Lilly smirks. “I bet he did.” She clocked the two of them at the party earlier tonight—June’s expression gone pleased and rosy, Charlie’s hand on the bare skin of her upper arm—and while June is notorious for being nice to literally everyone, no matter how boring or putrid, Lilly could tell as soon as she glanced in her sister’s direction that her smile was sincere. June is a human sunbeam, warm and bright and steady; Lilly’s not surprised that even Major Fantastic turned his face instinctively in the direction of her light.
“I mean, who knows if it’s anything,” June qualifies. “But he’s cute, right?”
“He’s very cute,” Lilly agrees, her bare feet brushing June’s under the covers. “It almost makes up for the fact that his friends are all horrifying garbage monsters.”
June hums noncommittally. “About that,” she begins, wrinkling her nose a little. “I mean, obviously you were there and I wasn’t, but are you sure they were saying what you think they were saying? Because I talked to Caroline and Anne Mulgrew for a little while in the library, and they didn’t seem so bad.”
Lilly sits up so fast she gets light-headed. “Seriously?” she asks. All at once she can feel the garlic knot sitting barely chewedbehind her breastbone, doughy and thick. “What do you think, I made it up?”
“Of course not,” June says quickly, holding both palms out. “I’m just saying, with great love and affection: occasionally you have been known to look for a fight where there isn’t one.”
Lilly bites back a scowl, but barely. This makes her nuts about June, her preternatural willingness to give the benefit of the doubt to people who clearly do not deserve it. If there’s one thing Lilly has learned from being not-quite-the-right-kind-of-famous, it’s that it’s better to judge first and ask questions later. “Often,” she counters crisply, “I’mjust saying, with great love and affection: there is in fact a fight.”
“Well,” June replies calmly, patting the pillow beside her, “not here, there’s not.”
Lilly holds her frown for a moment longer before feeling the annoyance drain right out of her. It is, and always has been, impossible to be mad at June for more than a second or two at a time. “I wonder if he’ll let you hold his magic spear,” she teases quietly, then lies back down in bed and rests her head on her sister’s shoulder until she falls asleep.
Chapter Four
June
“You’re sure this is okay?” Charlie asks the following afternoon, his handsome face creasing worriedly in the brutal midday sunlight. “Because we really can—”
“No, no, no, this is great,” June promises, reaching out as casually as she can to pluck a fat black water bug from the plastic tub of organic fruit salad. When he asked her to lunch she was thinking maybe Nobu or Little Dom’s but instead he showed up at the house with an enormous bag from Erewhon and asked her how she might feel about a picnic. Thirty minutes later—once her sisters had gotten their gander at him, the quartet of them draped dramatically over the upstairs railing like old women on a fire escape back in Sicily—and they’re sitting on the marshy bank of the man-made pond at the center of the development, an unsubtle whiff of sulfur wafting through the air. June wipes a bead of sweat from her upper lip as surreptitiously as possible, telling herself it has nothing to do with him not wanting to be seen with her in public. “It’s perfect.”
“Are you sure?” Charlie looks deeply unconvinced. “I had it in my head that this would be, like, romantic and unusual, but I also kind of didn’t anticipate the...” He waves his hand, presumably to indicate either the heat or the smell, which seems somehow bothfishier and more pungent than it did even a moment ago. “Whatever. We’re good. We’re good!”
“We’re good,” June assures him, trying and failing not to be charmed. He was like this at Rebecca’s party, too—bashful and a little bit dorky, like he was surprised she’d be talking to him at all. She keeps waiting for the gotcha, the moment when he reveals that he has half a dozen cardboard cutouts of himself propped in various locations around his home or that he thinks showering is overrated and so just does his pits with a Clorox wipe every couple of days, but actually he’s just sort of fun and cool and nice to be with—an easy and generous smiler, a good asker of questions. He talks a lot about how hard it is to find good deep dish in Los Angeles. He talks a lot about his dog.
“Four sisters, huh?” he asks now, handing her a tomato and mozzarella sandwich, balsamic vinegar soaking into the crusty baguette. June smiles—he must have googled her; she’s been a vegetarian since she was twelve—then sets it down on the blanket, hoping he doesn’t notice she doesn’t actually take a bite. It’s nothing to worry about this time, her diet. Like three more pounds and she’s going to stop. “What’s that like?”
“It’s incredible,” she says, which is mostly true. “And, you know, an occasional feral catfight. We contain multitudes.”
“You’re the oldest, right? Does that make you the boss?”
June shakes her head. “Lilly’s the boss. Of all of us, including my parents. And maybe your parents as well, actually.”
Charlie laughs. “I will be sure to let them know.”
“It’s possible she already sent them a certified letter.”
“Sounds about right.” He holds the bag of chips out in her direction; June shakes her head automatically, and he reaches in for a handful of his own. “I get it, though,” he says, taking a bite ofhis sandwich—roast beef and Vermont cheddar, she notes, probably twelve hundred calories all-in. “The sister-in-charge thing. I mean, look at me and Caroline. It can be nice to let someone else handle the details, right? Especially if they’re going to do it anyway.” He sets the sandwich down then, brushing his palms off on his jeans. “Okay,” he says, broad shoulders dropping, “real talk: that smell is, like, really bad, isn’t it.”
June wrinkles her nose. “I mean,” she admits, “it isn’t great? Also, I don’t want to alarm you, but I’m pretty sure I just saw a rat the size of a cocker spaniel take a swan dive off the fountain.”
“Do you want to get out of here?” he asks, getting to his feet and holding a hand out. Gazing up at his broad body silhouetted against the brilliant blue sky, all at once June understands why they cast him as Major Fantastic: He looks like someone who could leap tall buildings. He looks like someone who could snatch bullets clean out of the air. “Go to an actual restaurant? Somewhere indoors, even. Real big swing.”
“Real big swing,” June echoes with a grin, tucking her uneaten lunch back into its waxed paper wrapper. Lacing her fingers through his.
Chapter Five
Lilly
Charlotte hosts a supper club at her restaurant featuring a different up-and-coming female or nonbinary chef every month, so Lilly borrows June’s car and stops by with lattes to help her arrange the flowers. They’ve been best friends since the Benedettos moved into the development when Lilly was a junior in high school; all of them used to carpool, Charlotte climbing cheerfully into the back seat of Junie’s gleaming white Escalade five mornings a week. It was Charlotte who taught them how Saint Ann’s worked, at the beginning, where the good bathroom was and which teachers were hard-asses or perverts and that the truly and effortlessly popular girls didn’t wear their uniform skirts hiked quite so high. She was kind to them back when she had absolutely nothing to gain from it, and even at sixteen and spoiled, Lilly knew enough to grab tight and hang on.
“How did it go last night?” she asks now, perching on a stool at the scarred marble bar while Charlotte frowns intently at a half-finished arrangement of lupine and wild herbs. The restaurant is called Lodge, and Charlotte is deeply and lovingly fanatical about every detail, from the provenance of the salad greens to the hand soap in the bathroom, which is probably why even three years after opening celebrities are still ripping each other’s throats outwith claws and teeth vying for a table. “Didn’t you say you had a date?”
“I may have said something like that, yes.” Charlotte makes a face. She’s wearing her uniform of dark denim apron over fitted black button-down, her riot of red hair pulled back with a stretchy cotton headband. “He was wearing a shirt with a dinosaur on it.”
