Elin Hilderbrand - The Island

It had been Aunt India who said that having two teenage daughters lying on the beach in bikinis helped to keep Barrett Lee on-task. Tate’s heart trilled at the insinuation, but in the back of her mind, fear and jealousy festered. If Barrett Lee was interested in one of the Cousins girls, it would be Chess-and really, could Tate blame him? Chess had the long, wavy, honey blond hair, she had magnificent breasts, she had college-level expertise about how to smile and chat guys up, how to flirt, how to exude the confidence that came with acing her art history survey course and mastering the beer bong. She was reading thick books that summer-Tolstoy, DeLillo, Evelyn Waugh-that gave her an aura of intelligence and inapproachability, which Barrett Lee was attracted to. Tate, on the other hand, was stick thin and flat chested. She bounced a tennis ball incessantly on an old wooden racquet she’d found in the attic; she listened to her Born to Run tape on her Walkman until the Walkman ran out of batteries and Bruce warbled like a ninety-year-old man after ten shots of whiskey. Whenever they needed something from the store on Nantucket, they were to write it, in Sharpie, on “the list,” which was most often kept on a panel of brown grocery bag. But Tate’s grouchy father refused to pay for the sixteen-pack of AA batteries to power Tate’s Walkman until she had finished her summer reading, Their Eyes Were Watching God, which Tate found impossibly tedious. Tate didn’t do her reading, and Barrett didn’t bring the fresh batteries that would have so improved her summer.

Tate had been a tomboy and a late bloomer. One night after dinner, she overheard Aunt India ask Birdie if she thought Tate might be a lesbian. Birdie said, “Oh, heavens, India, she’s just a child!” Tate had filled with embarrassment, shame, and rage. In high school, she had once been called a dyke, but that was by an extremely ignorant girl who didn’t understand Tate’s devotion to the Boss or to the Macs in the computer lab. To have Aunt India, a woman of the world, suspect her to be a lesbian was confusing on another level. Tate lay in bed in the dark house-and darkness on Tuckernuck was far darker than in other places-listening to the rustle of what she knew to be bat wings (Chess slept with a blanket pulled over her head even though Tate had explained that bats echolocate and therefore would never accidentally brush her face or hair), thinking of how ironic it was that Aunt India would question her sexual orientation when she was suffering from the worst crush of her life. She came to the conclusion, too, that whatever it was that made Aunt India think that she, Tate, was a lesbian, was exactly the same thing that was keeping Barrett from looking at her the way he looked at Chess.

Predictably, that summer, things came to a head. One day, Barrett was invited to stay for lunch, an hour involving the whole family eating char-grilled burgers around the picnic table on the bluff that overlooked the beach, during which Tate’s father interrogated Barrett about his aspirations and plans for the future. The answers formed the sum of what Tate knew about Barrett Lee. During the lunch, Barrett looked at Chess fourteen times. Tate counted, and it was like fourteen nails in the coffin of her hopes for love.

She had spent her entire life losing out to Chess, but she couldn’t stand the thought of losing out to Chess with Barrett, and so she employed the only tactic that had ever been successful for Tate with a boy: she showed an interest in what he was interested in. This had worked organically for Tate at school-she liked Lara Cross, she liked Bruce Springsteen, and so did certain boys. These boys paid her attention; they thought she was “cool,” unlike the rest of the female high school population, who only cared about makeup and Christian Slater.

What did Barrett like? He liked fishing. Toward the end of that fateful lunch, Tate had proclaimed several times, too loudly to be ignored, her burning desire to go fishing. She was dying to go fishing. She would do anything to go fishing. If only she knew someone who could take her… fishing.

Her father said, “We get the hint, honey. Barrett, would you be willing to take my daughter fishing?”

Barrett smiled uncomfortably. He flicked his eyes at Chess. “Uh, both of you, or…”

“God, no,” Chess said. “I think fishing is just one more form of animal cruelty.”

Tate rolled her eyes. This sounded suspiciously like one of the radical positions Chess had picked up, like a flu bug, at the Colchester Student Union. “You eat fish,” Tate pointed out. “Is that cruel?”

Chess glared at her. “I don’t want to go fishing,” she said.

“Well, I do,” Tate said. She grinned at Barrett, not caring how transparent she was. “So you’ll take me?”

“Yeah, I guess,” he said. “Or my father could…”

Tate’s father said, “I’m sure Chuck is too busy to take Tate fishing. If you agree to do it, Barrett, I’ll be happy to pay you.”

Tate was mortified.

Barrett said, “Okay, yeah, sounds good. So… we’ll have to go pretty early. I’ll pick you up at seven, okay?”

She was nothing more to him than an hourly wage, but what could she do now?

“Okay,” she said.

That night, Tate didn’t sleep. She closed her eyes and imagined Barrett’s arms encircling her as he showed her how to cast. She imagined kissing him, touching his bare chest, warmed by the sun. She sighed and relaxed in the fact that she was most definitely attracted to the opposite sex.

She was up at dawn, dressed in a bikini, a pair of jean shorts, and a skimpy T-shirt that she had stolen from Chess’s drawer. Chess was sound asleep and wouldn’t notice until Tate got back, at which point it would be too late-the magic of the T-shirt would have worked. If Chess wanted to bitch about Tate borrowing her T-shirt without asking, she could go right ahead. Tate would be anesthetized by the power of Barrett’s love.

At quarter to seven, Tate carried a waterproof bag containing a sweatshirt, three peanut butter and honey sandwiches, two bananas, and a thermos of cocoa down to the beach to wait. The bikini and Chess’s skimpy T-shirt didn’t offer much in the way of warmth, and Tate waited on the misty shore with her arms crossed over her chest, her nipples as hard and cold as the pebbles under her feet. When she heard the motor of Barrett’s boat, she tried to appear sexy and enticing, even though her teeth were chattering and her lips, she was sure, were blue.

Tate’s heart was hammering in her chest as she waded out to the boat; she was convulsing with the chill.

Barrett offered her a hand up. They were, for one sweet second, holding hands! He said, “I packed a picnic lunch, some beers and stuff, for after fishing.”

It was, Tate saw now, a testament to her low self-esteem that she never once considered that the picnic had been meant for Barrett and her.

“And you’re going to…”

Barrett nodded. “Ask your sister if she’ll go with me. What do you think she’ll say?”

Tate pressed her lips together to keep from screaming. “She’ll say yes.”

“You think?”

“I know,” Tate said. Although Tate and Chess had not spoken about how insanely attractive Barrett Lee was, they were sisters, and therefore the whole novel of how Tate loved Barrett Lee and how Barrett Lee loved Chess and how this would eventually be revealed to Tate’s horror and Chess’s embarrassed delight was understood but left unspoken.

“Great,” he said.

The fishing was ridiculously successful. Barrett caught three bluefish and one striped bass, and Tate caught two bluefish and two striped bass, one of which was a whopping forty-two inches long. Tate’s dream of having Barrett wrap his arms around her as he showed her how to cast didn’t materialize because Tate’s first cast on her own whizzed out thirty yards.