Free The Island by Elin Hilderbrand Page A

clear as day how much better that had sounded than going to college, sharing a dorm room, sponging off her parents.
    She had spent that whole summer watching Barrett Lee. He was the one who brought the family their groceries, their firewood, their newspapers and paperback books. He picked up their bags of trash, which he took to the dump, and their laundry, which he took to Holdgate’s and returned in neat white boxes like treats from the bakery. On very good days, he did repairs around the house, usually without wearing a shirt. Tate couldn’t get enough of him—the deep tan of his back, the impossible sun-bleached lightness of his hair. He was gorgeous, and that would have been enough for Tate; she was, after all, only seventeen. But he was nice, too. He smiled and laughed with all of the members of the Cousins family—even Tate’s grouchy father, who in that final summer demanded a Wall Street Journal by 10 A.M . each day, crisp, so that Barrett took to bringing it in a Wonder bread bag. Barrett Lee made their vacation on Tuckernuck pleasant; he made it possible. Everyone remarked on it.
    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