Chapter 5

There’s a box on the dining room table that wasn’t here when I got up this morning, set at one end of the great glass slab with its top cut open. I can hear Mags and my mother talking in the kitchen, their voices drifting toward me like the warning music in a horror movie.

I open the box’s top flap to find, no surprise, that everything inside has the Saint logo embossed onto it in bright, unmissable white. The first bubble-wrapped layer is glass water bottles with crystals at their bottoms, no doubt intended to purify your H2O—as if supergluing a sparkly rock to a jar imbues it with healing powers. I push them aside to get at the small stack of velvety bags beneath, each embroidered in gold Saint stitching and bound by a slim, shimmering rope. When I pull one open I let out an unintentional yelp. It’s a vibrator. A Saint-branded, lasciviously matte black vibrator.

“Audrey?” my mother calls. “Is that you, honey?”

I drop the vibrator, pressing my palm to my shorts like it scalded me. “Yeah.”

“Would you like to join us for some coffee?”

Boy, would I. I press my eyes shut, quickly count off four fingers, and make for the kitchen.

They’re seated next to each other at the island, which is so massive it’s more of a continent. Magnolia is forty-five to my mother’s fifty-four, but they both look a decade younger, many thanks to the frequent procedures that Camilla calls “treatments.” I’ve known Mags forever; she’s been my mother’s assistant since the book came out, since all this began, since she was only twenty. She’s Camilla’s best friend and ultimate groupie. They’re only more intimidating when Laz is with them, when their power trio feeds off its own chaotic energy like a pack of circling tiger sharks.

“Good morning.” Camilla smiles, and I have to look away. She’s in a cream-colored cashmere sweater with short sleeves, already made up in pale pink lipstick and dark mascara. As usual, she seems to glow at me across the room. She’s the supernova that everything else falls into. “Do you feel better after a good night’s rest?”

I reach for a jar of cold brew on the counter. This is typical: the charmed, chipper tone, like nothing untoward happened last night. When I look at Magnolia, I can tell she’s bracing herself for what I might say next.

“Not particularly.” I lean against the lower cabinets, take a sip of coffee. We’re separated by the white expanse of the island but they’re both turned to face me, like this is some kind of tribunal.

“Mmm,” my mother hums, a vaguely sympathetic sound. There’s a minuscule wooden bowl of salt next to her coffee mug: she’s the only person I’ve ever seen salt their coffee, just another of her incomprehensible habits. “Your energy is a little stiff, I have to say.”

I blink. “That’s not a thing.”

“What isn’t?”

I’m—okay. I’m not doing this with her. “You can’t read my energy field, Mom, and honestly I just came in here to—”

“Well,” she cuts me off, “I’m telling you that I’m reading it right now, and it’s stiff.”

I wonder why?I nearly snap.

“Maybe you need to take a moment before we leave for the airport,” she continues. She lifts a green smoothie to her lips, and I wonder who made it. “For some earthing therapy. Take your shoes off, go walk around in the yard. Ground yourself.”

We stare at each other. I grind out, “I’ve been outside for the last hour.” I wouldn’t go barefoot through the yard in a million years—what, so the soles of my feet can get covered in crushed ants and grass clippings? I suck in a breath. “And I’m not flying to San Francisco with you.”

She looks at Mags, which sends a hot spark of fury up my spine. I barrel ahead. “I need a flight to Philadelphia.”

“Why Philadelphia?” Camilla asks.

My turn to look at Mags. “You didn’t tell her?”

“There’s nothing to tell,” Magnolia says. “You were overwhelmed last night, but you’ll feel better next time. Always lots of nerves for the first show.”

I laugh, a bitter noise that makes me hate myself, hate the person she makes me. “I wasn’t nervous. I just don’t belong here, doing this. My real life is waiting for me at UPenn, with Ethan, and I need to get there before classes start on Wednesday. You can do the tour without me.” I shift the coffee cup in my hands. “You always have before.”

“This isn’t like before,” my mother says. Her fingers are wrapped around the smoothie glass, and she leans toward me on her elbows. “I want this summer to be for us, Audrey. If you’re missing Ethan, let’s fly him out for a bit. What about the Miami stop, hmm? At the end of July? We can stay awhile, hang out on the beach.” She smiles, wiggles her shoulders like we’re just a couple of chums, happy dancing together in the kitchen. “Eat some fresh oysters?”

One time. One time she made me try an oyster and I said I liked it.

“No,” I say, pushing away the image of Ethan and me at the beach, reading side by side. A whole summer together is better, cutting across the quad after class, studying in coffee shops when it rains. No. “I’m not doing this. You can’t make me.”

For a moment, there’s silence. I watch her weigh what to say next: I’m eighteen, is the truth. She can’t make me do this. This isn’t like sixth grade, when she flew me to Colorado and left me there. When she made a decision on my behalf and I was powerless to stop it, no choice but to watch her recede across the autumn-dappled quad, my tears blurring the aspens into auburn flames.

I can do the leaving this time. I can be the one to walk away.

The doorbell rings, and all three of us turn toward the front of the house.

“Before you decide,” my mother says as Magnolia stands, “I thought you should meet Dr. Stone.”

“What?” Mags moves toward the front door, and when it opens, two voices rise to the house’s cavernous ceiling. “Mom.” I’m still wearing what I slept in: pajama shorts and an enormous Summit School EMS T-shirt. I haven’t brushed my hair. I have my own agenda for this conversation, and it’s being grenade-bombed, and before I can say another word Mags is coming back into the kitchen with the woman I’ve spent weeks reading about on the internet.

“Dr. Sadie Stone,” Mags says, gesturing toward her. Dr. Stone is shorter in person than I was expecting. Her headshot on American University’s biology department website is unflinching and unreachable, as intimidating as I expected from the youngest professor on campus. She’s the bargaining chip my mother used to get me to join this tour in the first place.

“Good morning,” Camilla says, smiling at Dr. Stone over her smoothie. “Thanks so much for stopping by.”

Dr. Stone says something that sounds like a cross between “of course” and “thank you,” a muddled whisper that floats straight up to the ceiling. Her chin is tipped nearly vertical, taking in the house in all its shocking splendor. She has light brown hair swept into a neat bun and wears a pale blue T-shirt with dark jeans. In any other context I’d be tripping over myself at the chance to work with her.

“This is Audrey,” Camilla says, a gentle attempt to hook Dr. Stone’s attention. “My daughter.” They look at each other, and Dr. Stone holds my mother’s eyes for just a beat too long before finally turning to me. I watch her compose herself, blinking apart the stunned set of her face. My mother does this to people, traps their attention like a moth to flame. Makes it hard for them to see anybody else.

“Audrey,” Dr. Stone says. She extends a hand toward me and I truly cannot believe this is happening while I’m in my pajamas. This woman has published in the New England Journal of Medicine. “Sadie. It’s so nice to meet you.”

“You too,” I tell her. Her grip is firm, squeezing my palm tightly before she lets go. “I’m really, um. Honored that you’re here. But the truth is—”

“Would you like some coffee?” Magnolia interrupts.

Sadie’s gaze flickers between us, tracking the tension in this marble hull of a kitchen. “Yes,” she says finally. “Please.”

“Mom,” I say. Everyone turns to look at me. I don’t want to do this in front of Dr. Stone, but there’s nowhere else to do it. Our flight leaves in four hours. “I’m not going with you.”

My mother draws a breath, her eyes flicking to Dr. Stone. She doesn’t want to do this in front of her, either. “Audrey, you can’t go to UPenn.”

“Yes, I—”

“I already pulled the tuition, honey.” She holds my gaze, and the kitchen hazes out around her—like my whole brain has gone static. “Weeks ago, when we scheduled the tour. There’s no place for you there.” Her voice gets smaller, fades until I can barely hear her at all. “Your place this summer is with us.”