“Mr. Summers?”
“Levi Summers. Big boss,” he explains.
Oh. Right. Summers. His name is on every building in town. Descendant of the founder of Beauty. Talk about privilege. I had no idea he owned the magazine. Rookie mistake.
Mr. Phillips holds out his hands. “That’s why Levi Summers yanked your application, so I’m afraid you won’t be getting the internship this summer. I’m sorry.”
Yanked. Just like that. Poof ! One more thing that’s gone wrong in Beauty over the last few months.
Mr. Phillips is telling me some other things I barely hear, about how the internship itself is four days in August, before school starts back, and the work is rigorous, from early morning until midnight, so there would be problems anyway because of age restrictions and labor laws.
“Besides, maybe it’s for the best, because you’d miss the Victory Day flotilla.”
“Huh?”
“At the end of Regatta Week—the big Victory Day celebration. Surely you went to the nighttime flotilla when you were a kid?”
Oh, I went, all right. Rhode Island is the only state in the U.S. that still observes a legal holiday to mark the end of World War II. And for Beauty, that means an outlandish patriotic flotilla. At twilight, every boat is covered in strings of white lights, and they light the big braziers in the harbor. It’s as if the townsfolk of Beauty sat around and said: How can we outdo Fourth of July and stick it to those assholes in Boston by stealing all the end-of-summer tourists?
“If you were interning, you wouldn’t be able to enjoy the flotilla,” Mr. Phillips says solemnly, as if it’s my one dream in life.
Yeah, okay. I don’t really care about yachts covered in fairy lights. The internship was going to help me get to Los Angeles, and now I’m feeling like my ship is sinking in the harbor along with my dreams. I can’t explain to Mr. Phillips about the ticking time bomb that is my grandma returning from Nepal and the mess that is Mom’s relationship with Grandma, but now it’s summer, and I’m no closer to getting to LA than I was a few months ago.
A group of senior boys rolls past us down the hall, radiating arrogance and a toxic kind of laughter, and though I try to turn my head away, the leader spies me—an asshole varsity football player everyone calls Big Dave.
“Josie Saint-Martin.” My name is thick in his mouth, too familiar. He doesn’t even know me, not from childhood or now. “Coming to my party tonight? I’ll let you take my picture,” he says, kissing the air. “Private photo session.”
His boys laugh.
“Hard pass,” I tell him, hoping I sound tougher than I feel.
“All right, Mr. Danvers. Keep walking,” Mr. Phillips says, pointing down the hallway.
They shuffle away, Big Dave miming snapping photos while one of his buddies makes suggestive gestures behind Mr. Phillips’s back. I hate all of them. I hate Mr. Phillips for quietly apologizing for their obnoxious behavior, like he just saved me, but you know, boys will be boys. I hate that he doesn’t have a clue that I’ve had to endure this garbage day in, day out for months when teachers aren’t paying attention. I hate being angry all the time.
But most of all, I hate that after Big Dave and his gang of lunkheads have passed, I spy a lean figure in a black leather jacket across the hall, shutting his locker.
Lucky Karras.
Everywhere I go, there he is. The bookshop. The curb outside, where he parks his vintage red motorcycle. Silhouetted in the window of the boatyard’s offices across the street, petting their black cat. Standing in line in the doughnut shop down the block. And here at school.
We never talk. Not really. He’s never said, So, let’s catch up! Or, How’s life been treating you? Nothing normal like that. We don’t acknowledge that we were once best friends and spent every day after school together. That I spent every Sunday eating dinner at his house. That we used to secretly meet up after school at an abandoned cedar boatshed at the end of the Harborwalk—secret code: “meet me at the North Star”—to listen to music and run terrible Harry Potter D&D campaigns.
No. He’s just … around. Like now. Dark eyes staring at me from across the corridor.
Did he hear Big Dave just now? Lucky is always witnessing my little humiliations at school, and I can’t decide if I’m angry or grateful that he never tries to intervene. All I know is that I’m weary of thinking about him all the time. Weary of wondering why he won’t talk to me. And weary of enduring his haunting stares.
I’m so glad my junior year is over.
When the last bell rings, everyone pours out of the hundred-year-old brick school building like ants deserting an anthill. Sad sack that I am, I hike the five blocks back to the South Harbor district, trying not to the let the internship rejection get to me. After all, I’ve weathered bigger storms than this. I just need another angle. Talk to someone else. Show the right person my work—someone who’ll be willing to go to bat for me and stand up against Levi Summers and his stupid age rules. Something. I’ll figure it out.
Tenacious. Wily as a fox. Schemer. Plotter. That’s me.
Once I get to the Nook and pass under Salty Sally the mermaid, I glance through the front door and spy Mom talking to a customer. Then I make my way around back where I march up rickety steps that are eternally covered in seagull shit. Up here is my grandmother’s old apartment—where I lived when I was a kid. It’s got a fussy old lock and a new security system, into which I tap a code before kicking the door closed behind me.
The front end of the apartment is basically one big living room with a fireplace and a tiny, open kitchen. It’s decorated in a mix of my grandmother’s left-behind furniture—New England antiques, worn rugs on hardwood floors, and her mermaid collection—and the few things that we’ve U-Hauled from state to state. A 1950s pinup-girl lamp I discovered in a junk store, which looks uncannily similar to my mom. Framed photos I’ve taken of all the cities we’ve lived in over the last few years. Mr. Ugly, a blanket Mom crocheted during one of her crafty phases. No matter where we go, those things follow us. Those things signal that we’re home.
At least, they’re supposed to. Right now, they’re sort of duking it out with Grandma’s things, and I’m constantly reminded that we are living in someone else’s space on borrowed time.
I shuffle down a narrow hall past Evie’s room—weird and spooky taxidermy, racks of altered retro clothes, stacks of worn historical romance paperbacks—and retreat into mine, which contains one hundred percent fewer taxidermized squirrel-cobra mashups.
In fact, my old childhood bedroom might as well be a hotel room because it contains little to nothing but clothes and photography stuff. I have a single bookcase filled with essential photography books, including my father’s coffee table book of fashion photos, and all my vintage cameras. My oldest is a No. 2 Brownie from 1924 (doesn’t work), and the rarest one is a Rolleiflex Automat from 1951 (it does), and of course, there’s my Nikon F3, my most used camera. My digital pictures are stored online like everyone else’s, and most of the film I develop is organized in containers that are stacked in the corner. However, the space above my pushed-against-the-wall bed is lined with curated photos I chose to display, hung on strings with wooden clothespins. I can take them down and pack them in under a minute. I’ve timed it.