BEAUTY HIGH, GO BREAKERS!: This quintessential 1980s plastic school sign molded into the shape of an ocean wave flanks the front sidewalk of the public high school. Last renovated in 1985, the building sits downhill from the well-funded Ivy League preparatory private school, Golden Academy. (Personal photo/Josephine Saint-Martin)
June
First impressions can be deceiving. Maybe I shouldn’t have kindled any excitement whatsoever about returning to Beauty, because it only took four months for my initial hope to drain, and now I’m basically functioning on low-power mode and praying my battery doesn’t die completely.
Between third and fourth period on the last day of school before summer break, I summon what’s left of my energy, make myself as small as possible, and head down the western corridor of Beauty High, music thrumming through earbuds that block out the discord of the hallways—all the lockers slamming and all the football players shouting out to their bros. The laughter and buzzy excitement about graduation parties. The freshman kid crying in the restroom. Summer plans being solidified. Drug deals being made.
I keep as far away from these people as possible. Some of them I used to know when we were kids, and some of them might be okay now, but I’m in a full-on survival mentality, and I can’t take any chances. Whenever Mom and I move somewhere new, I usually keep to myself and don’t make many friends. People aren’t disposable. It hurts when you get attached and have to leave them a few months later—something Mom doesn’t seem to understand.
But unlike in other places we’ve lived, the students at Beauty won’t leave me alone. They’ve poked and prodded me as if I’m a prize poodle who’s unwittingly stumbled into some kind of kennel club competition for Worst in Show. Since the day I registered for school here, it’s been one long series of invasive questions. Did you really live in a cheap motel for two months? Were you on food stamps? Is your mother a sex addict? Does your father really know Prince Harry? Why did your grandmother really go to Nepal to live with Sherpas? Is she involved in some kind of cult?
Leering eyes, the constant texted rumors zipping around school … sometimes just walking from one class to the next feels like I’m walking through a war zone. I might step on a land mine and lose a foot—or gain an illegitimate baby, you never know. I’m taking both my life and my flimsy reputation into my own hands every time the bell rings.
Everywhere else Mom and I lived, no one knew us. But here, people know just enough. Intimate details of our life are tossed around for entertainment. Not everything they say is true, but some of it is. And some of it hurts.
I’m starting to think that saving up for my exit strategy to LA to live with my dad might not be worth the torture of staying here for an entire year. But at least I have the summer to recharge. To retreat into the bookshop and my photography.
“Josephine?”
And I may have something else—this is the other thing, right here.
Please let me have this.
Pulling out my earbuds, I jog across the corridor to the journalism classroom to meet a bespectacled middle-aged teacher with a shiny bald crown, Mr. Phillips. He’s in charge of the Beauty High yearbook and the school paper. More importantly, his wife works at a regional magazine that’s published right here in Beauty—Coast Life. New England travel, food, lifestyle … that sort of thing. And it’s his wife’s job that interested me most, because where there’s a magazine, there’s photography. And where’s there’s photography, there are internships.
The summer internship at Coast Life is a good one.
“Miss Saint-Martin. See you made it through junior year.” Mr. Phillips smiles as he adjusts round, gold-rimmed eyeglasses that are, style wise, somewhere between John Lennon and Harry Potter. “Got any big plans this summer?”
I always have plans.
“Working at the Nook part-time,” I tell him, anxious for him to give me the news.
“Sounds fun. And what about your photography? Will you be taking more pictures of signs around Beauty for your portfolio?”
“Always on the lookout for a good sign. They’re humanity’s communications, and I’m just the messenger with the camera.”
“Love that,” he says.
Is he making small talk to let me down easy, or to withhold the good news longer? I can’t tell, but it’s making me nervous. Mr. Phillips is nice and one of the few teachers I actually don’t mind here. But the truth is, I need his help if I’m ever going to make it to Los Angeles next year.
The problem is that my famous father is famous for a reason, and he’s notoriously tough. I need to prove to him that I have what it takes. See, I know I can take pictures. I’m mostly self-taught—my dad’s given me pointers—but I’ve got a good eye, and I’ve taken thousands and thousands of photos over the years. I develop my own film, old-school style, in a darkroom. I’ve even got an online funding account—Photo Funder—a photography donation fan site on which I post exclusive photos for paid anonymous subscribers. Most months, it only brings in around a hundred bucks, and I’m pretty sure the majority of my subscribers are Mom’s friends and my grandmother. Not enough to prove to my father that I’m worthy.
For that, I need something more. Like a photography internship under my belt. I need to show him that other people think I’m talented enough to take me under their wing. And at the end of the summer, Coast Life takes on a Bright Young Thing to help them do fashion shoots for Regatta Week. Rich people partying on boats. To be honest, it sounds like a total nightmare—absolutely the opposite of my artistic interests. But it probably looks fantastic on a résumé, and the person shooting it is a semi-big-name fashion photographer. Someone my father respects.
“What’s the final word?” I blurt out to Mr. Phillips, unable to keep up the small talk any longer as my chest tightens.
He hesitates. “I’m sorry, Josie.”
My stomach sinks.
And sinks …
“It has nothing to do with your photo submission,” he assures me, “which they loved. The internship just normally goes to someone in college, and they just think you’re too young.”
“But I’m almost eighteen,” I argue. “And they know who my father is, right?”
I hate to throw around his name, but this is an emergency situation.
“Of course your father’s name doesn’t hurt. But …”
But.
“I shouldn’t be telling you this,” he says in a low voice, “but if you want to know the truth, they were going to give it to you. However, the big boss who owns the magazine came into the board meeting. Mr. Summers is a stickler for rules, see, and you’re underage.”
“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.
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.
While Evie gets caught up in a deep conversation with Vanessa about environmental activism and the rising temperatures in the harbor, I wander around the pool, pretending that I know where I’m going, feet matching the rhythm of the thumping music that blares through unseen speakers. And after making the mistake of wandering into the pool house—drinks and a bathroom, sure, but too many strange eyes staring at me—I head through French doors to a secluded patio around back.
It’s shadowy out here, lit only by a few globe lights, and there’s a shrub maze that shields the back patio from the pool; it’s segmented into a couple of seating areas. Plastic cups and cigarette butts litter a glass-topped side table next to a patio chair—unofficial smoking area, I suppose. I plop down in the chair and sigh heavily. This is a good moping spot for me to lick my wounds about the magazine internship. Maybe come up with a plan B. Maybe even a plan B through D.
Almost immediately, I feel a prickle on the back of my neck and suddenly realize my secluded oasis isn’t as private as I’d originally thought.
I’m not alone.