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 looksuncannily 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’resupposedto. 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 isnonexistent 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 townright this minute.
Evie doesn’t know the Never-There Winona.
Or my favorite, the We-Don’t-Talk-about-ThatWinona.
“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.
