“Oh, you’re good,” Penn says, but I’m not quite listening anymore, frozen in the tall arched doorway to the lobby. A couple dozen people are crammed onto the chairs and couches around the big stone fireplace, faces so familiar that for a moment I literally can’t move—Elizabeth Reese, who was student council secretary three years running; Jake and Annie, who I’ve known since pre-K and who have been dating just about that long. She nudges him when she notices me, her immaculately tweezed eyebrows crawling clear up to her hairline. She makes a big show of turning away.
I think of the note on my windshield—dirty slut—and feel my skin prickle hotly, imagining everyone here somehow saw it, too, or wrote it or is thinking it even if they didn’t do either of those things. This is what it was like before I left. Julia once called my house phone and left a message, pretending to be from Planned Parenthood saying my STD test had come back positive, and I remember being grateful to her when it happened because at least nobody witnessed that one but my mom. I deserved it, maybe, the way everybody seemed to turn on me as soon as the book and the article came out, like I had some kind of social disease that was catching. But that doesn’t mean I want to go through it again.
If Penn notices people noticing me—and they are: a restless kind of weight shifting, a girl from my junior English class whispering something behind her hand—she doesn’t let on. “Did everybody get a donut?” she begins.
It’s a fast meeting,welcome to the new Lodgeand how to use the ancient time clock. I look around to see who else is here. There’s a middle-aged chef and his younger, friendlier sous, who I met this morning as they were prepping the kitchen, and the housekeepers who’ve been airing the guest rooms, the old windows flung open wide. A trio of Julia’s cheerleading friends are perched on the leather sofa all in a row like birds on a wire, three identical French braids draped over their skinny shoulders. I work to keep my spine straight as I stand there in the corner, not to wither like an undernourished plant at their triplicate expressions of casual disdain: The one on the left looks right at me and mouths, very clearly, the wordskank. I cross my armst, feeling totally, grossly naked. I want to slither right out of my skin.
Afterward, I take my donut outside to the back porch overlooking the lake, picking at the sprinkles and trying to pull myself together. There’s a girl about my age in shorts and sneakers hosing down the lounge chairs, her red hair in a messy bun up on top of her head—she startles when she sees me, alarm painted all over her face. “Crap,” she says, checking her watch and looking back up at me, pale eyebrows furrowing. “Did I just miss the meeting? I totally just missed the meeting, didn’t I.Crap.”
“I—yeah,” I tell her apologetically. “It’s probably okay, though. And I think there’s still donuts left.”
“Well, in that case,” she says, dropping the hose and climbing the steps to the porch, holding her hand out. Her skin is alabaster pale underneath the pink flush of sunburn. “I’m Tess,” she says. “Head lifeguard, or I guess I will be once there’s anybody to swim here. For now I’m just a hose wench.” She wrinkles her nose. “Sorry, that sounded a lot less filthy in my head. Did you just start?”
I laugh out loud—the first time all day, and the sound is sort of startling to me, unfamiliar. “First shift,” I tell her. “Well, sort of. I’m Molly, I’m Penn’s assistant.” I explain how I used to work here, that I moved away and I’m just back for the summer. I take a big, self-conscious bite of my donut when I’m through.
Tess nods. “That’s why I didn’t recognize you, then,” she says. “I’ve only lived here, like, a year. I came in as a senior.” She gestures at my donut. “Are there really more of those inside?”
“There are,” I promise, opening the flimsy screen door and following Tess back into the cool, dark lodge. “Bear claws, even.”
Tess snorts. “I’ve got that going for me, at least,” she says as we head through the old-fashioned dining room, hung with half a dozen dusty brass chandeliers. “I don’t know if I thought this was going to be glamorous or something, working at a hotel? My boyfriend’s gone for the summer, though, so I was basically like, ‘Give me all the hours you can, I’ll just work all the time and have no social life.’”
“That’s pretty much my plan, too,” I agree, glancing around for Julia’s coven of nasty friends and leaving out the part where the wholeno social lifething isn’t exactly a choice. I like Tess already; the last thing I want to do is identify myself—or worse, have somebodyelseidentify me—as her friendly neighborhood adulteress and family-ruiner. “Where’s your boyfriend?” I ask instead.
The lobby’s cleared out by the time we get back there; Tess picks a glazed chocolate donut out of the box and takes a bite. “He’s in Colorado,” she tells me with her mouth full, reaching for a napkin and swallowing. “Sorry, I’m rude. He’s doing some volunteer firefighter thing. I think he saw a Lifetime movie about smoke jumpers or something. I don’t even know.”
She’s joking, but I don’t laugh this time; my heart is somewhere in the general vicinity of the faded dining room carpet. Whatever’s replaced it is cold and slimy and wet inside my chest.
He didn’t see a Lifetime movie, I think dully.He’s wanted to fight fires since we were little kids.
“Is your boyfriend—” I start, then break off, unable to say it. She can’t—there’s no way. There’s noway. “I mean, what’s his—?”
Tess smiles at me, easy and careless. There’s a bit of donut glaze on her upper lip. “Patrick Donnelly?” she says, the affection palpable in her voice, the way you talk about your favorite song or movie or person. “Why, you know him?”
He was my best friend. He was my first love. I had sex with his big brother. I broke his fucking heart.
“Yeah,” I say finally, reaching for another donut and forcing a weak, jellyfish smile of my own. “I do.”
There’s a moment of silence, Tess still smiling but her eyes gone cloudy and confused. Then I watch her figure it out.“Molly,”she says, like my name is the answer to a pie-piece question in a tied game of Trivial Pursuit, like she’d known it somewhere at the back of her head but hadn’t been able to come up with the word in time. Like she lost. “Wow, hi.”
“Hi,” I say, executing the world’s most awkward wave even though she’s standing a foot away from me. Jesus Christ, why do I insist on leaving my house? “I’m sorry; I wasn’t trying to be a weirdo. I didn’t realize—”
“Yeah, no, me neither.” Tess swallows the rest of her donut like a shot of Jameson, wrinkling her nose and setting the balled-up napkin down on an empty side table. For a second neither one of us talks. I imagine her calling Patrick in Colorado.I met your trashy ex-girlfriend this morning. I purposely don’t imagine what he’ll say in response.
“It was nice to meet you,” I tell Tess finally, wanting to get out of this lobby like I haven’t wanted anything since I got here. I wonder if she’s made friends with Julia. I wonder if she helped egg my house. It was stupid, to feel hopeful like that for a second. It was stupid of me to take this job at all. “I . . . guess I’ll see you around.”
“I guess so,” Tess says, nodding, raising one hand in an awkward wave of her own as I head toward the hallway that leads to the kitchen. I imagine I can feel her behind me the rest of the whole afternoon.
*
I’m sitting at the reservations desk in the lobby near the end of my shift, making a list of magazines and websites for us to advertise with, when the front door to the Lodge swings open and Imogen walks in. “Uh, hey!” she says when she spies me, clearly startled—she’s got that same look from the coffee shop the other morning, like I’ve surprised her and not in a good way. “Are you working here again?”
I nod, tucking my wavy hair behind my ears and trying for a smile. I hate how colossally awkward it feels between us, like puzzle pieces that got wet and warped and don’t fit correctly at all anymore. Imogen never treated me like a pariah before I left. “Grand opening in a couple weeks,” I try anyway. “Games and fireworks. You here to sign up for the three-legged race?”
Imogen shakes her head, smiling the kind of tolerant smile you’d use on a little kid who just asked if your refrigerator was running. “I’m actually supposed to pick up my friend Tess.” Her dress has buttons up the front and is printed with tiny leaves. “She works here, too. We were gonna get food and maybe drive over to Silverton and see a movie.”
I bite the inside of my cheek—ofcoursethey’re friends, of course they would be. For a second I think meanly of that movieAll About Evethat my mom likes, where the young actress takes over the other woman’s whole identity. “I met Tess,” I say. I’m dying to ask Imogen if she and Patrick are serious—if they’ve been together ever since last September, if he loves her more and better than he ever loved me. “She’s nice.”
“You want to come with?” Imogen asks now, her voice high and uncertain. “We’re probably just going to the diner or something, but you could . . . come with?”
