I am the one who goes nowhere.
This is the last summer.
* * *
• • •
“I’m Ivy,” the girl says. But of course I already know that. I tell her I think I’m her neighbor.
The mother holds up a fake antique watering can and says, “Ooh, this is so vintage! I love the rust.”
* * *
• • •
They are coming back, one by one, arriving at the airport with bags full of dirty laundry for their housekeepers to clean. They’ve already started their game of playing like adults with no consequences.
The local taxi service has called in reinforcements from the county across the bridge. There will soon be an island full of children getting drunk who need to get home.
* * *
• • •
I have to find boxes in the back to hold all the mother’s stuff. I concentrate on wrapping each thing in paper, but my hands are shaking.
“You seem nice,” says Ivy, the girl made of sun.
That’s me: Nice girl. Daddies’ girl. Good girl.
I am a middle-class girl from a loving, intact family. I am a fantasy. I am an endangered species. We are on the verge of extinction. I may be the last one of my kind.
“I’m supposed to recuperate this summer, and I need some company besides myself,” she says. “Here, write your number on this receipt. You can be like my tour guide.”
And now I have a real job. There is a use for me. I am chosen. I am touched.
2
Ash Kye. Tami Butler.
All year long, I follow their fabulous lives on social media while they forget I exist.
AshandTami. TamiandAsh. They are a unit. They are a single word.
I wonder what it would feel like to have a life that seems worthy of constant documentation.
I try not to get hung up on the fact that Tami is horrible. Ash chose her, so she must be made of at least something good. I’ve been trying to figure out what that is for years, ever since elementary school when we still went to the same A-Corp school, when she’d sit on top of the monkey bars and make us get in line to present her with “gifts” we found on the playground—a perfect pinecone, a special rock, a lost barrette—and no one questioned her authority. If we wanted to play with her, we had to play her game, and we always did.
It’s still like that every time she comes back from boarding school—everyone waiting to see if they’ll be chosen. I gave up caring a long time ago. People like Tami never choose people like me, so why should I bother wanting her to? What would I even get out of it? As far as I know, Tami doesn’t have any real friends. She has people she bosses around, people she parties with. Nothing deeper. Nothing real.
Despite all of that, my heart still jumps out of my chest when I see her car pull up behind mine outside the grocery store. Since when does Tami do her own grocery shopping? I expect her to act like I don’t exist, but for some reason she gets out of her car and walks up to me, her long white-blond hair trailing behind her in slow motion. She almost looks like she’s smiling. “You’re not fooling anyone with those sunglasses,” she says, and her voice is less bitchy than usual.
“Um, okay?” I say.
“Don’t act like you don’t remember me,” she says as she looks me up and down with what I think is approval. “It hasn’t been that long since Seth Greenmeyer’s party last fall.”
What is she talking about? We haven’t really hung out since elementary school. Is she high? She must be high. There are all sorts of designer drugs these days that make people act all kinds of weird.
“Of course I remember you,” I say.
“I would love to stay and chat,” she says. “But I’m running late. We have to hang out soon.” She pulls out her phone. “Here, tell me your number and I’ll text you.”
And that’s that. I give her my number and she drives off with a wave.
She didn’t even go into the grocery store. She stopped just to talk to me.
The first thing I think is that maybe she’s playing a trick on me. Maybe this is like one of those movies where the popular kid picks an unsuspecting loser to pretend to befriend only to humiliate later. This could be some kind of setup. But Ash wouldn’t let her do that. Even if our lives don’t intersect too much these days, he was still my best friend once. He’s the one whose house I went to every Saturday for years while Papa and his dad would go golfing, the one I built forts with, the one I tromped around with in the forest, pretending we were explorers from long ago before everything had already been discovered. Before there was AshandTami, there was just Ash, and he was mine.
His songs were mine. He started writing them when he was thirteen, and I was the only one he played them for. Even then, there was something about his music, a bittersweet beauty. He folded his body over his guitar while he played, all elbows and knees, thick black hair draping over his face like a package waiting to be opened. He wasn’t cool then. His braces were off but he still wore clothes his mother’s assistant picked out for him—preppy jeans that were a little too big and button-down shirts that were a little too short. His voice squeaked sometimes when he talked.
By sophomore year, he had learned to be cool. That’s when he and Tami started dating. Ash could have had his pick of anyone he wanted, but he chose her. Or he let her choose him.
His mother is Persian and his father is Korean. It doesn’t seem to bother him when Tami lifts her arm next to his and compares their skin, when she makes comments about what a pretty color their babies will be. He didn’t even seem to mind that time at a party when she was admiring their reflection in a hallway mirror and said, “I wish your eyes were just a little wider.”
Without a beat, he said, “And I wish you were just a little less of a bitch,” and then they laughed, and then they kissed, like he didn’t care that his girlfriend was kind of racist, like this is just how couples talk to each other.
But I’ve seen glimpses—the comments in passing, parsed over time like a continuing conversation: “Isn’t this exhausting?” he says to me at one party on his way to get another drink. “If only these assholes knew how I really feel about them,” he whispers in my ear at another, just before a couple of guys, pills in their pockets, lead him outside. “Wouldn’t it be nice to get away from all of this?” he sighs at still another, positioning his guitar on his lap, a crowd of girls seated at his feet. There have been so many glances at me across a room while Tami holds court next to him, while he’s surrounded by adoring people. But he looks at me like he’s alone, like he wants out, and I am the only person who sees it, I am the only one he’s allowing to see him.