Elin Hilderbrand - The Rumor

Bugsy? Eddie thought. He had checked the guy’s photo out online. Quite frankly, he looked like someone from a horror show. He was completely bald, and there was something wrong with his teeth. Eddie had wondered which of the girls would have to have sex with Bugsy Greer, but then he shuddered and tried to think of something pleasant-hot-air balloons, Christmas trees.

He was very nervous as he prepared to make the phone call. He left the office with his cell phone and loitered at the edge of the Nantucket Yacht Club parking lot. It was now summer, which meant that Eddie had to be more careful, or the attendant stationed at the guardhouse would tell Eddie to scram, or one of the old ladies carrying a Nantucket lightship basket would scold him.

He lingered on the far side of a brand-new Range Rover. He wished he’d listened more closely to Barbie when she was propositioning these groups.

Bugsy answered, “Hello?”

Eddie spoke so quickly, he tripped over his words. Hey, there, Bugsy, this is Eddie Pancik, your real-estate agent on Nantucket? Excited about coming to the island? Need any dinner reservations? Pearl? Cru? Ventuno?

And then Eddie said: Listen, here’s something for on the down low. We have a cleaning crew of five Russian girls who do more than just clean.

“Really?” Bugsy said, his voice perking up.

“Really,” Eddie said. “They can come back at night, if you’d like.”

“We would like,” Bugsy said.

“Would you?” Eddie said. He took some steady breaths. “You understand me, then?”

“I think so, yes,” Bugsy said. “How much?”

“Twelve thousand a night,” Eddie said. He felt both bad and good about raising the price. He was going to keep the extra two grand for himself.

Sleeping with Glenn Daley!

“That’s fine,” Bugsy said.

“Will you pay night by night or all at once?” Eddie asked.

“Which do you prefer?”

“All at once,” Eddie said. “If you can make that happen, Bugsy?”

“I can make that happen,” Bugsy said. “Bugsy” was obviously some kind of nickname, and Eddie felt ridiculous using it. “I can make anything happen.”

“I like the confidence of that statement,” Eddie said.

A few days later, when Eddie checked his voice mail, there was a message from Madeline. He thought maybe she was calling to express her dismay or anger over Allegra’s behavior, and Eddie was ready to list all the ways he’d punished his daughter: He’d taken away her phone, and she was grounded until further notice. No beach with friends, no parties, and she was never to see the Coburn kid again.

But it turned out that Madeline wasn’t calling about Allegra.

The message said, I’ve called Layton Gray, Eddie.

Layton Gray was the Llewellyns’ attorney, the very same attorney Eddie himself had recommended back when they needed someone to do their real-estate closing. He’s going to take action against you unless you pay us back by the end of next week. I’m being nice here, Eddie. You’ve got ten days. Then she hung up.

“What?” Eddie said. “No good-bye?”

He was selling numbers 9 and 11 to Glenn Daley, and he would use some of the cash to pay Madeline and Trevor back. He would get out from under his debt, and he would live his life on the straight and narrow-as soon as he could.

He called home to check in with Grace and the girls. How long had it been since he’d called just because? He would do it more often, he decided. He would do it every day.

Grace said, “Hi, there.” She sounded perplexed. “Everything okay?”

“Just checking in!” Eddie said. “How’s everything there? Are the girls home?”

“Yes,” Grace said. “They’re both here. Neither of them is working today, so the three of us are going to the Galley for lunch.”

Eddie wondered if “grounding” Allegra could reasonably mean taking her to the Galley for lunch. But he knew how much Grace wanted special together times with the twins, and that would never happen unless Allegra were grounded-sad fact. Eddie himself loved the Galley for lunch or sunset cocktails, although he hadn’t gone yet this summer. It was pricey. He wished Grace were tougher and had suggested Allegra take over mowing the lawn.

“Allegra seems… different,” Grace said.

“In a good way or a bad way?” Eddie asked.

“Good way?” Grace said. “Like she might actually be contrite?”

“Yeah, well, she’d better be,” Eddie said. He needed to hang up before his good mood evaporated completely. “Glad to hear things are headed in that direction. Have fun at lunch!”

“We will,” Grace said.

In a mere four days, Allegra’s world had imploded like a dying star.

On the morning after, Hope had relented and allowed Allegra to use her phone to text Brick and Hollis and her other friends-but the results weren’t pretty. Brick told her to never contact him again. He said she had made a joke of him. He had loved her as well as he knew how, but clearly it wasn’t enough love or the right kind of love, which was fine, but he wasn’t going to waste another second on her. Good-bye and good luck, he said.

The calm, firm words freaked Allegra out. Hope had never seen her sister lose her composure in this way. Allegra was screaming, her hair was wild, and she tore around Hope’s bedroom as though looking for a way off the Titanic. She stared at Hope’s phone, saying, “What do I tell him? How do I get him to forgive me?”

Hope sighed. She wished that she, like Cyrano de Bergerac, had magic words to offer her sister. But, even with as little experience as Hope had with relationships, she knew that Brick was beyond Allegra’s reach at this point. He might forgive her in ten years or, more likely, twenty or thirty-when he was forty-six and possibly had a tempestuous sixteen-year-old daughter of his own.

“I don’t know?” she said.

Allegra handed Hope the phone and said, “Here, you text him. He’s always liked you. He respects you. Tell him I’m not doing well. Tell him to at least take my phone call.”

“Okay,” Hope said. She sent Brick a text that said: Hot glass looks like cool glass.

She waited. Surely he would respond to their secret code?

Nothing.

She texted: My sister isn’t doing well. She’s probably too selfish to actually kill herself, but high anxiety and depression are likely. Can you please just talk to her? Thanks. Your friend, Hope.

Brick responded: Please never contact me again.

Hope texted: It’s me, Hope. Really. Hot glass looks like cool glass.

Brick texted: Yes, I know, Hope. Please never contact me again.

Hope felt stung. This was not how it was supposed to go. Hope and Brick were supposed to forge a secret connection, a deep simpatico understanding that would lead to Brick falling in love with her. Brick was supposed to realize that Hope was everything Allegra was, only she was also good, nice, kind, and honest.

Hope threw the phone down on the bed. “He hates me, too, apparently.”

Allegra started to wail. She picked the phone up to call him again, and that was when the screen started blowing up with texts from Hollis, Hannah, Kenzie, and Bluto. And none of them were very nice. Hope read the texts over Allegra’s shoulder and cringed at the names her friends were calling her: boozehound, pothead, anorexic slut.

“Do I look anorexic?” Allegra asked, showing Hope the photo.

“Well, you don’t look fat,” Hope said, in a voice meant to point out a silver lining. In fact, despite the gruesome circumstances, the photo of Allegra was gorgeous in a way. Minus the booze and dope, Allegra and Ian might have been doing a shoot for fragrance. “Maybe the photo will go viral and someone at a modeling agency will see it?”

Allegra gave her sister a hopeful, watery gaze. “You think? Maybe?”

A text came in from Bluto: Lying, cheating slut.

“Maybe,” Hope said.

Allegra put up a good fight. She had some choice words for Hollis and Kenzie, and she unleashed a mighty wrath on Bluto, calling him a lard-ass succubus. When she ran out of oomph, she fell back on the bed next to Hope.

She said, “I don’t know what to do.”

Hope said, “They’ll come around.”

“It doesn’t matter. The toothpaste is out of the tube. You can’t call someone a lying, cheating slut and then take it back. These are relationship destroyers. It’s all Hollis’s fault. She’s been waiting for years to knock me down.”

Hope had to concede that this might be true. Hollis and Allegra were pretty well matched, but Allegra had always been just a little bit luckier. Now that she had proved herself fallible, Hollis would solely retain the title of Queen Bee.

“This too shall pass away,” Hope said.

“So what do I do until then?”

Hope didn’t understand the question and said so.

“What do I do until it ‘passes away’?” Allegra said. “I don’t have a job, like you. Now I can’t go to the beach. I’m forbidden from leaving the house, for starters, but even if I weren’t grounded, I couldn’t go to the beach alone.”

“Well,” Hope said, “you could always read.”

“Read?” Allegra said. Her tone of voice contained actual wonder, as if to say, What? As if to say, Why would I do that?

Hope tossed her sister the copy of Lolita. Hope had recently finished it and was thus able to claim personhood. The book had been excellent, thought provoking, original, and weird.

“Read this,” Hope said. “There are some big words in it. It’ll help you with your critical reading score.”

Allegra studied the cover of the book skeptically. “Lolita. Vladimir Nabokov. Is it even in English?”

“Yes,” Hope said. “It’s about a grown man named Humbert Humbert, who abducts a thirteen-year-old girl and drives with her across America.”

“Sick,” Allegra said, but Hope could tell her interest was piqued.

Allegra had stayed in Hope’s bedroom all of that first bad day, reading and napping, and Hope stayed in the room as well. She plowed through most of House of Mirth, and then she practiced her flute. She told herself she was staying in her room to watch over her sister so that she didn’t do anything stupid, but really Hope was just enjoying their quiet camaraderie. When Hope finished playing a selection from Mozart’s Flute Concerto in G, Allegra-who was lying on her back, staring at the ceiling, with Lolita splayed open on her chest-said, “You’re really good. I wish I were good at something.”

Hope said, “You’re good at things.”

“Like what?”

Hope took her flute apart and pulled felt through the mouthpiece. The things that Allegra was good at-being pretty, being popular-were pretty compromised at that moment.

“Like what, Hope?”

“Like lots of things,” Hope said. “I’m not going to sit here and enumerate your many talents.”

“Because you can’t,” Allegra said. “Because I don’t have any talents. Because I’m a mean-hearted, cheating, lying tramp.”

“Oh, stop it,” Hope said. “You made a mistake, is all. We’re young. We’re supposed to make mistakes, learn from them, and move on.”

“Tell me one good thing about myself,” Allegra said. “Please? One thing.”

“You have a great sense of style,” Hope said.

Allegra was quiet. Her eyes closed. “You’re right,” she said. “I do.”

Hope would have guessed that Allegra’s newfound humility would be short lived and that by the end of the first day of shame, she would have tired of Hope’s company. But on the second week, Allegra had managed to score a volunteer job at the Weezie Library for Children, shelving books part time. Their mother was so pleased that she suggested lunch at the Galley, just the three of them. Allegra not only agreed but actually seemed excited. Excited to be seen in public with Grace and Hope? Well, it would get her out of the house-she would be relieved about that, maybe-and the Galley was fancy, so she would have a chance to dress up. Hope wore her strapless Lilly Pulitzer dress with the turquoise-and-white butterfly print. Allegra wore a jade-green patio dress from Tbags Los Angeles and a pair of Dolce Vita gladiator sandals. Hope had French braided her hair, but Allegra did some messy half-up, half-down style right out of Vogue.

“It’s really not fair how beautiful you are,” Hope said.

Allegra actually seemed embarrassed. “You look just like me,” she said. “We’re identical twins.”

“Except you’re Alice,” Hope said, “and I’m the Dormouse.”

“Stop,” Allegra said. She lifted the end of Hope’s braid and tickled Hope’s nose with it. “We can both be Alice.”