photography internship in the area, so getting it would be a huge deal for me. My dad would really respect it,” I tell him, feeling a little despondent but unable to admit that I lost the internship already. Because I’m too young.
“Hey, Regatta Week is a big deal for everyone with status in Beauty. More money is blown in one pointless weekend than on entire wars, and nearly no one gets killed, so hey. Good luck with snagging that, if that’s the kind of thing your dad will respect.”
I think he’s looking down on the internship. Pretty sure. Al-l-lmost positive.
“And I guess it confirms what I suspected,” he adds.
“What’s that?” I say.
“It’s just how it was before,” he says, eyes darkening. “Don’t get too attached to Josie Saint-Martin because she’s just passing through.”
Okay, fair …
But it also feels a little bit like a punch to the gut.
A shout snaps our attention to the French doors of the pool house. Someone’s fighting. Not the kind with fists and punching. The kind with name-calling and crying. Normally, that would be exactly the sort of drama I would try to avoid, but I recognize the tenor of one of the muffled voices beyond the paned doors, and my pulse goes wild.
“Oh no,” I whisper.
I push out of my seat, rush to the pool house, and swing open the doors. A crowd of gawkers cranes their necks away from a big-screen TV to see what’s transpiring across the open room. A couple is arguing near the kitchenette area. Half of that couple is my cousin.
“Just leave me alone!” Evie’s shouting across a granite kitchen counter littered with plastic party cups and half-eaten plates of catered food. Tear tracks stain her cheeks. She’s not crying now, but she has been recently. Now she’s just angry.
And the object of her anger is a very tall, very muscular guy with cropped blond hair and intense eyes. His crimson Harvard Crew T-shirt stretches over shoulders broad enough to hold up the world. “You’re the one who showed up at my cousin’s house after breaking up with me,” he shouts back, aggressively pointing at her over the counter. “You’re sending me a lot of mixed signals, Evie.”
Jesus. This is Adrian Summers?
“Here’s a signal for you,” she says, holding up her middle finger. “Leave me alone.”
As she stomps around the counter, he drunkenly calls to her, “So typical. You Saint-Martins are a three-ring circus, you know that? Diedre’s the world’s greatest hypocrite. Your mom’s a sociopath. You’re an emotional seesaw. And now Wild Winona, the Whore of Babylon, is back in town, along with her little mistake, the amateur photographer.”
I make a noise, and his attention slides from Evie to me.
“There she is. And who doesn’t love a good amateur, am I right? Word on the street is that all your best pics are behind a paid subscription wall online. Twenty bucks and you get access to all your nudes.”
“What?” I say, but it comes out as a whisper.
“Isn’t that how your mom met your famous photographer dad, posing in the buff for him? Like mother, like daughter, huh?” Adrian whips out his phone. “We were just enjoying one tonight, weren’t we boys? Where was that? Oh, here we go.”
He turns his phone around to show me the screen. It’s a nude, all right. One I’ve seen before by accident, when I was younger. It’s my mother, photographed by my father when she was nineteen. It’s in black and white, and the top of her head is cropped off, so it’s hard to identify that it’s her. In fact, it would be easy to mistake the girl in the picture for me.
Except that I know for a fact it’s not. But that doesn’t matter to anyone here.
Adrian puckers his lips and makes a kissy face at me.
Dark laughter swirls around the pool house.
An earthquake starts in my belly and spreads up into my chest. I feel sick. Humiliated. And completely unable to do a damn thing about it. So I just stand there, staring at a naked picture of my mother. Hating her a little for ruining my life once again. Hating all of these people for objectifying her. Wanting to rip the phone away from Adrian and beat his smug face with it.
Adrian just clicks off the screen, turns away from me, and finishes his grand speech to Evie, saying, “Your family’s cursed, all right. You’re all a blight on Beauty!”