independent schools in Manhattan.” It’s so funny how rich people have invented a less hoity-toity term for “private schools.” As if we normals don’t know it’s the same thing.

  “But she does bigger stories, too,” Delilah continued. “She covers Fashion Week in New York, plus social events the rest of the year—parties and stuff like that. Sometimes she writes about models. I guess she thinks I’m good.” You could tell Delilah was underplaying it, because even she couldn’t hide that she was kind of excited by the attention.

  “All the girls at Trumbo are obsessed with The Wanted,” Jeff said. “If they get mentioned on it, it’s like they won an Academy Award.”

  “The girl who runs it will grab photos from Trumbo parties off Facebook and analyze what everyone’s wearing,” Teddy added. “It’s probably not even run by a chick. It’s probably some thirty-year-old dude in his mom’s basement.” He and Jeff snickered.

  Delilah ignored them and looked at me. “It’s a really pretty site. And the girl who runs it goes by Jacinta, even though no one knows if that’s her real name. She takes a photo of what she’s wearing each day, but you only ever see her from the neck down. She could be anybody.”

  “It’s me!” Teddy announced. “I’m Jacinta!”

  “Oh, you are so not Jacinta,” Delilah said. “Jacinta has perfect taste.”

  As if on cue, Misti showed up for the mothers and Teddy to sign their account cards. She murmured, “Thank you for dining at Baxley’s.” I saw her hand shake a little as she took away the cards. Our eyes met for a moment, and she flicked hers away.

  “She’s going to have to be more subtle than that,” Jeff whispered.

  In the car on the way home, Teddy drove faster than was absolutely necessary.

  “Teddy!” Mrs. Fairweather said, giggling. “Slow down.”

  But he didn’t, and we ended up at my mother’s house rather quickly. Her house is lovely and expensive, but it’s no mansion—“just” five bedrooms, and only three bathrooms (the shame of two bedrooms that aren’t en suite!), a finished basement with a game room and home theater, a living room, dining room, big kitchen, and a spacious back deck. It has a nice view of the narrow, northern end of Georgica Pond, which laps the edge of the property. It’s not the fancier, Steven Spielberg-y end of Georgica—it’s nearer the highway, and the public landing where clammers and fishermen are allowed to enter, but you can make out the back of the Fairweathers’ house across the water. The property is still considered desirable, though not as desirable as beachfront real estate—but, as Mom never tires of pointing out, some people even prefer the pond as more private and less touristy than the beach.

  “Our humble abode,” my mother said wryly when Teddy screeched to a halt at the bluestone driveway.

  Mrs. Fairweather said, “I have always thought your cottage is darling. I remember when the Timothy Stanford family owned it, and they always had the loveliest eggnog and caroling at Christmastime.”

  “Well,” Mom said darkly, “I’d like to make some improvements, but I won’t have anything more done to it until I can find the perfect restoration experts to maintain the integrity of the original layout.” Mrs. Fairweather nodded approvingly.

  “Weren’t you talking about putting in a pool with a waterslide in the spring?” I piped in. Jeff held in a snort.

  “I most certainly was not talking about anything of the sort!” my mother snapped. “I did have an idea for a nice Zen garden with a reflecting pool, but it wouldn’t be for swimming. And of course it would be nothing like the one next door.” The house next door was something of an infamous legend among my mother’s friends. A three-story cedar-shingled castle, it fairly towered over Mom’s house. It even had a couple of turrets in the Queen Anne’s style. And while Mom had one very well-maintained acre of land, the house next door sat on over two acres. It even had a moat, sort of.

  A winding pool designed to look like a river dominated the backyard. It snaked along the right side of the yard and then doubled back, curving along its original path and then snaking out along the left side of the yard before curling around and returning to meet the place where it started. I imagine from above it looked like a giant bubble letter U drawn with squiggly blue borders, with perfect green lawn filling in the space between. There were a few rustic-on-purpose footbridges scattered along the river pool’s path, and here and there, little waterfalls built from smooth stones. There were even a couple of story-high water
slides. It was actually really cool, and ever since I was eleven, I’d secretly longed for a chance to swim in it.

  “Who lives in the Disney castle, anyway?” Teddy asked. “We’ve never been introduced.” You could tell by “we” he meant the entire great and powerful Barrington Oil clan. Super-rich people never really think of themselves as individuals—they’re forever blessed, or doomed, to be an extension of a glamorous genetic web.

  “Neither have we,” said Mrs. Fairweather.

  “God knows we haven’t, either,” my mother said with a touch of resentment. “Some Europeans who never actually visit. They rent it out to summer families and, I’m telling you, Merilee, they pick the people with the noisiest children. Last year it was a Saudi family who let their boys swim until three o’clock in the morning. Nine-year-old twins. Screaming little madmen. You can imagine how much we loved that.”

  “They were just excited to have that pool,” I said, not sure why I was defending a pair of rich Saudi boys. “It wasn’t their fault their parents let them stay up.”

  “I’m not saying it was their fault, Naomi, darling,” my mother said testily.

  We were all silent for a moment.

  “Well,” Mom said brightly, “it’s time we got ourselves to bed. We should be able to sleep through the night this year. No kids next door.” She leaned forward to peck Mrs. Fairweather near the cheek, and then began to clamber out of the SUV.

  “Who is staying there this year?” Delilah asked with mild interest.

  “Just some young woman, as far as I can tell,” my mother said. “She has a cleaning service come in every week, and the florist is over every few days. When I got here in May, she had an interior decorating service over for a full week. I can’t imagine any owners would let her redecorate if they knew about it.”

  “Maybe she’s doing it in secret,” Jeff suggested. “That would be a very East Hampton sort of crime.”

  “Like wearing white after Labor Day,” I said.

  “Or not going to a top-tier university,” Jeff added.

  “Oh, you two,” Delilah said. She giggled mischievously.

  “We should hang out sometime, if you want,” Jeff said in a low voice as the adults chattered to one another. “I’m a pretty nice guy. Really.”

  I looked at him and cocked an eyebrow. “We’ll see,” I said. He grinned at me, and I had to admit, he looked really good.

  I got out of the car, and we waved goodbye as Teddy tore off.

  Once the car was out of view, my mother and I stood outside the front door and looked at each other. Neither one of us was particularly pleased with what she saw.

  “I’m going to bed,” she said abruptly. “Do you need anything?” Now that no one else was around, she had dispensed with the doting mother act.

  “I’m just going to hang out here for a bit,” I said. “Stretch my legs.”

  “Be careful. Don’t wander or get lost.”

  “Mom, this is like the safest place in the entire world. Nothing bad ever happens in the Hamptons.”

  “Okay, okay,” she said with a sigh. “I forget that you know everything. Just remember to lock the door behind you when you come in. You’ve got your key, right? I’ll take your suitcases in.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Don’t go on some kind of artistic walk through the yards and scare the neighbors,” she said. “The last thing I need is for you to get arrested for trespassing.”

  “What the hell is an ‘artistic walk’?” I asked.

  “You know what I mean,” Mom said with a sigh.

  She gave me a dry kiss on the forehead and took my suitcases into the house. I stood and watched her go. She turned off the front porch light and the front walkway lights, leaving me suddenly awash in near-total darkness. And aside from the dramatic spotlights on the river pool, the enormous house next door had not one light on, either. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, the almost-full moon cast enough glow to allow me to wander without too much trouble.

  On impulse, I took off my Docs and socks and dropped them on the front porch. It was summertime, and that meant I could go barefoot, building up the resistance on my feet until I could walk on even a hot sidewalk without wincing. I’ve always liked going barefoot in the Hamptons. It’s so clean that you don’t need to fear stepping on a needle or in dog crap like you do in Chicago. And it made me feel vaguely scandalous. When I get away from my mother for a solo journey in town, I’ll slip off my flip-flops and put them in my beach bag, wandering down the sidewalk “just like some kind of dirty hippie,” as my mother once said in disgust when she caught me. I don’t care, though. I’m a Chicagoan through and through, which means I instinctively shed clothes (not in a whorish way) every time the temperature passes sixty degrees. So my feet get a little more sun. So what?

  If moonburn were a thing, the tops of my feet would’ve been fried that night. The moon seemed to glow brighter and brighter with each step I took, acting like a giant lantern in the sky. I walked around the side of the house and watched the moonlight sparkle on the water through the trees.

  Something strange caught my eye, an unusual light from an unusual spot. It was tiny, and at first I thought I’d imagined it, but I hadn’t—it was a pinprick of green, and it was coming from some inscrutable spot on the back deck of the castle house, in an area shadowed by one of the big turrets. It seemed to hover in midair, and for reasons I can’t quite explain, I crept closer to the neighboring yard than I ever had before. I got so close, in fact, that I managed to make out the shape of a person cradling whatever it was that glowed green.

  Then, all of a sudden, light flooded the person’s face, and I realized it was a she. And what’s more, she had just snapped open a laptop. The green light had come from the charging dock on the laptop, where a power adapter was plugged in. I could see now that the adapter cord ran to an outdoor outlet on the castle’s deck, and she had set the laptop down on a small table before her.

  I felt a little stupid, but my embarrassment was soon overwhelmed by fascination with what I beheld. The girl was beautiful, with a white-blond bob and blunt-cut bangs that glowed in the light of the computer. Her big, thick-lashed eyes were trained intently on the screen, which I couldn’t see from my vantage point. She had high, prominent cheekbones and full lips. She was so ethereally thin that she looked as if she might blow away in the light evening breeze and turn into a firefly, or a star. She could’ve passed for a teen angel, or maybe a fairy. Illuminated as she was by the computer screen, she didn’t look entirely of this world.

  Maybe it was because she didn’t seem real, but I actually thought about talking to her. It would’ve been completely out of character for me, and chances are I would’ve just freaked her out, probably, and then had to hide from her scornful gaze every time I sat on my mother’s deck. She didn’t look like the type who could generate scorn, but if she was anything like every other girl I’d met during my East Hampton summers, scorn was her second-favorite feeling, after boredom. Instead I stood, frozen and silent, and watched, for what must have been several minutes, as she read and typed on the computer.

  Then she did something I’ll never forget. The girl stood up, facing the lake. The white light from the laptop screen lent her face an unearthly glow from below as she stretched out her arms toward the twinkling houselights in the distance. She held it for a long moment, like some kind of yoga pose, just reaching and reaching for something I couldn’t identify. Then, after what seemed like hours, she scooped up the laptop and went into the house, leaving me alone in the moon-drenched yard. I lingered for a moment, listening to the sound of the spring peepers and other frogs calling to one another from the muddy banks of Georgica Pond. I turned back toward my mother’s house. I knew it was time for me to go inside, too.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Skag
s and I have an issue with the term “brunch,” as in, we think it’s stupid. I mean, if you’re having a meal and it’s in the a.m., that’s breakfast. If you’re having a meal and it’s in the p.m., that’s lunch (or dinner, if it’s after 5 p.m.) I don’t care what you eat. French toast at 1 p.m.? Lunch! Hot pastrami sandwich at 6 a.m.? Breakfast.

  Naturally, my mother loves brunch.

  I will say that the woman can cook. By the time I got up at 10 a.m., she already had a spread laid out on the table on the back deck—popovers, strawberry-flavored butter, mixed berries, scrambled egg whites with local (of course) goat cheese and fresh-squeezed orange juice. She’d done it all herself in the space of about thirty minutes, probably less. She may fall short of the mothering ideal in most regards, but when it comes to whipping up a fantastic meal, she’s just about perfect.

  “Hey, Mom,” I said blearily, blinking my eyes in the bright sunshine as I joined her on the deck. “Thanks for breakfast. This looks awesome.”

  She turned toward me with a smile that faded quickly as she took in my ensemble (a ratty basketball T-shirt and a pair of paint-splattered drawstring shorts.)

  “Still in your pajamas?” she asked, a clear note of disapproval in her voice. I was, but I decided to mess with her a little.

  “Naw,” I said breezily, sitting down and buttering a golden-brown popover. “I figured I’d go over to Baxley’s for lunch by myself, then maybe stop by the Marc Jacobs downtown and drop by the Fairweathers for tea.” Her look of horror was so classic that I snorted, cracking up.

  “Don’t joke about things like that,” she said, shaking her head and delicately spearing a berry with a fork. “I don’t understand why you can’t just give me an honest answer. I know you think your father just hangs the moon, and you two have always been buddy-buddy, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to stand for you giving me nonstop attitude for yet another summer.”

  “Oh my God, this strawberry butter is so good,” I interjected suddenly. “Did you use that wild strain you found at that farm last year?”