1. August
(a ridiculous name i blame my mom for)
Summer break—two of the best words in the English language—promising lazy days on the beach, waffle cones at Tony’s Surf Shack, and burritoing myself in my blanket until noon. The welcome end of senior year also means that Valentine (I call her Tiny) and I are back in business after officially removing the “be back soon” sign from the front page of our website. It only took forty-eight hours for the whisper network (as Tiny calls it) to realize we’d returned, it took five hours of interviewing worried parents and best friends to choose our first case, and it’ll take just three weeks of digging around in other people’s lives to complete it.
Tiny kicks off her flip-flops on the dock that connects our backyards and sits down next to me, letting her feet dangle above the calm water. Lights appear on her porch in preparation for evening and crickets hum in the brush. Illuminated, Tiny’s large house dominates our small inlet. In comparison, my family’s small Victorian with the peeling paint looks like an unkempt garage.
She opens the notebook she’s holding and pushes a stray piece of straight brown hair behind her ear. Her expression is smug. “Guess who just got off the phone with Katie’s best friends?” She wags her eyebrows at me. “Me, that’s who. They were gushing about us, August. GUSH-ING. They said she’s happier than they’ve ever seen her, that she’s excited about college again, that she actually started talking to her parents over dinner like she used to. They said they’re writing us a rave review.”
In our small harborside town in Massachusetts, summer jobs are easy pickings. Rich vacationers from Boston and New York flood rental properties with luggage piled high in convertibles, cash in hand, and the local businesses can’t hire fast enough. But Tiny and I aren’t applying at one of the waterfront restaurants. We aren’t trying to be lifeguards or gathering references to work on one of the yachts in the harbor. In fact, no one in our town knows what we do. Our friends think we’ve had some elusive intern job with Tiny’s dad’s music production company in Boston for the past year and a half. And our families think we work for a catering company. But really, we break people up for a living through a business with the cheesiest name imaginable—Summer Love Inc. —a combination of our names, August and Valentine.
Tiny (the creator) loves the name, and she loves love. She believes that we’re speeding people along on their path to finding their soulmates, steering relationships off a cliff so they can find better matches down the road. But me? I like the Inc.—a clinical suffix for a company that exposes relationships for what they really are so people can heal. And well, this job is personal, a service I wish had existed for my sister.
“Good,” I reply. It’s nice to know we helped Katie, the kind of nice that lifts your chin and bolsters your step. I smile at the water, the small ripples catching the last of the evening light and transforming it into a moving canvas. Without meaning to, I sketch a fast line drawing on it in my thoughts—a weird reflex that I thought had gone away.
Tiny laughs. “Will you stop being emo for five minutes and focus? I have some golden info here on our new case and I need you to appreciate my genius.”
I turn away from the water, my imaginary drawing dissolving into ripples, and I look at her. Her white T-shirt falls low on one shoulder, exposing the top of her bathing suit, and she wears a grin—all enthusiasm. I told her recently (in the middle of an optimistic rant about how she’d survive the zombie apocalypse and create a better world) that in her past life she was a Christmas tree or Fourth of July fireworks, something celebratory and neon and way over the top. To which she replied that in my last life I was Oscar the Grouch, only I made art out of found objects.
“Our new case,” I repeat.
“Exactly. So excited to be back at it. All that time off for finals felt like a lifetime and a half,” Tiny says, not needing me to say more than three words to understand me—she’s been translating my nonspeak since we were toddlers. “How ready are you to swoop in, expose some crapjock boyfriend, and then cry about having to go back to Canada and return to your job shearing sheep nuts?”
I laugh. “I never cry. Their transformations just hit hard sometimes and I get a little misty.”
She stares at me for a long second. “Right, because crying was the most objectionable part of what I said.”
“Shearing sheep nuts is honest work.”
“First of all, no. Just no.” Tiny’s smile is big and warm, the kind that’s contagious, the kind I imitate when I do these jobs but can’t seem to find in my everyday life. While I’m definitely better at pretending to be other people than I am at being August, Tiny’s the opposite. She’s been absolutely herself since always.
Tiny flips open her notebook. “And second of all, I’m quizzing you, so get ready.” She tilts the page away from me, not that I’d be able to read her massively terrible handwriting. “Start with the basics—full name, birthday, etc.”
I lean back, resting my palms against the wood of the dock, easing into our familiar routine. “Ella Becker. Born August eighteenth in a small town near Boston not unlike this one, where she’s lived her entire life—”
“Correction: no place is as small as this town.” A town that Tiny’s been planning on leaving since she found out planes existed. “Now, back to Ella.”
I shoot her a smile—because on this we agree: the farther we can get from here the better. “Her favorite movie is Romeo and Juliet, the version with Leonardo DiCaprio. She spends most afternoons at the coffee shop with friends.” I picture Ella’s parents, who we interviewed in a café twenty miles from here to avoid running into anyone we knew.
“She’s always been independent, fiercely strong willed,” Ella’s mother explained as she took small sips of her mint tea. “But this past year everything shifted.”
Tiny flipped through the folder of background information we requested from them. I could already tell she liked the case by the way she was rereading some of the details.
Ella’s father pressed his lips together and straightened his broad shoulders. He had a precise haircut that you might expect from someone in the military, but he was really just a finance guy with an affinity for order. “It all started with her dating this boy, this absolute cocky—” he said, and Ella’s mom touched his arm. He paused. “Anyway, it all started with him. Not two weeks after she began dating him, she gave up her position on the school newspaper to join cheerleading because he’s a football player. Then she started applying to schools she never cared about because that’s where her friends want to go.” He leaned forward. “We’ve been working on her college list since she was a freshman: she desperately wanted to go to Europe; she’s passionate about travel journalism. Now, even though she got into her dream school in London, she’s accepted a godforsaken college in Massachusetts—” Another touch from Ella’s mom as his volume increased.
Tiny and I exchanged a knowing glance.
Ella’s mom sighed. “We’ve held off on rejecting the London school, figuring she’d change her mind, but the final deadline is just four weeks away and she still says she’s not going. We don’t know what else to do. We’re desperate for help.”
I nodded and Tiny flipped to the “Information” page in her notebook. But before she could tell them about our process—how we research and execute our plan—Ella’s father interrupted her.
“Whatever you’re thinking of asking for this job, triple it,” her father said. “I’ll pay anything to get him away from her before that acceptance deadline.”
“Boyfriend?” Tiny asks, looking at her notebook.
“Justin,” I reply. “Friends with her friends and a central part of her social group. Popular. Football player. The kind of bro who does donuts on the front lawn of the school in his dad’s Porsche and then doesn’t get in trouble because his parents claim the car was stolen instead of making him own up to it. Obsessed with himself—”
“And his hair,” Tiny interjects. “The time spent on that coif is a lot, and the time spent documenting that coif in selfies is even more.” She looks at me with a mischievous smirk. “But alas, not everyone is blessed with a side-part, natural hair flip like you.”
I shoot her a warning look that only makes her smile grow. When we were twelve, I made the mistake of telling her I thought my best feature was my hair and she’s never let me forget it.
“Ella’s interests?” she asks before I can dredge up an embarrassing memory of hers to counter with.
“Travel—wants to be a journalist.”
Tiny waits a beat, but when I don’t continue, she says, “Right. But you forgot to mention that she has a super popular horoscope blog that she’s low-key obsessed with.”
I cringe. “I didn’t forget.”
Tiny rolls her eyes. “August Mariani, you can’t ignore an important part of her life just because you think it’s ridiculous.”
I open my mouth to argue, but I know she’s right.
“Social status?” she continues.
I scratch my eyebrow. I’ve never liked this section of the assessment. I know it’s important, key really, to getting someone out of a crappy relationship, but that’s the part that bothers me. “Was a bit of a nerd growing up. And now she’d be cast in a lead role in Mean Girls.”
“Big-time popular,” Tiny agrees.
Before I can respond, a screen door snaps shut on the small house next to Tiny’s and out comes a shirtless muscled dude in khaki shorts and penny loafers. Bentley Cavendish—the prep to end all preps, with a name that could make aristocrats feel common. He’s also the only other person our age who lives in this inlet.
“Yo, Valentine!” he says with a grin, clunking down a cooler on his part of the dock. “Party at my house, nine o’clock.” He doesn’t bother to include me in the invitation. He’s been mastering the art of ignoring me since ninth grade, when he asked Tiny out and she said no. He refused to believe it had anything to do with him and instead decided that I was the problem.
Tiny shrugs. “Sorry, it’s movie night,” she calls across the short stretch of water.
Bentley shakes his head. He knows all about movie night; he even came to a few when we were in middle school and repeatedly pointed out that we don’t watch the movies so much as talk at the screen and quote our favorite lines in sync with the actors. “Tell me you’re not really going to spend the firstFriday night of summer watching old movies you’ve seen a million times when you could be cannonballing off the dock into a narwhal?” He motions toward a box of inflatable animal-shaped tubes.
Tiny lifts her hands as though it’s an immovable fact. “Yup. But thanks for inviting us.”
Us. This is what it means to have a best friend: there’s no flaunting that she was invited and I wasn’t—everyone knows Valentine is a hundred times cooler than me anyway—and there’s no subtle regret that she’s missing out.
Tiny turns from Bentley without a second thought. “Also, can we pause a second and talk about how much money her parents offered us?” she says. “This job is the rest of what we need for the first year of Berkeley tuition.” She looks at me to join in on her enthusiasm.
Berkeley’s business program is THE dream. But her comment on tuition isn’t about her—her parents can and will pay—it’s about me. And right now, the last thing I want to tell her is that I used my entire savings to help my mom with bills this past year. But it’s fine; I don’t have to. This job should get me back on track before tuition is due.
“We’ve only got four short weeks to break them up, August,” she continues like maybe I don’t understand what a big deal this is.
While I’m with Tiny on the good-news part, to me it all sounds like pressure. Not to mention we only get paid if we complete the job. “It’s nuts,” I say.
“Not that we’re doing this for the money, but man, is it a perk,” she adds even though she doesn’t need to—we would never take a case without merit.
There are rules (documented in one of Tiny’s lists). Rules we argued over when we first started this business two years ago, trying to ensure that we wouldn’t wind up working for friends who were doing it for selfish reasons, for parents who were trying to control their kids, or worse, for anyone who was a discriminating jerk. The idea isn’t to manipulate people into breaking up but to expose what’s really there, lay bare the truth and let them do the rest.
HOW TO CHOOSE A CASE:
1) Clients fill out an electronic form detailing why they need our service
2) Interview the ones whose concerns make the cut
3) Do independent research to confirm relationships are harmful
4) Choose the most urgent or time sensitive relationship
And with Ella, it’s number four. The decisions Ella makes in these next few weeks will change her life.
“What do you want your name to be for this one?” Tiny asks, bringing the conversation back to strategy.
While I dislike the social-assessment part of this job, it’s fun creating a new identity—and strangely liberating. “Holden,” I say with a grin.
She smirks. “Pretentious much?”
“Totally. And if her town is like ours, then I’ll just be another rich summer tourist with a boat and a heart of gold.”
Tiny laughs. “That’s actually kind of perfect. Must get your genius from me.”
“What about your name?”
“Mia,” she says without needing to think about it, “same as always.” She pauses to read over some scribbled notes. “Well then, Holden, I say we try the Pretty in Pink strategy to start, and let you swoop in as the sweet preppy hero.”
“I mean... that should work—” I start.
“Oh, it’ll work,” Tiny says, cutting me off.
“It’s weird how you struggle with confidence. You should really work on that. Maybe commune with a narwhal while cannonballing with a shirtless dude.”
She puts her notebook down on the dock and looks up at me innocently, not that I buy it. I know she’s plotting. Half a second later she makes her move—a shove. But I’m ready, and the instant her hand hits my shoulder, I grab her wrist, pulling her off the dock with me.
She yelps in surprise as she hits the cool water and goes under. But the moment she resurfaces, she’s laughing again.
She wipes water off her face. “You suck, August.”
I push back my dripping hair. “You mean Holden?”
“I mean, wow, Holden, you’re so dreamy. And look at those muscles, you must work out... on your boat, in between buying an island and drinking a martini with your pinkie in the air,” she says overarticulating with gestures and facial expressions.
“Damn. That was convincing. Maybe we should switch spots on this one—you get close to Ella, and I’ll do the brilliant strategizing.”
“Pffft,” Tiny says, disturbing the droplets of water around her mouth and enjoying that I just called her brilliant. While Tiny takes the acting lead on a case here or there, she’s more than happy to hand over the majority of it to me, naming herself the mastermind; but if you ask me, it’s because she gets too attached to the subjects. Even the word subject bothers her—They’re people, August. PEOPLE, capital P, she says.
“Put your game face on, August.” Tiny kicks her feet up, splashing me in the process. “Because tomorrow we officially start the biggest case we’ve ever had.”
I smile and lean back in the water, letting it hold my weight. Summer. Is. The. Absolute. Best.