Katie clunked open her window. Her hair was down. Her tank top, white. Her sleep shorts, pink and purple plaid.
“What do you want?” she said.
“Were you... twirling?”
She paused the music—girl pop, and blaring—on her phone. “I’m trying to lock into my character’s point of view. She’s very—”
“Sunny?”
She glared at me. “Rude.”
I chuckled, then tilted my head. “What are you doing right now?”
“I literally just told you. Character work.”
My hand found a lighter in my pocket. I flicked it twice, then glanced up. The stars were out again, and it was so, so quiet.
“You hungry at all?”
Katie, for a second, froze. And then she said, “I... I can’t leave the house after ten.”
“Sure you can.”
“No, I...”
But it was too late. I’d already dropped from the sill, bent my knees, and let go. I’d already hit the grass and pushed back the loose slat of fence that separated us, already pulled back the thorny rosebush that bloomed beyond it. Already climbed the lattice, scaled the siding, and outstretched my hand.
Already knew what I wanted.
Already knew it was mine.
“I could get in trouble,” she said.
“Katie,” I said. “It’s just me, all right? I’d never let anything bad happen to you. That’s a promise.”
She looked around for a second, then put her hand in mine.
I think, in that moment, we both believed me.
28
Katie
Present Day
The Hamptons
I crawled under the covers, mind spinning. But it was nothing, right? That moment on the beach? Just a few charged and electric inches, and that was all. There had been no contact, no reason to recoil. We were friends now. We had, in many ways, always been. Even at his lowest, even that last year, when nobody else wanted anything to do with him. Maybe that was the point of this summer. To take Tyler McNally off his pedestal. To rewrite that chapter of my life. To realize it had just been an obsession, a cliché, some universal symptom of my own seventeen-ness, and nothing more.
My walkie-talkie garbled.
“This is Nick Carraway for Daisy. Over.”
I laughed. “They were literally cousins, Tyler.”
“I know that. But you’re not a Jordan. Over.”
I fingered the grooves of my necklace, tracing the warm letters of my name. “So, what do you think of West Egg?”
