“Hats are making a comeback,” I told him, pulling the hat further down over my eyes. “You should get one to cover that bald patch you’re working on.”
I’d fallen asleep with the hat over my face last night, inhaling the smell of a stranger who had disappeared on me.
“Fuck you.” Nate gave me the finger and swam a few feet away. His thinning hair was an obsessive issue with Nate, and despite being a completely imaginary ailment, I shouldn’t have gone there. I felt bad at once, but I was still irritated and antsy and not in the mood for banter. I spread my arms across the poolside while Nate performed sulky underwater somersaults, and I tried to look like I was enjoying myself at my own party.
The truth, which I didn’t even want to admit to myself, was that I was worried about my fucking sister.
It was that hot stranger’s fault. All his talk last night about how he couldn’t just walk out on his shitty family, how he wished he could be close again to that one family member—he’d been vague about their exact relationship—who really hated him…
It had all struck a little close to home. My sister Annie and I hadn’t had a real conversation in about four years, since we, as our father put it,fell out. “Don’t ever let anyone know about yourfalling out,” he would warn me.
My father and I hadn’t had a real conversationever, period.
As for my mother, I only heard from her when she had a new film to pimp out, and she wanted Annie’s star power and my waning glow to help her promote it. We’d hit a few red carpets with Micheline Beaumont when she demanded it, but Mom lived in the South of France these days.
And when it came to Annie…
We’d had ourfalling outand, ever since then, there’d been a frost between us. Last night, when I’d gotten home drunk and blue-balled and gone over again what that stranger had actually said, I started thinking that maybe he’d been right. Maybe familywasimportant, and maybe I had to be the bigger person in this situation, and make the first move to melt that ice.
What I’d said to him last night had been perfectly true: everyone in my family hated each other, but we were very polite about it. Wedidavoid each other. We did keep our loathing to ourselves. We pretended to the outside world—to friends, acquaintances, the media—that we were just your normal family who happened to be mega-rich, and that we all loved each other dearly and got along.
Once upon a time, Annie and I had been allies, the closest of friends. You can’t share a womb and then a crib and then a life with another person andnotbe close, at least for a time. And I still stalked her public socials occasionally, of course, because who couldn’t resist driving that knife of self-pity in a little deeper by seeing how much better other people had it?
So last night, in the early morning hours when bad decisions are made—especially when you’re drunk—I’d texted her and asked her how she was doing.
Ihatedtexting. I hated that it was the default form of communication these days, and any time anyone texted me, I got my phone to read it out loud to me anyway. So it was a big fucking deal that I’d texted my sister, and she of all people should know that.
I’d gotten absolutely no response. Usually she at least sent a fucking thumbs-up emoji or something. But this time?
Nada.
It had been less than 24 hours, I kept reminding myself. So it wasn’t exactly panic-inducing, unless you were me, and you had a gut feeling that something was off. But Annie wouldn’t thank me for calling the cops on her for a welfare check if she really was okay—or if she was off partying or something.
Just as I was thinking that, my phone dinged with my sister’s text tone. I turned over fast in the water, sloshing the couple next to me who were eating each other’s faces off, and grabbed my phone from where I’d laid it on a towel at the side of the pool.
I’m fine
It took me a few seconds to read it, but then relief pounded through me so hard I felt sick. I wiped my wet hand on my towel as I thought about what to say next. Usually I’d do voice-to-text or send a voice message, but I had no privacy with all these people around. So I settled on,Busy?Annie hadn’t come to our last scheduled torture session, a.k.a. the family dinner our father insisted on having once a month.
It took a while, but when the response came through, I laughed out loud.
Publicity stunt
She followed it up with a crazy-tongue emoji. I laughed again, replied with a facepalm emoji, and threw the phone back on my poolside towel.
“Should’ve known,” I muttered.
Nate swam over, grinning at me. “What up, my man?” I’d been forgiven for the hair comment.
“Annie’s trying to suck tabloid cock,” I told him, and a few people around me snickered. But I didn’t care who knew, I was so relieved that everything was fine. All those things I’d been thinking, all those dark places I’d gone to—I’d been worrying for nothing. Sure, my family was dysfunctional, but we weren’t the kind of people that trulybadthings happened to.
Not things like the stranger last night had hinted at.
Now I was free to indulge my imagination over that hot stranger without any nagging worries. I’d taken to drifting by the Beartrap every Friday night, round about the time he’d usually be there. Once I’d seen him break up a bar fight. Once I’d seen himstartone, when a group of homophobes barged in and refused to leave.
He’d finished that fight, too. Received a round of applause from the rest of the folks in the bar when he finally kicked out the last of them.
I still didn’t know his name. I’d asked Tim for it when I’d arrived back at the Beartrap, and gotten nothing but zipped lips and significant eyebrows, a silent message that I couldn’t interpret.
