Chapter One
Summer Break After University Sophomore Year
I don’t know why I thought I could pull it off.
This salmon-colored button-down, I mean. I’m too pale; it washes me out in every shot—or, no, wait, that one’s not too bad. I’m standing on the steps of Lily and Iris’s estate, right before shit hit the fan, so I’m still giving that masking cocky smile. Throw it in black-and-white, and it’d be a respectable picture of me.
Ha. Respectable.
After tonight, I’m surprised I can think that word without part of my brain spontaneously combusting.
So I think it again.Respectable.
No flames. It’s like a magic trick.
And because I’ve had about four dirty vodka martinis where I order it by asking for “vodka that at one point in time aspired to be in a martini before striking out on a solo career,” I rock my head and go “Rrrrrespectable” to my phone, which leads to me humming, then softly singing, “R-E-S-P-E—”
“Don’t drag Aretha Franklin into your bullshit.”
The stool next to me groans as my brother heaves himself onto it. I glance around, but Iris isn’t here—yet. She can’t be far behind.
If she wants to see me anymore. How pissed will she be that I ruined her sister’s birthday? Or will she be more pissed by thewayI ruined her sister’s birthday?
I lift the sweating glass of my fourth—fifth? Fourth. Fifth?—vodka martini and gulp half of my dry, bitter vice and go back to scrolling through the paparazzi site. Headlines fly past—Prince Nicholas’s LatestDisasterthis andPrince Nicholas: Finally Too Far?that. The television above the bar is playing a basketball game, but there’s a scrolling news alert at the bottom with headlines likeNATION GRANTED MILLIONS OF GIFTS FROM “SANTA” OVERNIGHT; SUSPECTED SHIPPING ERROR TO BLAME; STORY DEVELOPING—
“Oh, nowthatpicture’s a winner,” I tell Kris, because he followed me here, so he knows very well that that means he’ll be the recipient of my…me-ness.
Me-ness rhymes a bit with another word.
I sit up straight on the barstool and look at the ceiling becausethisis where my limit is, apparently. Drunkenly laughing at self-inflicted dick jokes.
… it would not be out of line for self-inflicted dick jokes to be called masturbation jokes.
I bury my face in my hands. “Shit fucking fuck.”
“Yep,” Kris agrees. To the bartender, he says, “Two waters. He’s cut off.”
“Fuck you.”
“On second thought, give me the soda gun so I can blast him in the face.”
I drop my hands, only there’s two of him, so I squint, and ah, there he is.
Kris looks like me, but if I were sober and not a disheveled mess. Brown curls, blue eyes, pale skin that I should tell him doesnotmesh well with pink tones, a friendly brotherly FYI. He has his long hair thrown into a topknot and he took off his suit jacket and button-down so he’s in an undershirt—
It’s not an undershirt. It’s bright green and saysSleigh My Name, Sleigh My Nameacross the chest, some of his ink peeking out beneath the sleeves. He absolutely buys these shirts too tight on purpose.
“Did you have that under your suit the whole night?” I ask.
“Yeah, that’s what we should talk about right now. Fashion.”
I turn back to my phone. “That’s what I was doing before you rudely stalked me.”
“To the same bar you always run away to.”
I like this bar because it’s walkable from campus and has the benefit of never being too overcrowded. Even right now, at seven on a Friday night, it’s half full, the booths and tables clustered with chattering students in the occasional Yale T-shirt, the jukebox playing some pulsing country song low enough for audible conversation.
Kris shrugs. “New Haven has other bars, you know, if you wanted toactuallyhide. The fact that you came here tells me you wanted me to find you.”
