Beautiful Little Fools(19)

* * *



I HIT THE balls, harder, faster. My arms ached as they sliced balls through the air one after another, after another. I thought about Lena, halfway to Tallahassee on the train right now, and I imagined the weightlessness she must feel watching the sky roll by, Danny waiting for her on the other side of the line. I sliced the balls. Harder and harder. I was so used to my arms being sore by now that I barely even registered the pain. But today I hit hard enough that I did. My arms groaned, but I kept on hitting balls.

“Jordan, where’s Lena?” Jerralyn Westport piped up with the question, interrupting my driving. She was a tiny raven-haired wisp of a thing who looked like she wouldn’t have an ounce of power, but really, she had a mighty swing that seemed to come out of nowhere. I stopped hitting balls, and I was breathing hard, sweating. I wiped my brow with my forearm and hesitated for a moment, thinking about Mrs. Pearce commanding me to stay quiet. But what if I did tell Jerralyn the truth? What if all the women left and ran back home to their fellows and the tour was over due to lack of participants? That pit of longing, of homesickness, that grew and grew in my stomach each day could shrink again. No one could blame me for going back to Louisville if there was no tour at all.

I rested my club back in my bag and turned to face Jerralyn. She had her arms crossed in front of her chest and she frowned at me, like whatever had happened was all my fault. Like I’d done something to Lena. “She left to go home and be with Danny,” I said. Then I quickly added, “But you didn’t hear it from me. Mrs. Pearce made me promise I wouldn’t tell anyone.”

Jerralyn rolled her eyes, and I wasn’t sure whether she was reacting to Mrs. Pearce or what Lena had done. Jerralyn was from Santa Barbara and she always acted like being from California made her better than the rest of us, more worldly or something like that. “Lena wasn’t even that good,” Jerralyn finally said, surprising me.

“That’s not fair,” I said. Because actually Lena was very good. She’d come in second in our practice round robin in Savannah last month. And now that she was gone, and I’d probably never see her again, I felt oddly protective of this girl I didn’t like all that much simply because she’d snored above me for three whole months.

“Women don’t always get a chance like this, Jordan. You know that. You’d have to be a simp to give it up. Lena is an honest-to-god simp.”

I nodded finally, so Jerralyn would leave me alone and I could go back to driving balls. But it made me wonder what she’d say about me, what they’d all say about me, if I ever just up and left one morning too.



* * *



THREE DAYS LATER, I woke up before the breakfast bell to the sound of someone knocking on my door. The rhythm of the day had been broken before it had even begun, and I got out of my bed, disoriented. Maybe Jerralyn had told Mrs. Pearce what I’d said, and now she was here to yell at me, away from the others. Or maybe Lena had changed her mind, come back. I swallowed hard, before I opened the door.

“Oh my! They didn’t tell me I was rooming with the Jordan Baker from Louisville.” I blinked for a moment before I realized who was standing there speaking to me: Mary Margaret. She appeared bright eyed and wide awake, even though it was not quite light outside yet. Her acorn hair cascaded down in front of her shoulders, and she reached up and tossed it behind her before stretching out her arms to grab me in a fierce hug.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. I barely knew Mary Margaret, but I felt this flood of relief course through my body at the sight of her, almost as good as if I’d opened the door and Daddy or Daisy had been standing there. Almost.

She stepped back, picked up her suitcase, and walked inside the room. “Some business about a girl having to leave the tour and apparently, lucky me, I was the alternate.” She put her suitcase down, held up her hands, and shrugged.

She sat down on my bed, bouncing a little to test its firmness. “So tell me, Jordan, is everything as fabulous here as we thought it would be?” She looked up and stared at me expectantly. And all I knew was, now that she was here, everything would be better. The rhythm of the day would rise and fall. My arms would ache and ache. And Mary Margaret would laugh and we would whisper to each other at night in the darkness. And I would have a friend here and I might feel something close to happiness again.

“It is,” I told her, smiling widely to hide my lie. “In fact, it’s even more fabulous than we’d dreamed. You are going to love it here,” I promised her.





Detective Frank Charles September 1922

MINNEAPOLIS




THEY WERE LIARS, EVERY ONE of them. The more Frank dug into their stories, the more he could pull them apart, thread by thread. It reminded him of the way Dolores would undo a sewing stitch, and suddenly, an entire hem unraveled.

It was Nick Carraway whose version of the truth he trusted the most. And not, as Dolores had chided him, because Nick is a man. But because Nick was the only one he’d talked to who’d genuinely seemed broken up about Jay Gatsby’s death. They’d been neighbors, friends. It was fair to say Nick had even idolized Mr. Gatsby and that his murder had left Nick a little… flattened. Then there was that thing that Nick had said, about Daisy being dead inside. Frank couldn’t stop turning that over and over in his head. It sent him down to lower Manhattan at lunchtime last week, waiting for Nick to walk out of his office so he could chat with him again.