It didn’t pay as much as the nannying gig (irony of ironies), and she would miss the kids and the girls—Jacqui was the only one left working for the Perrys, since Eliza had something else planned, as usual. But the best part of the job was that she would be free to live with Ryan on his dad’s yacht. They were going to live together, like a real couple. It was going to be the most romantic summer ever.
Mara sighed, dreaming of sailing on the bay, Ryan at the helm while she lounged on the deck, suntanning. The two of them kissing while the sun set behind them.
The plane glided into the gate, and Mara turned on her phone, which immediately buzzed with Ryans signature callback ring tone: John Carpenter’s Halloween theme. Doo-do-do-do doo-do-do-do …
She smiled as she flipped open her phone. So what if she was wait-listed? She was still spending her third summer in the Hamptons with the boy she loved, who was waiting outside the terminal for her arrival.
And no one could take that away from her.
on the upper east side, jacqui finds that packing for the hamptons doesn’t help a hangover
THE DOORBELL RANG, AND THE SOUND OF BELL CHIMES reverberated loudly in the studio, but Jacqui Velasco ignored it. She was hurriedly throwing clothes, shoes, and straw tote bags into two open suitcases in the bedroom. It was just half an hour since she’d walked onto the stage with the rest of the St. Grace Academy class to collect her diploma, and she was still wearing the pretty floral Blumarine dress and round-toe Gucci heels she’d chosen for the event.
Her grandmother had already left for the airport to catch her flight back to São Paulo. It had been great to see her óvo, who had been positively bursting with pride in her lace mantilla. After all, Jacqui had graduated with a solid B-plus average and honors in Spanish (being fluent in Portuguese certainly helped). She’d kissed her grandmother good-bye outside the auditorium and had scrambled to return home to pack for the Hamptons as soon as she could. The Perrys kept to a tight schedule and expected everyone to adhere to it.
Why, oh why, had she put packing off for so long? Jacqui wondered, even if she knew the answer only too well. Senior Week. Instead of spending time getting ready for the Perrys’ annual pilgrimage to East Hampton, Jacqui had chosen to celebrate with her friends. The last forty-eight hours had been a whirlwind—there’d been a boozy bash at the Maritime Hotel, mini-golf at the Chelsea Piers, and an overnight retreat to the Catskills (campfire hookups and roasted marshmallows). Between the festivities and schlepping the Perry kids to their after-school activities, there just hadn’t been any time to pack.
Her head hurt from a massive hangover, thanks to last night’s tequila-soaked grad party. She opened drawers haphazardly, throwing and discarding items at random. Pucci scarf. Yes. Cashmere cardigan. No. (Too hot.) Duro Olowu caftan. Yes. Juicy cover-up. Too last year. Havaianas. Yes. White Levi’s. Definitely.
She ran a hand through her thick black hair—the short, spiky fauxhawk she’d weathered for a fashion show last summer just a memory. The pixie cut had been cute, but she felt more like herself with her long dark tresses.
Her first year in New York had been nothing short of magical. The Perrys had installed her in a studio apartment formerly occupied by their ex-nanny. Jacqui had gasped when she saw the six-hundred-square-foot space—a charming, cozy room with floor-to-ceiling windows, a pretty alcove bedroom, a full kitchen, and a working fireplace. Only a block away from the Perrys’ massive town house, the apartment was close enough that Jacqui could come over and watch the kids easily but far enough that she had her privacy.
Jacqui had enrolled for her senior year at St. Grace—a small, all-girls’ parochial school on the west side that had accepted her after Stuyvesant, one of the most competitive public schools in the country, did not. The Perrys had covered her tuition as part of her compensation, and Jacqui’s classmates quickly idolized the brash, beautiful Brazilian in their midst. Jacqui had studied hard through the year but had still managed to become very popular. After all, she was the only one at school with her own apartment, and she’d hosted a lot of parties. She found an empty beer bottle underneath the bed and chucked it in the garbage can.
The doorbell chimed again, and this time Jacqui could definitely make out Anna and Kevin Perry’s quarreling voices behind the door.
“I’m talking to you—don’t answer your phone when I’m talking to you!”
“Anna, this is work. It’s important. Give me a sec, all right?”
“You never listen to me. Work always comes first!”
“Babe, please shut up. I need to take this.”
“Oh, just go ahead, then! Where is she? Jacqui! Jacqui!”
“Coming!” Jacqui yelled. She ran over and opened the door.
Anna Perry, a vision in sparkling Chanel tennis whites, tapped her French manicure impatiently in the doorway. “The limo’s here. We need to get to the Thirty-fourth Street helipad pronto or we’ll lose our departure time,” she ordered briskly. Kevin Perry, who looked tense and rumpled in a gray wool suit, gave Jacqui a curt nod as he put a cell phone to his ear.
“Yes, yes, sorry—just—give me a minute.” Jacqui nodded, closing the door in front of Anna’s face. The Perrys might pay for the apartment, but it was still her own. Besides, she totally had to hide the keg that was standing in the middle of the living room.
Also by Melissa de la Cruz
Beach Lane
Beach Lane: Sun-kissed
Beach Lane: Crazy Hot
Angels on Sunset Boulevard
Girl Stays in the Picture
The Ashleys
The Ashleys: Jealous?
The Ashleys: Birthday Vicious
The Ashleys: Lip Gloss Jungle
For all the wonderful girls who e-mailed, IM’d, texted, blogged, and posted reviews—thank you for your unflagging support, cheerful enthusiasm, and many interesting questions! This one is for you. And yes, there is a lot about Mara and Ryan in this book. And to new readers—welcome to the Hamptons! Now go home. Just kidding.
Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves.
—Dorothy Parker
All the riches baby, won’t mean anything, All the riches baby, won’t bring what your love can bring.
—Gwen Stefani, “Rich Girl”
in seat 12A, mara hopes that all good things come to those who wait
AS THE PILOT CIRCLED LAGUARDIA Airport, Mara waters switched off her iPod mini and put away the Dartmouth College catalog she’d been reading. She looked out of the tiny airplane window down at the Manhattan skyline—a luminous vision of steel and glass obscured by a late-afternoon haze. She’d made the forty-minute shuttle trip from Boston to New York several times now and was familiar with the commute. It was a pleasant enough journey that included stacks of complimentary magazines at the terminal and the company of crisp-looking professionals in worsted wool suits or crumpled corporate khakis, twinkling Bluetooth headsets discreetly curled behind their ears.
It was the first week of June, and barely forty-eight hours ago, she had officially graduated from high school. The ceremony itself had been a relatively straightforward affair, with a dull speech from the myopic valedictorian and the halfhearted singing of the class song (Kelly Clarkson’s “Breakaway”—chosen by the administration after the class’s real choice, Green Day’s “American Idiot,” was banned). The only excitement had come when a member of the marching band flashed the stage, showing he was wearing nothing underneath his gown as he accepted his diploma. (His brightly uniformed colleagues quickly struck up a sassy bump-and-grind version of “The Strip.”)
Mara had won the English prize, along with a two-thousand-dollar college scholarship. Her mother cried and her father took way too many pictures with his new digital camera while her sisters cheered from the stands. To the hearty beat of “Pomp and Circumstance,” she’d joined the three hundred other Fighting Tigers in tossing their cardboard hats into the air. Afterward, over watery punch and stale Mint Mi
lano cookies at the gym, she’d watched as her classmates exchanged new college e-mail addresses and promised to visit each other the next fall.
If only she had been able to do the same.
Mara frowned at the Dartmouth catalog, feeling envious of the cable-knit-clad coeds photographed studying on the lawn. Wait-listed. That was what the one-page letter inside the slim white envelope had said. Not “yes” or “no”, but “maybe”.
She could find out she’d been accepted in a week or even a few days before school started. Or she could never be accepted at all. Luckily, she’d been offered a place at Columbia with a generous financial aid package, and she’d put down a deposit to hold her place just in case Dartmouth didn’t come through.
So now her whole summer stretched out in front of her, filled with anxiety and dread, since she didn’t know where she would be in the fall. It was just so unfair. Dartmouth was her first choice, her only choice—as far as she was concerned. Ryan, after all, was going to be a junior there.
Ryan. When she thought of his name, she couldn’t help but smile. Ryan Perry. Her boyfriend. It had finally happened—the two of them together at last. They’d met two years ago when Mara was working as an au pair for his younger siblings, and they had immediately hit it off. But other things and other people quickly got in the way. That first summer, Mara still had been with Jim Mizekowski, her high school steady. Mara finally gave Jim the boot the week before she was leaving, and she and Ryan had spent a blissful week together in the Hamptons. But later that winter, Mara broke up with Ryan after feeling totally insecure about the whole background-incompatibility thing—Ryan being one of those boys born to everything, while Mara was a girl who had to work hard for everything in her life.
So they’d spent the second summer apart as well. Mara had found solace in the arms of Garrett Reynolds, the rich, tomcatting heir-next-door, while Ryan sought comfort even closer to home—hooking up with Eliza, one of Mara’s best friends. But that was all in the past now. Garrett was forgotten and Eliza forgiven. Over the past year Mara had often visited Ryan in New York and New Hampshire, and Ryan had finally made the trek to Sturbridge.
All her fears about what he would think—that her house was too shabby, her parents too weird, her sisters too loud—had been immediately dismissed once Ryan arrived. He’d bonded with her dad over football and polished off a record four helpings of her mother’s chicken-fried steak. Megan pumped him for celebrity tidbits from New York (“Your friend did a body shot off Lindsay Lohan? Are you serious?”) while Maureen declared Ryan was a great name for a boy as she patted her pregnant belly. And he hadn’t said a word about the unfinished bathroom with the piece of cloth nailed to the window that substituted as a curtain or the fact that her parents kept the house at a chilly fifty-eight degrees in the middle of winter to save on heating bills.
This summer was going to be the best one yet—she didn’t have to au pair anymore since she’d gotten a job as an intern at Hamptons magazine through a connection of Anna Perry’s. It was a standard entry-level post—fetching, faxing, and answering phone calls for the editor in chief, but it tantalizingly promised a few—underline few—writing opportunities. “We need someone to caption all the party pictures,” her boss had told her. Mara got the impression the job required the ability to accurately distinguish one Fekkai-blond socialite from the other rather than real writing talent, but at least it was a first step on the journalism ladder.
It didn’t pay as much as the nannying gig (irony of ironies), and she would miss the kids and the girls—Jacqui was the only one left working for the Perrys, since Eliza had something else planned, as usual. But the best part of the job was that she would be free to live with Ryan on his dad’s yacht. They were going to live together, like a real couple. It was going to be the most romantic summer ever.
Mara sighed, dreaming of sailing on the bay, Ryan at the helm while she lounged on the deck, suntanning. The two of them kissing while the sun set behind them.
The plane glided into the gate, and Mara turned on her phone, which immediately buzzed with Ryan’s signature callback ring tone: John Carpenter’s Halloween theme. Doo-do-do-do doo-do-do-do . . .
She smiled as she flipped open her phone. So what if she was wait-listed? She was still spending her third summer in the Hamptons with the boy she loved, who was waiting outside the terminal for her arrival.
And no one could take that away from her.
in soho, eliza is stuck in the fashion trenches
“EH-LIE-ZUH!”
“Eh-lie-zuh!”
“Are you listening to me?”
Snap.
Eliza blinked. Someone was talking to her. More specifically, someone was talking down to her. She put aside her chopsticks and tried not to look too irritated. Couldn’t she even eat dinner in peace?
It was half-past midnight. She had been at the showroom since nine o’clock that morning and couldn’t wait to get home for a shower. She was, for the first time in her perennially Fracas-perfumed life, seriously “funky.” She took a discreet sniff of each armpit and grimaced.
“Eh-lie-zuh. Hello. Earth to Eh-lie-zuh!”
Eliza rubbed her eyes and finally focused on the person who owned that voice. Paige McGinley. Otherwise known as a Paige-in-the-ass. Her so-called boss and slave driver for Sydney Minx—famous fashion designer and all-around diva, owner of the showroom and the reason she’d had barely half an hour of sleep in the past forty-eight hours.
Sydney Minkowitz was a gay Jewish dress designer from the Bronx who’d changed his last name to the more intriguing and less ethnic “Minx.” Early in his career, he’d befriended a coterie of New York socialites through vigorous ass kissing and with their support had launched a line of chic, casual, yet expensive sportswear that had grown to include licenses for accessories, perfume, housewares, candles, and linens. If you dressed, dined, or dreamed, you could bet there was a Sydney Minx product that catered to it.
The histrionic designer was opening his first boutique in the Hamptons in two days, and the whole office was buzzing with frantic activity to get all the details for the grand-opening party and fashion show completed. Like everyone in New York, Eliza had been a devotee of Sydney’s early work—the waffle-knit “poor boy” cashmere sweaters that came with enormous price tags, the sexy drain-pipe trousers, the artfully graffitied logo handbags. But the designer had been slipping of late. The latest collections had veered wildly from sex-bomb attire one season to starchy, covered-up pretension the next as the label tried to connect with an ever-more-fickle audience of high-fashion buyers. You could only have so many bad collections before you were considered fashion roadkill, and with this opening, Sydney had a lot at stake.
The place was so tense that if the notoriously difficult-to-please Sydney summoned the group to yet another meeting in which he called all of his design associates, production assistants, runway models, and office interns an untalented bunch of idiots, someone was going to burst into tears. Already, one of the pattern makers had left her sewing machine in a huff after Sydney had called the dress sample she was making “a two-dollar schmatte, an eyesore of epic proportions, an insult to the name of couture!”
“Can I help you?” Eliza asked belligerently as she wiped her mouth with a paper napkin.
“Why aren’t all the T-shirts folded yet?” Paige demanded. She was a dark-haired, sharp-featured twenty-two-year-old, a recent F.I.T. graduate who had ascended quickly from being Sydney’s personal assistant to being de facto creative director of the label. “I told you, all the shirts need to go in boxes so the messengers can take them to the stores tomorrow morning!” The T-shirts, silk-screened with the designer’s Photoshopped and markedly slimmer-than-life silhouette, would be given away for free in the overstuffed goodie bags to the VIP guests at the East Hampton party and sold for seventy-five dollars apiece at Sydney’s boutiques around the country to the hoi polloi.
“Because I’m spray-painting all the fabric gold like Sydney as
ked for the ‘Anna’ coat,” Eliza replied, pushing away the Chinese food containers. She showed Paige the metallic swatches that would be sewn onto a military trench Sydney hoped would catch the eye of the Vogue editor. Half of them were still unpainted.
Eliza wiped her hands on the backs of her So Low sweatpants, then crossed her arms defensively. Packing the T-shirts was, like, menial grunge work! She was Eliza Thompson. Once named in New York magazine as the most popular girl on the prep school circuit! She’d only taken the job because she liked fashion and thought it would be a cakewalk to hang around a designer’s showroom for the summer.
“Those swatches aren’t done yet? Sydney needed those hours ago,” Paige said, aghast.
Eliza tried not to look too guilty. She had taken her sweet time spray-painting the fabric just so no one would ask her to do anything else. She’d noticed that if she looked busy enough, she could avoid doing the more-boring chores.
“Anyway, forget this for now. Go help Vidalia. She can’t seem to get her dress on correctly for the run-through. Then I need those T-shirts.”
“All right,” Eliza grunted.
“And what is that smell?”
Eliza froze, pressing her armpits next to her torso.
“Ew! Who ordered Chinese food?” Paige demanded, holding up the half-empty container of beef chow fun that Eliza had been munching from.
“Um, we all did?” Eliza reminded. The whole staff had sent for takeout since it was hours after dinner and they were all starving. She had been ravenously devouring the noodles when Paige had interrupted her meal.
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