“Really,” she says, looking interested. “Well, we’re hiring. Personal assistant to the new owner. Actually, we hired one, but she’s late, and here you are. I’m gonna take that as a sign. That’s a thing I do now, I take signs. It makes my kids really nervous.”
I smile, I can’t help it. I definitely wasn’t looking for a job—especially not one where it’s entirely possible I’ll run into a whole glut of people who hate me—but there’s something about this lady that’s winning, that kindles the same lick of anticipation I felt when I ran into Gabe at the gas station the other day. “Who’s the new owner?” I ask.
The woman grins back, bright and wry like she’s got a secret and really likes to share it, and she’s glad that I’m here so she can. “Me.” She sticks one smooth brown hand out and shakes mine, confident. “Pennsylvania Jones. Call me Penn. Can you start tomorrow?”
Day 8
My first shift as Penn’s assistant consists mostly of locating and compiling the fourteen hundred to-do lists she’s made and then lost all over the entire property, scribbled on cocktail napkins at the bar and taped to the stainless steel fridge in the kitchen. I find one that just says CHLORINE scrawled on the activities chalkboard by the pool. By the time I’m pretty sure I’m found them all I’ve filled seven pages of old Star Lake Lodge stationery, back and front.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Penn says when I knock on her office door and hand them over, her desk buried under a jumble of purchase orders and receipts. There’s a trace of New York City in her exasperated voice. She and her kids—six-year-old Fabian plus a little girl named Desi who can’t be more than four and said not one word the entire time I was in the room—moved here from Brooklyn last spring, she told me this morning. She didn’t say anything about their dad, and I didn’t ask. “Okay. I’ll look at these after the staff meeting, all right? Come on, I told everyone two in the lobby. I meant to get donuts. Did I say that to you, or did it just languish in my brain all day?”
“You told me,” I promise, following her out the door of the office and down the dim, wood-paneled hallway. “I ran out and picked them up at lunch.”
“Oh, you’re good,” Penn says, but I’m not quite listening anymore, frozen in the tall arched doorway to the lobby. A couple dozen people are crammed onto the chairs and couches around the big stone fireplace, faces so familiar that for a moment I literally can’t move—Elizabeth Reese, who was student council secretary three years running; Jake and Annie, who I’ve known since pre-K and who have been dating just about that long. She nudges him when she notices me, her immaculately tweezed eyebrows crawling clear up to her hairline. She makes a big show of turning away.
I think of the note on my windshield—dirty slut—and feel my skin prickle hotly, imagining everyone here somehow saw it, too, or wrote it or is thinking it even if they didn’t do either of those things. This is what it was like before I left. Julia once called my house phone and left a message, pretending to be from Planned Parenthood saying my STD test had come back positive, and I remember being grateful to her when it happened because at least nobody witnessed that one but my mom. I deserved it, maybe, the way everybody seemed to turn on me as soon as the book and the article came out, like I had some kind of social disease that was catching. But that doesn’t mean I want to go through it again.
If Penn notices people noticing me—and they are: a restless kind of weight shifting, a girl from my junior English class whispering something behind her hand—she doesn’t let on. “Did everybody get a donut?” she begins.
It’s a fast meeting, welcome to the new Lodge and how to use the ancient time clock. I look around to see who else is here. There’s a middle-aged chef and his younger, friendlier sous, who I met this morning as they were prepping the kitchen, and the housekeepers who’ve been airing the guest rooms, the old windows flung open wide. A trio of Julia’s cheerleading friends are perched on the leather sofa all in a row like birds on a wire, three identical French braids draped over their skinny shoulders. I work to keep my spine straight as I stand there in the corner, not to wither like an undernourished plant at their triplicate expressions of casual disdain: The one on the left looks right at me and mouths, very clearly, the word skank. I cross my armst, feeling totally, grossly naked. I want to slither right out of my skin.
Afterward, I take my donut outside to the back porch overlooking the lake, picking at the sprinkles and trying to pull myself together. There’s a girl about my age in shorts and sneakers hosing down the lounge chairs, her red hair in a messy bun up on top of her head—she startles when she sees me, alarm painted all over her face. “Crap,” she says, checking her watch and looking back up at me, pale eyebrows furrowing. “Did I just miss the meeting? I totally just missed the meeting, didn’t I. Crap.”
“I—yeah,” I tell her apologetically. “It’s probably okay, though. And I think there’s still donuts left.”
“Well, in that case,” she says, dropping the hose and climbing the steps to the porch, holding her hand out. Her skin is alabaster pale underneath the pink flush of sunburn. “I’m Tess,” she says. “Head lifeguard, or I guess I will be once there’s anybody to swim here. For now I’m just a hose wench.” She wrinkles her nose. “Sorry, that sounded a lot less filthy in my head. Did you just start?”
I laugh out loud—the first time all day, and the sound is sort of startling to me, unfamiliar. “First shift,” I tell her. “Well, sort of. I’m Molly, I’m Penn’s assistant.” I explain how I used to work here, that I moved away and I’m just back for the summer. I take a big, self-conscious bite of my donut when I’m through.