a semi-big-name fashion photographer. Someone my father respects.
“What’s the final word?” I blurt out to Mr. Phillips, unable to keep up the small talk any longer as my chest tightens.
He hesitates. “I’m sorry, Josie.”
My stomach sinks.
And sinks …
“It has nothing to do with your photo submission,” he assures me, “which they loved. The internship just normally goes to someone in college, and they just think you’re too young.”
“But I’m almost eighteen,” I argue. “And they know who my father is, right?”
I hate to throw around his name, but this is an emergency situation.
“Of course your father’s name doesn’t hurt. But …”
But.
“I shouldn’t be telling you this,” he says in a low voice, “but if you want to know the truth, they were going to give it to you. However, the big boss who owns the magazine came into the board meeting. Mr. Summers is a stickler for rules, see, and you’re underage.”
“Mr. Summers?”
“Levi Summers. Big boss,” he explains.
Oh. Right. Summers. His name is on every building in town. Descendant of the founder of Beauty. Talk about privilege. I had no idea he owned the magazine. Rookie mistake.
Mr. Phillips holds out his hands. “That’s why Levi Summers yanked your application, so I’m afraid you won’t be getting the internship this summer. I’m sorry.”
Yanked. Just like that. Poof ! One more thing that’s gone wrong in Beauty over the last few months.
Mr. Phillips is telling me some other things I barely hear, about how the internship itself is four days in August, before school starts back, and the work is rigorous, from early morning until midnight, so there would be problems anyway because of age restrictions and labor laws.
“Besides, maybe it’s for the best, because you’d miss the Victory Day flotilla.”
“Huh?”
“At the end of Regatta Week—the big Victory Day celebration. Surely you went to the nighttime flotilla when you were a kid?”
Oh, I went, all right. Rhode Island is the only state in the U.S. that still observes a legal holiday to mark the end of World War II. And for Beauty, that means an outlandish patriotic flotilla. At twilight, every boat is covered in strings of white lights, and they light the big braziers in the harbor. It’s as if the townsfolk of Beauty sat around and said: How can we outdo Fourth of July and stick it to those assholes in Boston by stealing all the end-of-summer tourists?
“If you were interning, you wouldn’t be able to enjoy the flotilla,” Mr. Phillips says solemnly, as if it’s my one dream in life.
Yeah, okay. I don’t really care about yachts covered in fairy lights. The internship was going to help me get to Los Angeles, and now I’m feeling like my ship is sinking in the harbor along with my dreams. I can’t explain to Mr. Phillips about the ticking time bomb that is my grandma returning from Nepal and the mess that is Mom’s relationship with Grandma, but now it’s summer, and I’m no closer to getting to LA than I was a few months ago.
A group of senior boys rolls past us down the hall, radiating arrogance and a toxic kind of laughter, and though I try to turn my head away, the leader spies me—an asshole varsity football player everyone calls Big Dave.
“Josie Saint-Martin.” My name is thick in his mouth, too familiar. He doesn’t even know me, not from childhood or now. “Coming to my party tonight? I’ll let you take my picture,” he says, kissing the air. “Private photo session.”
His boys laugh.
“Hard pass,” I tell him, hoping I sound tougher than I feel.
“All right, Mr. Danvers. Keep walking,” Mr. Phillips says, pointing down the hallway.
They shuffle away, Big Dave miming snapping photos while one of his buddies makes suggestive gestures behind Mr. Phillips’s back. I hate all of them. I hate Mr. Phillips for quietly apologizing for their obnoxious behavior, like he just saved me, but you know, boys will be boys. I hate that he doesn’t have a clue that I’ve had to endure this garbage day in, day out for months when teachers aren’t paying attention. I hate being angry all the time.
But most of all, I hate that after Big Dave and his gang of lunkheads have passed, I spy a lean figure in a black leather jacket across the hall, shutting his locker.
Lucky Karras.
Everywhere I go, there he is. The bookshop. The curb outside, where he parks his vintage red motorcycle. Silhouetted in the window of the boatyard’s offices across the street, petting their