Something she loves about Poor People’s Pub is that no matter how hot and bright the day it’s always cool and dark inside, just as a bar should be. Today there was rain, then sun—it’s hot now, and Shelly is thirsty.
“Mudslide, please,” she says as she slides onto a barstool. She smiles outrageously at the bartender—he’s younger than Shelly, but not illegally so—and tries not to take it to heart when he doesn’t give her much of a smile back. He’s busy.
She wonders if Jack Baker might join her. Why not?
It can’t hurt to ask.
She texts him.
Her Mudslide arrives, and she sucks down a third of it right away. Man oh man, whoever invented the Mudslide deserves a prize of some sort. What’s the equivalent of a Nobel Prize for cocktails?Shelly should invent it, and assign herself the job of publicizing it. She would slay that job.
Still no answer from Jack. She texts him again. Should she call him?
She probably shouldn’t.
But she does.
No answer.
The past sneaks in, as it has a wicked tendency to do. Many summers ago Shelly sat right at this very bar and had a drink with Anthony Puckett, the local writer who is the reason she came to the island in the first place. She’d been chasing a PR opportunity, trying to get Anthony and his father photographed by Annie Leibovitz. Never panned out, then the father died, and obviously after that it was too late. But, hey, Shelly found herself a new home. There had been an older man in Manhattan at that time, and Shelly was in the process of leaving him. What better way to leave someone than to move yourself to an island?
She orders a second Mudslide and checks her phone again. Jack Baker owes her nothing—not a call back, not a text. Intellectually, she knows this. She knows that in their relationship she was the pursuer, not the pursued. She also knows that calling whatever went on between them a “relationship” is a fairly generous term.
She’s known all summer that he was also seeing Juliana’s neighbor Nicola, who is pretty in a fresh, unassuming way, which is exactly the opposite of the way Shelly is pretty. Shelly is pretty in a processed, Instagram-ready way. She can’t settle on a hair color. She has eyelash extensions—the longer the better—and henna brows. If she didn’t tan so well naturally (thank god she does) that would be fake too, and as the winter approaches certainly it will be. She can’t stand the way she looks with no color. But even acknowledging this, and even somewhat liking Nicola, she can’t get her mind off Jack. What if he’s The One? If he’s The One for Shelly but not The One forNicola (and, seriously, there’s almost no way he’s really into someone who spends her days with her hands in a fish tank)? Thus Shelly has a right—nay, aduty!—to wrench him away from Nicola.
Sure, it would be better if the act were less forceful thanwrenching,but.
Shelly could call someone else, but who? Juliana? Taylor? One of her local island friends? (She does have them, though this summer she’s been distracted with her work for Buchanan, and for Juliana, and of course with Jack.) On a Monday, people are probably working. She feels a little bad—she does! She really does!—that she told Taylor about Juliana’s name having been Jade in college at the party over the weekend. It just slipped out while she was drinking. But Taylor had said she could keep a secret, hadn’t she? Surely she’s not going to say anything. Shelly doesn’t even know why it matters, but it seems important to Jade that nobody find out.
Oops, Juliana.
I Don’t Like Mondaysby The Boomtown Rats is playing. Shelly’s brother used to play this song.
“Sweet sixteen, ain’t that peachy keen?”sings the bartender under his breath as he racks dirty glasses.
“You know this song is about a suicide, right?” Shelly tells him.Thisgets his attention. He looks up, startled. Good.
“Whoa. Mood shift. I thought it was about, like, not liking Mondays.”
“Well, it’s not,” says Shelly. Her voice sounds more shrill than she means it to.
The bartender tells another customer he has to change the keg on the Captain’s Daughter Double IPA. (This beer, Shelly has heard, is so strong that there are some places that won’t serve a customer more than two.)
When he comes back, she decides, she’ll have one more Mudslide. Just one. They’re on the smaller side, after all.
“Can I have another, please?” She taps the edge of her glass with a turquoise nail. (These too are completely unnatural: acrylics. Nicola’s are cut as short as they go, probably so she doesn’t get like crab poop caught in them. Do crabs poop? There’s so much about the world Shelly still doesn’t know.)
The bartender looks at her carefully. Okay, has he finally noticed that she’spretty?
“You driving?”
She sighs. Is Shelly losing her touch?
Did Shelly everhavea touch?
“No,” she says untruthfully—her car is parked across the street. “I’d like one more, please, and then I’m going to walk to another establishment.”
Shelly’s college boyfriend, a lacrosse player from Maryland named Ryan Griffin, broke up with her at the beginning of the season senior year, fourteen months into their relationship. It was his last year of college lacrosse, and he wanted to give it his all. No distractions.
