Chapter Four

By 8:00 a.m. I was already stressed.

I’d fallen back asleep, but it’d been broken and unsatisfying. Now the idea of going downstairs and interacting with the Barbanels made me burrow deeper in my—very luxurious—sheets. I considered myself extroverted, but maybe I was only extroverted in groups of people I already knew? I scrolled through my phone, wishing I’d brought snacks to ward off rumblings of hunger.

At ten thirty on the dot, someone knocked on my door.

Great. Hiding had made me conspicuous. “One minute!” I made sure I didn’t have yesterday’s underwear flung about before opening the door.

Miriam, Ethan’s younger cousin, stood there, her hair in two braided pigtails. “Morning!” she chirped. “Mom wanted me to tell you there’s pancakes for breakfast, if you want any.”

“Thanks.” I didn’t move.

Miriam took pity on me. “Most people’ve already eaten, so you don’t need to worry about a huge crowd of strangers.”

“Oh. Okay.” I unfroze and followed her down the hall. “Do you come here every summer?”

“Yeah.”

“Must be nice.”

She grinned wryly. “Bit of an understatement. My family’s apartment could fit into one of the bathrooms here.”

My surprise embarrassed me. I’d assumed all the Barbanels were as painfully rich as I was not. “Same.”

Downstairs, Miriam showed me a room spanning the length of the house. Large windows and open French doors overlooked the rolling lawn. The soft green scent of summer wafted in, fresh-cut grass and delicate lilac notes. Inside, a few adults draped themselves over sofas, coffee at their sides. Two women with the tight dark brown curls all the Barbanels seemed to have stood in the open kitchen, chatting as they brewed tea. A four- or five-year-old played with a toddler, moving the child’s limbs, and at a small table sat three identical girls, eating pancakes. I blinked.

“Iris, Lily, and Rose,” Miriam said. “They’re thirteen.”

“How do you keep track of them?”

“We don’t.”

I caught the whiff of coffee and pivoted, homing in on a carafe sitting on the kitchen island. “Is it okay if I have a cup?”

“Of course!” Miriam sounded scandalized I’d bothered to ask. “You can have whatever you want.”

Whatever I want. But what I wanted was to not be here; to be, instead, in my cozy house back home, with Dad there, too.

Miriam showed me the cabinet of eclectic mugs, and I poured a brimming cup into one with a Georgia O’Keeffe painting. I guess that was what counted for spicy among rich people. “Sugar or milk?” Miriam asked, a perfect tiny hostess.

“I’m good.” I clutched my mug. Some days, my morning cup of coffee felt like the only good and beautiful thing in the world. What was I going to do here?

“What do you do?” I asked Miriam. “Do you go to camp, or have a job, or what?”

“I volunteer at the Atheneum.” She nodded at the triplets across the room. “They go to theater camp—Iris wants to direct, Lily act, Rose write.”

Convenient they didn’t step on each other’s toes. Or perhaps they’d specifically split up their interests so they wouldn’t. “Organized. And is it social here? Easy to make friends?”

Miri shrugged. “I guess? We’ve been coming here for so long we know a lot of people already.”

Made sense. Hopefully some of the older cousins could introduce me to their groups. And I bet college kids rented places for the summer and hung out at bars and at the beach. That’s where I would have looked if I’d wanted to date—which I didn’t. I was sick of having my heart broken, for one thing. But even more, I didn’t want Dad to have any reason to worry about me. He worried too much when he should be focused on himself. He’d been so worried he’d even told Ethan Barbanel about my dating record. I had to prove I was completely and totally fine so Dad could focus on other things. With me leaving for college, I wanted him to start branching out, making friends or starting relationships, instead of spending all his time worrying if I was okay. He needed to have a support system so he’d be okay.

Still, just because I was taking a break from dating didn’t mean I wanted a break from gossip. “Does everyone usually have summer flings and stuff?”

Miri blushed furiously. “Oh, um, I wouldn’t know. I’ve never—I’m not dating anyone. Are you?”

Cool, so I wouldn’t be getting any fun stories from Miri. “Not right now.” The last guy I’d been consistently hooking up with—Austin, a stoner in my AP Physics class who I didn’t particularly like, but who I’d still developed feelings for—had ghosted me weeks ago. Before him, I’d had a brief fling with one of the regulars at Lulu’s Diner. My last real relationship had ended at Thanksgiving: Louis and I had dated for seven months, since my junior year, but apparently when he went to college he lost interest. He hadn’t told me until he came home in November because he wanted to do the break up in person since he “respected” me. Respect hadn’t stopped him from hooking up with people at college, though. Louis! What a gem.

I wondered what kind of people Ethan usually dated.

“Hey.”

Speak of the devil. Ethan strode into the room and dropped down at the kitchen island across from me. “Sorry if I freaked you out last night. I came out to the roof walk to make sure you were okay, but you were already gone.”

Miriam looked back and forth between us, gaze curious.

“You didn’t freak me out,” I said. “I don’t freak out.”

“I wasn’t watching you or anything. Sometimes I can’t sleep. Hey, Miri.”

“I knew you weren’t watching me. If you had been, you would have kept your light off.”

He laughed. “True. You’ve got your creeping figured out.”

I gestured at my black shorts and tank top. “It’s why I wear all black.”

“Here I thought you were a professional mourner.”

The corners of my mouth turned up. “Nah, for those occasions I need more fabric available to rend.”

“True, any rending of current attire would be…” He ran his gaze over me, the smile on his lips looking as irrepressible as mine. “…Problematic.”

“Ethan.” Miriam sounded long-suffering. “Are you serious? She’s staying with us for the summer.”

Oh my god. How embarrassing. How had I let myself start flirting with Ethan again? Ethan was a do-not-pass-go, do-not-collect-two-hundred-dollars. There was no way any situation with him would end well. Any further banter or hooking up would be soured by my resentment and would inevitably end in anger and jealousy and probably leave me a yelling, sobbing mess.

And destroy any chance of convincing my dad I was calm and fine and he could focus on his own life.

Ethan gently bopped Miriam on her head. “Don’t you worry, Miri. I’m never serious.”

“I’m going to get more pancakes,” she said. “I wash my hands of you.”

“I’m off, too,” Ethan said after Miriam had indignantly departed. “Ciao.”

“Where are you going?” I asked, suddenly distressed to lose one of the few people I knew in this giant house.

“Off to see the prof,” he said nonchalantly, as though he always gave this answer to this question. Then he paused. “Uh—your dad.”

Ethan and my dad had plans this morning? I wanted to have plans with my father. I should have told Dad earlier I wanted to help him out this summer, so he wouldn’t need Ethan. “Take me with you.”

Ethan gave me a frankly appraising look. “Why?”

“I can help.”

“With—what? Your dad’s work?”

“Why not? I’m here, aren’t I?”

“Yeah, but—he didn’t mention you’d be helping. Did you guys plan for you to join us?”

I shrugged. I’d planned it in my head, I just hadn’t really articulated it. “Does it matter?”

Ethan smiled slightly. But not the flirty, fun smile from earlier. No, now he looked like he knew something. I frowned. “What?”

“Nothing.” When my frown deepened, he shoved his hands in his pockets sheepishly. “Your dad mentioned you can be impulsive sometimes.”

Now I was irritated. “Are you gonna give me a ride or not?”

“Have you even had breakfast?”

I snagged two golden-brown patties off the top of the pile of pancakes. “Let’s go.”

Still looking skeptical, Ethan led me outside to a Jeep I had to struggle a bit to get into. Ethan turned the key, and the engine rumbled on. We started down the road, sunbaked roses and lavender sweeping over us. “Why’d you start working with my dad?” I asked. Ethan knew too much about me. I needed to level the playing field.

“You don’t know?”

“I know you started three years ago when a family friend introduced you. But I don’t know why.”

“He does interesting stuff.”

The title of Dad’s first book was Mapping the Atlantic: A History of American Maritime Cartography. Which, yes, could be interesting if you were fascinated by how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century people mapped and learned to navigate the ocean’s currents, floor, and coast. I just hadn’t run across a ton of teenagers who were.

Ethan drove us to a strip of office buildings mid-island, a place where you couldn’t even tell you were on Nantucket. He led me down a long hallway. At the end, a door had Dad’s name in small white print.

“Morning, Ethan,” Dad said when we walked in, then focused on me with surprise. “Jordan! What are you doing here?”

I tried not to bristle. “I thought I’d see what you were up to.”

Dad looked around, as though searching for the toys he’d kept on hand to entertain me when I was a child and visited his classroom—juggling balls, non-drying clay, an action figure or two. “I’m afraid it’s not very exciting—we sit here reading, most of the day—”

“I like reading.”

Dad gave me a skeptical look.

Okay, I was more of a numbers girl than a book girl. “What does Ethan do?”

“Ethan’s combing through old microfilms and documenting mentions of the historical figures we’re interested in.”

A real barrel of monkeys. “I could do that. Help you guys out.”

Dad grimaced. “You don’t want to do that, honey. You want to be out, exploring Nantucket, making friends—”

“I’d rather work for you.”

Also, I’d be free labor for Dad. Though of course, Ethan was also free labor; he could afford an unpaid internship. He’d probably started in order to get a nice recommendation for college.

I just wanted to spend time with my dad.

“Don’t you worry about us,” Dad said. Us. I wasn’t part of his “us.” “You’ll be happier with a job where you get to meet people! Where you don’t have to hang out with your old dad.”

Right. I got the message. He didn’t want me here. My plan to hang out with him all summer, to remind him I existed, not just Ethan, and I was competent and smart and had my shit together—that was all down the drain. I really should have talked to him about this earlier; now he’d think, once more, I was being impulsive.

“Sure. Got it.” I stomped toward the door, catching a flicker of some expression on Ethan’s face as I left—pity?

Sweet. Really loved pity coming at me from the hot guy I’d hooked up with. Made me feel super sexy.

“Ethan can give you a ride to town—”

“It’s cool,” I said. “I’ll walk.”

“It’s three miles,” Ethan said.

Oof. Further than I’d expected. Unfortunately, I was too proud to back down. “I like walking.”

Dad peeled several crumpled dollar bills from his wallet. “Here. You can catch the bus.”

So much for my grand exit. I took the cash. “Thanks.”

I caught the bus.

If I disliked anyone more than Ethan Barbanel, it was Benjamin Franklin.

But why?!one might ask. Benjamin Franklin did a bunch of cool stuff! Unlike most of the Founding Fathers, he did eventually, belatedly, become an abolitionist.

And yet he incurred my wrath and jealousy, for much the same reason Ethan did: because my dad devoted more time to him than to me.

Here’s what, when I was a mere inkling of a girl, I used to know about Benjamin Franklin:

Etched onto one-hundred-dollar bills, which were occasionally referred to as “Benjamins” in media, but never real life

Something about lightning?

Maybe had a rivalry with Edison??

People in France hated him and put him on chamber pots

Balding, with long hair and spectacles; classic aging-uncle vibe

Wanted turkeys to be America’s national bird

May or may not have been a plot point in National Treasure

Here was what I had learned in the past three years about Benjamin Franklin, after my dad’s attention-grabbing essay focused on BF himself, along with several significant chapters in the first book:

Benjamin Franklin’s maternal grandmother belonged to a prominent Nantucket family.

As postmaster general, Franklin was tasked with increasing the speed of the mail. This meant finding faster ship routes. With the help of his Nantucket relative Captain Timothy Folger, he mapped out and named the Gulf Stream, then told ships to avoid the current, and voilà, faster ships and faster mail.

Franklin’s great-grandson Alexander Dallas Bache headed the United States Coast Survey for two dozen years. He mapped the US coastline and instituted a lot of other real great stuff, probably, and also served as the first president of the National Academy of Sciences. (Bache got several chapters in the first book, too.)

Did I want to know these things? Not particularly! But you can only attend so many book events before knowledge seeps in. And while I couldn’t really blame Benjamin Franklin for my father’s summers on Nantucket, I would have been much happier if Dad had been enthralled by some dude in Boston instead.

After the bus dropped me off in town, I wandered through the streets, the gentle breeze whispering of the summer to come. I was painfully aware of being on my own while everyone else my age moved in groups. Plucking up my courage, I entered a café’s patio, the pancakes from earlier now a distant memory. Had I ever eaten by myself? Such a small thing, but I wasn’t sure I had. I snagged a seat at a communal outdoor table, put in an online order, and tried to figure out what to do next.

If my dad didn’t want my help, I’d need an actual job. I had three years of waitressing and hostessing experience, and I’d seen a few boutiques with Now Hiring signs. Maybe if a thrift shop needed help, the employee discount would allow me to buy clothes here.

But I was more bothered than I’d expected by Dad not wanting my help. Sure, I wasn’t the most academic person in the world, but I was good at math and I liked science, and while I sort of thought history was stuffy, I wasn’t an idiot. I could be good at the kind of things Dad respected. And I wanted to prove it.

I googled science jobs Nantucket and winced at the results. They were almost all for an oceanographic institute back on the Cape called WHOI. Also, most of them wanted me to have a PhD. Summer science job Nantucket surfaced better results, including internships and fellowships at a place called the Maria Mitchell Association. Clicking through, it looked like the MMA had an aquarium and a science center. Most of the teen opportunities were volunteer work taking care of animals and directing visitors. I glanced idly at adult opportunities. Education, development, natural sciences, astronomy.

I blinked. Astronomy?

Docent needed for Vestal Street Observatory tours, it said. Cashier needed for Open Nights at Loines Observatory.

Nantucket had an observatory? Potentially two observatories? Excitement bubbled up within me, fizzy and effervescent. I searched Vestal Street Observatory, which brought up another page from the Maria Mitchell Association’s site with pictures of a quaint house with a dome, built in 1908. Loines Observatory brought up a more modern observatory with domes built in the 1960s and 1980s. I navigated to the About tab: The Maria Mitchell Association was founded in 1902 to preserve the legacy of Nantucket native astronomer, naturalist, librarian, and, above all, educator, Maria Mitchell.

The MMA’s astronomy department was created over a hundred years ago, with help from Harvard. They had internships for undergrads studying astronomy and astrophysics. Past projects made my brows shoot up. Dark matter and exoplanets, star clusters and galaxy formations…

Maybe if I swung by the Maria Mitchell Association, I could get the inside scoop on any jobs. I finished my lunch, then plugged the address into my phone. It was a short walk; everything in town seemed to be a short walk.

Inside the small, neat building, a gray-haired woman greeted me. “How can I help you?”

Was I being ridiculous, walking into a place and asking if they had a job, as though jobs grew on trees? I cleared my throat. “I was wondering if you had any jobs for the summer?”

The woman’s patient expression didn’t change. “I’m sorry, no. If you’re interested in volunteering…”

I thought about all the money I was missing out on by not working at Lulu’s Diner, about how last year, embarrassed, Dad had said the overnight school trips were too expensive. How the year before, he’d softly suggested I drop private clarinet lessons, and how I’d always known clothing came out of whatever I made at Lulu’s or babysitting. If I was going to volunteer for anyone, it would have been Dad, but he didn’t need a volunteer because he had Ethan.

“Um, no, thank you,” I said. “I don’t suppose if you know any other opportunities for astronomy on the island?” I asked, not very hopeful. I thought of my father. “Or visiting researchers who need interns?”

She looked thoughtful “It’s not likely, but you can leave your name and contact info. I can ask around.”

“Really?” I perked up. “That would be great.”

At six, I met up with Dad at a pizza place he’d suggested. “How was your first full day on Nantucket?” he asked as we sat down, a little too heartily.

“Good, I guess.” Why didn’t you want my help? I wanted to ask. “I looked into jobs. And I went to one of the beaches.”

“Which one?”

“Jetties, I think?” I’d walked from town to a lighthouse, passing more houses and hotels, and tall hedges and climbing flowers. The lighthouse had been short and squat, surrounded by fishermen casting their lines into the water. To the right, I could see Nantucket harbor, filled with small boats and a few massive yachts. In front of me had sailed what looked like an honest-to-god pirate ship. I’d walked along the water all the way to a public beach, filled with laughing parties and aggressive seagulls.

Dad nodded. “They have a restaurant we’ll have to go to.”

I tried to picture my dad at the beach bar I’d seen, with its brightly colored chairs, live music, and colorful cocktails. “Is it your local hang now?” I teased.

Dad looked embarrassed. “I haven’t been. But I thought you might like it.”

Guilt hit me. Right, of course Dad wasn’t galivanting around restaurants. He just wanted me to have a good time here. “Yeah, okay.”

Dad cleared his throat. “I thought Ethan could show you around the island a bit—so even if you haven’t met anyone yet, there’ll at least be someone your age—”

“Dad! You don’t have to set up play dates for me, I’m not six.”

His shoulders drooped again. “Right, I know,” he said quietly. “I just don’t want you to be lonely.”

I blinked several times, my chest aching dully. “I’m not lonely,” I lied in a kinder voice. “There’s tons of cousins at the house.” I held up the menu. “What do you think—Veggie Supreme or the Fortissimo Formaggio?”

“Definitely the Fortissimo Formaggio. Great band name.”

“Wedding cover band.” My role, when Dad pointed out a potential band name, was to match them with their music. “Italian ballads only. Their showstopper is ‘That’s Amore.’?”

Dad laughed, and I felt warm and happy and like maybe this summer would be okay.

Our four-cheese pizza came, and we talked about normal, nothing topics, like the end of school and Aunt Lou’s trip and what Grace and my other friends were up to for the summer. At the end, Dad picked at the food, then set his fork down decisively. “Remember how I got a call last night? About the house?”

Uh-oh. This was an alarming tone. “Yes?”

“How would you feel…if we lived somewhere else?”

I put down my soda. “What.”

He winced. “I was thinking, after you leave for college, I’m not going to need so much room.”

Was Dad planning to sell my childhood home? “But I’ll be back! At Thanksgiving and winter break and the whole summer.”

Dad tilted his head back and forth, as though weighing these arguments. “True, though for the last few summers, you haven’t been at the house.”

“Because you haven’t been there!” I felt betrayed. “But you’re not planning to come to Nantucket every summer forever, are you? How long do you need to be out here?”

“I think it might be time, Jordan.”

“Why?” I asked. “I love our house. You love our house. Why would we leave it?”

He looked pained. “I know, honey. But if we sell, we could get a nice apartment in the city—”

I could feel my blood pressure spike. “You don’t only want to sell, you want to move to Boston? Dad, it’s where we lived with Mom.”

“I know, honey,” he said again, softer.

Wait. “Is this a money thing? Can we not afford it?”

“It’s only partially a money thing. It’s mostly a timing thing, Jordan. I think it’s time.”

“Well, I don’t.” I sat back and folded my arms. “So it’s one against one.”

“But I’m the dad, so I get two votes.”

“That’s not fair.”

He grimaced. “I know. Sorry.”

“If it’s a money thing, if I can figure out some solution, could we stay?”

“Honey. I know this is hard. I promise it’ll work out okay.”

“I’m not a little kid anymore, Dad. You don’t have to make me promises, especially when you don’t know if you can keep them.”

His lips pressed together. “Right. No, I know. You’re not a little kid.”

In stilted silence, we packed up our leftovers. Dad didn’t have a car today, so he called me a ride, even though I insisted I could take the bus partway and walk the rest. “It’d be easier if I was staying with you,” I said grumpily.

“Jordan, the Barbanels are being incredibly generous by letting you stay.”

“Them being generous doesn’t make me like it any more.” Dad was selling our home and dumping me on strangers; could he want any less to do with me?

“Can’t you try, with them?” Dad sounded tired. He pressed his hand to his forehead as the car he’d ordered rolled up beside us. “Can you please, at least, try?”

I felt like the most horrible daughter in the world: whiny and bitter and troublesome. If I wanted Dad to focus on himself, I had to give him less cause to worry about me. “Okay, Dad. Yes. I’ll try.”