Meet Me at the Boardwalk (4 page)

W
hen you clean mansions for a summer job, you’re invisible. You’re not supposed to speak unless spoken to. You just scrub the thousand-dollar furniture and launder the Prada clothes, and keep silent. It’s a requirement. That’s a big plus for me, right there. It’s probably the reason I’d decided to stay on, doing Jade’s job, cleaning up for tourists instead of working on the boardwalk. Mom has also asked me a million times to “help out” every single summer at the tourist board. To “help out” is a euphemism for answering outrageous phone calls and e-mails.
“Hi! You want to parasail with J-Lo for your birthday? Great! Eighty grand!”

The second plus of cleaning our town’s mansions, of course, are all the loony conversations you might overhear. I may be shy, but in the words of
The Seashell Register
, I do rejoice in a good scandal.

To give you some examples—and these are real quotes (the names haven’t been changed, in order to incriminate the guilty):

• “Darling, please. I know all about you and the child psychologist. When you come home smelling like our daughter’s Magic Markers, I know where you’ve been. I really
  am
  a househusband—except at the beach.”
  
• “If you were so worried about your body, Madeline, you wouldn’t lie about that Cohen idiot with the gray ponytail. Does yoga include a good banging?”
  
• “I must have passed out with her, Theodore. We’d been drinking chardonnay in the sun all afternoon. But no, I am not a lesbian.”
  

And, as bad as eavesdropping is, I’ve learned a lot from it. In fact, I would say that more than 90 percent of the tourists are actually pretty cool. They’re just going through the normal family stuff…only in a different tax bracket.

Then I met Lily-Ann Roth.

School was over. Jade’s dad had left for San Francisco, and the party planning had begun. Turquoise was locked away all day in her dad’s bedroom, poring over obscure law journals.

Jade and Miles were back at their usual jobs: Jade at the Jupiter Bounce for toddlers in Amusement Alley and Miles three stands down at Sonny’s Clam Shack.

Things were good.

The Roth’s mansion is
the
prime Seashell Point spot for tourists. It’s smaller than some of the others farther down the beach, but it’s the most luxurious and it’s got “location, location, location,” as in, it’s right next to the boardwalk. There’s a garden, too—a garden on the beach, encased in a
huge, climate-controlled greenhouse. I’m not kidding. You can water your roses and stare out at the ocean. It is entirely ludicrous, but somehow wonderful.

Every bedroom has a flat-screen TV, a king-size bed, Wi-Fi, and a bathroom with a Jacuzzi. There are three Roths: Arnold, Cheryl, and Lily-Ann. That leaves three empty bedrooms—three bedrooms that don’t need to be cleaned—a perfect gig for a cleaning person: half the job, all the fun. In theory, things were about as sweet as they could get. But when I showed up at the Roths’ on my first official working day…Who answered the door?

Mom.

“What are
you
doing here?” I asked.

“Megan! I—I suppose we could have walked here together. I was just talking with Mr. Roth,” she said in a strange, high-pitched voice.

I hoped to God that they were not having an affair.

Before she could go on, Lily-Ann swept into view.

Lily-Ann looked about as sour as my mood. She gave me a quick once-over, then dug her iPhone out of her skirt and began texting someone. Her flat stomach and belly button were plainly visible under her too-small spaghetti-strap top. I have to say, though, if she had a soul (I’d assumed she didn’t), she would have been pretty. She had great tanned skin, like Jade’s, a freckled button nose, and intense blue eyes. I could see why Miles had thought she was a trophy wife. I was also trying very hard to forget about that.

“Megan,” Mom began, “this is Lily-Ann—”

“I know, Mom. You introduced us in your office last summer.”

Lily-Ann’s lips were too red and narrow, like a pair of little worms. They didn’t smile or scowl; they
slithered.

Mom laughed a little too loudly. “Oh, that’s right! Anyway, I thought it would be nice if you could show her around town while Mr. Roth and I discussed some business.”

Then Mr. Roth appeared by his daughter’s side. His belly poked out from under his shirt, too. Only his stomach wasn’t flat. The shirt looked like he’d won it at a game stand on the boardwalk—it was stained with soda and read over forty and feeling foxy. I prayed he’d just been exercising. No grown man would greet a stranger at his own front door if he were sweating, unkempt, and wearing bike shorts. Well, unless the stranger in question was the invisible house cleaner.

“Megan Kim!” he shouted jovially.

“Hello, Mr. Roth. How are—”

“You’ve lived here your whole life, Megan,” he interrupted. “I figured Lily-Ann could benefit from a tour guide. Besides, there’s nothing here to clean. We just moved in two weeks ago. We haven’t had a chance to make a mess yet!
Hauggh…
”

When he laughed, he ended up coughing.

Is my mom is having an affair with the guy who wants to tear down the boardwalk?
But, no. She’d tell me about something
that
huge. Plus, people don’t laugh when they’re having an affair. They act snippy. That’s why Mom had always laughed, a decade
ago, when Jade and I kept trying to set up her and Jade’s father—because it never worked out. In our defense, why wouldn’t we try to set them up? The way Jade and I saw it, we’d be sisters and we’d both have a mom and dad. There’s five-year-old logic for you. So this really must have been about business. But that wasn’t a mood lifter, either. In a way, it was just as bad. Mom was in on the boardwalk plan, whatever it was.

“So whaddaya say, kids?” Mr. Roth said, ushering Lily-Ann toward the door. She kept texting, but didn’t protest. “Meg? Feel like being a tour guide?”

“Megan,” I corrected without thinking.

Mom glowered at me.

I forced a pained smile. “Sorry…it’s just—only certain people call me Meg.”

“Well, I like Meg!” Mr. Roth answered. “So, add one more person to the list.”

As I stood in the doorway, I imagined what it would feel like to grab Lily-Ann’s iPhone and cram it down Mr. Roth’s throat.

Lily-Ann finally looked up at me. She slipped her iPhone back into her skirt. She cast a long gaze at her father.

“Thanks for showing me around,
Megan
,” she said, emphasizing my name. “It is Megan, isn’t it?”

I grinned, for real this time. I think she might have smiled at me, too.

Those wormy red lips were tough to read.

M
iles’s and my first fight of the summer should be another Seashell Point tradition. It should be like the first tourist scandal (yet to happen), “Clam-Fest” (don’t ask), the Fourth of July fireworks. Every year, right about the same time, Miles and I get into a fight about something stupid.

Chalk it up to boredom. I sell tickets at the Jupiter Bounce. Yes, because I was fired from my first summer job ever. Yes, because I was caught making out with a tourist named Derek Madison on his rent-a-mansion couch while Megan was upstairs polishing the master bedroom mirrors. In my defense: Derek was truly tall, dark, and handsome; he played guitar; he claimed that he
“wrote a song for [me]. It’s called ‘Cleaning Lady.’”

Yes, he didn’t have much of a brain, but who needs one in Seashell Point? Luckily (or not) his family left town forever after they walked in on us in full-on French-kiss mode, the guitar long forgotten beside us. His parents were too outraged at the scandal to return. But, in fairness, our town’s scandal is best witnessed from a safe distance…another reason I want to be whisked away by a gorgeous rock star. (Derek, sweetie, it won’t be you. When you get a day job, please do
NOT
quit.)

Anyway, my boss, Sarah—a portly fiend of indeterminate age with an even worse sense of style than Dad—insists I arrive promptly at nine every morning, “just in case.”

No child has ever arrived before two in the afternoon.

Two
P.M.
is when local day care ends. Either that or the au pairs are too exhausted to spoil their kids any longer. Honestly, I don’t even know. All I know is that’s when the business begins. Pack ‘em in for five minutes at a time, let ‘em shriek and jump and push one another and do backflips and occasionally knock heads or elbows and cry. (Nobody ever
really
gets hurt; I can actually be a very strict monitor if I see a bully.) Ah, the joys of summer employment.

Likewise, Miles’s boss, Donny, insists that Miles arrive at nine
A.M.
, as well—even though no sane person would buy fried clams before noon. Well, except for Donny. Consider that Donny accidentally named his clam shack “Sonny’s” instead of “Donny’s.” In his defense, the S key and the D key are right next to each other on the computer keyboard. (Although the signs are all hand-painted.) But anybody could make that mistake. And Sonny’s has a nicer ring to it, too.

All this is a long way of saying that for the past two summers, Miles and I have had about three hours every morning with nothing to do. We pick that same strategic spot on the railing—the very first spot that Miles chose back in the day—where we can both monitor the clam shack and the Jupiter Bounce, “just in case”…and we BS. We rag on tourists (“Where did Sean Edwards get that cheesy seashell necklace? And why is he even back this summer?”) and, of course, we rag on each other (“Miles, that knapsack is grotesque. Is it
camouflage
?”).

But inevitably, the ragging turns from lighthearted to sour…like curdled milk.

Maybe this time, our secret fed into the fight. I don’t know.

It started stupidly and innocently enough, as all our fights do.

Miles asked, “So Turquoise is cool with the whole pact party?” That was what we’d started calling it.

“I don’t know. I swear; I’ve seen her only four times since she’s been home. She stays up all night studying and is asleep when I’m gone in the morning. We don’t eat together, ever. She’s mostly like this disembodied voice, shouting from behind some closed door. ‘Jade, turn the TV down!’ ‘Jade, do the dishes for once. I’ll empty!’ ‘Jade, you left the screen door open!’ Great to have Turkey home again.”

Miles laughed.

“What?”

He drummed his fingers on the boardwalk railing, Megan-style, watching the passersby. He shook his head. “Nothing,” he said.

“You know I hate the word
nothing
. If you ever use it again, I’ll take back—” I cut myself off. I was about to say:
I’ll take back that skateboard.

In the past three weeks, his limp had all but disappeared. He’d actually tried the board out a couple of times up and down the boardwalk…nothing fancy, just getting his balance back. His first try, I nearly cried. (I ran to the bathroom,
stammering that he’d undercooked the day’s batch of fried clams.) He kept it in his knapsack most of the time, though, except to look at it.

“You’ll take back what?” he asked.

“Every nice thing I’ve ever said about you,” I replied.

“Name one nice thing you’ve said about me,” he joked.

“Ha! Didn’t I say you had nice hair once? You have nice hair. You’re the only natural blond in Seashell Point. That’s something.”

“Not the only one. Lily-Ann Roth.”

I rolled my eyes. “Why are we talking about some snooty tourist we don’t even know? I thought we were talking about my sister. You were going to say something about her.” I snatched my sunglasses out of my bag and put them on.
Note to self: Use the Jupiter Bounce earnings to invest in a pricier pair of shades than the $15.99 special at Clement’s. Shades that will rival Lily-Ann Roth’s.
“Talk Turkey, Miles.”

He drew in a deep breath. “All I was going to say was…maybe she wants to be invited to the pact party.”

I stared at him through the dark lenses. “I’m sorry?”

Miles shrugged. “I just thought it might be, I dunno, rude or some crap to have this rager right in the house while she’s upstairs. I just don’t know if you always think things through, Jade—”

Fury rose in me.
You mean the way you should have thought before you kissed
me
?

“Forget it,” I snapped. “Turquoise doesn’t
do
parties. If
anything, she’d want to police it and chaperone. She was forty years old when she was born, and nothing will change that, Miles.”

Miles’s eyes darkened.

“You’re so stubborn.”

“My house, my rules.”

I bit my lip. Okay, that was unfair. I felt a twinge of guilt—and I was almost about to apologize, when Miles’s face suddenly brightened.

“What?”

He nodded down the boardwalk, toward the south side. “Speak of the devil.”

“Turkey?” I whirled around…and froze.

It wasn’t my sister. It was Megan and Lily-Ann Roth.

Walking side by side. Chatting. Smiling.

Megan waved.

My mouth hung open.

Megan never
talked
to the tourists.

But…

“Hey, guys,” she said. She threw her arm around the new girl’s shoulder. “I want you to meet my friend, Lily-Ann.”

N
either Miles nor Jade said anything at first. I couldn’t blame them. If Jade had walked up and pulled the same stunt with me, I would have been speechless, too. Obviously. I would have never seen it coming.

But the very first words out of Lily-Ann’s mouth, in the ten minutes it took for us to walk from her mansion to Amusement Alley, were: “You know what would piss my dad off more than anything? Being best friends with the hired help who cleans up after me.”

I didn’t answer.

“I’m sorry, that was really rude,” she said.

“No worries.”

“Really?”

“I’ve heard worse. You should have heard what Mr. Madison said two years ago when he fired Jade…Never mind.” I shook my head, keeping my eyes on the planks as we plodded up the boardwalk steps from the beach. “But, uh, if that’s the case, why did he ask me to show you around town? He expects me to be friendly, right?”

She snorted in a way that reminded me of Jade. “He just wanted to get rid of us so he could talk to your mom about his big plans for your town. Whenever he laughs a lot, it means he’s not really there. His mind is on a hundred
different things. And he was exercising before, so the endorphins were flowing. He was in an altered state.”

Jeez.
I could barely understand her. “What
are
his big plans?” I asked.

“I’d tell you if I knew,” she said with a sigh, flinging her blonde hair over one shoulder. “But the last thing I want to do is find out about his business. Sometimes, ignorance really
is
bliss.” She waved her hand at the long, weathered expanse of wood ahead of us—still relatively deserted at this hour, just some toddlers in strollers and young moms, and seagulls cawing and circling overhead. The salty wind was light enough so we could hear the creaking under our flip-flops. Hers were bejeweled, naturally. “I do know that he wants to tear this thing down and put something else in its place. What, I don’t know. He’s mostly built hotels, so I bet it’s something like that.”

My stomach squeezed. Jade was wrong; it
wasn’t
gossip. It was real.

I tried to imagine what the beach would look like without the boardwalk. It would look like Boca Raton, where Jade’s grandma lived. In other words: cheesy, bland, modern. Different. I tried to shake the thought from my mind. Once the boardwalk was gone, Miles and Jade wouldn’t be able to meet me at the same spot, and nobody would be able to notice a surfer in trouble—except from a hotel room balcony.

“So, you’re going to Williams in the fall, huh?” I asked. “That’s awesome.”

“I’m glad somebody thinks so.” She snorted again.

I glanced at her out of the corner of my eye. “What do you mean?”

“My dad thinks I should have gone to Harvard. He went to Harvard. Unfortunately, I didn’t get into Harvard. So I’m not going to Harvard.” Each time she said
Harvard
, she pronounced it with just a little more venom. “My mother’s generous contribution to Williams seems to have had a much bigger impact than my dad’s lack of contributions to his alma mater. So I’m going to Williams.”

“Well, maybe Williams will be more fun?” I offered lamely.

“What would be more fun is not going to college at all.”

I laughed. “You really think so?”

“No, not really.” She sighed again, sounding about twice her age.

I stole another quick peek at her. She was smiling curiously at all the cheap concession stands, as if she’d never seen one in her life. All were closed. On the south side, it’s strictly swimwear and surf gear, so none of the owners show up before eleven at the earliest. Most look like washed-up eighties Hair Band members. Some actually are. That’s where the brilliantly unoriginal stand names like “Surf’s Up, Bro!” or “Hang Ten for Under Fifty Clams!” come from. I almost felt embarrassed. There was a very good chance Lily-Ann
hadn’t
seen a cheap concession stand in her life, particularly if she’d vacationed in places like St. Maarten before coming to rustic old Seashell Point. She’d probably feel a lot more comfortable downtown. Come to think of it, downtown essentially was
St. Maarten, only dressed up eighteenth-century-Mid-Atlantic-coastal style.

“Where are
you
applying, Megan?” she asked.

“I was thinking about NYU,” I answered absently. “I researched on-line, and they have these great internship programs where you can work in the city government with people who try to solve local problems—” I coughed. “Sorry. As if you care.”

“No, I do.” She paused for a second and turned toward me, fixing me with an intense stare. “It’s just…” Her wormy lips formed what looked like an actual smile. “Okay, I don’t really. But I do think it’s cool. I mean all I care about is pissing off my dad. You know what he always tells me? ‘You can do better.’ It’s like this weird mantra. Better than what?”

I lifted my shoulders. I’d just met her. Besides, I
was
the hired help. I couldn’t answer that question. It wasn’t part of the job description. I should have been Soft-Scrubbing their marble tub.

“The first time he ever said that to me was when I started going out with this guy who got kicked out of my old school,” she went on. “Roland Evans. His dad is some big-time Manhattan shrink, so of course the kid is crazy. He was hot though, in a kind of bad-boy way, and funny as hell—he just didn’t give a crap about anything. He used to skip classes and troll the school halls singing ‘
RO-Land, RO-Land, RO-Land…’
You know, like that rap song,
‘Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’…’
and this one time he started singing it when we were in the janitor’s closet, and I was—”

“How…how about I show you downtown?” I stammered before she could finish. My cheeks were hot. Jade and I hardly ever talked about sex. Especially hot sex in a janitor’s closet. Neither of us had gotten there yet. Not even close. “I mean, there really isn’t much to see on the boardwalk right now.”

She brushed a long blonde curl out of her face and gave me another apologetic half smile. “I’m making you uncomfortable, aren’t I?”

“No,” I lied.

“Hey, here’s in idea. Why don’t you show me the spots where all the cute guys hang out? I haven’t really seen too many so far.”

My gaze wandered toward the north end of the boardwalk. I shielded the sun from my face, standing on my tiptoes—and sure enough, spotted Jade and Miles leaning against the railing, maybe a quarter mile away. Miles’s tousled blond hair was impossible to mistake. And, of course, Jade was waving her hands dramatically. Their first summer fight. Duh.

I didn’t want Lily-Ann to see Miles.

“There is this one guy you should meet…”

“Sean Edwards?” she asked.

My hand dropped. I turned to her. I wasn’t sure whether to laugh. “You know Sean Edwards?”

“Yeah. I met him yesterday. He’s taking care of our greenhouse this summer.”

I forgot myself for a second. “He
is
?” My eyebrows twisted in a knot.

“Why, is that a problem?” she asked.

Yes!
I answered silently.
And more than one!
Indeed, many problems. The first? I’d be spending the summer working with a doofus I’d been stupid enough to kiss a few times in the past. (Thank God he’d be confined to the greenhouse.) But I wasn’t even really thinking about that. I was thinking:
Sean Edwards is a tourist. Why did he get a summer job tending to another tourist’s garden? Tourists don’t work. This is a first in the history of Seashell Point. This is wrong!

Lily-Ann smirked.

And after a long look at her, it hit me.

“Oh,” I said out loud. I had to laugh. Sean must have Googled the Roth family—or maybe he even knew them. He did live in D.C. most of the year but wealthy families hung out with other wealthy families. Yup. One glimpse of Lily–Ann at some society ball…well, the thought of tending to her garden was too good to pass up. Classic horn dog. I had to hand it to the guy. Maybe he was cleverer than I thought.

“Oh, what?” she asked.

“Oh, well,” I said. “I’m not sure of his gardening skills, but he’s okay.”

She drew closer. “You know him?”

I knew my face was bright red. I began to perspire. “I made out with him once,” I blurted in as hushed a voice as possible.

“You
did
?” She grabbed my arm and giggled. “Oh, my God.”

“What?” I asked nervously. “You just said he was cute.”

“Yeah, but you’re way hotter than he is cute.”

“Excuse me?”

Lily-Ann’s eyes twinkled. “You can do better, Megan Kim. You can do better.”

I laughed again. “Well…I…that’s…I don’t know. Nice of you to say?”

“I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t mean it,” she replied. “Look, what do you think would piss off my dad the most? Hooking up with the semi-cute gardener,
and
being best friends with my hot house cleaner, right? Which, judging by how cool you’ve treated me so far, seems in my best interest in terms of this town. Imagine it: my boy-toy and my new BFF in the same house for a whole summer.”

“Please tell me you’re kidding,” I muttered.

“Of course. No. Yes. A combination.”

My God.
This girl truly
was
insane. But in kind of a good way. She certainly wasn’t like any of the other self-obsessed, phony tourists I’ve known. Plus, now that I thought about it, she was straightforward—very different from Miles and Jade, at least lately. Those two had been acting beyond weird for the past year, and I knew they thought I didn’t notice.

My mood swelled, and I couldn’t help but think somewhere deep inside:
If I play Lily-Ann’s BFF and Sean plays her boy-toy, there’s no chance that Miles will hook up with her.

And I knew just when to put that plan into action.

“So what do you say?” Lily-Ann asked. “Ready to help your boss out?”

I nodded. “You know, a really good friend of mine is planning a party because she has her house to herself. Do you want to come?”