Chapter 9
August
“Soulmates!” I said.
Fletcher looked up from his drawing and smiled, as if he had been waiting for this exact moment and was trying not to show it.
He dropped the marker on the coffee table and leaned back on his hands.
We had just won. Again. Our team for Pictionary was me, him, and Poppy.
Because we were an odd number of people (with Margaux there this year), we had pulled out names from a hat.
The hat decided to put me with Fletcher.
It also decided that Douglas would spend the next forty-five minutes partnered with Margaux, which he was handling with the patience of a very, very confused man.
Poppy jumped up.
“We won,” she announced, to the room, to the ceiling, to whoever was listening. “We won because August can read Fletcher’s terrible drawings and that is a skill no one else has.”
“My drawings are not terrible,” Fletcher said.
Callie held up the paper. The soulmates drawing looked like two potatoes holding hands next to what might have been a moon or possibly a wheel of cheese.
“The soul,” Poppy said, pointing, “looks like a kidney. How did you figure out that word, August?”
“I guess I do have a skill.” I said.
Then I looked again at the potatoes Fletcher drew and I started laughing.
I couldn’t stop. Every time I looked at the two potatoes I started again and Poppy’s face every time she looked at me laughing made it worse.
Fletcher was watching me laugh and trying to keep a straight face and not managing it at all.
Poppy grabbed both of our arms and pulled us into a hug, her small arms not quite reaching all the way around. I felt Fletcher go stiff for a second — just a second — the way he sometimes did when something got too close without warning. Then he let out a breath and the stiffness went away.
Over Poppy’s head, across the coffee table, Margaux was looking at me.
She looked at me the way you look at a stain on your shirt that you can’t do anything about until you get home.
“Fun game,” she said. “Should we play something else?” She looked around the circle. “Never Have I Ever. I’ll go first. You drink a shot of Vodka if you’ve never done the thing I say.”
She looked at Poppy.
“For children,” she said, very sweetly, “it’s lemonade.”
“I would prefer lemonade anyway, even if I was a hundred years old.” Poppy announced.
Jennifer and Douglas were already standing.
They had a cocktail thing with the Hendersons — family friends who summered one street over — and they’d been trying to extract themselves from Pictionary for the last three rounds without being rude about it.
Jennifer kissed the top of Poppy’s head.
Douglas collected his jacket from the armchair.
He told us not to stay up too late and looked at the vodka bottle on the table and then looked at Callie.
“Responsibly,” Callie said.
“Mm.” He left.
We sat in a circle on the rug. Me, Callie, Fletcher, Poppy, Margaux. The vodka was in the middle. Poppy’s lemonade glass was very full because she had refilled it in anticipation.
Margaux smiled. “I’ll start.”
“Never have I ever,” she said, “been on a private yacht.”
I drank a shot.
“Never have I ever,” Margaux said, “been to a black tie gala.”
I drank a shot again.
“Never have I ever had a personal stylist.”
Fletcher and I looked at each other. We both took shots.
We kept going. A skiing trip in Aspen. A private chef. A helicopter ride.
By the end of the round, I was down ten shots.
Fletcher was at one. Poppy had also not done most of the things Margaux was shooting at us, and she had taken a few shots of her lemonade as well.
Fletcher watched me carefully at each shot I took, and the more I got drunk, the more tense he seemed to be getting.
“Margaux, let’s stop this game.” Fletcher demanded.
“Come on, babe. This is fun. Okay, one last one, and then we stop.”
Margaux looked at the circle, and then buried her eyes on me.
She tilted her head slightly.
“Never have I ever,” she said, “been tucked into bed by my mother.”
The room went quiet.
Poppy, Fletcher and Callie looked too shocked to react.
I looked at the rug. It was a nice rug. A deep blue one with a cream border. I had always liked that rug. I focused on the pattern on it.
“Margaux.” Fletcher shouted. It was his boardroom voice, the one that meant someone had made a colossal mistake they’re going to pay dearly for.
“Enough. Stop it right now. We all know what you’re doing.”
Margaux opened her eyes wide. “What am I doing? We’re playing a game, Fletcher. If people are too sensitive—”
“Stop talking.”
“—that’s not my problem. I didn’t make the rules—”
“Margaux. Stop.” Fletcher shouted again.
She stopped.
Then she looked around the circle slowly. Her eyes moved over Callie, over Poppy, over me, and came back to Fletcher.
“You always have a problem with what I say,” she said.
Her voice had changed. The sweetness was gone and something underneath it was showing, something raw and shaky.
“Everything I do. Every single thing. Why did you even invite me here?” She looked at all of us.
“You all make me feel like— like I’m not wanted here.
Like I’m in the way. Like you’d all be much happier if I just—”
She stopped.
Her chin was trembling. She started crying.
She got up and walked to the patio. The sliding door opened and closed behind her.
Fletcher sat there for a second. He looked at me. He looked sorry in every possible way a person could look sorry. Sorry for Margaux saying it, sorry for not stopping her faster, sorry for the vodka and the whole evening.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Go.”
He went.
Callie picked up the vodka bottle and looked at my glass. “Do you need any more of this?”
“I’m fine.”
Poppy was watching the patio door. “She thinks we don’t like her,” she said. “And we think she doesn’t like us. The only person she actually likes here is Fletcher.” She looked at me and Callie. She mouthed two words: The Calloway Name.
Callie covered her mouth.
I laughed before I could stop it. Then I felt bad for laughing and pressed my lips together and looked at the patio door and felt bad all over again.
The room was quiet. Outside, through the glass, I could see the shapes of Fletcher and Margaux on the patio.
The curtains were half drawn and the sliding door was open a crack and I could hear the ocean but not their words.
Fletcher was standing, his back to us. Margaux was facing him.
She was still crying, or close to it. Her shoulders were doing the small shaking thing.
“Maybe we should say sorry,” I said.
Callie looked at me.
“If she feels unwanted—”
“August.”
“That was never our intention. I don’t want anyone to feel like that.”
“It was absolutely my intention,” Poppy said. “I was very intentional about it.”
“She called you a fixture,” Poppy said. “And part of the furniture. And a flower girl. And a charity case. And she said that thing just now.” She held up her fingers and counted. “That is five things. In three days.”
“Poppy is right,” Callie said. “August, we’re all adults. She’s not sixteen. She’s been doing this since she arrived.” She leaned over and put her hand on my knee. “You did not make her feel unwanted. She has been the one making you feel unwanted. Those are not the same thing.”
“She’s crying on the patio.”
“She is a very good crier,” Poppy said.
I looked at the patio door.
I thought about the mother thing. The way Margaux had said it — tucked into bed by my mother — looking at the circle but meaning it directly at me, with that tilt of the head and that small smile. She heard me say it and she had used it. I was aware of that. I wasn’t stupid.
But she was also standing on a patio crying because she felt like nobody in this house liked her, and there was something about that I couldn’t entirely dismiss.
“I’m going to go say something,” I said.
“August—”
“Just something small. I won’t apologize for things that aren’t my fault. But if she’s feeling—”
“She is performing,” Poppy said.
“She might also be actually upset. Both things can be true.”
Poppy looked at me the way she looked at the sandcastle when I made the walls too narrow. Like she respected the effort but predicted the outcome.
I stood up. I straightened my top. I walked toward the patio.
The curtains were drawn most of the way across the sliding door. There was a gap, maybe four inches, where the door was still cracked open. Through it I could see the edge of the patio, the railing, the dark water beyond. I could see Fletcher’s arm. I could see Margaux’s shoulder.
Their voices were low. Too low to make out.
I lifted my hand to knock on the glass.
And then Fletcher said my name.
I heard it clearly. My name, in his mouth, on the patio. I went still with my hand raised.
I stayed behind the curtain.
I heard every word of what he said next.
I had spent five years wondering what Fletcher Calloway truly felt about me. And now, five years of almost-moments and what-ifs meshed together in one sentence. Five years of hope I kept folding up small and carrying around, shattered by just a few words.
Now I knew.
***