“They don’t have cold cheese slices in the city?” I ask, looking down at the grease-stained paper plate in front of front of me. We both ordered slices of Pelican Island Plain, which is basically a delicacy here. It’s a slice of piping-hot plain pizza topped with a handful of cold shredded cheese that slowly melts into the already-meltedothermozzarella, resulting in the cheesiest, most comforting bite east of Manhattan. To so many outsiders, it seems overindulgent, a bit gross, even, but here, it’s heaven.
Olivia bites into her slice and moans with pleasure. She swallows and wipes her mouth with a paper napkin. “I gotta say, there are so many things I missed about Pelican Island, but this is number one.”
“Is your dad still at that company?” I ask, folding my slice. “That’s why you moved, right?”
Olivia nods and pulls at a piece of cheese. “Yeah, but thewhydidn’t really matter to me. I was so glad to be leaving after…you know.”
I set my pizza down on the table as a boulder settles into the pit of my stomach. Olivia’s looking at me, and our eyes lock for a moment. I hold her gaze, afraid to look away. She doesn’t flinch, and all I want to do is lean forward and press my fingers to her cheek, to get close enough to see if her skin is as soft as I remember. Her lips part slightly, and I wonder if she’s thinking the same thing, if the question on the tip of her tongue is the same as mine:What could we have been?
But then she blinks, and her eyes flit upward to the ceiling. “Can I tell you something?”
“Of course.”
“You know how I’m taking a gap year?” she asks. “I said it’s because I didn’t get a tennis scholarship, which is true,” she continues. “But the real reason is because my parents can’t pay for school.”
I tear at my crust to have something to do with my hands.
“The job my dad took in the city…The company went bust,” she says. “It was a total tech-bubble thing. He put everything into it, including my trust, the one my grandparents set up.”
“Oh my god.”
“I was supposed to get all this money when I turned eighteen, use it to pay for college, start a life. Now—poof. All gone.” Olivia raises her eyebrows and picks a speck of cheese off her pizza. “None of my friends in the city know. It’s not something that’sdonein our circles, you know? Take out loans for college?” She blushes. “I can’t believe I’m embarrassed by this. How much of a snob am I?”
“Look around,” I say. “We’ve both grown up like royalty. If thatchanged…” I want to say something comforting, but the truth is I don’t know what it’s like. I’ve never had to worry about paying for school, paying for anything. And neither has Olivia.
“I’m taking the year off to figure out what I really want to do before saddling myself with some huge student loan.” Olivia blinks and her eyes are glassy, like she’s trying not to cry. “That’s why my parents are in Europe this summer. Dad’s trying to get some funding for a new project, and Aunt Sally said I could live with them while I figured things out.”
“Olivia, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s ridiculous,” she says. “There may be other ways, but…” She waves her fingers in the air. “I don’t know. It’s my own shit to deal with. I hate that it scares me. It wasn’t even my money to lose.”
“You’re not a bad person for worrying about that,” I say. “If I was in your position, I’d be losing my mind.”
“Really?”
“Yes,” I say definitively. “We’ve all grown up with things we don’t deserve, that we didn’t do anything to earn.”
“Yeah,” she says quietly.
“But what we do with that privilege is what matters. That’s how we determine if we’re good people or not.”
“Do you think I’m a good person?” Olivia asks.
Her desire to connect lands deep within my chest. It reminds me of the conversations we’d have when we were together, when we were anus. Lying on the sand after school in the fall, wrapped in our tennis hoodies, we’d curl up close to each other and ask questions like this:What do you think I’ll be like in ten years? If you could live anywhere in the world, where would you? What would you change about Pelican Island?Our answers were aspirational andhigh-flying, full of promise and purpose and dreams. But, above all, honesty.
That autumn, after joining the mock-trial team, I asked Olivia if she thought I was smart enough to become a Supreme Court Justice one day, and she paused, thinking. Nerves hummed in my stomach until finally she answered.
“I don’t think it’s just about smarts,” she said hesitantly. “It’s about how hard you want to work. And you, Lucy Gold, are the hardest worker I know. So the answer is yes, but not without grinding like crazy.”
The answer comforted me because I knew she wasn’t justsayingthat. She meant it.
Sitting at Little Vincenzo’s two years later, I want to do her the same courtesy.
“Do I think you’re a good person?” I ask. “I think we have to work at being good people, that we have to make the right choices and consistently decide to do good things. But you seem to do that.”
She reaches over the table and rests her fingers on my wrist, her touch so warm I want to melt right into it. “I think you do, too.”
—
