We heard a throat clearing. “I have an idea, if I may,” Lacey said from the stairwell. A thumping noise accompanied her hopping down the last few steps.
“Clive’s got a new girlfriend,” she began, coming around in front of us. “Her dad owns half the world, basically, and she’s throwing a New Year’s Eve party on their private island. Staying at their house is free, and he owns Luxe Airlines, so we can get there for like twenty bucks or something insane,” she said, at our mother’s expression. She bounced on the balls of her feet. “What do you say? Nick won’t be there. You can see everyone in a super-fun atmosphere and then we’ll all head back to England together.”
“Hell, I’d go, if I didn’t think you’d rather die than party with your old man,” Dad said.
I threw my arm around his neck and kissed his cheek. “You’d be great company, but I should probably brave this one on my own.”
Lacey’s eyes sparkled. “So you’re in?”
“I’m in.”
And that’s how the debauchery started.
Chapter Two
The room reeked of booze and smoke and stale sweat. My mouth felt like I’d eaten a stick of paste, and tasted about as compelling. My head throbbed. My stomach churned. I was clammy and cold, which I quickly realized was because I was naked other than a sheet covering my ankles.
And some guy’s leg was thrown over mine.
His breathing was slow, heavy, rhythmic; whoever he was, he was asleep. I pried open my eyes and saw a very posh hotel room that a cyclone of hedonism had torn to bits. The carcasses of the minibar blanketed the floor alongside heavy glass ashtrays full of cigarette stubs and ashes. Clothes dangled from anything they could; a deck of cards lay scattered as if someone had hurled it up into the air. A trail of powder led to the suite’s second room, where I could see a slumbering couple I didn’t recognize. Carefully, so as not to stir him, I lifted my head and looked my mystery companion in the face.
It was Clive.
*
New Year’s Eve on Wayne Hanson’s island reawakened a sleeping beast in me that would have given my selective biographer Aurelia Maupassant a stroke. I flirted with inappropriate guys. I gave out absurd fake names like Picasso Von Trapp and lied elaborately about my job—neurosurgeon, buttock-implant technician, party planner—while wearing tight shirts and tighter skirts provided by Joss, who seemed to like me a whole lot more now that I was feeling, as Bea might’ve said, more experimental and psychotic. Clive’s new girlfriend, an old ex of Nick’s called Davinia Cathcart-Hanson, was generous with the perks of her father’s conglomerate and routinely booked us cheap airfare and gratis suites anywhere that had a warm beach, strong drinks, and a throng of people who either didn’t know who I was or didn’t care. And I went, again and again, to escape the memories that were boxed up in my Chelsea love nest along with a great deal of Nick’s stuff. Which apparently he didn’t want. He’d simply dropped away without so much as a note to tell me I should toss the chartreuse tie he left behind, which was a gift from the Queen, and which he hated. Of course, I hadn’t texted him either to return his cashmere sweater that I was still sleeping in, even though it didn’t even smell like him anymore.
Instead, we engaged in a screamingly immature game of cat and mouse. Photos of Nick and Gemma had given way to a mix of reports that he was exceedingly popular at the Royal Naval College, and grainy stills of him inside nightclubs, or leaving them, with a series of pretty women. I insisted I didn’t care, that it was all gossip for sport—and yet, when the paparazzi caught me bodysurfing in Portugal, the surf ripping off my ill-advised string bikini top, I didn’t hate the gloriously carefree shot of me that made the paper. Nor did I mind when the photographers found me in an even more tenuous Joss-designed bikini in Cinque Terre, the week after the press had hotly dissected snaps of Nick at an Eton friend’s wedding reception, his arm wrapped around a gorgeous brunette so that his hand appeared to rest on her breast. And when Nick’s ship docked in Majorca (the last phase of his Naval training) and the Daily Mail’s Xandra Deane reported he’d done body shots off a bevy of exotic beauties while shouting, “It’s good to be free,” I was particularly okay with the paparazzi catching me in Cannes perched on the lap of a hot young beefcake promoting his action flick Venom Has a New Face. None of it was choreographed—I hadn’t alerted the paps, and Marj would never sign off on Nick publicly licking tequila from a stranger’s clavicle—but it was definitely satisfying.
But once the pictures of me with the actor hit the Internet, the press decided I was a calculating fame addict, trading a future actual king for a future king of Hollywood (or any other title-adjacent guy who dared to be seen near me). In the following months, the paparazzi’s formerly genial tone became toxic: I can still describe with laser accuracy the carpet in Heathrow’s terminals, because of how often I hung my head and plowed over it while they took my picture and hissed things like, “Oi, nasty tart, look up,” and, “Where’s this weekend’s shag, you dirty bird?” There was even a new nickname: the Ivy League, a pun on Lacey’s and my Cornell educations and the fact that the press believed we were, in Xandra Deane’s words, “attractive, creeping, climbing, and pernicious,” like the vine itself. Lacey thought this was catchy, but I could hear Lady Bollocks’s voice in my head: It’s not a compliment.
“Honey, don’t you think you should slow down?” Mom asked about six months into my bender, putting me on speakerphone. “All those trips. That actor. You’re looking peaky.”
“Never believe what you see in the papers, Mom.”
“I believe what I hear, which is that you’re exhausted and defensive,” Dad opined. “You’re never home. You’re always with strangers. What the heck are you doing over there?”
“Exactly what you told me to do,” I said. “Finding myself.”
“No,” he said. “All you found was another way to escape.”
The sadness in his voice filled up my chest and exploded in a way that did not look especially good on me.
“You wanted me to come back and stick it to them,” I said. “You told me to act like I don’t care. Mission accomplished.”
“You should still act like you care about yourself,” Mom said.
“Oh, please,” I snapped. “I’m just having fun. So is Lacey. Somehow I suspect you’re not calling to tell her she’s acting like a skank.”
“Young lady, I don’t care how screwed up you are right now, you will not speak to your mother that way,” Dad said. “We are worried, and we want better for you, and that is that.”