Genius: Chapter One
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Plink. I drop one of the nails I’m holding and it splashes into the turquoise water below. I lean further over the railing of the deck of my Key West seaside bar—so far, in fact, that at any minute I might lose my balance and tumble head first into the water. I cling to the rough wood, and feel a giant splinter slide deep into the pad of my thumb. “Shit.” I ignore the pain as I hold the nail in place and bang it with my hammer.
“Now that’s a view I could get used to.”
I glance behind me.
It’s Kyle, our busboy. He’s a competitive weight lifter. He has veiny, pumped-up muscles that look manufactured and steroid-enhanced. “When are you going to go out with me, Luna?”
“I don’t date employees, I’ve already told you that.” Around seven hundred times. It wouldn’t be appropriate. Besides, he’s not my type. Sure, muscles are great but not to the point of resembling an oily, spray-tanned Incredible Hulk.
“Need help?” he says.
“If it’s the kind of help that means you get on with your job, then yes, that would be fabulous.” I smile at him to take the edge off.
“Come on. How about one little after-work drink tonight?”
When hell freezes over, is what I’m thinking. I don’t date pumped-up gym bunnies. Or prowling suits on their conference business trips. Or drunk, over-eager tourists. And definitely not home-town jocks. I’m … between types at the moment. For reasons I don’t dwell on, especially on a beautiful day like this one.
The sunlight glints off the water in shimmery flecks, glazing everything with its magic, or at least that’s how it so often feels to me here in Key West. This little island has become my haven, as though the surrounding barrier of blue water is providing a necessary forcefield. Out there, beyond the Seven Mile Bridge, somewhere among the amber waves of grain and just before you get to the purple mountain majesties, lies my past and all my regrets. Here, I can breathe. The sugar sand and lush humidity comfort me in ways I didn’t even know it was possible to be comforted. “See you inside, Kyle,” I say lightly, pretending to threaten him with my hammer.
“Aw.” He wanders off and I resume my work, leaning a little further over the railing, holding on for dear life and desperately hoping I don’t catapult myself overboard. I bang another nail into place.
“As if that’s going to help,” I hear another voice behind me say. I recognize the voice instantly as my best friend, the one and only Josie Farrell. My family moved into the house next to Josie’s in Cedar Rapids, Iowa when we were both nine years old. I’d just arrived from New York City still in my city clothes. Josie saw me sitting on my front step, completely lost, like I’d spent so much of my childhood. Over the course of an idyllic summer, she showed me how to hand-squeeze lemonade. How to whistle with a blade of grass. How to find the best hiding places in the barn loft during our long hazy afternoons of playing hide and seek with her older brothers. How to get good height on the rope swing before you let yourself go, to get to the deepest, coolest water of the swimming hole. We’ve been inseparable ever since.
Her family became my family. My family is what you’d call … what’s the word for it? Broken. Dysfunctional. Blended. Or some unhappy combination of all three. My parents divorced very un-amicably (i.e. they basically loathe each other) when I was six years old. My father ran off with his knocked-up (by him) secretary, who definitely didn’t want a step-daughter in tow, especially one who was the spawn of her new husband’s evil ex-wife. My mother is what you might generously refer to as a social climber. I think somewhere deep down inside her gold-digging heart she genuinely loved my father. The fact that their marriage imploded made her, in a way, give up on love altogether. So she went for money instead. Luckily for her, she was—and still is—beautiful enough to get away with it. Before the ink on her divorce papers was even dry, she moved us out of the only home I’d ever known and in with husband number two, a Manhattan real estate developer. I somehow found myself mired in the world of the super-rich. A