Genius: Chapter One
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Plink. I drop one of the nails I’m holding and it splashes into the turquoise water below. I lean further over the railing of the deck of my Key West seaside bar—so far, in fact, that at any minute I might lose my balance and tumble head first into the water. I cling to the rough wood, and feel a giant splinter slide deep into the pad of my thumb. “Shit.” I ignore the pain as I hold the nail in place and bang it with my hammer.
“Now that’s a view I could get used to.”
I glance behind me.
It’s Kyle, our busboy. He’s a competitive weight lifter. He has veiny, pumped-up muscles that look manufactured and steroid-enhanced. “When are you going to go out with me, Luna?”
“I don’t date employees, I’ve already told you that.” Around seven hundred times. It wouldn’t be appropriate. Besides, he’s not my type. Sure, muscles are great but not to the point of resembling an oily, spray-tanned Incredible Hulk.
“Need help?” he says.
“If it’s the kind of help that means you get on with your job, then yes, that would be fabulous.” I smile at him to take the edge off.
“Come on. How about one little after-work drink tonight?”
When hell freezes over, is what I’m thinking. I don’t date pumped-up gym bunnies. Or prowling suits on their conference business trips. Or drunk, over-eager tourists. And definitely not home-town jocks. I’m … between types at the moment. For reasons I don’t dwell on, especially on a beautiful day like this one.
The sunlight glints off the water in shimmery flecks, glazing everything with its magic, or at least that’s how it so often feels to me here in Key West. This little island has become my haven, as though the surrounding barrier of blue water is providing a necessary forcefield. Out there, beyond the Seven Mile Bridge, somewhere among the amber waves of grain and just before you get to the purple mountain majesties, lies my past and all my regrets. Here, I can breathe. The sugar sand and lush humidity comfort me in ways I didn’t even know it was possible to be comforted. “See you inside, Kyle,” I say lightly, pretending to threaten him with my hammer.
“Aw.” He wanders off and I resume my work, leaning a little further over the railing, holding on for dear life and desperately hoping I don’t catapult myself overboard. I bang another nail into place.
“As if that’s going to help,” I hear another voice behind me say. I recognize the voice instantly as my best friend, the one and only Josie Farrell. My family moved into the house next to Josie’s in Cedar Rapids, Iowa when we were both nine years old. I’d just arrived from New York City still in my city clothes. Josie saw me sitting on my front step, completely lost, like I’d spent so much of my childhood. Over the course of an idyllic summer, she showed me how to hand-squeeze lemonade. How to whistle with a blade of grass. How to find the best hiding places in the barn loft during our long hazy afternoons of playing hide and seek with her older brothers. How to get good height on the rope swing before you let yourself go, to get to the deepest, coolest water of the swimming hole. We’ve been inseparable ever since.
Her family became my family. My family is what you’d call … what’s the word for it? Broken. Dysfunctional. Blended. Or some unhappy combination of all three. My parents divorced very un-amicably (i.e. they basically loathe each other) when I was six years old. My father ran off with his knocked-up (by him) secretary, who definitely didn’t want a step-daughter in tow, especially one who was the spawn of her new husband’s evil ex-wife. My mother is what you might generously refer to as a social climber. I think somewhere deep down inside her gold-digging heart she genuinely loved my father. The fact that their marriage imploded made her, in a way, give up on love altogether. So she went for money instead. Luckily for her, she was—and still is—beautiful enough to get away with it. Before the ink on her divorce papers was even dry, she moved us out of the only home I’d ever known and in with husband number two, a Manhattan real estate developer. I somehow found myself mired in the world of the super-rich. A limo driver drove me to my private school each morning. We had chefs and housekeepers, an indoor pool and gym, even a helicopter pad on the roof. My mother thought she’d died and gone to heaven. Me, not so much.
I discovered I’m not cut out to be super-rich. Maybe that sounds strange since so many people seem to crave it or aspire to it, but I just don’t happen to be one of them. I spent three years living someone else’s warped fantasy, which to me felt more like a gilded prison. Like being forced to wear a diamond-studded suit that didn’t fit.
I prefer the simple things in life. A good friend to laugh with. A late-summer field of wheat to walk through. A beach at sunset. A cold beer after a hard day’s work. People sometimes call me a hippie or a free spirit. I’m not sure if I’m either of those things. I am what I am, and it’s … unique, so I’m told.
In Iowa, with its rolling hills and big blue skies, I finally felt free. I could get dirty and ride a bike and play flashlight tag in the dark. I could see the stars.
And Josie was there for all of it. Her family was everything mine wasn’t. Big and loud and fun and close-knit. I found out what it feels like to laugh and to feel loved. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t my own family loving me. Josie’s family felt more like mine than my own family ever has. So when my mother’s second marriage fizzled out a few years later and she decided to move to Los Angeles for husband number three, I stayed with Josie.
The next two years ended up being a time of my life when I could have used a mother, as it turned out.
No one ever tells you the hard stuff can be harder than you ever imagined. No one tells you that some of that hard stuff is going to cut you down until you know for a fact you’ll never be quite the same. Or that you’re going to need more courage than you ever knew you had.
Somehow, I survived those two years.
The day after we graduated from high school, we jumped into Josie’s beat-up old van and headed for Florida. We couldn’t get out of there fast enough. For her, it was her one chance to get out of the town she’d been born in and had never left. For me, it was a form of recovery. I needed to get out of that town like a drowning man in shark-infested waters needs a lifeboat.
We decided on Key West for no other reason except that we liked the sound of it.
And after three days of travel, as we drove through the tiny, sun-charmed, character-laden town, I knew I’d found the place I wanted to stay. Forever is a long time, but for me, something about the lazy heat that oozes out of this place answered a craving in my soul that was hard to explain. I still can’t see myself ever leaving.
We got jobs as waitresses. We found a run-down one-room apartment, swam in the ocean and saved all our money. Turns out waitresses can earn good tips in Key West.
Three years later, when Josie’s father died and left her a small inheritance (her mother had died years earlier, before I met her), we pooled all the savings we had, I sold an emerald bracelet Stepfather Number One had given me for my eighth birthday, and we somehow managed to scrape together enough money to put a down payment on a business that had just come up for sale. Our bar, where we’d worked all along.