There’s something intoxicating about this, about being let in on someone’s secrets, like glimpsing a tiny light shining through a crack in a wall, and all you want to do is start hammering away, see what else is hiding there, be the one to find it, to claim it. All I want is to see inside. To be the one.
I wonder what Ivy Avila was like as a kid. I wonder what she wants. What was it that made her who she is now? If, like Ash, she started out as someone different. Or if, like me, she hasn’t changed at all.
* * *
• • •
Tami called me two days after I ran into her at the grocery store and invited me over. I tried on a total of six different outfits before leaving the house, ultimately deciding on a pair of jeans and a black tank top because according to Papa, “the simplest option is always the most elegant,” and he knows these things, even if all he designs these days is armor. I’ve known Tami since kindergarten, but this is the first time she’s ever invited me over to her house, alone, for something other than a party that everyone else was also invited to. I try not to think too much about what this means, but I can’t help but wonder if maybe Ash had something to do with it. Maybe this is all some sort of premeditated plan. Maybe he’s the one who wants us to be friends. Maybe he thinks I’ll rub off on her or something. Like how Ivy Avila said, “You seem nice,” and asked for my number.
Ivy still hasn’t called. It’s been five days. I’m trying not to think about that either.
I drive to Tami’s house on the east side of the island and announce myself to the security camera at the front gate. It opens mysteriously and I park Papa’s little electric Honda behind Tami’s Tesla. I thought Ash might be here, but hers is the only car I can see, and I suddenly want to turn around and go home. My disappointment is not a surprise, but my fear is. I have never been alone like this with Tami Butler, not socially, not on purpose.
The house is just like Tami—beautiful and perfect and cold. On the outside, it is black corrugated metal. On the inside, it is all chrome and glass and white leather. A housekeeper leads me through the living area to the back deck.
“How are you today?” I ask her.
“Fine, thank you,” she says with a monotone Southern drawl, without looking back at me. She is probably one of so many workers from the southern states here on an inter-state work visa, or a refugee from the flooded coast, where things are so bad with hurricanes and poverty and diseased mosquitos. I wonder if she still has family back there, her own children maybe, while she’s here taking orders from Tami. I wonder if Tami even knows where the housekeeper’s from, what happened in her life that made her come here.
Housekeepers, gardeners, nannies, personal assistants. I wonder what it would be like to be able to hire people to do everything for you that you can do yourself.
Mountains frame the skyscrapers of Seattle, creating a dramatic backdrop to the covered deck where Tami is sitting with her arms stretched over the back of a huge wraparound couch. She could be posing for a magazine. She could own the view itself.
She does not rise to greet me, but simply gives a little wave of her hand, like she summoned me and is now simply acknowledging my delivery. She is perfection in black yoga clothes, the epitome of Seattle rich—active, casual, flawless—with long platinum hair that has never known a split end, and ice-blue eyes surrounded by long black curls of fake eyelashes. She is strikingly beautiful, powerful in a sharp, slightly scary way, with a look on her face like she’s sizing me up, calculating my worth with some intricate math only she knows and that I have no hope of learning.
“Luanne, bring us some snacks, will you?”
“Yes, ma’am,” the housekeeper says. I will never get over eighteen-year-olds being called ma’am by women old enough to be their mothers.
“Well, you certainly are beautiful,” Tami says to me with something like disappointment in her voice.
I have never been the kind of girl anyone called beautiful. Maybe pretty, but more often than not, nothing at all.
“You changed your hair,” Tami says.
“I’ve been growing it out.”
“I envy you.”
“Me? Why?” I am nobody. I am the invisible girl who never leaves this island.
“You make it look so easy.”
“Make what look easy?”
“Being special.”
Special. Ash is special. Tami is special. I am not special.
I want to be special.
If Ash were here, he’d have his back to me. He’d be facing the water and the city, playing something soft on his guitar. His hair would be much longer than the last time I saw him. He would not turn around. He’s the kind of person who likes to keep people waiting. He’s the kind of person who likes people to come to him. And we always do.
“I love this view,” Tami says as I enter the shaded U of the couch. I imagine her sliding closer to Ash now, draping her long legs over his knees, claiming him, pushing his guitar against his body so he’s trapped, unable to play. “You don’t need that right now, do you?” she would say. The tight muscles of his back would be defined through his thin T-shirt as he turned to set the guitar behind the couch.
You don’t need that right now. Tami dismisses Ash’s music, like his parents have. They’re old-school, the kind that require their children to learn an instrument at a young age, not to instill a love of music but because it’s supposed to make them smarter. He is not supposed to be a musician. He is supposed to continue the family A-Corp dynasty and turn out just like them. Just like Tami.
“Where’s your boyfriend?” I say.
Tami looks at me with a raised eyebrow.
Now is when he’d finally look at me from behind his curtain of hair, flicking it out of his eyes, and I would try to smile back, but my face would be crooked. He would smile with one side of his mouth like we were in on something together, like we’ve been carrying on some secret correspondence while he was away at school that no one, not even me, knows about.
He would say my name. He would smile that smile that feels like you’re being shined on. He would get up and hug me, his body hard and sun-warmed, smelling like sweat and pine needles.
“He’s stoned,” Tami would say. “He’s a hugger when he’s stoned.”
“You want to smoke, Fern?” he would offer as he sits back down, as Tami’s legs stretch over him once again.
“No thanks.”
“Remember, honey,” Tami would say. “Fern is morally superior to you and me.”
“Someone has to be.” He is so adept at softening Tami’s constant blows.
“I suppose you don’t want a drink?” Tami says now, taking a sip of hers, something clear and icy with crushed herbs of some kind.