“Bravo,” Patricia said to Kate in the library office first thing Monday morning. “Your hair looks amazing, Rock Star Readers was the talk of the evening at our Fourth of July party, and did you see The Wind this morning?”
Kate shook her head. If she’d had time to read anything, it would not be the local paper.
“So you missed this,” Patricia smirked, holding up a copy of The Wind and watching Kate’s jaw drop.
Local Response to Developer’s Plan Is One for the Books, read the headline. Snatching the paper out of Patricia’s hand, Kate couldn’t believe her eyes: Splashed across the entire front page was an article about Harry Leeper’s sneaky redevelopment attempt and the outpouring of public dissent in response, most accurately depicted by the 2,311 signatures collected over forty-eight hours. Below a cute photograph of Ziggy reading The Story of Ferdinand was a full rendering of the petition Kate had agonized over for weeks, tweaking the verbiage and the order of sentences as she worked behind the library checkout desk. The last line of the article was a direct quote from Arnold Nixon, chair of the zoning board and planning committee. “We represent the interests of Sea Point residents and they’ve made their voices clear—I’d say loud and clear, but you’re supposed to whisper in the library.”
Kate didn’t realize she was wiping tears from her cheeks until Patricia passed her a box of tissues.
“So this is incredible,” Patricia offered gently, “but I wanted to meet with you before that even happened.” Kate looked up, confused, just as Patricia asked, “What’s your dream job?”
“Oh. Ummm. I’m not sure.”
“I know, I know, it’s a daunting question,” Patricia said as she sympathized, “but a very important one since I now owe you my livelihood. Besides, every young woman should have a list.”
“I’m not that young anymore,” Kate mumbled.
“Well, the alligator gets us all in the end, my dear. It’s a matter of perspective—and skin care.”
As Kate tried to understand the gnarls of her own thoughts, Patricia continued. “Maybe I should be clearer. Here’s what I can offer you. If you’re interested in library work, my friend from graduate school now runs the MLS program at Drexel, which, as you may or may not know, is top tier for the field and she owes me about three hundred favors. If you want to go back to PR, I can reach out to my high school roommate, who’s a VP at H+K Strategies. If you want to try your hand at publishing, I have people at Random House, HarperCollins, and—”
“Those are in New York,” Kate said, sitting up straight and paying attention.
“Isn’t that where you want to go?”
“Yes,” Kate said, grinning even harder now than she had at The Wind. “Definitely yes.”
“Terrific,” Patricia said, winking at Kate. “Make your list and leave the rest to me—I bet we’ll have options by Labor Day.”
The following night, Ziggy could not have been more surprised to see Kate’s text asking for a walk-off. So she was, in fact, capable of initiating plans with him. For a moment, Ziggy wondered if she somehow knew that Bev had sent one email to Harry Leeper and another to the accountant. Ziggy considered ignoring the text but decided it was now or never. Soon enough, a different family would live across the street from the Campbells. Their nights for walk-offs were numbered.
“Dude!” Kate yelled from across the street. “Where have you been? Do you want a Popsicle? It’s not really a choice; I grabbed two for the road.” Her unbridled enthusiasm cut through the dark as she tossed him the treat. For a few moments, Ziggy escaped the weight of his present life and appreciated that, twenty-five years later, the Campbells still stocked their freezer with Creamsicles.
“You chopped your hair,” Ziggy said, staring at her.
“And?”
“And you look different but also—I dunno—more you?”
Kate nodded, pleased with this assessment. “I have so much to tell you!” Her pace matched her mouth as she zipped past the duck pond and told Ziggy about Patricia’s offer to network on her behalf and the blowout fight with Bernadette.
“Wait, why did she tell you to go to the wedding alone?” Ziggy asked, feigning ignorance.
“Because I asked Miles to go with me,” Kate replied matter-of-factly, as if she’d made a sound business decision. “Going with the Wharf’s future CEO will drive Thomas crazy.” The way Kate made Miles sound like the strategic choice, the obvious pick—reminded Ziggy of his club hockey coach when he announced the lineup, as if starting any other players than the ones he’d named would have been foolish.
“But isn’t he—”
“And I’m seeing Georgina that same weekend!” Running up to a rock, Kate kicked it down the road.
“You never told me what happened between you two,” Ziggy said. “What was your big fight about?” He wanted to puncture her good mood, bring Kate down to his level, but even so, Ziggy felt a twinge of guilt as he watched her physically deflate: Her head sank into her shoulders first, then her shoulders melted into her legs, into her sneakers.
“We disagreed,” Kate answered just as they reached the lighthouse. She could hear her own shortness, her defensiveness turning over like an engine.
“Okay.”
“Fine,” Kate relented. “After college graduation, Georgina and I were going to work one more summer at the Wharf. I had two interviews lined up at a publishing house and one at a literary agency, but they were moving slowly, and then Thomas came to visit.”
“Right,” Ziggy remembered, “and he and Georgina didn’t exactly hit it off.”
Kate nodded. “Yeah, but she’d already met him the summer after our junior year and she didn’t really like him then, so I knew not to expect chemistry.”
“So if it wasn’t about Thomas, what was the fight about?”
“It’s bad,” Kate replied, her voice dropping. She had cataloged each cruel word and then shoved the whole disgraceful mess into the back of her mind. The price of maintaining her self-image as a good person required letting go of Georgina. And this was fine, because Georgina had witnessed her insurmountable ugliness and so Kate couldn’t exist in the same universe as that in which she’d said all those heinous things, just as Jekyll and Hyde couldn’t attend the same party. It wasn’t that Georgina had been unable to forgive Kate, but that every time Kate had looked at her best friend, she saw herself through Georgina’s eyes and couldn’t bear what she saw. In the name of self-preservation, or pride, or both, Kate had given up her georgeous best friend.
Ziggy cut in. “I’m waiting for you to say you tried to strangle her.”
Kate found a rock on the edge of the street to kick. “Metaphorically speaking, yeah.” She struck the rock and it didn’t go as far as she’d wanted. “The summer after we graduate, Thomas comes to visit and we go out to dinner and he tells me I got a job. My mind starts whirring about how and why they would have contacted him but, hey, he’s a Mosby, and his mom is well-connected in that world so who knows? So I shriek and ask him which job it was and was there an email or a letter or what, and he laughs at me, enjoying this moment where he knows the ending and I don’t. And he’s like, ‘No, my mom thought you’d like working at Artemis’—and he slides me this formal letter from his mother. ‘On behalf of Artemis International’ blah, blah, blah, and my head is just swimming, and I’m skimming the lines, and then I see that they’ve offered me, no joke, Ziggy, twice the salary that publishing would have offered.”
“So you take it.”
“Yeah, I take it! I’m glad it makes sense to you too. I take it there on the spot—we leave the restaurant so I can call Evelyn and thank her and hit all the important buzz words—‘honored’ and ‘opportunity’ and ‘grateful’ on loop for five minutes. And then I text Georgina to tell her the good news and she doesn’t respond.”
“Maybe she was on her own dinner date.”
“Close—I remembered she was bartending, and Jo has that rule about no phones on the floor, which was why Georgina hadn’t texted me back. So I dropped Thomas off at home because he had already started med school and had some big test the following Monday and drove over to the Wharf. I run over to Jetty Bar, interrupt some tourists to tell her the good news, and her response is, ‘That’s cool but you didn’t say yes, did you?’ ”
“Uh-oh.”
“Yeah, but I was still so giddy. She’d been accepted to a bunch of MFA programs for creative writing, and I’d been sinking in unanswered emails, and now, finally, we could succeed together, at the same time. I said something like that to her, and she made this weird face and said, ‘But you don’t want to be in PR—you want to be in publishing. You want to be an editor.’ ”
Ziggy winced sympathetically. “How dare Georgina speak the truth.”
“Exactly.” Kate laughed, making fun of herself. “But of course I didn’t see it like that. I told her how much they offered versus what I’d get paid in publishing, hypothetically, since no one had even hired me yet, and she just sort of shrugged and said something like, ‘You’ll never work in publishing if you’re not willing to make sacrifices.’ And that did horrible things to my brain so I just left. I walked outside to the employee parking lot and Georgina followed me, but she didn’t apologize—she actually doubled down—so I started sputtering every mean thing I could think of.”
“Because she wasn’t excited for you?”
“I think, looking back, for our entire friendship, I always swallowed the fact that she could afford stuff I couldn’t. Yeah, she didn’t have her dad around and her mom worked long hours, but they had money—not Hoffman money, but money. They went to a different country every spring break, and it was always understood that her parents would pay for college, graduate school—any sort of education, which also meant rent, food, a car—all the stuff that’s not included in tuition.”
“Sure.”
“I mean, if Georgina had earned my test scores on the PSAT, her parents would definitely have paid for her to go to Yates.” Kate took a step outside herself and remembered she was talking to Ziggy. “Is it weird that I’m complaining to you about this stuff?”
Ziggy smiled. “Up until February, I would’ve defended dropping out of Cornell. But now that my dad is gone and I’m desperate, I think I should have tried to stick it out. I could have taken business classes that would have benefited us. Then again, if he was gonna die as early as he did, I’m really glad I didn’t spend four years away from him.”
“Yeah.” Kate sighed, aware she was treading in foreign water where she, most fortunately, had never touched the bottom.
“Anyway, this isn’t my story,” Ziggy said. “Keep going.”
“One time Georgina even said, ‘My parents really value my education’—as if my parents, my high-school-history-teaching parents, didn’t care about education.”
“Oh boy.”
“So it seemed pretty fucking unfair”—Kate felt herself growing angry all over again, her face starting to flush, her speech quickening—“for her to judge me about taking a job that would allow me to actually live like a professional adult.”
“Right.”
“So Georgina went on a rant about how she just wanted me to be happy and to pursue my dreams, and that twenty-two was the best time to be broke, but I was just fuming at that point. I mean, it wasn’t even a rant probably, I think it was supposed to be a pump-up talk. She did say she believed in me at least ten times, but all I heard was her judgment. She kept repeating, ‘You need to be true to yourself’ and each time she said it, it felt like she was taunting me, because she was being so hypocritical.”
“How so?” Ziggy held her gaze.
“So then I told her that she was just jealous,” Kate said, ignoring the question. “Because I had a successful boyfriend who’d helped me secure a fantastic job while she was alone and pursuing the most impractical career path imaginable on her parents’ dime.”
Ziggy cringed. “I mean, that’s not that bad.”
“No, but I was just getting started.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Because then I said, ‘Of the two of us, you’re the one not being honest about who you are,’ and I still remember how she looked like I was choking her, like every word I said was a finger tightening around her windpipe. So then I doubled down.”
Ziggy’s eyebrows were so worried that they touched each other as he stared down the street. Kate wondered if he was about to walk away from her—his body suggested he was considering it. She took a deep breath. “I said, ‘For having a therapist for a mom, you should be more aware that you’re projecting all this living-a-lie bullshit onto me because even though you have the world’s most supportive parents, you are one hundred percent gay and one hundred percent hiding in the closet like this is Nebraska in the nineties and I’ve been so patient, waiting for you to stop being so pathetic’—I said that, I called her pathetic—and I said, ‘I finally figured out why you haven’t.’ ”
Kate was suddenly back at the Wharf, staring down her best friend in the employee parking lot, waiting for her punches to land. In a flat, emotionless voice, her hands coiled into fists, Kate had said, “Just admit you’re in love with me. Just admit you hate Thomas, you hate the idea of me staying in New York, you hate that I got a job doing PR and that I’ll never be able to publish your books—if you even ever write them—because you hate the fact that I love Thomas, not you.”
To her shock, Georgina had sneered. Kate had leveled her by going low, and yet Georgina had delivered the final blow of the night in a prophecy destined to come true: “You’re going to end up back here, alone and unhappy, because at your core, Kate Campbell, you are a pretentious, superficial, wannabe snob who only cares about being rich and popular.” Georgina had said it with a soothsayer’s calm, her dark eyes glimmering and furious. “You will never be happy, because you go after the wrong things. You are the one who is truly, deeply pathetic and I feel sorry for you.”
“Jesus,” Ziggy said, stopping in his tracks and looking down at his steel-toed boots.
“I gave notice at the Wharf that night,” Kate said. “Denise said she’d heard about the fight and they were overstaffed anyway, so she told me no hard feelings and no reason to stick around for two weeks. I started at Artemis the following Monday and moved in with Thomas, and I heard through the grapevine that Georgina got into Iowa last-minute so she moved there. I think she kept waiting for me to say sorry, but I kept waiting for her to say sorry, and then so much time passed that it became this deep, deep wound that didn’t get cleaned out and was just, like, totally infected and festering with twenty types of bacteria until it just—we just died.”
“Friendship gangrene. And you haven’t talked since?”
Kate shook her head. “She’s married now, you know. I wasn’t invited to the wedding. Obviously.” Kate took a breath. “Did you know she was going to write a memoir called The Only Asian in Sea Point and the opening scene was going to be from her first day of school here? The fantasy was for her to become a bestselling author and I would be her editor.”
“It could still happen.”
“Yeah right.”
“Well, unless I missed it, she still hasn’t become a famous author and you still haven’t become her editor—or anyone’s editor. You could still go into publishing, too, if you wanted.”
With a teenager’s sense of theatrics, Kate stopped in her tracks, put her hands on her hips, popped her leg, and cocked her head. “Why, Ziggy Miller, you’re the most optimistic plumber I’ve ever met.”
Ziggy couldn’t help but laugh. “Yeah, okay, I’m also the only plumber you’ve ever met.”
“Speaking of which, and I’m sorry to ask, but could you look at the outdoor shower at some point?” Ziggy felt his stomach sink—he couldn’t even successfully install an outdoor shower correctly. Could he do anything right anymore? But before he could pepper her with follow-up questions, Kate added, “I can’t get it as hot as I want.”
“Oh, that’s easy,” Ziggy said, his confidence instantly surging to 100 percent. “I just need to adjust the anti-scald valve—I can do it now,” he offered as they rounded the corner of their block.
While Ziggy retrieved his tools from the back of his truck, Kate told him how she usually used the shower twice a day because she would come home so gross from the Wharf. “That’s why I need it hotter,” Kate explained. “During the day, the temperature is great, but at one in the morning, I want to crank that heat way up,” she said, gyrating her hips in a comical move that seemed borrowed from Miles. Ziggy tried not to think about the fact that the two of them spent so much time together at work that Kate probably felt closer to Miles—she probably didn’t even realize she was mimicking him now.
“Do you mind holding up your phone flashlight?” he asked, hanging his tool bag on the towel hook and feeling around for his screwdriver.
As Ziggy pried off the shower handle and took out the center screw, he explained each step to Kate—not because she asked or because it was particularly interesting, but because he was suddenly very aware of how close their bodies were in the small cedar box he’d built just for her. Ziggy could smell her shampoo, the faint tang of her sweat as they stood in the four-by-four space and grew aware of their breath. He might have been imagining it, but he felt like Kate was using the flashlight to look at him, not the valve, as he focused on rotating the small circle counterclockwise to increase the heat.
“A slight shift makes all the difference,” he said. Reaching across her for his tool bag, Ziggy’s arm brushed Kate’s bare shoulder, making her jump. “Sorry!” Ziggy yelped. Fortunately, Kate had turned off the flashlight—his face was so hot that it needed its own anti-scald valve.
They parted ways quickly and said good night without looking at each other because it had been a strange phenomenon—too strange, in fact, for either of them to acknowledge. Everyone knew that, in the dead of winter, dry air lent itself to static electricity. But it was the height of summer in Sea Point—even at night, the humidity was so thick that tourists joked about carrying oxygen tanks on the boardwalk. Kate and Ziggy knew static electricity didn’t happen this time of year, and yet, standing together inside the outdoor shower, they’d both felt the shock.