That Summer by Jennifer Weiner (free e reader txt) 📗

the TV screen with her mouth hanging open and her dad on the phone with Uncle Jeremy, saying, “I knew this was a bad idea!”

“The woman who died was an Instagram influencer named Drue Cavanaugh. She’d come to the Cape to get married,” Beatrice typed. “She was murdered on what would have been her wedding day.” Beatrice hadn’t known the dead woman, but she knew her grandparents, the Lathrops, an elderly couple who lived in an enormous house on the same dune as the Shoemakers. The Lathrops would call to complain if Lester ever chased a chipmunk into their yard, back in Lester’s chipmunk-chasing days, and when Beatrice and her mom saw Mr. Lathrop at the post office, or Mrs. Lathrop at Jams, they’d just get a single stiff nod. “WASPs,” her mom had said with a shrug when Beatrice had asked why they were so mean. When Beatrice was little, she’d thought that maybe the Lathrops were actual insects, hiding their wings and their stingers underneath Lilly Pulitzer dresses and Brooks Brothers shirts. Drue Cavanaugh had been their granddaughter.

Beatrice stared at the cursor for a moment, imagining what Mrs. Hardy, one of the only teachers she’d liked back at Emlen, would have asked. Why are you telling us this story? How do you feel about it? What does it mean to you?

“I thought about the murder all last year,” she typed. “How I probably walked on the sand, exactly where the dead woman walked. How we’d been swimming at the same beaches, and probably eaten in the same restaurants.”

The dead girl had been easy to find online. She’d looked so perfect, rich and beautiful and perfect, with honey-blonde hair and sun-kissed white skin and the kind of slim-hipped, big-busted body that it usually took a surgeon to achieve. She’d had a Harvard degree and a man who’d loved her, money, about a million followers on social media, and a huge, global brand. Only none of it had been real. The dead girl’s death had exposed the truth of her life, the way she’d been two people, the real one and the one she’d portrayed on social media.

For the rest of the summer, Beatrice thought about Drue Cavanaugh. Maybe Drue had learned to swim at Gull Pond or waited in line to buy croissants at the boulangerie on Route 6 in Wellfleet; maybe she’d walked into the bay at low tide, with a bucket made of metal mesh banging against her hip, feeling for clams with her feet. Maybe she’d eaten fresh oysters at Moby Dick’s or gone fishing for stripers with her father. It had made Beatrice feel strange in a way she couldn’t describe; newly aware of the world, and the people around her. It had made her think about her own future: what she wanted, where she’d live, what kind of life she’d have, when her choices were her own. Right now, she could run her Etsy shop, she could pierce her ears and color her hair and wear long Laura Ashley dresses instead of Lululemon leggings, but when she’d timidly brought up the topic of applying to one of the city’s magnet art schools, in the car on the way home, her dad had said, curtly, “You’ll go to Emlen, and after that you’ll get a liberal arts degree. Do whatever you want after that.” He’d concluded with one of his favorite sayings: “He who pays the piper calls the tune,” and her mom had closed her eyes like her head hurt.

Tomorrow isn’t promised, Beatrice typed. She couldn’t remember if she’d read that somewhere, or just seen it on a handmade sign at a store, next to the ones that said LIVE LAUGH LOVE and IT’S WINE O’CLOCK. She sighed and erased it, hearing Mrs. Hardy say cliché! She thought for a moment about how to express what she was trying to say, and the difference between being a thing and only seeming that way, and, when the bell rang, she finally wrote, “Cape Cod is one of the most beautiful places in the world. It’s always been my favorite place, the place where I’ve made some of my happiest memories. But what I learned last summer is that it isn’t a safe place. Maybe there are no truly safe places for girls and women. Drue Cavanaugh and I probably looked up at the same stars from the same spot on the beach and thought about our futures. Only now she’ll never have one. And I am thinking even harder about mine.”

3 Daisy

In 2018, the iconic signboard at Thirtieth Street Station, the one that had clickety-clacked through train numbers and gate assignments and destinations, had been replaced by a new, blandly digital one. Preservationists had written petitions, newspaper columnists and the Historical Society had complained, every passenger Daisy had ever met preferred the old version, but the outcry had not been enough to get the Amtrak executives to change their minds. Daisy missed the sign, even though the station retained its grandeur, with soaring ceilings and gold marble and the enormous statue of Winged Victory, her arms enfolding a man’s body, in honor of Philadelphia’s wartime dead.

On Sunday morning, Daisy arrived at the station an hour ahead of time, and it only took her two tries to liberate the ticket to New York City that she’d reserved from the machine. At a coffee shop near the waiting area, she bought herself a cup of coffee and, after some deliberation, a warm chocolate croissant.

She and Beatrice used to go to New York City every year, for Beatrice’s birthday. They’d get their nails done ahead of time and purchase a new dress for Bea. They would take the train up, and see a Broadway show, and spend the night in a hotel, and have brunch at the Plaza. Daisy still had the Playbills in a box in her closet: Waitress and Avenue Q, Wicked and Legally Blonde. The last time