to admire the woman; she knows she was topic A. before she walked in, but she volleys like a pro. ‘He was at my house!’
Score! New to the game, Jessie slips. ‘No shit!’
Nenna grins. ‘We were having iced tea.’
‘Get out!’
‘And my oatmeal cookies. That’s why I’m late.’
‘You’re not late, you’re . . .’
Cathy says kindly, ‘Just in time. We were just starting.’ Never mind the empty coffee cups and pastry crumbs and ruined paper napkins; they’ve been at it since ten.
‘Good thing I baked last week.’ Nenna glows – not like she’s lost her man, more like she just scored a shiny new one. ‘He ate about a dozen.’
‘What’s he doing in Fort Jude?’
‘He’s here on some big story.’ In training since nursery school, Nenna waits a beat before she adds, ‘For the Los Angeles Times.’
‘Is he really Lucy’s son?’
‘He says he is.’
‘I could say I’m the queen of France, but would you believe it?’
‘Where else would he get The Swordfish from our year?’
‘He had The Swordfish?’
Topic A. when she came in. Now look at her, with yellow feathers in her teeth. ‘Bobby’s, actually,’ she tells Betsy and Jessie relaxes, but only a little bit.
‘He knows Bobby?’
‘I saw what you wrote to him in The Swordfish, Betsy. And I thought you were my friend.’
‘Houseparties. It was a crazy time,’ Betsy says, propelling Jessie into a bad place.
Kara’s from Chicago, but that doesn’t stop her. ‘I hear they were pretty wild.’
Sallie says, too fast, ‘Don’t believe everything you hear.’
‘You’re the ones who laid it all on me, how crazy it got, especially the last night when your friend Lucy showed up . . .’
‘We were never really friends.
‘Lucy kept to herself until that night.’
‘White bikini, see-through shirt, you might call it her coming out party.’
Resentment crackles in the room. ‘Like she was asking for it.’
And Jessie’s automatic censor breaks down. ‘Nobody asks for a rape.’
‘A rape! At houseparties? Don’t even think it.’
‘Puh-leeze.’ Sallie’s smile scrapes Jessie raw. ‘People like us don’t do things like that.’
Don’t, Jessie thinks. Just don’t, but she’s sliding into the zone. Everybody who was anybody was at the beach the week before graduation, running around crazy, like it was the night before the Battle of Waterloo, and this was the Last Good Time. She hadn’t exactly been invited to camp out in one of the beach houses because she had, OK, she had a reputation, so she crashed at home and slipped into the parties in all those houses after it got dark, stayed up all night when the parties spilled out on the beach and never left until the last dog was hung and the last of them staggered off to bed and, man! It was almost like she belonged.
So she was at the bonfire on the famous last night when Lucy showed up for the first time ever, all gorgeous and sexy and brash. She sneaked out. That grandmother kept her on a short leash.
Jessie knows how her own night ended – Don’t go there – but Lucy? The girl was everywhere, she danced with everybody, all these aging girls’ boyfriends, captains of this and that and a bunch of guys that nobody knew. They rolled in from Broward and Sarasota and as far away as Tarpon Springs. Fort Jude houseparties were that famous. By the time the night ended Jessie knew why Sallie and Betsy and all were so pissed off at her, she just didn’t know who Lucy left with or what happened after that, and the rest? She jerks herself back into the present, where it’s safe.
Fucking Sallie is going, ‘These things do happen. Just not to people you know.’
‘Don’t be so sure.’
And as if she knows what Jessie’s thinking, Betsy scowls. ‘Probably one of the Pierce Point boys, you know, like the Horshams or the Ackleys, Lanny Rucker or the Pikes.’ Take that.
And Sallie drives in the stake. ‘People like that don’t get invited to our things, they just don’t.’ She covers her mouth like a priest crossing himself after the stake goes in. ‘Oh! Sorry, Jessie. Wade is soooo not the same person now. He was much, much different back then.’
‘So was I.’
‘No offense!’
Jessie does not back off with the traditional, ‘None taken.’ She won’t. But leaving is out of the question. All she can do is sit, waiting for this to end.
As if to make up for what she just did, Sallie Bellinger diverts the pack. ‘I wonder if Brad’s OK. Brought down in front of all of us,