All the bedrooms up here are super tiny, but mine has a bay window that looks out over gabled rooftops and steeples toward the town common. I stumble out of my shoes and head there now, to the window seat and its cushioned nest of pillows—a nook where I’ve spent a good chunk of the last few months reading and watching seagulls.
Might as well feel sorry for myself here, too.
But though I’m fully prepared to stay in all night and sulk, Evie shows up an hour later with other plans for both of us, pulling me out of my room to eat cold leftover takeout noodles while Mom is buried in some accounting mess downstairs in the bookshop.
Evie closes her eyes and holds up a finger to one temple. “Madame Evie the Great is getting a vision from the beyond. The spirits are showing me … wait. I’m seeing you and me on First Night.”
“Is this a biblical vision of the end times?”
“It’s tradition here for everyone to throw First Night house parties—as in first night of summer. School’s out, students are home from college, and the tourist season is about to begin.”
“And all of that equals an excuse to cut loose and throw wild ragers?”
“Pretty much,” she agrees.
And after months of watching me suffer through gossip at Beauty High and misunderstanding my depressed state over not getting the magazine internship, Evie thinks a First Night party—the right party—will help my social situation. Which is nonexistent by choice, but she thinks if I tried to reach out to people, they wouldn’t gossip as much.
Okay, fine, but I definitely can’t explain why I’m not sticking around Beauty long enough to make friends due to my entire exit strategy to Los Angeles. And I love Evie, but like everyone else, she would just tell me I’m too young, and how much it would hurt my mom. She doesn’t understand what it’s like to live with Winona Saint-Martin. She only sees Fun Winona. Or Dedicated-Manager Winona, who is smart and determined to run the bookstore and trying really hard not think about hooking up with nameless guys in bars across town right this minute.
Evie doesn’t know the Never-There Winona.
Or my favorite, the We-Don’t-Talk-about-That Winona.
“Look, cuz, I’ve got a ticket to a great party. Not a Beauty High party. We’ll go together. You’ll meet some new blood. Maybe I will too. Not everyone is horrible here, believe it or not.”
Evie just briefly dated and broke up with some Harvard guy named Adrian who’s been low-key stalking her and being a total dick. Evie hasn’t talked about it much, but I think it’s starting to upset her.
“I thought book relationships were better than real-life ones?” I remind her.
“They’re teaching me to have better real-life relationships,” she says.
“Because you run into so many dark dukes and gothic widows in Beauty?”
“The world is a haunted castle on a moor,” she says. “Your duke can be anywhere. Maybe at a First Night party tonight, even. Just have to be receptive to letting him into your life.”
“Until the Saint-Martin curse hits, and my duke is drowned in a lake or cheats on me with three mistresses.”
“I’m not entirely sure how I feel about the Saint-Martin curse anymore.”
“You aren’t a believer?”
She shrugs. “Yes and no? I believe all the women in our family are a little weird, but that’s another matter,” she says with a grin. “Now, come on. Let’s get out of this apartment. Fresh air and new faces will do us both good. Let’s just relax and have a chill night out, okay?”
Fine.
The house party we’re heading to isn’t that far, fifteen or twenty minutes, and we dare to walk down Lamplighter Lane to get there—a tiny street between our neighborhood and the Historic District that’s full of old shops and a wax museum, and, according to my superstitious mother, the actual, precise location of Beauty’s portal to hell.
“Not sure if she’s mentioned this to you,” I say to Evie, “but Mom claims if you stop on this corner at midnight, you’ll meet the devil and he’ll make you an offer for your soul.”
“Do you have to enter a fiddling contest for it?” my cousin asks, amused, stepping sideways to avoid a crack in the sidewalk.
“Probably,” I say. “You know she literally drives two blocks out of her way on the bank run to avoid this street, right? Always has, ever since I was little.”
“They do ghost tours down here around Halloween. Maybe she got scared when she was a kid. I’ll ask my mom on our next Skype call. In the meantime, if you see any devilish looking figures with fiddles, warn me. Come on—this way.”
The party is in the sprawling backyard of one of the historic mansions near the center of town. I don’t even know whose house this is, one of Beauty’s Old Money families with a multimillion-dollar manor. Evie hands over a party invitation at a gated driveway filled with luxury cars, and we’re allowed to come inside. We’re directed to follow a path that leads to a pool and pool house—one that looks bigger than our apartment above the bookshop.
“Uh, Evie? Who are these people?” I ask as we make our way toward the pool’s blue water, around which dozens of teens are laughing and drinking and dancing to loud music.
“Mostly Goldens,” she says. Golden Academy, the private school in Beauty. Elite. Ivy League prep. Out of reach. “A lot of college students, home for the summer. Harvard’s only a couple hours away. Wish I could afford it.”
My goth cousin at an Ivy League? I wonder if this is because she briefly dated the Harvard guy. She’s taking some basic biology courses at the local community college for a couple of years, but she wants to be a forensic anthropologist. Or a historian. Or a writer. In typical Saint-Martin fashion, she’s always changing her mind. Even her mother, Franny—the straitlaced sister, compared to my mom—changed careers a dozen times before she rented out their house and ran off to Nepal with Grandma.
I get a little nervous the closer we get to the pool, where everyone’s congregating. These kids don’t just look rich, they look older. Prettier. Bigger. Faster … Better. I see them swaggering around town, but it’s weird to be invading their personal property. I feel like an interloper. “Um, Evie? How do you know this crowd again? Because you dated that guy?”
“Adrian. Yeah, sort of.”
“If you broke up with him, why are we here?”
“He’s one person. Plenty of other fish in the sea. Besides, I was assured he wasn’t invited, so we won’t be running into him. One hour, okay? Then if you want to jet, we’re out.”
One hour? Dream on. Twenty minutes of weaving through the bikini tops and top-siders, hearing snatches of conversations about Harvard’s rowing team and summering at the beaches north of the harbor and trips to Europe … and it’s all. Too. Much.
Evie finds her people, though. One is a friendly brown-eyed girl from Barcelona named Vanessa who goes to college with Evie and knows enough about me to catch me off guard. “Feel like I already know you,” she says in a pretty Castilian accent.
Which is odd, because Evie’s never mentioned this Vanessa person before. Guess they’re close friends, because they link elbows and Evie visibly relaxes around her. There’s another girl with them who’s headed to Princeton next year, but I don’t catch her name. They pretend to try and include me in their conversation in an obligatory kind of way, but they’re older than me, and it’s pretty clear that I’m deadwood by the way they turn their shoulders to exclude me.