“That’s it,” she mutters to nobody. She switches on the bedside lamp, rises from her bed, removes her statement T-shirt (a polar bear sweating on a tiny iceberg with the wordsNOT COOLabove), dons a bra, and then puts the polar bear shirt back on. She turns on the light on her phone to guide her across the grass—already dew-kissed—and to the house next door.
As it turns out, she doesn’t need the phone. Holy hell, the lights from the house are more than plenty. The house is lit up like a—well, like a house where every single light is on. There are people everywhere, just everywhere: spilling from the open back door tothe slice of lawn between the house and Great Salt Pond, moving in and out of the shadows in the side yard, and even crowded on the dock that points like a finger out to the pond.
“What the major hell,” she grumbles. She knows she sounds like an old crank, but some people have to work in the morning. Two shadowy figures move past her, both laughing, and she says, “Hey!” and then says it again until one of the figures turns toward her and says, “Yeah?” in a voice more curious than challenging.
“What’s going on?”
“Party,” said one of the figures, male. A vape pen moves in and out of his mouth; the smell of weed is prevalent.
“Well, yeah. I figured that much out. What I mean is, what’s the occasion?”
“No occasion,” explains the companion, female. “There are parties here all the time.”
“All the time?” Nicola is perturbed... and maybe a little envious. “Who knows enough people to have a party all the time? On a small island?”
“Oh, you don’t have to know her to come to the parties,” says the girl, and the male confirms this, saying, “Half the time you don’t even see her.”
“Half the time you don’t even see who?” Nicola’s astonishment and perturbation begin to hew more closely to frustration. She feels like these two are talking in riddles she’s too tired to solve.
“Juliana. Juliana George?”
“Should I know who that is?”
“She’s like totally famous,” says the girl.
“As what?”
“As what, again?” The girl turns uncertainly toward Vape Man.
“Tech stuff,” says Vape Man, with great (possibly unwarranted) confidence and authority. “I think? She started that company...” His voice trails off.
“Right,” says the girl. “I can’t remember the name of it. But it’s really good for our platforms, being here.” As she says that she lifts her phone at a very specific angle, and she and her companion press their heads together and look up. The flash goes off.
“Well, what’s the company do?”
“Not sure,” says the girl vaguely. “But she made gazillions. She invented something?”
“Or discovered something,” offers the companion.
“Right. Or both? Or maybe it was an app—”
Nicola scans the scene. There’s no hope, she can see now, of asking the party host—Juliana George, whose name, she thinks, might ring a bell; she pictures a magazine cover, a sharp suit and bright lipstick—to be a bit quieter.
“I’ve never seen her,” says the male. “And this is my third party in ten days. Hey, is that a polar bear?”
Nicola glances down at her shirt and says, “Yeah.”
He nods and says, “Nice.”
The shirt had been a gift from Zachary. They’d been together four years, sharing an apartment for two. They’d been in law school at Suffolk University at the same time, studied for the bar together, had eaten dinner every Friday night at the same Italian restaurant on Federal Hill when they’d both gotten jobs at different firms in Providence.
It was at this restaurant, not so many Fridays ago, that she’d told him about the internship.
He was halfway through his gnocchi (not just the same restaurant every Friday night, but the sameorder); he paused with a forkful in the air. “But you can’t take it. You have a job.”
“Not anymore. I quit today.”
Zachary had been suffering all week from a cold, one effect of which was that his normally vivid blue eyes had a rheumy opacity.
