It’s weird how plans change.
Before I got to New York for the summer, I figured it’d be the usual routine each day—wake up when my mother yelled at me, eat some of her amazing food, dive into some books, break for lunch, hit the books again, and have dinner at home alone while she went out to some social function or another. Of course, there would inevitably be times when she’d drag me against my will to the Horticulture Society benefit or some boring polo event, and on certain days I’d actually feel like trekking to the beach for a bit, but generally my life in the Hamptons would follow a very familiar pattern.
Then Jacinta Trimalchio entered my life, and everything changed.
Because of what happened on the Ferris wheel at her party, I had a boyfriend for the first time in my life. We didn’t use that word or anything, but it’s basically what Jeff Byron instantly became to me.
We hung out all the time, watching movies—or pretending to, anyway—going to the beach, hiking, and trying the lobster rolls at every beach shack and fancy restaurant for miles around. Jeff said he wanted to learn how to cook, so I taught him how to make his favorite things: mac and cheese, pizza, spaghetti with meatballs, and even pad thai. He took me waterskiing, which was mildly terrifying but also incredibly fun. We talked about politics and history and lay around listening to NPR podcasts, our fingers intertwined. Once my mother walked in on us quizzing each other on SAT words in the living room in the middle of the night.
“It’s two o’clock in the morning,” she said wearily. “As long as you’re awake, shouldn’t you be at a bonfire on the beach or—or something fun, dears?”
“This is pretty fun,” Jeff said.
“You two are perfect for each other,” Mom said, sighing. She turned around and went back to bed.
I liked almost everything about Jeff except for the fact that my mother approved so wholeheartedly.
During the hours when I wasn’t with Jeff, I was with Jacinta—and, usually, Delilah. They were always throwing little tea parties and slightly-more-adult-beverage parties over at Jacinta’s house in the afternoons. Ainsley Devereaux would come over and divide her time between kissing up to Jacinta and fawning over Delilah. The Fitzwilliams sisters would show up, and a pair of girl cousins whose family owned the New York Times, and other girls whose names I had trouble remembering. They seemed interchangeable to me—they all had horses, and long shiny hair, and bright white teeth, and plans to go to Harvard or Yale or Princeton or wherever their fathers and grandfathers had gone. A few of them carried that type of bag Jacinta had stockpiled upstairs—the Birkin, Delilah had called it.
Once, we all sat on the deck drinking mojitos and trading sex stories. Obviously, I didn’t have much to contribute, even though I was gaining more experience with Jeff on that particular front. And Jacinta kept herself busy freshening everyone’s drinks, so she didn’t speak up much, either. When Ainsley mischievously asked Delilah how it was with Teddy, Delilah rolled her eyes.
“Ugh,” she said. “We hardly ever do it anymore.” The Fitzwilliams sisters exchanged a look, and Ainsley Devereaux wore a pert smile. I remembered how she’d treated Misti at Jacinta’s party. Then I remembered how Jeff said everybody knew about Teddy and Misti. I wondered if Delilah knew.
Jacinta smiled gently and poured Delilah another mojito.
The girls were all perfectly nice to me, warmer with each subsequent visit. There were group beach excursions where Ainsley exclaimed over the flatness of my stomach (“You mean you don’t even have a trainer? God, I am so jealous!”) and the Fitzwilliams sisters asked me which clubs in Chicago checked IDs. (I had no idea.)
And something funny started to happen, something that had never happened before during all the summers I’d spent in the Hamptons. I started to feel like I almost belonged. I didn’t come from the kind of pedigree these girls had, and I didn’t get all their references to private schools and Swiss ski resorts and high-end designer this-or-thats, but for the first time, I was one of them. I began to realize that they weren’t so bad, at least not all the time. You just had to ask them questions about things they were interested in: shopping, parties, horses, guys. Sometimes I would bake surprises for our afternoon get-togethers, and the girls would squeal with delight over my creations (when they weren’t moaning that I was going to make everybody fat by the end of the summer).
The most fun, though, happened after the other girls left, drifting home to parentally mandated dinners. That was when Jacinta and Delilah and I floated lazily on mini-rafts in the river pool, letting the current take us, talking about everything and nothing. But at times I’d catch them staring at each other with what I could only describe as longing. Something was developing between them that went beyond friendship. It was like they got high off each other, and every mutual encounter was another chance to feel some sort of pleasure that was very specific to their union. There was me, and then there was the Delilah-Jacinta combo, a two-headed blond creature. It was almost like watching two people fall in love. I didn’t feel left out, but there always came a certain moment when I knew it was time for me to leave them alone. I’d excuse myself to go to the bathroom or just to walk outside for a moment, and when I returned, I always felt as if I were interrupting something. But they took pains to make me feel welcome, so I stayed. I could tell they both genuinely liked me. It felt good to be genuinely liked, especially in a place where I usually felt genuinely ignored. Even with Skags, I was always the beta friend. I knew a lot of people at school saw me as her sidekick. But when Delilah Fairweather trained those big blue eyes on you and told you she was glad to hang out with you and you alone, you believed it. I believed it, anyway.
Since they knew I was invariably going to see Jeff in the evening, they assured me I needed to look super-hot each time. It was like I was their pet project. I protested that I was giving him an unrealistic impression of my own grooming habits—left to my own devices, I’d go bare-faced, with my hair in a ponytail. But Jacinta and Delilah seemed horrified by the prospect of my leaving the house in anything but a full face of makeup.
“It’s not that you aren’t naturally beautiful, love,” Jacinta said one day as she carefully applied lipstick to my mouth with a lip brush. “It’s just that—well—what would you say, Delilah?”
“A guy likes to see that a girl has made an effort for him,” Delilah said helpfully.
“I think you’re both nuts,” I said, laughing. “You’re like the fussy older sisters I never had.” Skags would’ve probably said that they were forcing me to embody conventional, narrowminded notions of femininity—and that I was woefully complicit with my own subjugation—but Skags wasn’t there. And we weren’t talking all that much these days, so it’s not like I gave her the details. She wouldn’t have understood. She would have said I was turning into a Beast (one of the evil ones, not her newly beloved Jenny Carpenter), and I couldn’t take her judgment when I was this happy.
After I was all done up, Delilah would leave for dinner with Teddy, either at the Barringtons’ place or at her parents’ place. She and Jacinta seemed to have an unspoken understanding that while her days belonged to Jacinta, her nights belonged to Teddy. And because Jacinta always seemed a little sad to see Delilah go, I’d stay awhile, sipping tea with her on the back deck. Eventually it would be time for me to meet Jeff, and I’d give Jacinta a hug goodbye. When I left, I always paused for a moment on the lawn and looked back at her house. It gave me a tiny pang to leave her there all alone, though I couldn’t have told you why.
One day, after everyone else had gone home, Jacinta shut the door behind Delilah and walked into the kitchen looking particularly forlorn.
“I hope you don’t get this sad when I leave,” I joked, trying to coax a smile from her.
She looked at me quite seriously and said, “Well, it’s a completely different thing with you and me than it is with me and Delilah.”
“Ah,” I said, trying not to feel insulted.
“We just . . .” She hesitated a moment and peered at me closely, as if she were searching for something. I guess she found it, because she continued, “We’ve actually known each other a bit longer than we let on. We knew each other when we were kids. Briefly. So this has all been a bit of a reunion for us.”
“Oh,” I said. “That makes sense, actually. It sometimes seems like you are speaking your own language. Why didn’t you tell me?”
Jacinta smiled a little. “I guess we wanted to keep it to ourselves a little while longer. We used to play together every day as kids. Her housekeeper used to call everything ‘scrumptious,’” she recalled fondly. “Like, literally everything. And she always baked us snickerdoodles. And we had matching mini-Birkins when we were kids. Hers was red; mine was white. Don’t tell anybody though, okay?”
I thought about this new revelation on my way across the lawn to my house, where Jeff was going to pick me up for dinner. I didn’t begrudge the girls their friendship, or their semi-secret past. It just seemed a little . . . intense for just a regular friendship, actually. And I still didn’t understand why they hadn’t been open with me about the fact that they used to hang out when they were little, but I didn’t know them that well, after all.
I tried to call Skags a couple of times, but either she couldn’t talk more than a few minutes or she didn’t pick up the phone. I guess I could’ve tried harder to call Skags, or at least to text back and forth, but it seemed like something else was always coming up—a clambake, or a day at the village spa with Jacinta and Delilah, or a long bike ride with Jeff. Usually I spent all summer wishing I were back in Chicago, but at some point that summer I stopped thinking about home.