“He’s never had much passion for anything but you.”
I brushed it off. “He switches his affection between me and other people.”
Daisy rolled her eyes. “This again. You can’t see how dapperyou are, but it doesn’t change the truth. What he has for you is more genuine than what he has for them.”
I was slightly embarrassed but charmed more than that. “I could run it by him, I suppose? It might be a tall order to get him to entertain it—he has love for his father. It’s risky to ask him to lie!”
“Riskier than waiting forever for this horrible world to change?” Daisy implored.
Silence followed between us. It was the quiet of possibilities. And I realized how serious she was about bringing justice to the elites, who’d built their wealth in shady ways.
“What might happen if we stopped waiting for permission?” she went on.
“Well, we’d get what we wanted,” I said. “And probably go to jail.”
“And what if we fled before they could catch us?”
Daisy raised her eyebrows at me. It seemed she had considered this already and I was only just getting invited to the discussion.
“You’ve thought about this,” I said, meeting her eyes.
She shrugged. “Maybe a bit. Only because I know Tom is corrupt and has a lot of money.”
How much money?I wondered.More than the Gatsbys?
“I do think a lot...” Daisy went on. “Maybe too much, about how wrong it is that Tom is rich in the first place. His family owned slaves before the war. They made a fortune off the backs of our people. The money in his house? It onlyscrapes the surfaceof all that he has, written in the wills of his father and the fathersbefore, and yet he tips the scales more in his favor every day.
“Not because heneedsit—just because he wants it.” Daisy locked eyes with me. “All I’m saying is... Tom is indestructible. But we’re not. And he knows it. So, he gets this sick satisfaction, watching me work around the house. Clarence handles all his odd jobs and he bosses the man around like he owns him. Funding the Eggonly because he knows it will create more servants. And just as easily, he burns it all down when it strikes his fancy.”
My mind opened up as she spoke, to the horrible reality of Buchanan’s manipulation.
She’d made a good point. If he really was as rich as Daisy said, what harm would it do, really, if he lost some of it? An amount that could change our lives?
The Blue House was the worst of what Gatsby had inherited from Buchanan’s property—a crumbling piece of architecture they turned into a dorm. Not a place for students—just a building desperate to disintegrate from the weight of the seasons, where Negroes could be corralled, locked away in case someone wanted to kill a bunch of us at once. It felt like the home I’d fled, its constant memory shooting through my brain, reminding me of how quickly we could be destroyed, forgotten.
I was queasy at the images that pulsed through my mind, of Buchanan watching from a distance as we all fell for the trap and found our demise. That didn’t explain why it was so easy for everyone to get out though. If someone really wanted to harm us, wouldn’t they have bolted the exits?
Well, maybe it was because it wasn’t death that they wantedbut the power to control us through fear. And that required us to be alive.
“Jay is in the middle,” Daisy went on, her voice soothing me out of my thoughts, some. “Rich, but he hates it. Maybe it’s time we use him to help us level the playing field. You might be surprised what he would do for you.”
Part of me believed her. My bond with Jay was strong, despite our ups and downs. I couldn’t imagine Jay taking it so far that he’d actually steal from Buchanan. I’d have to talk to him.
What else could I do? What other option did we have? We tried for fairness through protest and it got us brutalized. Buchanan and his kind never had to feel their faces pushed to the concrete, and they did so much worse. We were running out of ways to take back our power.
Daisy and I sat in a silence that became increasingly thoughtful, holding on to this dangerous, desperate plan as if it were the only hope we had left. And perhaps it was.
I thought and worried about convincing Jay to do a major job in the coming days. Aphrodite was one thing, but actually targeting Tom Buchanan? The big guy? Stealing? I wasn’t sure.
My time with Jay already had to be more private now that I was on Mr. Gatsby’s list of bad apples. But Jay insisted I visit his home on Long Island again when his father was out of town, as if he wanted to break the rules.
It was an unusually warm spring day and he’d gone for a swim. He wanted to play Marco Polo, but I wanted to sit in my whitespeed suit, with its elastic rib, and just enjoy the warm wind. He matched me with a white pair of cotton trunks, with a navy trim. We didn’t plan it. It happened naturally.
“What would it take to convince you to say... rob a rich person?” I asked, as I sat on the edge of his pool, teasing my legs through the water.
Jay popped out of the pool water, threw his hands backward over his hair. “What?”
“What would it take to make you rob a rich man?” I asked.
