Page 29 of Bombshell

“Oh, and the Royal wedding is coming, so we can get all the commemorative merchandise and maybe we can even—”

“You are so British sometimes,” Ava says, staring at her. “But, I guess that means I can still seduce Alexander before he’s married.”

“Good luck with that,” Poppy says.

“I have high standards.” The two dissolve into a debate about the Royal family that I quickly tune out. Weddings. Happiness. Love. Even sex. All of it makes me feel sick. But maybe the city being obsessed with a stupid wedding will mean the museums and book stores will be empty.

But all that really matters is that wherever Sterling went there’s no way he’s there. I need to put some distance between us. An ocean is a good place to start, and suddenly, I want to be gone already—away from Valmont and him and the minefield of memories he’s left behind. “Can we leave tonight?”

10

Adair

God bless the British stiff upper lip.

Back in Valmont, if you say you’re having a shitty day, people stop what they’re doing and urge you to tell them about it—until it feels like you’re living out every crappy thing all over again. But in London, I’m finding that people got used to living with pain about a dozen generations back. There’s no wallowing allowed.

I don’t know what I’d do without Poppy, but ever since Sterling left, whenever she sees me looking sad her eyes well with tears. It gets old.

We arrive at our hotel from Heathrow late, and my friends crash as soon as they see the beds. But I’m not ready to sleep. And the only place to get a meal is a late-night cafe across from our hotel, nearly empty in the half hour before closing. My waitress, a young British-Indian girl with dyed-purple pixie hair and a knowing smile, takes one look at me and diagnoses the problem. “You looked like you needed this,” she says, pausing to drop off a slice of four-tiered chocolate cake along with the coffee and sandwich I ordered.

“Is it that obvious?” I say, my head swimming with the disorienting effects of jet lag.

“Yeah,” she says, dropping the bill on the table. “Remember, love. Never let them see you bleed.” Then she is off, disappearing to work on whatever it is waitresses do at closing time.

I decide to take her advice to heart. Wherever Sterling Ford is in the world, if he could somehow close his eyes and see me in London, I don’t want him to see me pining for him or losing one glorious moment of this trip. I want him to see an Adair MacLaine who has moved on to a better life. I want to stay beyond his reach, and beyond my own regret. Which is so much easier to do here than in Valmont.

After coffee and cake, I leave an outrageous tip for the waitress and wander around London for an hour or so. I’ve travelled abroad before, of course, but that was with my family, who subscribe to the idea that people in other countries have nice things worth enjoying, sure—but it would be better if you didn’t have to talk to any of them. I was never allowed to wander, never allowed to sate my curiosity for what was around the corner. It was almost more infuriating than not going at all.

London is the perfect mix of old and new. Our hotel is small but luxurious, located in the poshest area of Belgravia. I’m not sure it’s exactly where I’d want to be for a long stay, but I already know I want to live here. Maybe not for my entire life, but I’m willing to be convinced.

By the time I can no longer fight off how tired I am, I take an Uber back to our hotel, and—for the first time in weeks—fall into a deep, dreamless sleep.

The worst thing that happens the next couple of days is that none of us can agree on what kind of fun to have. Ava prefers to sleep late and go clubbing. Poppy prefers to be up early, and can’t stop talking about going to Saville Row to shop for clothes for Cyrus. I want to see some museums and libraries, but I quickly discover that going to either of those things with people who don’t want to be there is worse than not going at all.

We hit the breaking point on the fourth of our five days in London. Poppy sets it off by trying to literally drag Ava out of bed, still drunk from the night before. I wasn’t happy about getting up at 7am, either, but I’ve never quite figured out how to say no to my best friend.

It’s not a problem for Ava, though, and within a minute all three of us are talking over each other and saying all the things we had so far managed to leave unsaid. It gets dark, but before anyone says anything friendship-ending, Ava actually comes up with the solution: today will be a “split up” day. Poppy doesn’t like it, but I’m pretty sure it’s just because she wants to keep an eye on me.

I already know everything I want to do, and it starts with a trip to Notting Hill, which is everything I saw in the Hugh Grant movie, and more.

London tends toward the posh and sophisticated. It’s easy imagining every man in a suit going to a high-pressure City job. And I’m the least well-dressed woman on every block I walk down. Notting Hill is the opposite of all that. More than anything, it reminds me of the Nashville Farmer’s Market. A mind-boggling amount of tents choke the city streets, selling everything from antique books to tie-dyed shirts and hemp beanies. Mouth-watering smells waft by from every direction, and at the exact moment I no longer smell delicious food, another cluster of street vendors making Afro-Caribbean chicken and rice appears, and I cave to temptation.

I’m not quite sure why I’ve kept Sterling’s copy of The Great Gatsby in my backpack. I threw it in my bag at the last second of packing, I think because I wanted something to look at if I decided I still needed to understand where it all went wrong. And it’s just stayed there ever since. I’ve had twenty chances to take it out, and every time I forget it’s there I see it again and hear the waitress’s advice about not letting them see you bleed.

I can’t help myself, though. With my paper plate rapidly disintegrating from the effects of steaming hot rice and chicken jus, I pull out the dog-eared paperback and flip to a page at random. Sterling’s clean, neat scrawl fills about half the margin on both pages, and it’s almost as interesting to read his notes as it is to read Fitzgerald himself.

One passage reads: “It understood you just as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”

And in the margin beside it: “Never understood this. Probably b/c I don’t care what impression I convey. Except maybe to Francie. Some of the looks I get from her are *almost* like this. But is that because I don’t want her to suffer from worry about me—which amounts to doing her a kindness? Or because I’ve never had anyone whose opinion of me was better than my own (which is saying a lot, but also nothing at all)?”

Sterling’s note is heart-breaking and infuriating all at once. On one hand, I wonder how he doesn’t even seem to be aware of using the margins of The Great Gatsby like a journal. But how else would he process things? A poor, abused kid who lost his family, bounced around the foster system, and never had anyone to relate to? Sterling was a scared little kid when he wrote this, but it might have been less than a year ago for all I know. Sterling never seems vulnerable in person. But the boy who wrote in the margins of this book didn’t go away because he grew into the body of a Greek god. I wonder if everything I knew of Sterling was just a facade built to protect the boy who wrote these notes. I wonder if it’s so easy. I wonder if it’s fair to judge from a note in a margin.

Suddenly, I get the feeling eyes are on me, and I shudder slightly. If Sterling could see me now he would definitely see me pining. Did he leave the book for me like an apology? Like, Hey, Lucky. I know I did you wrong. But maybe if you read this and try to figure out what happened, you’ll realize I’m not complete shit.

Or is it something else entirely? Am I Daisy to his Tom? Would that make Sterling’s blackmail of my father actually a test of me? If I’m Daisy, I’ll pick heartbreak if it means privilege. Sterling wanted to know if I meant it when I said I didn’t care about my family’s money, and so he did what he did…?

I throw the book on the ground and a disgusted, frustrated scream escapes me. I hear people around me gasp—my floppy upper lip must offend them. I grab my bag and take two full steps away from the picnic table I’ve been sitting at. The Great Gatsby lies there on the ground, but it asks me a question as plainly as if it were speaking: