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Jake could tell his mom was in awe of him, that this new life she’d pulled Jake into was a kind of fantasy to her, a life of stylish leisure that she’d always dreamed of. The way she gazed at him, her chin on her hand, barely blinking her big blue eyes—it was like she was disappearing into his aura. Cameron hardly noticed how starstruck she was. He seemed to assume that women would respond to him this way.
“It was drifting sideways, a good hundred yards out already. The bay was so deep that the anchor hadn’t reached the bottom. So we had no choice, we had to dive. Operation Save the Boat. My first foray into extreme sports.”
Pouring with one hand while gesticulating and illustrating his story with the other, he almost unnoticeably kept Jake’s mom’s wineglass full of pinot gris.
Jake quietly took it all in, trying to make sense of his new reality. His mom’s romance with Cameron Pendergrass had been a whirlwind of frantic change. She’d met him only four months ago, when he’d hired Tiki Tiki Java to cater a reception at StarFish, the glitzy hotel he owned in Dream Point. Jake had barely met the guy before they’d suddenly gotten engaged and then, two weeks later, married, in a secret ceremony that not even Jake had been invited to on that yacht somewhere off the coast of St. John. He was happy for his mom, of course. She’d been lonely for a long, long time. But he was baffled by how to relate to Cameron. The guy intimidated him.
“You want a pour?” Cameron asked Jake, pointing the half-empty wine bottle at Jake’s glass.
Jake glanced at his mother, who subtly shook her head no. “No thank you, sir,” he said.
“It’s Cameron to you, Jake. We’re family now.”
A voice from the other side of the room called out, “I’ll have a glass. Since you’re offering.”
Everyone turned to see a guy Jake’s age leaning against the wall near the front door to the house like he’d been there for a while, watching them. He was tall, though not as tall as Jake, and fit under his formfitting rich-navy-blue T-shirt in a metrosexual way. He had stylishly cut blond hair and was wearing sunglasses that must have cost as much as Jake’s car.
The way Jake’s mom lightly touched Cameron’s hand, as though to brace him and calm his nerves, made Jake think that the guy wasn’t welcome. He wondered who he was and how he’d gotten here.
“Glad you could make it,” Cameron said. “You’re only, oh”—he made a show of checking his Omega watch—“two hours late.”
When the guy smirked it was like he was flashing a switchblade. “Well, you know, anything for you, Cameron,” he said. “How ’bout that wine?”
He sauntered toward the table like he owned the place and the waiter appeared out of nowhere to silently set a fourth place setting at the table.
As Cameron grudgingly poured a dollop of wine into the glass that had appeared with the new place setting, Jake caught his mother’s eye and mouthed, Who’s that?
She cleared her throat. “Jake, this is Nathaniel. Cameron’s son. He’s in town from the Roderick School in Atlanta. Nathaniel, this is my son, Jake.”
With a flourish, Nathaniel reached out his hand to shake. “How are you,” he said, and then after a pause he added, “brother.”
His grip was a vise, like he’d been told by someone—Jake couldn’t imagine it would have been laid-back Cameron—that a firm handshake was the key to success in the world and he’d turned this wisdom into a competitive dare.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said, glancing at his father. “I had, you know, other things to do.”
Cameron patted him on the back, shot him a sharp glance, and said, “You’ll do better next time.”
Jake’s mom chimed in. She’d always been good at playing the gracious hostess. “We’re just glad you could make it at all,” she said. “It means a lot to your father. And I can say, for me, I’ve been dying to meet you since he first mentioned you.”
“Oh,” Nathaniel said drolly, “he mentioned me?”
“Of course he did. He loves you, Nathaniel.” She gave Cameron’s hand one last pat and then withdrew her own hand back into her lap.
Nathaniel grinned at this, showing off his sharp white teeth, and seeming, briefly, touched by what he’d heard. “Aww. Shucks,” he said.
The tension between Cameron and Nathaniel was overpowering. Jake could sense it in the way Cameron subtly adjusted his posture to make more room between himself and his son. He could feel it in the sharp end to Nathaniel’s charm, the way he was displaying his refusal to defer to his father.
He again wished Elena could be here to see this. He tried to imagine her making one of her silly faces at him, secretly letting him know she was noticing the same weirdness he was and reminding him simply by sticking out her tongue that he shouldn’t take it too seriously.
“Now—” Nathaniel took a swig of wine, downing the small amount his father had allowed him in one swallow. “That cliff. It was a hundred-foot sheer drop. The water was so clear that you could see the floor. I have this right, Cameron? Should I tell them how it ends? They survived. They saved the boat. That’s Cameron for you. He’ll do anything to save that boat.” He raised his empty glass and said, “But cheers to that, hey?”
Cameron met his challenge and graciously, indulgently, touched glasses with him. “Cheers to that,” he said.
Jake got the sense that Cameron could squash Nathaniel any time he wanted and it was just his good heart that stopped him from doing so. He wondered what had brought the two of them to this point, and how long their antagonism had persisted. Nathaniel’s behavior didn’t seem like the usual teenaged rebellion.
It felt uncomfortable just being in the room with them. There was a story here, a lifetime of resentments and secrets that Jake might never know. If Elena were here, she’d be taking mental notes so they could go over it all together later, dreaming up explanations filled with dangerous intrigue. But she wasn’t here. And even though she was just a couple miles across town, she seemed farther away than she ever had. It struck him that this was the first time in forever that he’d have spent an evening away from her.
4 (#ulink_2b004646-479f-5ff3-bfc9-163092d158d6)
Even with her headphones on and the volume turned up as high as it would go, Elena could hear her father and sister going at it on the other side of her locked bed-room door.
Sitting at the drafting table she used as a desk, she tried to ignore them, to fill her headspace up with the new clips her friends on AnAmerica had uploaded. There was a spoof of Hello Kitty by EvilTwin82 in which the cute pillowy cat was mutilated into a cartoonish sea of blood. There was an amusing journey through the daily life of an ant by NaNo_NoLa. An abstract dance of colored lights choreographed to a Yo-Yo Ma song by CelloMello. Another installment in the ongoing saga of “The 98-Pound Weakling” by ImNotNervous. But none of them held her attention the way she needed. None of them could compete with the never-ending soap opera of her family.
They were arguing over the remote now. Her dad was saying something about the Heat, how there was a crucial game against the Pacers tonight and no way was he going to let Nina stop him from watching it, even if she was pregnant. Elena didn’t even want to know.
She watched a clip of a crime-fighting dog and cat who solved their cases, usually involving evil squirrels, by accident as they chased each other around the neighborhood. She liked this one. FranSolo was the name of the girl who’d created it. Elena wrote a comment on her page. “I always knew those squirrels were up to no good!”
Having run out of clips to watch, she got down to work uploading her new animation—the one she’d made for Jake—to the site.
Electra, her online tag, was a kind of celebrity on AnAmerica, and she knew a lot of love would be coming her way soon. With nothing better to do with herself, she sat back and stared at the screen, waiting for the outpouring of likes and comments to rack up under her new clip.
And here they came. One, two, three, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five likes. It felt good to see them every time, though she didn’t know why—it’s not like they really meant anything. The comments started rolling in.
“Toy Story is the best movie ever!”
“So sorry to hear Jaybird is moving away!”
“Very cool, Electra!”
As usual, everyone was so nice to her here. So why did she still feel so empty inside? Stupid question. She knew why.
The sound of the basketball game blasted from the TV in the other room. And her father’s voice: “So go somewhere else, Nina. It’s not like you forgot how to walk when you got pregnant.”
She whipped out her phone and shot a text to Jake. “YOUR VIDEO IS LIVE.” Then she immediately sent him another one. “I MISS YOU!”
His response came within seconds. “I MISS YOU TOO! RICH PEOPLE ARE WEIRD!”
For the first time all evening she felt in some small way connected to the world.
5 (#ulink_d2e0cbcd-0894-53b2-bbbd-d046c67375c4)
Jake had trained himself to know when a new song was coming on. He could feel the rhythm in the fingers on his strumming hand. He’d unconsciously start miming out the chords and catching strings of lyrics in his mind. He’d learned to take note of these phenomena, to mark them and memorize them and hold them tight until he could begin doodling around them and teasing them into a musical form. Or better, to drop what he was doing immediately and follow the music wherever it was leading.
And tonight, after that uncomfortable dinner, he’d caught sight of the night view of the ocean from his new bedroom window for the first time—all that endless black water beyond the gray moonlit dunes—and known a sweet and slightly sad new melody was beginning to form in him.
Sitting on an unpacked box, surrounded by stacks of other unpacked boxes, he strummed at his favorite guitar, a worn old Gibson his father had given him way back when he was twelve, and tested various chord progressions. He had two phrases in his head—everything a boy could want, everything but you and don’t let the sea wash me away. He knew they went together but he hadn’t figured out exactly how.
He gazed out the window again and studied the way the blackness of the sky met the even darker blackness of the water. A new line came to him. I carved your name in the sand with a stick. Maybe it could be the first line. He tested the line out, fingerpicking in a slow minor key beneath it.
To inspire himself, he’d propped his computer on one of the stacks of boxes and pulled up Elena’s AnAmerica page. Her talent, and the energy she put into developing it, always inspired him. He had a notion that this song could be a response to the beautiful video she’d made for him, though he still wasn’t sure if he’d admit this to her. For now, it might be better to continue pretending he was pining for “Sarah,” the free-spirited Key West beach bunny he’d invented to explain to her where all his love songs were coming from.
A new fragment came to him as he stared at her page: don’t hate me for loving you. He knew this one would find its way into the song. It was the most honest line so far. It described what was going on inside him exactly.
Don’t hate me for loving you
Oh-o’delay
Don’t let the sea wash me away
Maybe that could be the chorus. It was a start.
He sang the lines again and again, changing his intonation and phrasing in little ways, running through the possible variations in search of the perfect version.
When he looked up from his guitar again, he was startled to see Nathaniel sitting on the sleek Scandanavian dresser across the room, slouching against the wall, smirking at him. His feet dangled off the edge and he tapped the drawers rhythmically with the heel of his polished black shoe. He seemed nervous, like there was a bundle of energy trapped inside him, bucking against his skin, trying to get out.
“Not bad,” he said. “Where’d you learn to pick like that?”
Jake clutched his guitar as though he could hide the music he’d been making. He didn’t like being distracted when he was composing. But like everything else about this foreign house, the bedroom didn’t feel like it belonged to him enough for him to tell Nathaniel to leave.
“I … My dad’s a musician,” he said. “He taught me.”
“Oh yeah?” said Nathaniel. “Have I heard of him?”
In his right hand, Nathaniel held an ornately decorated silver flask that had been inlaid with an image of a stalking tiger, delicately carved in ivory. He raised it to his lips and poured a nip of whatever it contained into his mouth as he waited for Jake to respond.
“He used to be in a band. Hope Springs. Kind of folky-bluesy stuff. They had a song called ‘Dandelions.’ You might have heard that one.”
“That song was huge. That guy’s your dad?”
“It wasn’t that huge. Nobody got rich off it. It went to number eighty-six.”
Jake glanced at his guitar, wishing he could get back to work.
“Still …” Nathaniel warbled a few lines of the chorus to Jake’s dad’s minor claim to fame. Then, tipping the flask toward Jake, he said, “Want some forty-year-old, oak-cask rum?”
Jake shook his head no, but then realizing that since Nathaniel showed no signs of leaving, he wouldn’t be getting any more work done on the song, he changed his mind. He felt like he should probably get to know his new stepbrother, anyway. “Know what, sure,” he said.
Popping down from the dresser, Nathaniel handed Jake the flask. The ivory inlay was impossibly intricate. It depicted some sort of Chinese landscape complete with mountaintop and weeping trees and a wise old man with a cane climbing a lonely path.
“How do you like the room?” Nathaniel asked, wandering around and poking his nose in the various boxes Jake had opened but not unpacked.
“It’s okay, I gu—”
Cutting him off, Nathaniel went on. “It used to be mine. That dresser? Mine. That bed? Mine. That bookshelf? Mine. I guess what’s mine is yours now, though, brother. Enjoy it.”
This was news to Jake. “They gave me your room?” he said, wincing at the burn as the rum hit his throat.
He felt a tug of guilt over having taken Nathaniel’s room, though Nathaniel didn’t seem all that upset about it. He just kept on poking around in the boxes, lifting things out to study them and then putting them back.
“Fuck it. That’s what happens when you don’t come home for two years.”
Every new detail Jake learned about this guy led to a hundred more questions. “Two years. Wow. That’s a long time. You didn’t come home once?”
Nathaniel threw him a look as if to say, Isn’t it obvious? “You’ll see,” he said. “Once you know Cameron like I do, you won’t be asking questions like that.” He peered at the screen of Jake’s computer. “Who’s this?”
Jake blushed. He felt exposed, like just having Elena’s profile open like this was a betrayal of the secrets of his heart. Instead of answering, he said, “Did something happen between the two of you?”
“You’re hilarious,” Nathaniel said. He took the flask back and downed a large shot of rum. “He’s my father. Is that not enough?” He went back to studying Elena’s profile. “Electra. And that makes you Jaybird.”
Jake could tell that he shouldn’t push the topic too hard, but he had to ask. “Why aren’t there any photos of you anywhere? I mean, I didn’t even know you existed. That’s sort of weird.”
“Ask Cameron, not me.” Nathaniel pulled up a box and sat in front of Jake. “Let’s talk about Electra. She’s obviously much more interesting to you than the ongoing saga of Nathaniel and Cameron. That song you’re writing for her is pretty sweet. But eventually you’re going to have to come clean with her.”
Just the thought of telling Elena how he felt made Jake’s heart swell until it almost cracked in half. Immediately defensive, he said, “She’s my friend, that’s all.”
“She’s your friend whose pants you want to get into. Unless you’re lying to yourself, too.” Taking another nip from his flask, Nathaniel stared at Jake like he was trying to break him. “I don’t think that’s true, though. ‘Don’t hate me for loving you’? You know exactly how you feel.”
Jake didn’t know what to say. Nathaniel was right, of course, but he didn’t seem to understand how sensitive and complicated the situation was.
“I know how it goes, man. I’ve been there,” Nathaniel said.
“Have you?” Jake said shyly.
Nathaniel smirked knowingly. “Here’s the thing.” He handed Jake the flask again. “Drink up.” As Jake forced himself to swallow down a little bit more of the rum, Nathaniel laid it out for him. “You can go on following her around forever, making puppy-dog eyes, knotting yourself up inside, dying a little bit every time she mentions some other guy, but you’ll never get what you want that way. You’ve gotta make your move. That’s the only play.”
Maybe it was the rum or maybe it was the fact that they were in this intimate space that had once been Nathaniel’s and was now Jake’s, or maybe it was just that Nathaniel seemed so much more self-confident and successful at life than Jake, but Jake felt like he could trust him, like he had something to learn from his new stepbrother. “If I never make a move, she can never reject me,” he said, admitting his deepest fear.
“So let her reject you. Then get on with your life,” Nathaniel said. “There’s a lot of fish in the sea.”
Jake knew he was right, but that didn’t make the truth hurt any less. He nervously picked out the few bars he’d written of his new song.
“There you go,” Nathaniel said. “Sing your heart song. And stick with me. I won’t steer you wrong, brother.”
6 (#ulink_11d33309-b22e-5b2d-ab87-5bcd490f0b8e)
By the next day, Elena’s new Jake-less reality had begun to sink in. She sat on the tile floor in the living room, cradled in a misshapen pink-and-yellow polka-dot chair pillow that just barely fit in the space next to the tree, tooling around on her computer to distract herself from her sister’s television program and, hopefully, escape the funk she’d fallen into since Jake had moved away.
The show today was Hoarders—even worse than Storage Wars.
As Elena bounced back and forth among BuzzFeed and Twitter and her own AnAmerica page, which was still racking up likes and comments now, three days after she’d posted her latest animation, she couldn’t help but track the gist of what was happening on the show. A woman in her forties who rescued cats to com-fort herself from all the ways she couldn’t rescue herself is confronted by her worried parents after they discover that the house she lives in is so overrun that she’s now sleeping in her garage.
The thought that Elena was supposed to find this entertaining disgusted her, but she wasn’t about to say anything to her sister. Nina loved it. She sucked on a giant candy cane and periodically popped it out of her mouth to click her tongue at the outrages the show paraded across the screen, shaking her head, bugging her eyes at Elena.
“Ay-yi-yi-yi!” she said.
Elena smiled in recognition and checked her AnAmerica page. A new comment popped up. Some guy going by the handle Harlow. “You’re the best artist on this site,” he said.
A grin broke across her face. She didn’t get compliments like this all the time, and it felt good to be singled out. She wondered who this Harlow guy was.
