“Look, Ally can’t be alone for five minutes without going crazy. You know that. She can’t eat alone, she can’t walk to class alone, and she certainly can’t study alone. She’s probably just jealous of you.”
“It didn’t sound like she was jealous.”
“Well, then she’s intrigued. You do your own thing, that’s all. You don’t need a clan of girls around you at all times.”
“I guess,” Cleo said. But it wasn’t that she didn’t need it, she’d just never had it. She’d learned to live without.
Cleo felt like she’d failed in some very real way, to be almost a senior in college and not have one single girlfriend to show for it. It was her mom’s fault, probably. Elizabeth didn’t have any friends, not really. She had work people that she went out to dinner with sometimes, or to the Hamptons with, but not real friends that she relaxed and spent time with. And now Cleo was all fucked up because of it. She’d never seen an example of how to have friends and now maybe she never would. She could go on a talk show about it.
One night she and Max were watching TV, and she said, “You’re my best friend, you know.”
Max smiled. “Why do you sound so sad about it?”
“Don’t you think it’s weird? That you’re my best friend? My only friend, really? That I don’t have any girlfriends?”
Max thought for a minute. “No. I think you got in with a bad crowd early on.”
“A bad crowd?”
“Yes, a bad crowd. Any house with a milk tracer and a chore wheel is a bad crowd. In my book, at least.”
“I guess so.”
Max came closer to her and pulled her head down to his chest. “You’re my best friend, too,” he said.
“You’re such a liar.”
“I’m not. I’m not lying at all.”
“What about Mickey?”
Max wrinkled his nose. “He’s fun, but you smell way better.” He lifted up her shirt and started kissing her stomach. “Way better.”
IN THE MIDDLE OF AUGUST, they packed their bags and headed to the shore for a weeklong vacation with the Coffeys. They’d agreed to keep their living arrangement a secret from their families, and Cleo was terrified that she was going to blurt it out during the trip. Max told her she was being paranoid, but she knew better.
Around the Coffeys, she became a strange version of who she was. She tried to be chatty, but her voice came out higher than it usually was. She tried to be casual, but she felt uncomfortable everywhere. It was exhausting.
Cleo was almost certain that Aunt Maureen was bordering on a drinking problem, although when she suggested this once, Max laughed. “She just likes to have a good time,” he said.
On the drive to the house, Cleo asked how Claire was doing. She was nervous about seeing her after the whole engagement disaster.
“She’s good,” Max said.
“Well, she can’t be good. She just called off her wedding.”
Max had shrugged. “I mean, it sucks, but I think she’s handling it fine.”
“It’s just so sad. I feel so bad for her,” Cleo said.
“Well, don’t ask her about it.”
“You don’t think I should say anything?”
“No,” Max said. “You know Claire. She doesn’t like to dwell on things.”
“Yeah, but I’ll feel weird not mentioning it.”
“Trust me, she doesn’t want to talk about it.”
So now there were two things that Cleo wasn’t supposed to talk about. She took a deep breath and looked out the window.
“Are you okay?” Max asked.
“I’m just nervous, I guess,” she said.
Max reached over and took her hand. “It’ll be fun,” he said. “I promise.”
Cleo felt very grown-up just then, driving with her boyfriend to join his family on vacation, discussing the things that they weren’t to discuss with the rest of the family. And the two of them drove almost the whole way like that, holding hands, sometimes linking their fingers, sometimes just resting against each other. It thrilled Cleo a little bit to be doing this, traveling in a car, with her live-in boyfriend, driving through the night with their secrets between them.
CHAPTER 5
The house at the shore looked like it belonged in a fairy tale. When Claire was little, she used to call it the Gingerbread House, because it was tan and pink with sculpted posts, and rising turrets that looked like the perfect place for hiding a princess. She’d been there every year since she was a baby. Even the year she was in college, when she had her own shore house with friends in Ocean City, she still stayed at the Gingerbread House for the last two weeks of August.
She’d pretended to be annoyed that summer, pretended that her parents were making her stay with them, but really she was grateful. She’d been sharing a room with Lainie, which meant that she was also sharing a room with Brian. The room smelled like mildewy towels and had two twin beds with thin mattresses that dipped in the middle. Every night, Claire had to get upstairs before Lainie and Brian, put on her Discman, face the wall, and pray for sleep so that she could ignore whatever happened when they came in. The alternative was to sleep on the couch downstairs, which always felt wet and smelled worse than the bedroom—a mix of feet and old cheese.
There was sand all over the house, dirty dishes everywhere, and every morning Claire woke up sunburned and hungover. She was filled with relief when it was time to go to the Gingerbread House. She packed up her clothes quickly, saying, “This sucks, I can’t believe I’m missing the end of the summer here. Yeah, my parents are so annoying.”
Claire loved the Gingerbread House, loved waking up to the sound of waves and the smell of sand. It was part of the reason she’d finally agreed to go this year. Well, that and also because she didn’t have enough money in her account to pay September’s rent.
She’d taken the train to Philly on Saturday, and her parents and Martha had picked her up at the station and they’d all headed right for the shore. Everyone was in a great mood. Her dad was whistling, her mom was almost bouncing up and down in her seat, and Martha wasn’t discussing any recent tragedies. Claire started to feel calm for the first time in months. This was exactly what she needed. She had three new books to read, and the thought of lying on the beach and resting in the sun sounded like the most wonderful thing in the world. And then when the time was right, she’d tell her parents that she was broke. And moving home.
But that would all come later. She could wait until the end of the week to fill them in. Actually, it was preferable, since she could just leave right after. In the meantime, she’d enjoy her vacation, go for a walk on the beach or the boardwalk. Eat saltwater taffy. Just relax.
When they were younger, all of the cousins stayed in the same room. Cathy, Martha, Claire, Drew, and Max were all tucked away in bunk beds and sleeping bags. One summer, Martha forgot to put sunscreen on her feet and they burned, badly. She’d insisted that the fan in the room had to stay pointing right at her feet to cool them down, instead of circulating the room like it normally did. They’d all disagreed, of course. But as soon as Martha thought they were all asleep, she’d pull the lever on the fan to make it stop, and one of the other kids would realize it and yell, “Martha!” But they were all laughing, not really annoyed, just thrilled with their own little game they’d created.
Had they ever slept during those summers? They must have at some point, but Claire didn’t remember it. She remembered sandy beds and Cathy telling them stories about girls that were kidnapped. “I knew a girl,” she said, “that was taken right out of her room, pulled right through the window.”
“You did not,” Claire said. But she wasn’t sure. Cathy always sounded sure.
Usually, as they were drifting off to sleep, Drew or Max would fart loudly and all the girls would scream, and there’d be a big to-do over airing out the room and running into the hall. Weezy and Maureen tried their best to get them back to their beds, yelling threats and using their full names, “Claire Margaret, Martha
Maureen, Catherine Mary.” It rarely worked.
During the days, they’d run as a pack, going to the beach and then to the boardwalk to play skeet ball and walk around. The girls would get wrapped braids in their hair, feeling very special and exotic when school started and they still had a tiny seashell attached to their hair.
They always went to the same little candy store. It was made to look like one of those old-fashioned places, with bins of colored candy balls, swizzle sticks, and fudge. They always chose Atomic FireBalls and Super Lemons—candy that was more pain than pleasure, that tested the will of all the sunburned kids that ate it. They’d stand in a circle outside the store, count to three, and pop the little sugar balls into their mouths. They’d groan and scream, wriggle back and forth and bend over laughing in a mix of agony and total pleasure, drooling colored sugar and waiting to see who could keep the candy in their mouth the longest. Martha always won. Usually the others would have to spit the candy out in their hands, take a break, and try again.
It was funny—her cousins hadn’t come to the shore in years, but whenever she thought about it, she imagined them there. The house had been redone and the sets of bunk beds in the big room replaced with a huge king bed. But still, when Claire pictured the house, she saw all of them bunked down in the big room, scaring the bejeezus out of each other and laughing until they thought they were going to die.
THEY ARRIVED AT THE HOUSE a little after five o’clock, and when they opened the front door, they heard music playing and saw smoke coming from the back patio. They heard laughing, and even though they all knew it was Max because his car was right out front, and because he’d told them he’d arrived the night before, Weezy stepped in nervously and called, “Hello? Max?” as if an intruder had broken into the house and started grilling out back.
Max appeared at the screen door with a big smile on his face. “Hello, family,” he said. He raised a spatula in the air. “Cleo and I decided to cook you a welcome meal!”
He was pretty drunk, Claire could tell, and she wondered what time he’d started drinking. Weezy just clapped her hands together. “Oh, Max,” she said. “How sweet is that?”
It would, no doubt, be something she talked about for months, the way Max cooked for them out of the blue; went to the grocery store all by himself, with no one asking (as if he were an incompetent), and then made dinner, like he was performing a miracle of some sort. Once, when Max was in high school, he’d folded towels that were in the dryer and Weezy had gone on about it for weeks, until Martha said, “Claire and I fold laundry all the time,” to try to shut her up. It was one of the few times that they’d been on the same side, Claire and Martha, but they were just so sick of listening to Weezy talk about Max and his amazing laundry abilities.
Max turned to Claire and gave her a hug that lifted her off the ground. “Clairey!” he said. “Clairey’s here.” He set her down gently and Claire laughed. This was, of course, why he was Weezy’s favorite, after all. He was adorable and charming, even when a little bit tipsy—maybe especially when he was a little bit tipsy. He turned to Martha and bowed. “Welcome, miss,” he said.
Cleo walked in from the patio then, carrying an empty platter and wearing nothing but a bikini. “Oh, you’re here already,” she said. “We thought we’d be done cooking by the time you got here.”
“Well, this is such a treat,” Weezy said. “Personal chefs on our first night here.” Cleo smiled and looked down at the ground. Then Weezy hugged Cleo, which must have been awkward since the girl was practically naked. Claire noticed that her father stayed on the far side of the kitchen and just waved. She didn’t blame him.
“We made chicken and salad,” Cleo said. “We thought you’d be hungry when you got here.”
“That we are,” Will said. He looked around the kitchen, still averting his eyes from Cleo. “You didn’t happen to pick up any brewskies, did you, son?”
Claire closed her eyes for a second and took a deep breath. Her father had never used the word brewskies in his whole life. He’d never called Max “son” either. She was embarrassed for him, but figured it wasn’t fair to judge. After all, when you had a twenty-one-year-old near supermodel standing in all of her naked glory in the kitchen of your summerhouse, you were bound to be a little rattled.
She would change eventually, Claire figured, but it never happened. Cleo ate dinner in her bikini, she cleared the table in her bikini, and then she sat and had a glass of wine with the whole family in her bikini.
When Maureen arrived later that night, she walked in, looked right at Cleo, and let out an “Oh!” Then she tried to recover and said, “I guess you’re ready for the beach.” Cleo just smiled.
And that was just the first night. It seemed that Cleo intended to wear nothing but her bikini for the entire vacation. In the mornings, she was in the kitchen, sipping coffee, bikini-clad.
“I mean, she’s great, but don’t you think it’s a little weird that she never puts anything else on?” Claire asked Martha. Martha just shrugged, which bugged Claire. Normally, this was the kind of thing that Martha would jump right in on, getting upset and whispering behind Cleo’s back. But she barely seemed to notice.
“I can’t believe we have to share a room,” Claire went on. This surely would make Martha angry. “Just because Mom doesn’t want Max and Cleo in the same room, we have to share. They each get their own space.” Martha just shrugged again, and Claire grabbed a towel and left the room.
ON SUNDAY NIGHT, THE WHOLE FAMILY sat outside making s’mores after dinner and Claire drank glass after glass of white wine. Weezy kept talking about what activities everyone wanted to do, like they were at some sort of summer camp; Will read the paper and called Max “son”; Maureen kept getting up to sneak around the house and have a cigarette, like they all couldn’t smell the smoke on her when she got back; Martha was lost in her own thoughts and stared at the stars; and Max and Cleo used any excuse to touch each other, which would have been inappropriate for a family vacation anyway, but since Cleo was half-naked, it was downright pornographic.
“Aren’t you cold?” Claire asked.
Cleo laughed. “No, I never get cold at the beach. It’s like the sun warms me all day and stays with me into the night. I could live at the beach.”
Claire snorted into her glass. Then she let herself admit that if she looked like Cleo did in a bikini, she would consider wearing one as much as possible too.
The night ended with everyone playing Scrabble, which Claire thought would make her feel better since she would surely win. She ignored it when Weezy said to Cleo, “Watch out for Martha! She’s a killer at this game.” Claire wanted to point out that Martha almost never won Scrabble. It was Claire’s game.
It turned out that in addition to having a body that was meant to live in a bikini, Cleo also had an incredible vocabulary. After she got a triple word score by turning dish into dishabille, Claire made a comment about memorizing the dictionary and Cleo actually blushed.
“My first nanny was French, and she always had trouble with English. She was always asking me, ‘What’s the word for this?’ and I wanted to make sure that I could tell her, so I kept a dictionary with me. Then it just became a habit. I read dictionaries all the time. And thesauruses. I just love words, I guess,” Cleo said. She shrugged and smiled a little bit and Claire made herself smile back. Of course Cleo read the dictionary for fun. If life was going to be unfair, it was going to go all the way.
The end of the Scrabble game was a bit blurry to Claire, but she did remember dropping her glass of wine on the floor, the glass smashing and spraying everywhere. She tried to clean it up, until Maureen came in to help and sent her out of the kitchen because she was barefoot.
CLAIRE WOKE UP ON MONDAY, groaned, and rolled over to bury her face in her pillow. She could feel a burn on the edge of her scalp where her sunscreen had, of course, worn off the day before. She could hear everyone downstairs in the kitchen, dishes clinking, her dad telling some story about pea
ches, or something that sounded like that. Claire pulled the covers over her head. If she waited long enough, maybe they would all go to the beach without her.
At first, Claire thought she’d tell Weezy about her situation. Then she changed her mind and thought she’d tell Will, because he’d be calmer and would keep Weezy calm too. But then she thought no, that wouldn’t work. Will would just sit there and listen, not sure how he was supposed to respond. Will was never the one they would go to when they asked permission for anything. And if it ever happened that they did come across him first, and asked to go to a friend’s house or anything of the sort, Will always looked surprised to see them, like he couldn’t quite place who they were, and then he’d say, “Ask your mom.”
So it would have to be Weezy that she told. It would be fine. She’d just wait until the end of vacation, go up to her mom, and say, “I’m out of money. I’m moving home.” Simple. She was going back to New York on Sunday, which meant that she had seven more days to do it.
Claire took a shower and then threw her wet towel on Martha’s bed. If Martha came up and saw it, she would lose it. She was such a neat freak. Growing up, whenever they got new sneakers, Martha made a point to keep hers as white as possible for as long as she could. She’d step over puddles, avoid any dirt, and stare at her unblemished shoes with pride. Claire’s Keds were usually dirty by the end of the week, and it used to drive Claire crazy, to watch Martha step around messes, so pleased with herself and her white shoes.
“That’s probably the only reason why you wanted to be a nurse,” Claire told her one time. “Because you knew you’d get to wear really white shoes.”
Once, when they were playing kickball outside with the neighborhood kids, Martha refused to take her turn for fear that her shoes would get filthy. Claire walked right up to her and stepped all over Martha’s feet with her own dirty sneakers. Martha looked down at her shoes and let out a howl, then pushed Claire on the ground.
“Why did you do that?” her mother asked Claire. “Whatever possessed you to do such a thing?”
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