by Julia London
“Just passing through?” Mia asked, sounding a little more hopeful than she intended.
“Yeah, of course. Always passing through. I’ll probably be here for the summer unless something better comes up.”
Mia’s heart sank. When Skylar was around, there was always trouble, and Mia sucked at deflecting it.
“I definitely want to be here for the Lake Haven Music Festival. I’ll be living with the ’rents,” she said. “Just like you, right? Isn’t that wild? Whoever would have thought we’d both end up back here in this dump of a town?”
Mia didn’t like the idea that she and Skylar were anything alike. Skylar never settled anywhere for long, never held onto a job for more than a minute. She’d been running for years, running away from home the first time when she was fifteen years old. Mia loved Skylar on some level, but during the summer of her senior year, it had all ended in disaster because Mia wasn’t like her cousin. Not even close.
Wallace walked in at that moment, and at the sight of Skylar, he stopped dead in his stride. He scowled.
“Hello, Wallace!” Skylar said brightly. “I bet you’re super happy to see me. Am I right?”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Wallace drawled. “What cat dragged you in?”
“Oh, come on,” Skylar said, and threw her arms around Wallace, giving him a bear hug, too. “I’ve actually missed you, you old meanie.”
“I’m very serious—what are you doing here?” he demanded. “And I don’t mean East Beach, I mean in this store.”
“I’m going to answer phones,” Skylar said proudly. “We’ve actually had a call this morning, can you believe it?”
“What do you mean?” Wallace demanded.
“I mean, when it rings, I pick it up and say, ‘Hello, John Beverly Home Interiors and Landscape Design, how may I help you?’”
Wallace huffed impatiently. “Are you answering phones for a short while today? Or will we have the pleasure of your company longer than that?”
“Oh, longer,” Skylar said, clearly as delighted as Mia to torment Wallace. She looped her arm through Mia’s. “Don’t look so pissed, Wallace! Remember how much fun we had last time I was here?”
“No, I do not,” he said gruffly. “Well isn’t this just fantastic? John Beverly’s Home for Wayward Girls,” he groused as he stalked past them into the shop.
Skylar laughed. “He’s such a queen.”
“Really, you’re going to work here?” Mia asked, feeling just as stunned as Wallace. It was one thing that Skylar was in the same town, same family. It was something else entirely if she was in the same work space.
“Sure! Why not?” Skylar asked. “Geez, don’t look so worried. This is going to be loads of fun.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a joint, holding it up so that Mia could see it, then slid the joint back in her pocket.
Mia stared at Skylar.
“Don’t be a wimp, Mia!” Skylar said, and put her arm around Mia’s shoulders. “Come on, let’s catch up. I have so much to tell you.”
Eight
Skylar’s arrival back in East Beach put new urgency to Mia’s need to get her act together. There was something about being lumped into John Beverly’s Home for Wayward Girls that made Mia want to prove she’d only suffered a small setback, but nothing more.
First things first, she was not going to be the Lassiter kid who had no choice but to live with her parents. So Mia took Wallace up on his offer to introduce her to his friend, Dalton Blaylock.
Dalton was a plastic surgeon who summered in a house on the northern edge of East Beach. He’d bought property that had once been a farm and had built an ultramodern, lots-of-windows, spectacular lake house right out of Architectural Digest, which, naturally, had been decorated by Wallace.
Dalton had left the old barn standing and had renovated the second floor into an apartment.
Mia hated to say it, but Wallace was right—it was perfect.
“I’m really looking for someone who will keep an eye on the place when I’m in the city,” Dalton said. “Not that you’d have to do anything, but, you know, a presence is always nice. A quiet presence. I don’t want to hear garage bands cranking up in the middle of the night.”
“Luckily, I haven’t been in a garage band since I was twelve,” Mia assured him.
The apartment was small, but immaculately turned out. On one end stood a kitchen with modern appliances and glass countertops. On the other end, a double bed on a raised wooden platform. In true Wallace style, the bed sported so many decorative pillows that there was hardly enough room to sit on the foot of it.
A potbellied stove was on the north wall, atop marble tile that matched the tile in the kitchen. The furniture was rustic chic—big chairs and a sofa with soft cushions and canvas coverings that frankly could have used some of Mia’s fabric designs. But what caught Mia’s eye were the French doors that opened onto a small balcony. The amazing view out those doors was an expensive one—through the trees, Mia could see the beach and the lake. She could imagine sitting on the balcony on Sunday mornings with a cup of coffee and a piece of toast, her easel and her paints.
“Quite nice, isn’t it?” Wallace asked smugly, always happy to be right.
“It’s beautiful,” Mia agreed.
“Five hundred a month,” Dalton said. “Eckland’s Hardware and General Store is at the bottom of the drive. They’ll have all the groceries you might need,” Dalton said. “And of course, you know it’s a quick jog into the village.”
“Only a mile or so from Ross house,” Wallace added, looking at her pointedly. “A much easier walk from here than from town.”
Oh yes, this place exceeded Mia’s wildest expectations.
“Well,” Dalton said, “while Mia thinks about this, I’m thinking of redoing the master, did I tell you?” He touched Wallace’s arm with one fingertip.
“Again?” Wallace exclaimed.
“Again,” Dalton purred. “Mia, take all the time you need. Take a walk down to the store and see what the old man has in stock while I show Wally what I’m thinking.”
The two men went out. Mia stood alone in the loft looking out the French doors at the view.
It was amazing. She’d have to search long and hard to find a place like this for the price. The thing about it was she could actually work here. There were two slight problems—one, she didn’t know how she’d pay for it, especially if Aunt Bev didn’t get the Ross house. And she still owed her brother Derek the cost of the van they’d rented to haul her few things home from Brooklyn.
And two—if she took it, did that mean she was staying here? Was she going to give up and live in East Beach? Was she really ready to admit defeat?
But still . . . she loved it.
Mia walked downstairs and outside to look around. Below, on a little patch of grassy green, there was a bistro table and chairs outside the door to the barn. Someone had put a tiny pot of flowers on the table. There was a slight breeze, enough to lift the ends of her hair, and it carried the scent of new pine needles with it.
Between the disaster of her senior year and having fled East Beach for the city, Mia had forgotten how truly beautiful Lake Haven could be. She had forgotten how this vista had often inspired her to want to create stunning art. She felt the draw of that desire to create now. This very minute. Give her some paper, a pencil—something.
This was what she needed. Wasn’t it?
She decided to take Dalton’s suggestion and walk down to Eckland’s Hardware and see if the general store had anything even remotely organic.
She was surprised to discover that the store hadn’t changed one bit in all the time she’d been gone. Mr. Eckland, who had been ancient when she was sixteen, was still here, only more ancient. His ears looked as if they might have grown another inch or two, and the shock of white hair on top of his head was noticeably thinner, but still sprung up, untended.
“Hello, Mr. Eckland,” she said.
“Huh?” He looked up from hi
s spot near a window where the spring sun was streaming in. He was seated in an old wicker lawn chair, his feet propped on a pile of boxes, reading the paper. He squinted at her from over the top of it.
“I said, hello,” Mia said louder.
He waved at her as he turned his attention back to his paper, clearly uninterested. “Lemme know if you need anything.”
There was no one else in the store, so Mia wandered around its aisles of hammers and canned goods, weed whackers and frozen pizzas. This was not a Home Depot–type hardware store—this was the hardware store of the idle wealthy. That didn’t mean there weren’t serious bits of machinery, but there were more colorful watering cans and hammer sets for junk drawers and old-fashioned, gasless crank lawn mowers for the environmentally conscious than one might find in a big box store.
Memories of this store and her childhood began to surface as Mia moved through the aisles. Snatches of her and her cousins riding their bikes up the beach and leaving them in tumbled piles of handlebars and banana seats at the end of the footpath to run up to this store and its candy aisle. Of buying snow shovels with her father one year when the winter was particularly bad.
And, of course, the night of her ultimate humiliation, when she and Skylar had stopped here for lighter fluid.
Images of that night suddenly overwhelmed her, coming in a flurry of memories so quickly that Mia had to grab onto a stack of cheap lawn furniture to steady herself. There had been a bonfire on the north end of the beach, just below the Ross house. It was secluded there, out of sight of the three East Beach cops that patrolled the streets.
Mia hadn’t wanted to go. Her boyfriend, Aiden Bowers, had broken up with her the night before graduation, and she’d been moping around for weeks, not knowing what to do with herself. It was supposed to have been a glorious summer—she was out of high school, bound for college in Brooklyn, and those should have been her last few weeks of pure freedom. But Aiden had ruined that and Mia didn’t know how to bounce back.
She hadn’t had many friends to rely on because Mia had always struggled to fit in. She’d always been different. She saw the world around her in shapes and angles, in shading and light. She noticed the motion in some things, the stillness in others. She loved colors beyond reason and even claimed them as her own as girls will do—chartreuse, magenta, azure.
The world of color and light had been a wonderful one to inhabit as a girl. But then Mia had started school, and her view of the world had already been set apart from the other kids. As she’d grown up, teasing turned to mocking. In high school, she’d worn her difference like a crown, and some of the mocking had turned downright derisive.
The more some kids pushed, the more determined Mia was to be different. She sought the company of other kids on the fringe, experimented with drugs and sex. She’d had a hard time maintaining friendships when it seemed like every girl her age wanted to be a cheerleader, and she wanted blue hair.
Mia was a senior when she started dating Aiden. He was her first real boyfriend. He was an unlikely boyfriend, too, because Aiden had always been one of the cool kids. Mia had been surprised when he showed interest in her, but when they started to date, Mia had believed that her class had grown up, and maybe, at last, they were all ready to accept people for who they were. Maybe.
Aiden broke up with her after four months of serious dating. It was a shot out of the blue, his reasoning that he wanted to be free of commitment during his last summer at home. It had seemed so easy for him to do, and Mia had been crushed.
Skylar, a year older than Mia, had taken pity on her. She’d introduced her to her friends. Mia found some of them to be aimless and more concerned with the easy way out of life. She wasn’t like that—she wanted to succeed. She wanted to be an artist, and she worked hard for it. But she also wanted to matter to someone, and that summer, she mattered to Skylar.
The night of the bonfire, Mia had been at home when Skylar had come around. “Come on, go with me,” she’d said.
“Nah. I’m going to stay in,” Mia had said, not impolitely.
“Jesus, don’t let Aiden Bowers ruin everything for you,” Skylar had said. “This is the last summer before college, Mia! It’s just a little get together on the beach anyway.”
Mia could see that Skylar was right—she couldn’t let Aiden rule her summer. So she’d reluctantly put on a dress she’d made herself and gone with her cousin.
The “little get together” turned out to be more of a mob, and worse, Aiden was there with his new girlfriend, Shalene.
Someone was passing around big fruit jars of a homemade liquor concoction. There were several fat joints floating around, too. Skylar passed Mia the drink. At first, Mia shook her head.
“Just take a few sips,” Skylar said. “Don’t be an asshole.”
Seeing Aiden with Shalene had made it easier for Mia to drink—anything to dull the pain.
“That’s my girl!” Skylar had shouted over the boom box.
But either the concoction was deceivingly strong or Mia drank more than she could remember, because the night quickly got away from her. She could remember dancing, she could remember Aiden’s leering grin. She could remember him asking if she missed him.
Wow, Mia hadn’t thought about that night in a long time. She took a deep breath and shook it off. She’d definitely put it behind her when she’d left for New York . . . but sometimes that horrible night came creeping into her thoughts like an uninvited guest.
Like right now.
Mia took a deep breath and moved on, wandering down the aisles. Long time ago. Doesn’t matter.
But she couldn’t shake the memories of that night. Even now, she could recall how heavy and oppressive the air was, how the fire felt too hot. She could remember feeling hazy, like she didn’t have full control of her body. She’d been confused and woozy, and somehow, she ended up dancing with Aiden.
A lewd and suggestive dance.
Of course Mia could remember Shalene very clearly, and how she’d taken great exception to their dancing. She’d gotten in Mia’s face about it, too, her dark head bobbing around on her shoulders as she hurled insults and threats with a finger in Mia’s face.
Mia had looked for Skylar, desperate for her help. Shalene had sneered when she told her that Skylar had left with a guy.
That’s where Mia’s memories got really hazy and weird, nothing but snatches of color and movement. Someone’s hands on her. Someone’s alcohol-soaked breath on her neck. The feel of dew on her back, the smell of a dead fire, the taste of ashes in her mouth.
Whatever happened, Mia woke up the next morning next to the smoldering remains of the bonfire. The ground around her was littered with bottles and cans. Dirt was in her mouth, muddy sand in her hair. She sat up and realized her dress was up around her chest, her torso and legs exposed. She looked down and had felt sick when she saw that someone had scrawled the word freak across her bare belly.
It was horrifying, humiliating, and Mia was filled with crushing shame for not knowing what had happened to her. She stumbled home through a path in the woods to her grandmother’s house. Fortunately, no one was home, and Mia showered, scrubbed away the word, scrubbed away her humiliation before anyone saw her.
She could kill Skylar for leaving her, but she thought the whole ugly thing was over. One super bad night.
It was far from over.
Skylar found Mia later that day, and Mia knew the moment she saw her cousin’s ashen face. Skylar showed her the pictures that had begun to circulate. They were of Mia passed out on the beach, the word freak on her belly clearly visible.
Mia begged Skylar not to say anything, but Skylar couldn’t let it stand and told Mia’s parents. Naturally, her parents went to the police with a list of names they’d forced Mia and Skylar to give them. A few days later, the detective came to their house and said that as Mia had not been sexually assaulted, and couldn’t remember what had happened, it was basically her word against the other kids’, none of whom see
med to remember anything except Mia getting wasted. No one saw anything. “Bottom line,” he said, “we’re lucky no real harm was done.”
Oh, but so much harm was done. Mia was the laughingstock of East Beach. She couldn’t sleep; she lost her appetite. She rarely left her house. Nevertheless, she thought it was truly over, that all she had to do was wait out the summer and go to school.
And still it wasn’t over. One afternoon, Derek ran into Shalene and Aiden on the street and words were exchanged. Derek was arrested for disorderly conduct.
That’s when Mia’s family decided it was probably best if she moved to Brooklyn early, and Derek went off to law school as he planned.
Now, of course, almost nine years had passed and Mia could put some perspective around the events of that year. The only true scars were emotional—she could see her teen years for what they were and would be forever grateful that by the time she went to college, she was through experimenting. She didn’t do drugs or sleep around. She actually lived fairly conservatively.
She wasn’t going to let those memories keep her from the best apartment on Lake Haven.
Mia moved past the frozen foods section, the gourmet cheese and wine section, and walked outside to the garden area. Just outside the door, dozens of lanterns, made from paper, mason jars and tin cans, glass and bottles, hung overhead in a delightful array that covered the garden section. She grabbed her phone to take some pictures of the lanterns so she could paint them later.
She was startled by a crash of what sounded like plastic and leaned to her right, peering past a rack of hoes. Plastic watering cans had scattered across the brick walk, and a man was squatting down to gather them up.
That shaggy head of hair looked familiar. Mia squinted at him. “Brennan?”
His head came up at the sound of her voice. He gained his feet and turned toward her.
It was Brennan. But not the same Brennan. This was a much better Brennan . . . a much better Brennan. For starters, his clothes looked clean. And while she wasn’t standing close enough to smell him, he looked clean. He was wearing snug khaki slacks that rode low on his hips, a long-sleeved chambray shirt open at the collar, and boots of soft leather. The stubble of two or three days ago when she’d last seen him had filled in, his hair had definitely been combed, and it looked as if it had been trimmed, too. Combed and trimmed!