He kinda is European. Can we please stop talking about them? It’s giving me a headache.”
“Why are you the only person in school that isn’t interested in the Delos family? Aren’t you even curious to get a look?”
“No! And I think it’s pathetic that this entire town is standing around gawking at them like a bunch of hicks!” Helen shouted.
Claire stopped short and stared at her. It wasn’t like Helen to argue, let alone start yelling, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself.
“I’m bored to death of the Delos family!” Helen continued, even when she saw Claire’s surprise. “I’m sick of this town’s fixation with them, and I hope I never have to meet, see, or share breathing space with any of them!”
Helen took off running, leaving Claire standing by herself on the trail. She finished first, just like she’d promised, but she did it a little too quickly; Coach Tar gave her a shocked look when she recorded the run time. Helen blew by her and stormed into the locker room. She grabbed her stuff and bolted out of school, not bothering to change or say good-bye to any of her teammates.
On the way home, Helen started crying. She pedaled past the neat rows of gray shingled-sided houses with their black or white painted storm shutters and tried to calm down. The sky seemed to sit particularly low on the scoured land, as if it was pressing down on the gables of the old whalers and trying to finally flatten them after a few centuries of stubborn defiance. Helen had no idea why she’d gotten so angry, or why she’d abandoned her best friend like that. She needed a little peace and quiet.
There was a car accident on Surfside; some gigantic SUV had tried to turn onto a narrow, sandbanked side street and turned over. The drivers were okay, but their beached whale of a car blocked off traffic from end to end. Annoyed as she was, Helen knew she couldn’t even pedal past the boneheaded off islanders without losing her checkers. She decided to take the long way home. She turned around and headed back toward the center of town, passing the movie theater, the ferry, and the library, which, with its Greek temple architecture, stuck out like a sore thumb in a town that otherwise was an ode to four-hundred-year-old Puritan architecture. And maybe that’s why Helen loved it. The Atheneum was a gleaming white beacon of strange smack-dab in the middle of forget-me-now drab, and somehow, Helen identified with both of those things. Half of her was no-nonsense Nantucket through and through, and the other half was marble columns and grand stairs that just didn’t belong where they had been built. Biking past, Helen looked up at the Atheneum and smiled. It was consoling for her to know that she might stick out, but at least she didn’t stick out that much.
When she got home, she tried to pull herself together, taking a freezing-cold shower before calling Claire to apologize. Claire didn’t pick up. Helen left her a long apology blaming hormones, the heat, stress, anything and everything she could think of, though she knew in her heart that none of those things was the real reason she had flipped out. She’d been so irritable all day.
The air outside was heavy and still. Helen opened all the windows in the two-story Shaker-style house, but no breeze blew through them. What was with the weird weather? Still air was practically unheard of in Nantucket—living so close to the ocean there was always wind. Helen pulled on a thin tank top and a pair of her shortest shorts. Since she was too modest to go anywhere dressed so scantily, she decided to cook dinner. It was still her father’s week as kitchen slave and technically he was responsible for all the shopping, meals, and dishes for a few days yet, but she needed something to do with her hands or she’d use them to climb the walls.
Pasta in general was Helen’s comfort food, and lasagna was the queen of pasta. If she made the noodles from scratch, she’d be occupied for hours, just like she wanted, so she pulled out the flour and eggs and got to work.
When Jerry came home the second thing he noticed, after the amazing smell, was that the house was swelteringly hot. He found Helen sitting at the kitchen table, flour stuck to her sweaty face and arms, worrying the heart-shaped necklace, which