Chapter Four #2
She swept her eyes over the offerings. “You’ve done well, Adam.” She smiled at me in kindness. “Next round, could you use more honey? Don’t fix these - they’re fine. We have too many hungry guests, and we need to get food out there.”
I picked up the tray and balanced in one hand, hoping I looked more comfortable and much smoother than I felt.
Fuck, I was so out of place, and the garments hanging on my body only served as confirmation of that.
I’d seen parties like these in Hollywood films, but never dreamed of attending one.
Of course, I wasn’t attending—I was working—but I still found myself lost among the glittering guests and bustling staff hurrying to meet each demand.
I estimated more than two hundred people were at the party.
I had never seen that many people in one place before.
“Would anyone like a crostini?” I asked the first group of people I encountered after leaving the kitchen, a man who looked to be in his seventies and two women wearing a garish amount of makeup over their surgically enhanced features.
The three guests hardly acknowledged me, but I didn’t expect them to.
Instead, when they didn’t take any of the offerings, I moved away, threading myself deeper into the crowd.
Thousands of twinkling lights crisscrossed overhead, wrapping in between and around the palm trees in the backyard. People, dressed in some of the finest clothing I’d ever seen, drank champagne and laughed with each other. I caught tidbits of their conversations.
“We’re ending the year so well; the fourth quarter estimates are really strong…”
“…and that’s why we’re spending New Year’s Eve in Exuma…”
“I hate New York this time of year. I swear my blood will freeze…”
“…and you really must go to Jackson Hole in January. Some of my favorite skiing…”
“Oh God, there’s Robert and Vicky. The two of them have enough social clout to get a window seat at IHOP.”
“He’s CEO of Web Solutions, the data management firm, and…”
I offered appetizers to the various groups I encountered, trying as hard as possible to make myself small and insignificant, just as Martin had instructed that afternoon.
Rich people wanted things to simply appear in life, they didn’t want to have to ask for them.
Being a good server meant anticipating their unspoken needs, and—
I almost dropped the half-empty tray into the pool.
At the other end of it stood Lila, talking with her father and three other guests. Of course, I knew she’d be there, but the bustle of requirements and menial tasks needed to help pull off this party had pushed thoughts of her, and her origami boats, from my mind.
But damn. She looked gorgeous.
Lila wore a red dress and a pair of black dress shoes.
Her hair had been arranged in spiraling curls, and it seemed for a moment as if she had a sort of halo around her, a light that seemed aimed only on her, coming from somewhere above, as if it wanted to make sure I saw her that night.
I didn’t think I’d ever seen anyone so beautiful in my life.
In fact, seeing her stirred something inside me I hadn’t felt before, something I didn’t understand.
But as I watched, she swiped twice at her eyes after her father and his friends turned away from her. Wait, was she crying? I watched her for a few more seconds. Yes, yes, she was crying.
And as soon as I realized that, she fled the backyard, disappearing inside the house. What the fuck? What did they just say to her?
Lila
15 YEARS OLD
What was I to my parents? Something to put on display? An acquisition to reflect their perfect lives? Did they even love me? Of course, they did—why did I wonder—but why were they always treating me like a petit four or a macaroon in the dinner party of their lives?
“Lila’s just back from Hempstead,” Dad said to George Crane, one of his golf buddies who came down from Boston for the season in Palm Beach, each time with a different, much younger woman in tow. “She started school there this fall. Can’t remember if I told you about that the last time I saw you.”
“It’s been too long since we’ve hit the links.” George sized me up as he chomped on a miniature egg roll. “Hempstead, huh? What an excellent school.”
“She’s doing great things there, and we’re very proud,” Dad said. “Her teachers are impressed.”
I stared at my father, more than a little taken aback.
He knew that comment wasn’t the truth—he’d seen my grades and he’d read the email from the school administrators about my overall academic performance.
We’d even had a family meeting about it in his office the night after I arrived home for the break.
I’d cried, and Mom had made little comments about having an expensive education, how lucky I should feel to get to attend school, and how I would have to work twice as hard because failing wasn’t an option for a girl like me.
Then they’d insisted on the Latin tutoring to help me “get ahead.”
Now here Dad was, insisting to his friend that I was something I wasn’t.
“What is your favorite subject?” George asked me.
“Um.” I gulped. I didn’t have one. “English.”
“Lila is excellent with languages. A real whiz.” Dad gave me a wink.
Everyone else would have taken that as a kind gesture, a moment of proud endearment, but I knew what it really meant.
I heard warning—do not challenge me, Lila.
Don’t even think about it. “She’s studying Latin during her time home. ”
“Impressive,” George said. “Not enough attention on a subject like that. Latin is the root of all languages and should be appreciated.”
Dad put his hand on the small of my back.
Again, another warning. He wanted me to go along with what he said, even though I knew it wasn’t the truth.
“Her tutor says it’s remarkable the speed in which she has been able to pick up the conjugations of verbs.
Many students struggle with the tenses and pronunciation. ”
“And many would rather spend all their time on their phones, messaging their friends.”
Dad laughed at George’s small joke, and the pressure of his hand increased. “Lila doesn’t do that.”
“No, sir, I don’t,” I added dutifully, but without bothering to explain why. I didn’t have any friends. Not really. Not beyond the small circle I’d made at Palm Beach Country Day, and they’d all moved on now that we were in high school. Several of us studied at some far-flung preparatory academy.
“Good girl.” George sipped his cocktail. “Maybe this next generation isn’t completely lost, eh?”
“Not with her around,” Dad replied.
I teetered back and forth on my suddenly uncomfortable black heels and wondered for a moment if I might throw up.
I couldn’t take any more of this charade.
It was a joke, a farce, a play which forced me to act like a person I wasn’t—a confident, smart, vivacious, well-rounded, perfect fifteen-year-old who fit right into my parents’ glittering world.
Everything my parents did had calculation, every step and every conversation designed to make sure they stayed atop the social pyramid in Palm Beach.
They might not be the island’s richest people, but they were among the town’s most respected, and that had endless credits of its own.
“Lila knows what’s expected of her.” Dad’s grip tightened. “What she needs to do as a Montague. And what the consequences are if she doesn’t.” He glanced at me, and I saw the warning behind his eyes, the message meant only for me. “And I am sure she won’t let me down.”
“Please excuse me,” I croaked, totally horrified, searching for a way out, anything to remove myself from the embarrassment and shame I felt for being unable to live up to the Montague ideal. “I’ll be right back.”
I got barely ten feet away when the tears started falling.
What a mess. My life was nothing but that.
I swiped at my cheeks and rushed to the perimeter of the pool deck, then crept along the wall of the house, hoping to God my parents’ important and influential guests wouldn’t notice I was crying, wouldn’t notice that unlike them, I wanted to be anyone and anywhere else that night.
When I reached the open sliding glass door that separated the courtyard from the east wing of the house, I slipped through it.
The party faded into the background as I moved into the sitting room, but I resisted the urge to shut it out further by yanking the door shut behind me. I didn’t want anyone to realize I’d fled.
At least the sitting room was empty.
I put my hand on my heaving chest and willed myself to relax.
It didn’t do much good, and I sent up a silent curse, angry and annoyed with myself for letting my emotions get the best of me, for letting my father’s incessant bragging unsettle me to the point I just wanted to board a rocket ship for Venus or any other place far, far away from there.
With my chest still heaving, I surveyed the French revival furniture in the room.
The love seat, matching chairs, and coffee table were all stiff and immaculate, and the space itself was more of a statement about what we had than about comfort.
Almost no one spent any time here; I’d last been in the room for the Palm Beach Ladies Guild tea my mom threw every year in the spring.
No, I wouldn’t stay in here.
Instead, I left the room and moved to the one place I knew no one would come looking for me, the one place I loved in the house even more than I loved my bedroom—the library.
It was warm where the rest of the house was cold.
I’d often found refuge and solace among the floor-to-ceiling shelves that held hundreds of books, many of them dating back to my great-great-great-grandfather’s rare book collection, the one he started when he made his first million at the end of the 1890s.
Exhausted, I shut the library door behind me and sank into the overstuffed brown leather sofa.
It’s okay, Lila, it’s going to be okay…