Local Girls

by Jenny O'Connell

  “There are my cousins.” Ryan nudged me and waved to a family walking toward us. “I guess this is it. Tell Henry I said hi and have fun with Mona.”

  “I will,” I told him, realizing I’d almost forgotten about Mona’s twin brother.

  And that’s when I saw it, the shiny black hood making its way out of the ferry doors and down the ramp. The back passenger window was open and I waited for Mona to poke her head out and scream my name. Instead I watched as Henry waved in my direction.

  I waved back and walked toward the car, now pulling up against the curb to let the cars behind it pass by.

  “Kendra!” Mona jumped out and ran toward me, her arms outstretched like in those slow-motion sequences in the movies. When she reached me, the force of her hug knocked me backward, quite a feat for someone who was at least four inches shorter, and fifteen pounds lighter, than me.

  “You look so great,” she told me, giving me one last squeeze before taking my hand and pulling me toward the car. “Mom, look at her, she looks exactly the same!”

  Well, not exactly the same—my hair was longer and not as blonde as when Mona left the island last summer, but I didn’t point that out. Instead I let her tow me toward the Land Rover.

  “Kennie!” Izzy reached through the open passenger-side window and held her arms out.

  I leaned in and let her hug me. “Hi, Malcolm,” I said over Izzy’s shoulder.

  Malcolm smiled at me. “Hello, Kennie.”

  “I know you girls have a lot of catching up to do. So don’t let us stop you. Are you going with Kennie?” Izzy asked Mona.

  “Yeah,” I answered before Mona could even get a word out. “I can take you to the house, Lexi let me borrow her car.”

  “Great.” Mona reached into the backseat and grabbed her purse with one hand and my elbow with the other. “Let’s go.”

  Chapter 2

  The line of cars was thinning out by the time Mona and I wove our way back through the parking lot to Lexi’s silver Honda. Up ahead of us the black Range Rover inched up to the stop sign, paused briefly, and then turned right toward Edgartown and disappeared, leaving just Mona and me.

  “There it is.” I pointed to the Honda and Mona slipped down the narrow opening between the passenger’s side and the car in the next space. She stood there waiting for me to find my keys, and when I fished them out of my pocket and looked across the roof of the car at her, she smiled at me.

  It should have felt like the hundreds of other times I’d picked Mona up—from her house, from school, from Kevin’s hockey games. Since Lexi and Bart, my brother-in-law, moved back in with my family, I’d been the one with the car, the one who always drove. Mona was always the passenger, the one who changed the radio stations and flipped through the stack of CDs on the backseat until she found something we both liked. But even though I was about to get in the driver’s seat, and Mona would be sitting to my right like always, something felt different, even if I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

  “It’s open,” I told Mona, who then grabbed the door handle and pulled.

  And that’s when it struck me, why this didn’t feel the same. For the first time Mona wasn’t waiting for me to pick her up, to take her where she needed to go. For the first time I was the one waiting for Mona.

  Most of the cars from the ferry had beelined it out of there, which meant that we were the last of the stragglers leaving Vineyard Haven.

  “So tell me everything,” I told Mona, glancing over at the Louis Vuitton bag perched on her legs, its intertwined Ls and Vs marching across her lap.

  “There really isn’t much to tell.” Mona laid her right hand across the monograms as if to hide them, then reached for the radio dial to turn up the music with her other hand. As she sat back she pushed the purse to the floor, where it fell out of my view.

  It was almost as if she was trying to hide it from me, like she didn’t want me to see. If she’d dangled her purse in front of me and gushed, “Look at this! Can you believe it?” I don’t think I would have been as bothered. I probably would have grabbed the purse and agreed. I would have shared it with her, like we’d shared everything in the past. Instead she wanted to keep it to herself.

  “You know everything already,” Mona told me.

  Normally that would have been true. Only this time it wasn’t. I didn’t know Mona carried around six-hundred-dollar purses. Or that her nails were filed into perfect square tips and edged in white polish. I didn’t know if she planned on seeing Kevin this summer or even how she felt about being back on the island. Almost worse, I didn’t even know what to say to her. Maybe nine months ago I did, when she’d just started at Whittier Academy and I was the only friend she could talk to. Like clockwork, I’d come home from school and there’d already be an e-mail from her, a voice mail on my cell phone, an instant message on my computer screen. Miss U! she’d write, or Where R U? Call me! There was always an exclamation point, as if without it I wouldn’t feel the urgency of her need to talk to me, to talk to someone who knew her before she moved into Malcolm’s town house on Beacon Hill, before she was supposed to make friends with the private school girls who used to pass her by on Main Street during the summer as if she were invisible.

  All she wanted to do was come home, she’d say, and I always made sure I had the right words ready and waiting every time. It will get better, I’d tell her, everyone is going to love you. But even as I assured her that everything would turn out fine, I wasn’t so sure. When Mona left the island at the end of Labor Day weekend last year, I had no idea when we’d see each other again. I didn’t expect her to come back to Malcolm’s house off-season, and the fact that Zilda, Malcolm’s housekeeper, had been practically cleaning the place with a toothbrush before they left meant they probably weren’t planning to come back, either. Before Mona left we’d made plans to see each other over Christmas break, what seemed like ages away back in September. But then she’d come back to the island less than six weeks later for Poppy’s funeral. When she left that time there was no talk of getting together over Christmas vacation or spring break. It was almost as if when Mona’s grandfather died, her last connection to the island died as well.

  After Mona returned to Boston that time the voice mails tapered off and the e-mails became few and far between. When we did talk on the phone, the conversations became less and less about how much she wanted to come back to the island and more about the new friends she was making, her plans for the weekend, the ski trip they were organizing over Christmas break. I started to do more listening than talking then, not even reminding her that we’d talked about her coming back to the island for a visit. Or that she didn’t even know how to ski.

  “So how’d the year at Whittier end up?” I asked as the song on the radio faded to an end.

  Mona didn’t answer right away. Instead she wiggled her flip-flop off her foot, drawing my attention to her matching French pedicure.

  “Was it as bad as you expected?”

  Mona shifted in her seat, tucking her bare foot under her leg and turning toward me. “It was tough, although it got better. But you know all that. I want to know about what went on here. Tell me about everyone.”

  “Same old, same old. Brian and Alicia broke up about six times.” If Mona wasn’t going to tell me about Boston, then I figured I may as well tell her about the island. I filled her in on the people she’d find most interesting. When I’d pretty much run through our entire junior class, I tried again. “So, really, what about your first year at Whittier?”

  “I did end up meeting some girls who were fun to hang out with,” she owned up, almost as if she was confessing something she wished she didn’t have to admit.

  “Come on, tell me,” I urged, curious to hear about the girls Mona spent the past year with. “Who were they?”

  Mona started rattling off the names of people I didn’t know: Jilly, Devon, Abby, Emily, Samantha something.

  “I bet they’re going to miss you this summer.”
r />   “Well, a bunch of them actually have houses here,” she added at the end, like the fact that her friends summered on the island was an afterthought.

  “That’s cool,” I told her, and hoped it sounded like I meant it. Because a part of me did. I hated listening to how unhappy Mona was in Boston those first few months, even if I liked hearing how much she missed me. There was no way I’d want Mona to be miserable and friendless in Boston. It wasn’t as if I’d locked myself in a closet and swore off all social contact once Mona moved. I hung out with other friends. It’s just that, by junior year, everyone had already chosen the groups they’d hang out with. It was a lot easier to find a boyfriend than a best friend, which was why I ended up spending most of my time with Robbie. I’d hate to think I was one of those girls who substituted her best friend with her boyfriend, but when your best friend isn’t around, there aren’t many choices. And the fact is, it’s easier to find a boyfriend than trying to learn everything there is to know about someone else, or teaching them what you like and don’t like and how you hate it when people don’t wave thank you when you let them go first at a stop sign, even though it’s your turn. Because that’s what a best friend is, someone you don’t have to explain yourself to, someone who just knows. Mona was the person who always knew without any explanation, and I was looking forward to having her all to myself again this summer.

  I glanced over at Mona, the dark, smooth hair lying against her shoulders, the ends bending under ever so slightly. It was so obviously the work of a serious blow-out because nobody could get their hair that perfect on all sides, especially Mona, who was a lefty and had significant issues wielding a brush with her right hand.

  There was a time when we used to cut each other’s hair, although I wouldn’t say it was a good time hairwise for either of us. Mostly we just trimmed the ends with a pair of scissors we found in my mom’s sewing basket. But one time, in seventh grade, Mona decided I needed bangs. And I decided she needed a short little pixie cut that was all the rage at the time. We got the sewing basket out and we did rock, paper, scissors to see who’d go first. I lost. In the five minutes that followed Mona discovered she would never have a future in the salon business, and I discovered a nasty cowlick that would seal my fate as someone who should never wear bangs.

  I was about to remind Mona of that afternoon, about my blonde chunks of hair on the bathroom floor, some of the strands almost white from the sun, and how she’d stepped back to take a look at me, scissors still in hand, and declared, “It looks great, really, but I don’t think I’m going to go for the pixie thing after all.”

  Instead, I took it all in, Mona’s perfect hair, the polished nails, the round diamond studs blinking at me from her earlobes, and I stopped, letting the song on the radio fill the silence instead.

  “So what are your summer plans?” Mona asked when the song ended and a commercial came on.

  “Well, I have a surprise for you.”

  “What?”

  I paused for dramatic effect. “I got us jobs at the Willow.”

  I expected Mona to freak out. She’d always been a shrieker, like when Poppy planned a surprise party for her thirteenth birthday and Mona walked through her front door to discover eleven girls jumping out from behind the furniture. But this time she didn’t cover her mouth and yell, “Oh, my god!” Instead, she just sat there with a sort of half-smile on her lips, as if she didn’t quite understand what I’d said. “What do you mean, you got us jobs?”

  “I mean I did it. We’ll be serving breakfast and helping out around the inn the rest of the time, doing whatever else it is you do at an inn. I start tomorrow, but Wendy said you could wait until the end of the week if you wanted to get settled in first.”

  Still, no freaking out.

  “This guy Lexi met knew somebody who knew Wendy, the new owner,” I explained, and still there wasn’t a noise coming from my passenger seat. I knew my news wasn’t the equivalent of a surprise party, but still, some reaction would have been nice. “Aren’t you surprised? Isn’t it going to be great?”

  Mona picked at her thumbnail, scratching at the glossy top coat but not hard enough to actually remove any polish. “Yeah, I’m surprised. And yeah, it’s great.” She let the last word linger, as if it was anything but great. As if there was more she wanted to say but didn’t.

  “And?”

  This time Mona bought an extra ten seconds by clearing her throat. “And I think it’s really sweet of you to have done that, but I wish you would have asked me.”

  “Asking someone if they’d like your surprise kind of ruins the surprise, right?”

  Mona smiled. “Right.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  She tucked her hair behind her ear and took a deep breath, stalling. And that’s when I knew it wasn’t going to be good. “Well, I guess I wasn’t really planning on getting a job this summer.”

  “I know. I figured you wouldn’t be able to look for anything from so far away, so I did it for you.”

  Mona untucked the hair she’d just tucked behind her ear, pulling it forward until the perfectly round solitaire diamond was covered.

  “I didn’t mean that I couldn’t look for a job, I meant that I wasn’t planning on getting a job because I don’t have to.” She spoke the words slowly, letting them sink in.

  “So you’re saying . . .?” I tried one more time, even though I knew exactly what she was saying. I just wanted to hear her say it without all the hair tucking and deep breaths and throat clearing.

  “I guess I’m saying that even though I totally appreciate you thinking of me and all that, and I do, Kendra, really”—she reached over and squeezed my shoulder—“I don’t think I’ll be taking the job at the Willow.”

  A new song came on the radio, its drumbeat pulsing in the silence, and Mona reached over and turned down the volume.

  “But I still think it’s very cool, and really great of you to do that for me. I’m sure you’ll still have a blast.” She smiled but I could tell it was forced. You’d think after being my best friend for ten years, she wouldn’t even try to fake it. “I’ll even probably regret not taking it once I hear how much fun you’re having.”

  How much fun I’m having? Serving omelets and berry pancakes at eight o’clock in the morning? Was she kidding me? I wasn’t letting her off that easy. And, unlike Mona, I didn’t even try to fake it. “The fun part about it was that we’d be working together, Mona.”

  “I know, but still.” Mona shifted in her seat, slipping her bare foot back into the flip-flop on the floor mat. “You understand, right?”

  Yeah, I understood. When your mother marries Malcolm Keener III, you don’t need a summer job. You don’t need to get up at six o’clock in the morning five days a week and you certainly don’t need to serve cheese omelets to a bunch of tourists who couldn’t possibly fall asleep without lavender sachets on their pillows.

  I hadn’t forgotten that summer kids don’t work. They get tans, hang out downtown, and buy stuff. I guess I’d just forgotten that now Mona was one of them.

  It wasn’t even the not-working part that bothered me so much. It was the fact that she would’ve been working with me and it didn’t even make a difference to her. “Sure,” I told her, my voice frostier than I’d intended. “I get it.”

  As I took a left onto Atlantic Drive, Malcolm’s house came into view, its gray shingles offset by the brilliant white trim of the ocean-facing decks. Before I knew it was Malcolm’s house, before he and Izzy even started dating, I always wondered what kind of people had summer homes four times larger than most people’s year-round homes. Once I met Malcolm, I learned they were the type of people who could have whatever they wanted. Eventually I started thinking of it as Malcolm’s house rather than an imposing estate with an amazing view, but I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to think of it as Mona’s home.

  I turned my gaze on Mona, but instead of looking at her summer home she was chewing her lip and staring into her l
ap.

  She wasn’t going to take the job, but at least she didn’t look happy about it. And for whatever reason, seeing Mona feel so bad made me feel sort of bad, too.

  Yeah, it sucked. And yes, there was no reason she couldn’t work at the Willow if she really wanted to, but I guess I couldn’t blame her. Given the option of hanging out or working, I’d probably make the same choice. Probably everyone would make the same choice.

  Still, even if we wouldn’t be working side by side, we had the whole summer together. I wasn’t about to have the entire summer ruined in the first twenty minutes.

  “So what do you want to do this afternoon?” I asked, the edge gone from my voice.

  “Well,” Mona began, looking up at me as if to gauge whether I was really willing to forgive her so easily. “I sort of promised some friends I’d meet them at South Beach.”

  “Oh.”

  “You can come, if you want,” she offered. “But I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t want to hang out with a bunch of people you don’t know.”

  I assumed a bunch of people meant Jilly and Devon and the rest of the Whittier Academy crew.