“NONE OF YOU ARE GOING TO HARVARD.”
Mrs. Fiore paused for effect, scanning the faces in my Honors Lit class with a smug smile. She’d delivered the words with such conviction, it was as if the dean of admissions called and told her that no girl from the entire junior class of Sacred Heart Academy would even be allowed to apply to Harvard.
This was supposed to be a pep talk.
It was a rainy, miserable Friday in November. The kind better suited to burrowing under a comforter watching a Gossip Girl marathon than being dissed by your guidance counselor. My chances of going to Harvard, or any college for that matter, were on the fringes of my mind. The future was a faraway idea that came after more pressing ones, like Thanksgiving break or the gamble of putting a deposit down for junior prom by the December deadline without a date prospect in sight.
I surveyed the class, wondering if anyone else found this speech irritating. Resigned eyes stared straight ahead as Fiore droned on. Next to me, Jazz took notes. Across the room in the back corner, Maddie had her head down, pencil in hand. It looked like she was taking notes too, but I could tell she was sketching. I hoped I wasn’t her subject this time, because the look on my face was anything but pretty.
Honestly? Harvard had never been a passing thought, even as a reach school, but to hear someone, a guidance counselor no less, tell me it wasn’t a possibility made my mind reel. Was this some sort of Guidance 101 mind trick? Didn’t Mrs. Fiore realize she was insulting us?
I imagined recording her little speech. I’d strap her into one of our ass-numbing desks and demand proof of her guidance degree, since it was painfully clear she must have skipped the How to Inspire Your Students seminar in favor of the Dowdy Floral Prints and the Many Ways to Rock Them workshop. Then I’d force her to listen to that condescending drivel over and over again and see how inspired she felt afterward.
Fiore’s proclamation added another depressing dimension to what was fast becoming my semester of discontent. My current class rank was an unimpressive forty-nine. Forty-freakin’-nine out of one hundred and two, which technically put me in the top half of the class but barely. And my application for the Sacred Heart National Honor Society was a total fail. Nominated but denied. To add to the humiliation, the teachers felt compelled to let you in on the reasons why you didn’t get in, so you could improve and work harder to make it the following semester.
Wren Caswell. Doesn’t participate in class.
Bright but quiet.
Quiet. Quiet.
Too quiet.
I tried not to let the evaluation bother me, but it did. Being quiet was not a conscious protest. It was my nature. And once that sort of “Wow, you’re quiet!” klieg light was forced on me, it drove me deeper into my shell. If I had something to say, well, yeah, I would say it, but I never went out of my way to call attention to myself. In school this had always been a good thing. Applauded, even. The NHS evaluation made it sound like a character flaw. Something I could improve.
That’s just not how it worked.
“What was up with Fiore today?” Jazz asked, peeling away the plastic wrap from her baby carrots and fat-free dip. Jazz was training to run her first half marathon with her father in January and had adopted a clean-eating philosophy. Lately she ate the same lunch—lean protein on sprouted-grain bread, a Vitaminwater Zero, baby carrots and fat-free dip. It had never bothered me, but today, after the No Harvard speech, I resented its wholesome overachieving perfection.
“Thank you. You thought she was out of line too?”
“Oooh, who’s out of line? What did I miss?” Mads plopped down her lunch tray on the table.
“Fiore. Last class, or were you dozing again?” Jazz asked, pointing at her with a baby carrot. Mads leaned over, grabbed the carrot out of Jazz’s fingers with her teeth, and chewed as she shimmied her chair closer to the table. With her close-cropped platinum hair and devilish grin, she looked like a naughty, private-school Tinkerbell.
“Not dozing, doodling,” she said, grabbing a sketchbook from her pile of books and sliding it to me.
“You were doodling Ben Franklin?”
“No.” She grabbed the book and flipped to a different page. “That was yesterday. Here, from before.”
“Oh, um . . . who?” I asked, handing the book to Jazz.
“You can’t tell?”
Jazz peered at me over the sketchbook, brows raised in question.
“Some guy from a boy band?” I guessed.
“No! Zach,” Mads said, taking the book from Jazz.
“Ah, should have known, very Cro Magnon–like,” Jazz said, dipping another carrot.
Mads scrunched her face but smiled. “I suck at noses. It’s all in the shading. So what about Fiore?”
“You know, that whole ‘none of you are going to Harvard’ thing,” I said.
“Oh, that? What’s the big deal?” she asked, popping open her bag of baked chips and offering me one. I waved them away.
“I don’t like to be talked down to,” Jazz said.
Mads shrugged. “She’s a realist, that’s all.”
“I can get in to Harvard if I want,” Jazz countered.
“Okay, so maybe you can, Dr. Kadam, but what about the rest of us? Harvard is like a million miles away from here, metaphorically, at least. Why are you both taking it so personally?”
“Because it feels personal,” I said, pushing my brown-bag slacker lunch away. “It was like she was telling us we’re stupid, so why bother?”
Neither of them responded, and instead shared a knowing look. Mads crunched a potato chip extra loud between her teeth.
“What?”
“This is about NHS, isn’t it?” Jazz asked with the same doe-eyed face of pity she’d given me when I’d shown her my rejection letter.
“It’s okay to be pissed, Wren,” Mads added.
The pressure of backed-up tears made me blink fast and look away. Sometimes I hated my friends and how well they knew me.
“That’s not it.”
“Screw NHS, it’s not a big deal,” Mads said.
“It is a big deal,” Jazz protested.
“Jazzy Girl, not helping.”
“You’ll be nominated again next semester. It’s a great thing to have on your transcript.”
They bickered back and forth about the importance of NHS while I zoned out. I knew NHS was a big deal. It was the academic elite of the school. What bothered me most was that damn evaluation that summed me up as the average, quiet girl.
I’d always thought of myself as smart, had no problem making first or second honors, but in a small, competitive school just making it didn’t translate into anything spectacular. My rank had slipped because my brain refused to comprehend higher math. Even with tutoring, I’d taken home my first-ever Cs in Algebra II and Trig earlier in the semester. As I sat across from my NHS-accepted pals, I felt like an imposter. Like maybe I’d be better suited to being friends with Darby Greene, who sold her mother’s Xanax for ten bucks a pill in the back of the classroom and didn’t seem to be bothered with less-than-stellar grades. Then again, teachers liked her. She spoke up in class.
“Forget it, really, I’m okay,” I finally said.
“And why should we be taking guidance from a woman who buys her hair color off the shelf at Duane Reade?” Mads asked. “Come over after school. I’ve been dying to practice those ombré highlights on your hair. Zach and his friends can drop by. We’ll hang in my basement.”
Zach was Madison’s overgrown pup of a hook-up buddy. They had about zero in common, except they couldn’t keep their hands to themselves when they were within three feet of each other. She’d been trying to share the wealth by setting me and Jazz up with his pals, but so far Zach’s friend pool was about as bland as the baked chips Mads was noshing.
“If ‘hang in your basement’ is code for fighting off whatever soccer teammate Zach has with him this week, I’ll pass, but I’ll take a rain check on the highlights,” I said.
“How ’bout a movie night?” Jazz suggested. “I reserved Pretty in Pink at the library. I could pick up something else too, make it a double feature? Big bucket of air-popped popcorn? I’ll even splurge with peanut M&M’s.”
“That sounds great, but—”
“Wait,” Mads said, “so both of you would choose cheesy, canned romance and junk food over flesh-and-blood, six-packed-out-the-ass soccer guys?”
Jazz’s dark eyes turned incredulous. “Cheesy? Canned romance? Pretty in Pink is a classic—”
“—that I’ve seen chopped up on basic cable about umpteen times.”
“Guys, I have to work,” I said, trying to snuff out their fantasy-versus-reality debate.
“What’s the fun in being the owner’s daughter if you can’t skip out now and then?” Mads asked.
“We’re booked solid this weekend. Besides, the Camelot may be my future.”
Jazz looked between Maddie and me. “Since when?”
“Weddings are big business. It wouldn’t be a bad thing, right? I wouldn’t need major math skills to run it. I could hire someone for that.”
“Sure, and then you could hire me fresh out of Pratt to give the place an overhaul,” Mads continued. “And Jazz could have her huge Bollywood-style wedding there, and we’ll all live happily ever after.”
“Why am I the one getting married in this scenario?”
“Because I’m the architect, and Wren is the business owner, and I wasn’t sure how a pediatrician would fit into the whole thing. Besides, I want to wear a sari.”
“Four years of medical school plus a residency, ha, I’ll never have time for a real romance.”
“It’s just an option I’m tossing around. Not everyone has such a clear picture of their life after high school,” I said, balling up my uneaten lunch. The PB&J squished like Play-Doh in the brown paper bag.
“What about after work, Wren? You’re usually done by eleven, no?”
“Dunno. I think I’m just gonna lie low this weekend.”
“You’ve hooked up with someone like, what, once, twice, since the Trevor hump-and-dump? Come on, ditch work for one night. You’re overdue for some fun.”
“Madison,” Jazz reprimanded her in a whisper.
I gathered my books and trash and pushed back from the table. “Stop telling me what I need, ’kay?”
“Wren, wait, sorry. Trev’s the idiot. All I’m trying to say is it’s time to get your feet wet again . . . well, among other things.”
“Mads, really,” Jazz said, chuckling.
“Use it or lose it. Zach’s friends are hot. You never know, you could be cozying up with the next David Beckham.”
“Yeah, I’ll give that some thought . . . not,” I said, walking away before either of them could say anything else.
One slight mention from Mads and—zap—Trevor DiMarco was back in my head. I was over him, but I wasn’t exactly over us. He was my first. My only. My cautionary tale.
He’d been a friend of my brother, Josh. One of the many guys that hung around our house, playing basketball in the driveway or sitting around our living room watching Comedy Central and wasting time until they figured out what sports event or party they were hitting that night. The revolving door of cute boys was a perk of having an older brother at St. Gabriel Prep, and I took full advantage during Josh’s senior year. Inventing reasons to be in the kitchen. Doing my homework on the deck. Anything to inconspicuously put myself in the middle of the action.
Trev called me Osprey. Seagull. Raven. Every bird name except Wren. But I never took his teasing to be anything more than that. Until the night I looked up from Wuthering Heights and saw that Josh and the others had left. Trev stood in front of me, hands in pockets, shoulders hunched to his ears, his blue eyes slightly timid, unsure. Something I’d never seen in him.
“Hey, Wren,” he said, taking the book out of my hand as he leaned against the island. My stomach knotted up when he said my name. I hadn’t even had the chance to bookmark my page. “I was thinking, maybe . . . would you . . . how about . . . wanna hang with me tonight?”
“Here?” My voice was tight as I drummed my fingers on the counter. He’d never made me nervous before, but now that we were one-on-one, it hit me upside the head. He was the reason I hung around so much. Trev, with his perfect sandy hair and laid-back attitude had gotten to me. He cupped his hand over mine to stop the drumming.
“Why don’t we just, you know, roll where the night takes us?”
“Roll where the night takes us” was Trev’s life philosophy, and I couldn’t get enough. Our relationship was a dizzying blitz of prom, graduation parties, and endless nights rolling wherever life took us, and while sometimes it only led us to the lumpy futon in his family room, it was exotic to me. I was gone, gone, gone—caught up in the rush of being in what felt like my first serious relationship. With Trev starting SUNY Purchase in the fall, I knew we had an expiration date, but it wasn’t something we talked about. Part of me even held on to the hope that maybe we wouldn’t have to end.
None of that was on my mind, though, as we rolled into Belmar one gorgeous day in mid-July. The sun was warm, the breeze was cool, and I was having my first-ever hand-in-hand walk down the beach in the surf with a guy I truly cared about. Then we had that conversation.
All Trev said was that he couldn’t believe he’d be at orientation in less than a month. All I said was that I couldn’t wait to visit him in the fall, how I’d work it out somehow, take a bus or a train or hitch a ride with Josh when he went up to see him. Then we walked in silence. His grip loosened slightly, and he kept looking at me like he wanted to say more. The longer the silence, the more I realized I’d said too much, but I never thought he’d dump me right then as a biplane with a banner that read One-Dollar Shots and Half-Price Apps—D’Jais! sputtered by overhead.
“Baby, no, I thought . . . well . . . I want to be free when I go to school. You should be free too. I thought that was sort of . . . understood.” The tone in his voice was sweet, almost concerned. I knew this breakup wouldn’t bother him—this was something he was just rolling with, like everything.
That was the last day I saw him.
I tried to be casual about the whole thing, worldly, but . . . hump-and-dump, well, yeah, that felt about right.
With my mom already at work and my dad stuck on a case at the prosecutor’s office, I had to walk the ten blocks crosstown to the Camelot. I raced down our front steps, bracing against the raw dusk air, and stared wistfully at my sister Brooke’s Altima, which sat idle in our driveway since she was away at law school. Four more months until my road test, and then it was mine. Tonight I didn’t mind the walk. At least the rain had stopped, and the exercise helped shake off my grumpy mood.
The Camelot had been in my mother’s family for forty-five years. Every celebration, from my grandparents’ golden wedding anniversary to my sweet sixteen, had been held in one of the Arthurian-inspired ballrooms. When the Camelot opened in 1967, it was the place to have a wedding. Now only the lobby retained the kitschy medieval charm, with dark wood, burgundy drapes, and an oil painting of King Arthur (which insiders knew was my great-grandfather posing as him) over a working stone fireplace. One suit of armor, a six-foot monolith Josh had named Sir Gus, presided over the entrance to our main ballroom, the Lancelot.
None of us were ever forced to work, but there was an unspoken expectation that we would pitch in when we hit high school. Brooke had worked around her studies and social life. Josh, on the other hand, had turned the Camelot into his social life when he was on, recruiting friends and transforming the back room into a party between courses. I filled in here and there through sophomore year, but now, since both Brooke and Josh were away at school, I took on a full weekend schedule when necessary.
As I breezed through the front doors, the chaotic energy of wedding prep gave me an instant lift. I’d been joking with Jazz and Mads, but maybe it wouldn’t be so crazy for me to take over in the future. I already knew the business from shadowing my mother, and I definitely had opinions on what worked and what didn’t. I’d even helped choose the color scheme when we gave the ballrooms much-needed makeovers. Since Brooke was in law school and Josh was . . . well, doing whatever he was doing at Rutgers, it was a sure bet that neither of them was interested. The Camelot, right under my nose, might be my calling. I knocked on the doorjamb to my mother’s office before strolling in, ready to share my recent epiphany.
She slammed down the phone and fumbled with a bottle of ibuprofen before shaking out two little orange pills.
“You were supposed to be in twenty minutes ago,” she said, popping them into her mouth and washing them down with a swig of water from the bottle on her desk.
“I’m sorry. I had to walk,” I answered, whipping off my coat and pulling down the sleeves of my starched white work shirt. My underarms were damp. I did a quick sniff test. Clean.
“I didn’t mean to snap at you, Wren,” she said, rubbing her eyes and leaning back in her rolling chair. The wall of her office was covered with forty-five years’ worth of framed thank-you letters and pictures of smiling couples. Mom looked harried. The weight of the world or, more precisely, the weight of every wedding and event, sat on her shoulders.
“Well, I’m here now,” I said.
“If one more thing goes wrong tonight, I’m going to jump ship myself. The florist is running late, Chef Hank is complaining about the quality of the salmon, and Marguerite and José called in sick. We’re seriously understaffed for this wedding tonight. Any chance Jazz or Madison would want to earn some extra cash?”
“I think they’re already out,” I said, tightening my messy French knot.
“Then you’d better hustle, sweetie. Cocktail hour starts in less than thirty minutes,” she said, standing up and reaching for her suit jacket.
I hurried into the Lancelot to find a dozen or so black-and-white-clad Camelot staff assembling table settings with more silverware than any modern-day person needed. Eben saw me and grinned.
“Hey, ’bout time you showed up.”
Twenty-one and working his way through culinary school, Eben Phillips had started at the Camelot around the same time as my sister, Brooke. He was practically part of the family and hands down my favorite work bud.
“Check this out, charitable donations as favors,” he said, handing me one of the cards.
In lieu of little glass swans or bars of chocolate with their names on them, the couple had donated money to a charity that distributed mosquito nets to needy families in Africa.
“Cool. That’s one I’ve never heard of,” I said. “Need help?”
“I’ll be your bestie for life if you take over,” he said. “I’m assigned the head table tonight, and they’re in Guinevere’s Cottage. I have to get over there, like, yesterday, to make sure everything is in order.”
“Lucky. Can I be your second in command?” I asked, batting my eyelashes.
Cocktail hour at the Cottage was always fun because it was like being at the epicenter of the party. You caught a glimpse into the lives of the couple and their friends as they rehashed the ceremony and took silly photos. The change of scenery also made the night go faster somehow.
“Aww, baby, maybe if you had your butt here on time. I already picked the new guy,” he said, motioning with his chin over to a tall, blond boy who appeared confused as to how to arrange the water goblets.
“New guy? Come on,” I said. “But I guess it’s not his skills you like.”
“Um, don’t go there, Baby Caswell. I’m not into jailbait,” he said. “You’ll just hafta sling those cocktail franks yourself tonight, darlin’.” He handed me the box with the rest of the engraved donation cards and summoned Clueless Blond Boy to follow him across the parking lot to the Cottage.
By the time I’d finished setting out the favor cards, there were guests in the lobby waiting for cocktail hour. I closed the curtains on the glass doors to the ballroom so the big reveal would be more dramatic and made my way to the frenzied kitchen to pick up a serving tray for the first round of hors d’oeuvres. I waited and watched as others walked by with platters of mini quiches, fried ravioli, and shrimp-cocktail shooters, getting a sinking feeling about what I’d get stuck serving.
Chef Hank pushed a tray of cocktail franks toward me. I reluctantly grabbed it and made my way to the already bustling ballroom as the opening strains of the wedding band’s version of “Fever” echoed through the back room.
Little hot dogs were the bane of my existence. On my first day serving, when a guest asked what they were, I felt like saying, “Duh, are you blind?” but instead came out with “Tiny batter-wrapped kosher frankfurters with dipping sauce” in a formal voice that Eben never let me live down.
“The proper name is cocktail frank, but I like your style,” he told me, after he composed himself in the back room.
“I was just trying to make them sound . . . I don’t know, more impressive.”
“Call ’em whatever you want. They’re the height of tacky, but everyone gobbles them up faster than you can say, ‘Mustard with that?’”
Since then, whenever a guest asked that idiotic question, Eben and I made up some lavish-sounding name to make the lowly cocktail frank sound classy. The hot-dog name game was more fun when the two of us were working the same room. I was not in the mood.
When I ran the Camelot, they would be banished from the menu.
I put on my cheek-busting service smile and wandered into the crowd, offering the tray to anyone who looked interested. It wasn’t long before I ran into the other bane of my existence at work: the group of rowdy guys. They were the ones at a wedding who made obnoxious jokes, drank too much, and flirted with anything that had a pulse.
“The Weenie Girl!” bellowed a ruddy-faced man in a brown suit.
Rowdy guys who gave me a nickname: a special breed. At least I knew they wouldn’t ask me what I was serving.
“Not a party till the wieners come out!” someone else said as thick hands emptied the tray, leaving nothing behind but grease stains and crumbs on the paper doily. I went back to the kitchen, hoping to snag more trendy hors d’oeuvres like crab-cake sliders or raspberry Brie bites. Instead I watched helplessly as Chef Hank gave me more of my vile food nemesis.
“You really hate me, don’t you?”
He saluted and busied himself with the next server.
Back in the Lancelot, I took my time weaving through the crowd, ducking here and there and trying to avoid the Rowdies.
“Hey, Weenie Girl!”
People actually turned to look at me. I froze, embarrassed from the shouted nickname and the laughter it provoked. My face cramped from smiling. I walked slowly toward them, but all I wanted to do was throw the tray Frisbee-style across the room and let them deal with the fallout.
“Grayson, just the girl you’re looking for,” said the brown-suit man.
The person in question spun around and flashed a dazzling, white-toothed grin that made me want to fix my French knot. He was younger than the rest of them, with dark, jagged hair that fell into his eyes. I held up the cocktail franks to him, softening my smile and praying he wouldn’t ask any questions, since his appearance had completely short-circuited my brain.
“Sweet. Watch this,” he said, grabbing at least five dogs.
He tilted back his head, threw one of the hot dogs high in the air, and caught it in his mouth to the applause of the surrounding group. While chewing he kept his eyes on me, maybe wondering why I wasn’t cheering along with the rest of them. I should have left, but there was something about the way he oozed confidence while acting so asinine that fascinated me. He was a complete tool, but I bet no one ever accused him of being too quiet.
For his next trick, he threw two weenies in the air at once and successfully caught them in his mouth, to the delight of his rapt audience. This time, when he brought down his chin, he wasn’t grinning. The rest of the hot dogs fell from his hand, and he gestured frantically toward his neck.
No one in the group thought he was choking for real. The brown-suit man pounded his fist against a nearby table and chanted, “Gray. Gray. Gray.” Gray’s face blossomed into a bright shade of red, and drool spilled out of the corner of his mouth. My first thought was that if he would go to those lengths for a joke, he must be a real asshole. I was about to leave when I saw the animal-like panic in his eyes.
I dropped my tray and wrapped my arms around him from behind. The words fist, thumb in, right above the navel came out from the recesses of my brain, and I squeezed upward several times to no avail. Someone yelled for help. There was desperate movement around me, but I continued pushing my fist into Gray’s abdomen until I felt his body release. Just as the band finished playing “The Girl from Ipanema,” a gooey mass tumbled out of his mouth and landed with a splat on the cocktail table in front of him. Someone groaned. Gray gripped the table, head down, and coughed. Sound. A good sign. My arms fell from around his waist, and I stepped back.
His navy-blue jacket stretched taut across his back with each breath. Brown-suit guy put a glass of water in front of him, but Gray waved it off. He stood up straight and turned toward me, mouth dropped open like he had something to say.
His dark brown eyes held mine for a second. Open. Honest. Longing. As if the hot-dog-tossing tool was just some mask he’d put on for the party. A wave of recognition coursed through me. Did I know him? No. I’d never seen him before . . . but . . . I took a step toward him.
He blinked and lurched forward.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
Then he hurled all over my black Reeboks.