Great (22 page)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

V
ery early the next morning, I waited at the end of the driveway for the passenger van to pick me up. It wasn't as fancy as a chartered helicopter or as private as a town car, but it was cheap and would get me to JFK.

A black BMW convertible with the top up rolled down the wrong side of our street. It had tinted windows, and if it belonged to any of the neighbors, I'd never noticed it before. It came to a stop right in front of me. Slowly, the driver's side window rolled down, and I found myself face-to-face with Teddy Barrington.

“Hey, Naomi,” he said.

I stared into the distance, not saying a word.

“Naomi, I'm sorry about what's happening with your mother,” he said, just as if this were a normal conversation under completely normal circumstances, just as if I weren't making a studious effort to ignore him.

He paused to see if his offer of sympathy would elicit any response from me. I gave him none.

“Years ago,” he continued, “my father almost got nailed with some insider trading bullshit. Some asshole prosecutor was trying to punish successful people so he could win points in the press. Dad beat it, though. So will your mother.”

I sighed loudly and turned my back to him. It was probably the rudest thing I'd ever done. And it really threw him for a loop, too. I don't think Teddy Barrington, ex–child star and scion of one of America's wealthiest families, was particularly used to being ignored.

“Naomi,” he said in a pleading tone. “You can't still be upset about the other night.”

I whirled on him then.

“You mean the night your girlfriend murdered your other girlfriend? The night you're helping her lie about? That night?”

Teddy's eyes flashed with anger. “It was an accident,” he said. “If you didn't listen to that psycho so much, you wouldn't—”

“Her name was Adriana DeStefano,” I said. “And you can go to hell.”

Something truly unexpected happened then. Teddy's handsome brown eyes filled with tears. They were angry tears, but they were tears nonetheless. He looked like the world's tallest toddler. I stared at him in disgust until he rolled the window back up and screeched off.

The passenger van came not long after. I'm not a fan of being in close proximity to strangers, but it couldn't be helped. I muttered an unenthusiastic hello to the other people in the van and squished in between the window and a woman with skin pulled so tight across her face you could practically see every single contour of her skull. She had a companion, a friend with similarly bad plastic surgery.

“That's the suicide house,” murmured Skull #1 to Skull #2.

I glared at both of them with such undisguised hatred I'm surprised their fake skin didn't melt.

I put my earbuds in and listened to my iPod on shuffle. When we got to the Shinnecock Canal, the only point on the trip with a momentary view of the ocean, Bill Withers's “Ain't No Sunshine” started playing. I stared at the distant waves and thought of Jacinta and Adriana. I'd barely known them, but somehow, I missed them both.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

H
oled up in a corner of Alan's Coffee Shop, I hit refresh on the site over and over again. It was only 11:58, and I hadn't set it to update until noon, but I was growing impatient. It had been a day since I'd arrived home in Chicago, and I'd done everything Jacinta had wanted. But I wanted to
see
it to know it was real.

I drank my double espresso and felt increasingly irritated. I guess caffeine doesn't really help you stay cool, calm, and collected in situations like that, but Alan's makes the best espresso in the world. And since I hadn't gotten much sleep the night before, I needed it.

11:59. God, this was taking
forever
. I drummed my fingers on the communal tabletop, earning myself a sneer from the girl sitting across from me. I shot her a tight, insincere smile, which is how Midwesterners say “I hate you” to strangers.

And then finally—
finally—
finally it was noon, and I could see the results of my handiwork.

I hit refresh again, and this time the front page of TheWanted.com updated with a post labeled “THE TRUTH.” In the post, I'd embedded the video Jacinta had made—only this time it was public and accessible to everyone, just as she'd wanted. And that meant it was also automatically on
The Wanted
's Twitter page (200,000 followers) and Facebook page (250,000 fans).

I hit refresh again and looked at the Twitter and Facebook widgets on the post. At first it had been tweeted and liked zero times. Within five minutes, the tweet count went up to 10, 20, 35, 50. The Facebook likes climbed similarly from nothing to dozens. As the minutes passed, both counts got higher and higher, reaching the triple digits within the hour. And the comments rolled in, one after another, also numbering in the hundreds within sixty minutes. I sat in that coffee shop all day, hitting refresh, reading the comments, the tweets, the Facebook posts. Other blogs picked it up, big ones—major gossip blogs, even a few big news sites. There was no question about it: Jacinta Trimalchio's final act had gone viral almost as soon as it had appeared online.

As for what happened now—well, it was out of my hands. I'd done my job. I'd done right by Jacinta, something so few people had done in her short life.

I think I sat there for five hours before a breathless Skags banged into the place. She always did make a noisy entrance. She was holding hands with Jenny Carpenter, who looked at me with shy eyes.

“Naomi!” Skags shouted, earning her the ire of nearly every other customer of the coffee shop (including my across-the-table neighbor). “Where the hell have you been? I've been trying to get a hold of you all day!”

I turned around and said, “Well, hello to you, too.”

“It's discount day at the record shop!” Skags said. “They've got a mint-condition bootleg of Liz Phair's Girly-Sound songs. They said they'd only hold it for us for an hour. C'mon, we'll split it!”

“Hi, Jenny,” I said.

She looked at me timidly.

“Hi, Naomi,” she said.

“You know she gets like this every single Monday, right?” I said. “Every Monday is discount day at the record shop.”

“I know,” Jenny said, and we shared a smile. Skags rolled her eyes.

“Enough with the femme bonding,” she said. “If we don't get there within ten minutes, they're gonna sell it to somebody else and my life will be freaking
over
. Naomi, get off your dumb computer and live in the real world.”

I took one last look at
The Wanted
. The hit counter on the post was through the roof.

“Okay,” I said, and shut my laptop. Then I shoved it in my shoulder bag and followed my best friend and her girlfriend out into the late-summer sunshine.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

SARA BENINCASA
is the author of the recently published Morrow title,
Agorafabulous!
(which was based on her one-woman show). Sara has received much acclaim as a comedian and memoirist and is now turning to YA fiction. You can visit her online at www.sarabenincasa.com.

 

Visit
www.AuthorTracker.com
for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

BACK AD

CREDITS

Cover photo © 2014 by Maren Slay/Trigger Image

Cover design by Laura Lyn Disiena

COPYRIGHT

HarperTeen is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

 

Great

Copyright © 2014 by Sara Benincasa Donnelly

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

www.epicreads.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Benincasa, Sara.

     Great / Sara Benincasa. — First edition.

          pages cm

     Summary: In this contemporary retelling of
The Great Gatsby
, seventeen-year-old Naomi Rye becomes entangled in the drama of a Hamptons social circle and a tragedy that shakes the summer community.

     ISBN 978-0-06-222269-5 (hardcover bdg.)

     [1. Wealth—Fiction. 2. Conduct of life—Fiction. 3. Celebrities—Fiction. 4. Fashion—Fiction. 5. Blogs—Fiction. 6. Lesbians—Fiction. 7. Hamptons (N.Y.)—Fiction.] I. Fitzgerald, F. Scott (Francis Scott), 1896–1940. Great Gatsby. II. Title.

PZ7.B4339Gre   2014

2013008047

[Fic]—dc23

CIP

AC

EPUB Edition © DECEMBER 2013 ISBN 9780062222718

14   15   16   17   18   LP/RRDH    10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

First Edition