Page 37 of The Someday Daughter
“You said it was the best one.” She chews thoughtfully as Silas comes to stand beside us with his own caramel-slathered plate. “I need to see for myself.”
“And?” Silas says. He looks between her and Mick, who’s sticking his tongue out like the hot July air could un-burn it.
“Mmmmm.” Cleo tilts her head back and forth. She motions toward my cake. “You try.”
Silas looks up at me, his eyes bright in the glow of the funnel cake stand. “Can I?”
And my head nods on its own, my arms extending the plate toward him. I have a flash of Ethan in the dining hall at the Summit School, standing up to get me my own fork so I could have a bite of his lasagna.It’s cold and flu season, he’d said. He could kiss me but not share utensils, like the germs were somehow different. I wonder what he’d say if he were here now, watching three separate people put their hands on my food.
“Don’t burn yourself,” Mick warns as Silas lifts the bite to his mouth. But instead of burning himself, Silas commits the cardinal sin of powdered-sugar consumption. He inhales.
The aftermath unfolds in slow motion: the sugar going up his nose, the pitch of his body as he lurches forward, the gasping cough that sends an enormous rush of air in my direction. The powdered sugar from my funnel cake lifts in the gale of Silas’s breath and splatters all over my dress.
“Oh my god,” Silas says, his voice raspy and strained. Cleo howls with laughter as he steps toward me, one hand outstretched. “I’m so sorry.”
I look down at myself. There’s sugar all over my chest, down my cleavage, fanning my shoulders like freckles.
“Are you okay?” Silas asks, hand falling to his side as he leans closer to me. I look up at him. Draw a breath. His eyes dart back and forth over mine. “Audrey?”
When I jerk forward and blow, the remaining sugar flies off my funnel cake and promptly coats Silas’s T-shirt. It lands on his cheekbones, his chin, in the dip of his collarbone. When he blinks at me in shock, it snows off his eyelashes. There’s a single beat of stunned silence, and then he starts laughing. Chin tipped back, the length of his sugar-flecked throat exposed. I do, too—surprising myself with it—loud and unlike me.
“Audrey,” Cleo says, sounding breathless and thrilled. “You little minx.”
“Now we see why she wanted powdered sugar,” Mick says, reaching over with a napkin to brush off my shoulders. I take it from him and start working on my dress, laughter still hiccuping out of me. “It’s a weapon.”
“For real.” Silas swipes at his shirt collar, sugar raining onto the boardwalk between us. He finds my eyes in the dark and grins through sugar-dusted lips. “You’re full of surprises.”
I shrug. Think,So are you.
26
“Since when do you have a boating license?”
Magnolia looks up at me, adjusting her sun hat as she settles in behind the wheel. She’s wearing a gauzy sarong over a purple one-piece—the exact same style as the one my mother’s wearing, just in a different color.
“Since 2013,” she says. “Do you need to see proof, Officer?”
I feel my nose scrunch—the last thing I need is cheek from Magnolia Jones, busybody extraordinaire. But I can hear Mick laughing behind me, and when he nudges me with an elbow I turn in his direction.
“Grab these for me?” he asks, and I take the grocery bags he’s holding out. They’re full of chips and candy and trail mix—enough food to feed a small army for a whole weekend, decidedly overkill for six people with a four-hour boat rental.
“Think you bought enough?” I ask, and he jerks a thumb over his shoulder at Cleo, who’s still on the dock with Silas and my mother.
“Ask Cleo, she did the shopping.”
Which tracks, considering the three—yes,three—separate packs of Twizzlers I can see through one of the thin plastic bags.
“Don’t knock my shop!” Cleo shouts. She’s in a neon-blue bikini and a white bucket hat, wearing giant heart-shaped sunglasses. Next to her, Silas holds Puddles—her little sausage body stuffed into a bright yellow life jacket. “I didn’t hear anyone else volunteering for snack duty.”
The truth is this plan came together so last-minute I can’t believe anyone had time to prepare anything—Magnolia knocked on all our doors at ten this morning and told us Camilla had rented a boat beginning at noon. The show last night went off without a hitch—sold-out theater, enthusiastic signing line—and my mother wanted to celebrate with an afternoon on Lake Michigan. Sadie bowed out, citing seasickness, but the rest of us are here.
It does feel like theLetterstour has hit some kind of stride; even I can begrudgingly admit it. One of the women at Preeti’s book club in Winnetka turned out to be the Lifestyle & Leisure editor at theChicago Tribune, and the day after we met she published a piece about Camilla and me and what she called “the synergy of our summer together.” It detailed all my plans with Sadie, the fall shadowing position, the reasons I want to be a doctor (in my own words, for once).In taking her someday daughter on the road, she wrote,Camilla St. Vrain has set them both up for successful somedays.
It’s an overexaggeration, sure. The most successful setup for mysomedaywould’ve been the Penn program, and that’s not where I am. But it’s the first press piece all summer that’s talked about me like anything other than my mother’s pet—like an entire human being with aspirations beyond appearing in the gilded social posts on her feeds.
And, for the first time, the questions I got at last night’s showweren’t all about self-care. They weren’t about how basking in Camilla’s glow has made me just the luckiest girl to ever live. No one brought up the Sex Summit. The article painted me as my own person, and in its wake I was able to step on the stage as myself, instead of as the character Camilla has made of me.
“Check it,” Cleo says, climbing onto the boat and sneaking a hand into one of the bags I’m holding. She pulls out a hot-dog-folded magazine, some glossy rag from the checkout aisle. There’s a picture of Camilla and me on the cover, seated side by side at last night’s show.Camilla St. Vrain’s Valedictorian Daughter Holds Court in Chicago, the headline says. “You’re famous.”
