Chapter 30
West’s friends are exhausting, but Daphne and I discover pretty quickly that they’re so up their own asses it’s easy to stay out of their way.
Petra, a girl I can only describe as pointy—from her nose to her winged eyeliner to the hip bones jutting out of the top of her pleated miniskirt—is in Daphne’s SoulCycle class.
The two got to talking, and when Petra found out that Daphne was a writer, she invited her to spend the week at this retreat.
The instructor yelled at them to be quiet before Daphne could get more details.
When I ask Daphne if Petra is a writer, Daph admits that she thinks she’s a podcaster who also might be writing a play and running a Kickstarter to fund her online zine.
In the short time we’ve been here, I haven’t seen Petra write anything except a string of “hot take” tweets crafted to go viral.
But who am I to judge? I haven’t done much writing lately, either.
This cohort is young and beautiful and dressed in clothes that are both expensive and insane.
As West predicted, they sleep late and appear at dusk like a coven of malnourished vampires.
They unironically claim to be creating “art” while writing their Instagram captions.
They spend the evening basking in their own cleverness and cloaked in vapor.
Every conversation is buried under three layers of irony.
As soon as we meet, they “casually” mention that a reporter from the New York Times Culture Desk is visiting at the end of the week to write an article about them and the “microneighborhood” they haunt.
They call it Dimes Square, which is basically a concrete triangle at Canal and Division Streets in New York.
When I ask if that’s just gentrified Chinatown, they raise their eyebrows at one another meaningfully.
Simply put, they are delightfully insufferable.
Whenever we have the misfortune of being harangued by them, Daphne and I leave in stitches, grasping each other for support as we laugh.
We could try harder to avoid them, but pointy Petra might just be Daphne’s muse.
Their endless self-righteous conversations about everything from international politics to woke internet culture hit Daphne like a truck, and soon she’s twenty thousand words deep into a bloody thriller about a group of unlikable nepo babies getting murdered.
We create a schedule that looks like this: While they sleep, Daphne and I enjoy our WASP cosplay as we write on the wraparound porch.
When the sun sets and the temperature dips, we all eat dinner together on the back deck.
As their night is ramping up, Daphne and I head back to our room to gossip in between writing sprints.
Writing hasn’t been this easy in years. The words finally start to flow, and I credit the unbroken roar of the ocean in the distance and the salty sea air.
The porch swing.
Daphne’s encouragement.
Anything other than the fact that West and I are breathing the same air again.
It’s not because of the way my chest hurts when he looks at me from across the dinner table or because we brush our teeth side by side in the mornings.
On the first morning, he caught me wearing a Fox T-shirt as pajamas.
The smirk on his face was catastrophic. We’ve been sidestepping each other for two days, never in the same room for more than a few minutes.
He rounds a corner, and I quickly retreat. My palms are permanently damp.
Dinner tonight is a mountain of oysters and three lobster rolls to share between the eight of us.
(Tristan was high as a kite when he ordered and just hit buttons.) I’m not an oyster girl, and if I’d known this was dinner, I would have skipped with Daphne, but I’m starving, and she’s in a trance.
She’s already written ten thousand words today with no signs of stopping.
Tristan, Petra, and a DJ named Blake are at the table when I sit down. (No, I don’t know why a DJ is on a writing retreat. Yes, I asked.) Blake and Petra are debating religion—Scientology and Catholicism, respectively. I tune them out while I nudge an oyster onto my plate and stare it down.
“You squeeze the lemon juice on top,” Tristan says.
“Yeah, I know.”
“You looked confused.”
“I wasn’t.”
He waves his white napkin and exchanges a look with Blake. “Forgive me, I didn’t mean to mansplain.”
They laugh while Petra rolls her eyes. “Ignore them,” she says as she takes a hit off her vape. There’s an untouched lobster roll on her plate. My stomach growls. She tips her head back to blow blueberry-scented vapor into the sky before looking at me. “West said you’re a writer?”
“She wrote the book that that movie is based on,” Tristan says.
“No, no, don’t waste your words,” Petra drawls.
“What’s it called? Fire and Flame and Third Cliché Here?”
“Don’t be rude,” Petra says, the corner of her mouth curling up. “She’s my guest.”
“Actually, I’m here with West,” I say. I can’t help myself. The lie is worth the puckered confusion on Petra’s face.
“You know Emerson?” Tristan asks, appearing genuinely interested in me for the first time all week.
“Since college.”
“Is it Torched?” Blake’s staring at his phone. He missed the change of subject.
“Ooooh. Cinematic!” Tristan says.
Blake angles his phone so they can watch the trailer together. I sit opposite, watching them watch. Petra elbows Tristan in the side when he laughs at the dramatic climax.
“Cute!” Petra croons when it’s over.
“If I was in it for the money, I’d write something like that,” Tristan says. “Like taking candy from a baby.”
I care too little of his opinion to be upset by it. “I bet it’s easy not to be in it for the money when your parents own this house.”
Scientologist-slash-DJ Blake laughs so hard that sauvignon blanc squirts out his nose as West emerges from the house with damp hair and bare feet.
“I don’t think your friend Mars likes us,” Tristan says, and drains his glass. “We have too much privilege.”
“Don’t be an asshole,” West says.
Tristan turns to Petra. “Is ‘privilege’ the buzzword of the day? The insult that’s supposed to hurt us the most?”
“We should record that for the podcast,” Petra says.
“Now?”
“Now.”
“Don’t come inside for an hour,” she warns me and West. “Ambient noise will ruin the recording.” She, Tristan, and DJ Blake take their smoke and their post-woke, wannabe-edgelord humor inside the six-thousand-square-foot Martha’s Vineyard beachfront mansion.
“They get off on shocking people,” West says apologetically.
“I can tell.”
He sits in the vacant seat next to mine. His eyes look tired.
“So…your friends suck,” I say.
“Yep. Yeah. I’m increasingly aware.” He nods.
I lean toward him. “West, what are you doing here?”
“You’re here.”
“Because there’s something cultish about SoulCycle and Daphne is bad at saying no. What’s your excuse?” I rest my chin on my hands and wait.
“I know,” he says with a sigh, running a hand through his damp hair. “The guy who owns the press that published my book is part of all of this.” West gestures to the house.
“Okay. And?”
“And what? I’m in kind of deep with them.”
“Why? Because you sold them your novel for—and I’m guessing here—a fraction of its worth? They published it, the deal is done. You don’t owe them anything.”
“They have connections, Mars. They have a reporter from The New York Times coming to talk to us. That could be big for me.”
“You don’t need them! You have more talent than all of them combined.”
He looks surprised, and then uncomfortable. “You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do.”
“How?”
“I remember.” I turn sideways to face him and tuck one leg up under me. We’re treacherously close. The butterflies in my stomach wake from hibernation.
I remember, but I don’t know if he does.
When I’m feeling emotionally fragile, I sometimes wonder if I made it all bigger in my head. If, in the process of writing Fox and Juniper, I’ve mythologized our own history in a way that was outside of reality and then bought into my own lie. Maybe what we had is better on the page than off.
West’s gaze is searing. His hand lands on my bare skin, just above my knee, and silent acknowledgment passes between us. The set of West’s shoulders and the weight of his palm say the same thing: It was real. You didn’t imagine it.
I look down at his hand. Heat is building in all my dangerous places.
The glass pocket doors at the back of the house slide open. West withdraws his hand, seemingly unbothered. Meanwhile, my heart pounds like we’ve been caught by our parents. A bearded guy with no shirt on sticks his head out the door. I can’t remember his name.
He stifles a yawn. “Food?”
“Depends. Do you want oysters for breakfast?” I pick up the oyster from my plate and gag it down. It’s disgusting and unsexy. What a move.
“Pass.” Beardman vanishes back into the house.
West looks at the table. “Are you going to eat this?”
“Not if I don’t have to.”
“We could make dinner?”
I pretend to gasp. “Think of the ambient noise!”
He laughs, and I grin, feeling nineteen again.
“There’s nothing edible in the kitchen anyway. Except the edibles,” I add.
Under the table, West’s foot nudges mine. It feels like a question. I nudge back. A silent negotiation. What the outcome will be, I don’t know.
He takes a bracing breath. “Want to walk with me to town? Grab dinner? You can tell me more about how you hate all my friends.”
I sink my teeth into my bottom lip, tempted to tell him that I’d go anywhere he wanted. I’d put up with his awful friends for as long as it took. “Deal.”