Mascara blotted, Melody heaved a sigh and managed to look like a beautiful, sad girl. No red, running nose. No blotchy skin. No fair.
“Hey, those shoes are really adorable,” she said, sniffling again. “Where’d you get them?”
For a moment, I thought she was alluding to those damned silver sneakers I’d dreaded lacing up day after day for two months, even though she’d never spoken another word to me. But her pale green eyes were wide and sincere. She had no recollection of what she’d done to me five years earlier, or my association with the nickname Boyce had invented that still made her livid.
“Barney’s. In New York?” I answered.
Since I was only thirteen, Mama and Thomas had taken me along on their honeymoon. We’d stayed in a suite at the Plaza, where I had my own room and watched television all night in the king-sized bed in an attempt to obstruct all thoughts about what was going on in the adjacent bedroom. We’d spent our days shopping and visiting places like the Empire State Building and MoMA and Ground Zero. Evenings, we walked through Times Square and saw a Broadway show and ate at restaurants that made Mama nervous about silverware use and what she was wearing. Thomas had smirked in a charmingly smitten sort of way and told her she could eat her mushroom risotto with her soupspoon or her roasted duck breast with her dessert fork for all he cared.
“You went shopping in New York? Lucky!” Melody said. “Mama and I go shopping in Houston every spring break, but that’s not even the same.”
I shrugged, unsure what to say to a girl I’d wanted to punch in the nose for years, who was now regarding me with jealous admiration. We exited the bathroom together minutes later, and had been friends ever since.
Me: Melody told me about your dad. I would say I’m sorry…
Boyce: Yeah, don’t waste your sympathy.
Boyce: See you around while you’re home?
I stared at his question, harmlessly asked—another behind it. Mama’s words rose up: You’ve never been afraid of any challenge—never in your life. Untrue. So untrue.
I’d confided in one person when I received that acceptance e-mail over winter break. Not my boyfriend. Not Melody or my sorority sisters. Not my university peers—the ones applying for and in many cases not being accepted into leading graduate programs. Not my parents.
But I’d told Boyce without hesitation. I’d told him in the voice of someone who wasn’t planning to follow that dream and disillusion everyone she knew in the process.
He’d taken one look at me and gotten straight to the heart of everything. “When are you going to stop being afraid to live your life, Pearl?”
No one ever asked me that. No one knew it. I was the valedictorian of our high school class. I’d gone away to college and worked my ass off, graduating with highest honors. I’d been accepted into more than one of the most prestigious medical schools in the country. I looked like I had life by the scruff of the neck, but that was an illusion. Because I was scared to death of who I really was and what I really wanted. And somehow he knew. He’d always known.
Me: Yes. I’ll be here all summer.
Chapter Five
Boyce
I wasn’t sure when Pearl would leave for medical school, or even where she’d decided to go, but she said she’d be around all summer. Which meant her boyfriend might come around again. He’d been here for a week last year, chatting up her parents and making douchebag cracks about the place we’d grown up. I’d only been around him twice, but it had taken a shit-ton of self-control to keep my fist from bashing all the jabs about our hometown right back into his mouth. He’d paraded his intelligence like it gave him the excuse to be a superior fuck to her too.
After he finally vamoosed, Pearl and I met up at our spot along the beach—an alcove cut into the dunes where one of the island’s hotel monstrosities had built a private boardwalk to the public beach. Not many people came and went through the locked gate once it was dark, and the dunes—full of cactus and wild vegetation and the occasional snake—screened the beachside portion of the boardwalk from the lit patios and balconies of the hotel’s occupants.
When I got there, she’d looked up from one of the wide, sandy steps and asked what I thought of him.
“He’s a prick,” I said, lowering myself next to her.
“Wow. Tell me what you really think.”
I shrugged. “You asked, so I assumed you wanted the truth.” She nodded, so I went one step further. “I don’t like how he talks to you. I think he could hurt you, and it had better go no further than emotional damage or I’ll have to end him.”
She’d rocked back, head angling to the side like it did whenever she was trying to work out something complicated. Funny, considering I’ve always been anything but. Boyce Wynn: what you see is what you get.
“Jesus, Boyce. What did he say to make you think that?”
“It’s not what he says so much as how he says it.”
She frowned. My answer wasn’t good enough for a girl who lived and breathed hard facts.
“Are you… jealous? I know Mitchell had access to opportunities you didn’t have, and his family is supportive of his academic ambitions. But they aren’t rich or anything.”
She thought I was jealous of her boyfriend’s awesome childhood or his fancy education? Fuck me. “Nothing to do with money or opportunities I wouldn’t want even if they were offered. He’s smart. I get it. And he makes damned sure everybody knows it.”