A Scandal at Eastwick Read online

  Julia looked out the car window. “I don’t know. Maybe? I’m not coming back.”

  “Doesn’t mean I can’t ever see you again, just because you’re not settling in St. Clair.”

  Possibly, Julia thought. But in some ways, wasn’t that exactly what it meant? St. Clair was its own beast. A warm, coddling mother when it wanted to be—a cruel, vindictive ex-lover when spurned. She had seen the best that the rich lakeside town had to offer, its little nods towards small-town wholesomeness, its attempts here and there to stay with the times, its opulence, of course its opulence, where quiet wealth dripped from every home and car and damned boat on the expansive shore. Nobody left St. Clair without severing some invisible tie that could never be repaired. Julia knew that, and she still wanted out.

  Atul was looking sideways at her. Worrying about her again, though this time Julia didn’t want him to. She wanted to enjoy tonight and ignore whatever the future might bring.

  “Are you thinking of Lia?” Atul said.

  “Of course not. I have no problems with her.”

  Atul lifted one eyebrow at this.

  “Seriously,” Julia said. “Why should I? She didn’t know.”

  “You’re not nervous to see her at all?”

  “Are you?”

  Atul considered this. “No. I feel bad for her, I guess. She probably doesn’t want to be back here.”

  “Then she can just leave again,” Julia said. “Seriously, Lia is the last person that I’m thinking about.”

  It was true, of course. But even speaking of Lia brought back images of those high school times: there had been four of them back then, five if you counted Atul—whom they all had a crush on at some point, though only Bella had dated him later. Julia had been the practical, bookish one. Katie had been the outgoing, popular one. Bella had been the funny, sarcastic one. And Lia? Lia had been, Julia supposed, the One Who Was Supposed to Make It. To go on to bigger and better things outside of a town obsessed with its own prosperity, drunk on its own secrets.

  That was what it had been like in high school, when everyone had to have types, when every person was so eager to fit themselves into a box, to take the latest personality quiz, to sort themselves into some sort of order that would help them make sense of themselves and the world. Julia wanted to shake the high school version of herself, tell her that it was all lies, that friendships could not be sustained just based on this neat assortment, this willingness to mold yourself around the other ‘types’ within your group. That was one of the reasons Julia had to get out of St. Clair: already the people in it had formed their vision of her, and reflected in their eyes, Julia had no idea how to grow, how to change. How to be anything other than exactly what they expected of her.

  Still, Julia thought, a pit forming in her stomach as the Eastwick mansion came into view. If she was going back to types, Lia had always been the intuitive one.

  And what would she see that night in Julia?

  What, after all these years, would she guess?

  Chapter 5

  Lia Logan had never felt so sick in her life.

  She had practically fainted when the housekeeper first told her—a smug older woman called Mrs. Briggs who had detailed with ill-concealed pleasure exactly when the party was to take place, which vendors would be arriving when, and which guests (so many guests!) would be attending.

  Lia had instantly gone back to her room to book a flight out of St. Clair. She had taken on the house-sitting gig as a favor, though the Eastwicks were doing her one just as much. Lia’s parents had retired to Florida, and Lia needed a place to stay, temporarily, until she decided on a new city and found a new job. A holdover at a family friend’s expansive mansion certainly seemed like a better way to spend the holidays than cooped up in her parents’ downtown townhome, fielding questions about what she would do now that she had “given up that silly acting thing.”

  That “silly acting thing” had taken up ten years of Lia’s life. She had left St. Clair with the intention of never coming back. At eighteen, Lia had broken up with her high school sweetheart and, within twenty-four hours, boarded a plane to Los Angeles to room with a girl she had met in some online classifieds.

  The girl she roomed with was from Wisconsin, though prior to her L.A. move had spent two years in New York City—Brooklyn, in fact, and she had the stylized social media photos to prove just how much of a hipster adventure success it had been: her, looking out over a garden balcony at a jagged skyline, or taking a bite of an ice cream cone in a small green park rimmed with iron gates, or swaying to music in an oversized hat and A-line skirt and military-style boots at some famous DJ’s performance. She was a model, though Lia learned when she moved in that this was a highly flexible word to her new roommate: she spent most of her time smoking on the balcony and going on dates with a mysterious older gentleman whom she referred to as “The Producer.”

  But her first roommate introduced her to her friends, and from there Lia had started moving in the churning L.A. circles where someone always knows someone who knows someone, where this person or that is always dating some minor celebrity, where you get enough tastes of fame to believe that it really is just one gig away from you, close enough to touch. Lia had gotten herself an agent, which was easier than she expected, and went on casting calls left and right to land jobs, which was harder than she had believed possible. She booked little gigs here and there, commercials, mostly, and did some extra work to earn her membership in the actor’s guild.

  Mostly she enjoyed the camaraderie of it: it was okay to be young and dumb and hopeful, because the world was your oyster when you were eighteen and nineteen and twenty-two and twenty-four. Everything seemed to be building towards something exhilarating. And she was in a city full of people with dreams—people who had left their small towns and never settled. She would never settle. They spoke of the word sometimes, drinking on emergency stairwells in their AC-less apartments, with a sage pity in their tones. They would never be like those poor souls, too afraid of the world to leave their hamster wheels.

  Until, of course, reality hit a little too hard, and the money ran out, and soon Lia was no longer a hopeful girl in her early twenties on the come-up, but a woman approaching thirty with nothing to show for her decade of work and dreams except for a few commercials and a minor part on a crime drama that featured her as Sassy Streetwalker #3.

  She had found herself facing the same decision she had faced year-in and year-out: pick up some tutoring work, start waitressing again, or work for the disorganized temp agency that some of her actor friends had referred her to. Except, this year it had felt different. It felt, truth be told, like she had traveled the same circle so many times that she no longer had any faith that it led anywhere, or that she would one day be able to break out. She had faced what her early twenties self would never have believed: failure, and the real possibility of giving up.

  Lean in only worked for those too young and too naïve to realize that it was fool’s advice. At twenty-eight, Lia had met enough failed actors and models and creatives to know that the answer to failure was not always giving it one more go. And her time, she had decided, was up.

  She knew it had been a risk returning to St. Clair, trading some money and free rent for exposure to all that she had left behind. And now the whole world was crashing around her. The mansion was hosting a party—no, worse, somehow she was hosting the party.

  Harry McKenzie, her high school sweetheart, the one she had left all those years ago, was going to be there. With a plus one.

  “Fly out!” her mother had cried, when Lia had phoned to tell her of her plans. “But you promised Elizabeth, my dear, that you’d take care of things.”

  “Mrs. Briggs will be here—the housekeeper.”

  “Is she staying the night, too?”

  “Well, no, but—I mean, I thought they were just doing me a favor, anyway. There really isn’t any reason I need to stay, is there?”

  Lia’s mother did not t
ake kindly to this. She went on a rant about frozen pipes, thermostats, and house plants before launching into all of the reasons that Lia was ungrateful for even thinking of leaving, and oh, how embarrassed she would be if Lia backed out now! After everything that Elizabeth and poor John had been through!

  “All right,” Lia snapped. “Fine. I’ll stay. I’ll just lock myself in the room for the party.”

  “Oh, darling, you’re being overdramatic. No one will care that you’re there.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  “It’s true! It’s been years since you’ve been back, my dear. Harry has moved on. Your friends all have lives—no one will give two thoughts to the fact that you’re around, trust me. You worry too much about these things.”

  “Appreciate the pep talk.” And then, because she could feel her irritability rising as her mother’s lectures multiplied, Lia said her goodbyes and hung up the phone.

  It’ll be fine, she promised herself. She’d steal a plate of catering and hole herself up in her room, pretend that no one was in if someone tried to knock on her door. She’d get through it without seeing any of her high school friends, without answering any questions about her past ten years or her future plans, without once subjecting herself to the judgmental gaze of people who had been safer and less foolish than she, who would look at her and see nothing but the hubris of believing yourself to be special.

  Four hours later, with the shrill voice of Mrs. Briggs outside her door, Lia was changed into a borrowed party dress and trying to reassure herself that one could not die of humiliation—at least not immediately.

  Chapter 6

  Bella tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ears and then tugged at the edge of her too-tight dress, pulling the fabric farther down her thighs as she entered the Eastwick mansion. She wished, not for the first time, that she had accepted Atul’s offer of a carpool, instead of twisting around her schedule just so she could pick Katie up and drive over to the Eastwick mansion together. Katie always looked beautiful and effortless, and the contrast drove Bella nuts: Katie was long-limbed and lanky where Bella was short and just shy of plump, elegant and graceful where Bella was plodding and clunking. Katie’s mother’s family was from Haiti and her father’s family was from Korea, and as if her beauty were not enough of an assault, she also spoke both French and Korean and worked as a marketing manager at a fancy agency in the city, where she got to attend hockey games in corporate boxes and go to early restaurant openings in the name of wooing her clients.

  “Atul just came in,” Katie said, craning her long neck over the gathering crowd. “Want to go say hi?”

  “In a minute.”

  Katie swiveled around, still scanning the room. “I haven’t seen Lia yet.”

  Bella shrugged. She had taken Lia’s departure and eventual wholesale communication snub as just part of growing up—certainly she had never taken it as personally as Julia had, or Atul, in defense of Julia. Even Katie sometimes seemed awed by the nature of the cut in their high school friend chain, as if Lia had broken some unassailable law of the universe by pursuing her passions.

  Well, good for her. That’s what Bella thought. Even better that Lia had never become successful—it was more easy to sympathize with her, rather than envy her.

  Bella had certainly had more than enough envy for one lifetime.

  “I see her,” Katie said, snagging Bella’s arm. Bella turned and looked at the wide, carpeted staircase. Like some ridiculously comical film scene, Lia descended. Bella could have sworn the music grew quieter, the conversations hushed. Lia was still beautiful—not as beautiful as Katie, oh no, they had played awful teenage girl games where they had definitively ranked each other’s beauty (Katie, Lia, Julia, Bella), among many other traits. But Lia still had that glow about her, that way of carrying herself, that seemed to somehow both downplay her flaws and draw attention to them in ways that gave her face what someone would call character. She had a strong nose, a rounded jaw, eyebrows that were always just slightly uneven. But she also had dark, full lips, rich brown eyes, and bronze skin. Most of the boys had always preferred Katie, but the ones who fell for Lia, fell hard.

  Just like Harry McKenzie.

  Bella found herself scanning the room for him, turning her shoulders away from Lia. She felt Katie assess her with surprise, and then suspicion.

  “Hey,” Katie said. “Let’s go say hi to Lia.”

  “I’m good right now.”

  “Bella. I’m serious, let’s go.”

  But Bella pulled away from Katie and floated towards the kitchen, no longer interested in the scene. She had acquiesced to the party when Katie told her, excited and hopeful, because Katie was always hopeful that people who had hurt you in the past could still be part of your future.

  Bella knew better.

  The wounds from the past stayed with you, invisible but permanent. Clawing at you, refusing to let you move on.

  Chapter 7

  Alyssa Naples walked into the banquet hall of the Eastwick mansion and tried her very best not to look impressed. Oh, if she had seen the hostess, of course, she would have gushed about the golden chandelier above, about the swan-shaped ice sculptures hovering over the buffet tables, about the two-story ceilings and the crown molding and every other little perfect detail of that magnificent house. Take note, she wanted to say to Harry. This is exactly what I want for ours someday.

  But for now Alyssa did not want to look like she hadn’t seen such a mansion before. So she kept her face carefully neutral as she greeted Harry’s old friends and family, and was introduced to all sorts of friends of the Eastwicks, all of them repeating the same lines: yes, so unfortunate what happened here; so glad Elizabeth and John are doing well; the future is bright for the young man, it really is!

  Alyssa could care less about the golden boy kicked out of his college for his father’s sins. No, she was interested in meeting one person and one person only tonight.

  Lia.

  Her eyes scanned the room, but so far she could see no one who looked like the failed actress and failed girlfriend of Harry McKenzie. She recognized the few girls around Harry’s age as his childhood friends, and the rest of the women there were much too old to be Lia. So where was she? Perhaps she had heard that Alyssa was coming—perhaps she had realized that she wouldn’t have such an easy time securing Harry for herself again. Alyssa took a glass of merlot from a passing waiter and took a long, warm sip.

  Her eye caught movement at the far end of the bar. Next to her, Harry excused himself to go to the bathroom. She nodded without looking at him, watching as Arthur McKenzie, Harry’s uncle, approached the bar where Harry’s brother and sister-in-law sat. She should go over there, Lia thought. She still needed to woo James and Mariel, to make them love her as much as Paulette soon would, to ingratiate herself with them so that she could charm every person in Harry’s life, binding him irrevocably to her.

  But Arthur was acting strangely. He kept looking over his shoulder, scowling, and when James or Mariel tried to talk to him, he jerked his head left, as if surprised to still find them there. Once, Alyssa caught him staring off into the distance, a dark shadow over his face, but when she tried to see what he was looking at, she came up empty.

  What business did a man have to date his brother’s widow anyway? Alyssa thought. She still viewed the arrangement as strange, if not worse, and could tell by Harry’s uncomfortable silence on the topic that he felt the same. Still, Arthur could use a little charming, too. An approving uncle certainly couldn’t hurt anything.

  Besides, Alyssa thought, bringing the glass of merlot to her lips once more. I know your secret—and that means that you’ll have little choice about liking me.

  Chapter 8

  “Let’s just go to the bar,” Atul said. Julia stood next to him, expression stoic and arms crossed. She had been like that ever since they arrived, and wouldn’t explain. It frustrated him, for it made it so that he could not even make the announcement he had wished to th
at night: to tell Julia that he had proposed, over Christmas, to his girlfriend, though they were keeping it off of social media until they could talk to all of their family members.

  “We can leave, if you’re uncomfortable,” Atul finally said. Julia blinked and looked sideways at him.

  “I’m fine,” she said stiffly.

  “Atul!” They both turned to see Katie striding towards them, face beaming and bright. Atul tried to match her expression; Katie dragged Bella on her arm, who looked as sour-faced as Julia herself. One would think, Atul thought, that such a shared grumpiness might have bound the two girls together.

  “Long time no see,” Katie said, and indeed it had been. Atul had always been the awkward fifth wheel in high school, the boy made fun of for having mostly female friends. But their crew had been inseparable: Katie the leader, Julia the nerd, Bella the sarcastic, and Lia the dreamer. Atul had been a later addition, adopted by the girls, he later found out, due to Bella’s blooming interest—an interest that had led to a rather lukewarm relationship for a few years, before college had given them a blissful reason to go their separate ways. The friendships would have survived the milquetoast breakup, except that Lia had gone that year, gone and never looked back. Texts went unreturned, calls unanswered, and when she came home for the winter holidays, as they all did, she made excuses as to why she could not meet up. She had dropped them, through and through, and their little group had never recovered.

  “Two weeks,” Atul acknowledged, referencing the last time he had run into Katie in the grocery store—a surprisingly common occurrence, in St. Clair. “How is everything? Bella, how are you?”

  Bella nodded at him, her eyes searching the room.

  “She left a few minutes ago,” Julia said, noticing Bella’s gaze.

  “Oh, Lia?” Katie said, wrapping one long arm around Bella’s. “We saw her. Tried to say hi, actually, but she saw us coming, I think. Dipped out for the bathroom.”