Free The Summer We Read Gatsby by Danielle Ganek

table and raise their glasses over and over again as the light changed and the stylist angled the pasta salad just so? But she’d studied the aspirational glossy pages carefully and with yearning, as though they contained the exact formula for success.
    My half sister was quite thrilled with her own social daring. She’d invited a hundred people at least, some of whom she’d never actually met. “This is how it’s done out here,” she informed me, when I’d wondered at the wisdom of inviting people who didn’t know her.
    Peck said things like this with total seriousness, to the point where you would start to wonder if you weren’t actually the one who didn’t make sense. “Isn’t that a bit, well, arriviste ?” I wondered aloud, speaking her language.
    She waved away my suggestion with her cocktail, spilling some of it on her wrist. “You’ll thank me. Later, when you get invited to everything, you’ll be grateful.”
    “I’m only going to be here a few weeks,” I reminded her. “I don’t need to get invited to anything .”
    She frowned at me. “Could you be any more boring ? Besides, I have a feeling you’re going to be here a lot longer than a few weeks.”
    “Are you kidding?” I said. “It was hard enough to take this much time off as it was.”
    “This place grows on people.” She waved her cocktail at me. “Drink up.”
    I’d been looking at the painting above the fireplace mantel, with its swirling movement and heavy layers of paint. “That one’s growing on me,” I said, gesturing toward it with the still-full drink in my hand. I had no intention of waking up with another hangover like the one I’d suffered through that morning.
    If I thought Peck wouldn’t notice, however, I was wrong. “Would you please just drink the damn thing?” she grumbled.
    I ignored her and gestured at the painting. “Do we have any idea who painted it?”
    “Listen to you. Aunt Lydia’s body is hardly cool and already you’re trying to make a play for her stuff?”
    I explained that I wasn’t making a play for it, just expressing my interest, and she put her drink down on the bar cart and pulled a chair over toward the fireplace. She stood on the chair to reach the canvas and pulled it down off the flimsy hook on which it had rested for years. She stepped down from the chair and flipped the painting over so we could look at the back. There, on the stretcher, scrawled in black marker, were the almost illegible words. She read them aloud. “ ‘For L.M. From J.P.’ ”
    “Who’s J.P.?” I said.
    She shrugged, gazing down at the canvas she held out in front of her with two hands. “The artist, I guess. Probably one of her friends. Or a Fool-in-Residence.”
    She hung the painting back on its hook and took up her drink. “Let’s get dressed.”
    I got up to my room to find Biggsy with a camera in my closet—a small walk-in crowded with Lydia’s overflow and other items I hadn’t yet gone through. “Oh, hi,” he said, as casually as if it were perfectly normal for him to be there.
    “How did you get in here?” I hadn’t noticed him going up the stairs.
    “I’m working on a new series,” he said, as if that explained it. He spoke earnestly, fixing his strikingly blue eyes on mine. “I hope you don’t mind. I’m shooting people’s closets. There’s an air of mystery, and also of history, to them.”
    “Mystery and history?” I repeated.
    “I’m using black-and-white film, very grainy,” he continued. “So there’s a sense of a long-buried memory, of the past, of encounters not quite remembered.”
    He hadn’t moved yet, but I held the door to the closet open for him. “I have to get dressed for the party.”
    “Sorry,” he said, slipping past me with his camera held high. He smelled distinctly of patchouli. “You’re very pretty, you know.”
    I knew he was trying to win points with me, and it worked; the compliment distracted me from being bothered by his presence in my