The Retreat E-Book

Sherri Smith

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 535

Beschreibung

Sherri Smith illuminates the dark side of the self-care and wellness industry in a thrilling ride of revenge perfect for fans of Liane Moriarty's Nine Perfect Strangers.Katie Manning was a beloved child star until her mid-teens when her manager attacked and permanently scarred her face, effectively ending her career and sending her on a path of all-too-familiar post-Hollywood self-destruction.Now twenty-seven, Katie wants a better answer to those clickbait "Where Are They Now?" articles that float around online. An answer she hopes to find when her brother's too-good-to-be-true fiancée invites her to a wellness retreat upstate. Together with Katie's two best friends—one struggling with crippling debt and family obligations, one running away from a failed job and relationship—Katie will try to find the inner peace promised at the tranquil retreat. But finding oneself just might drudge up more memories than Katie is prepared to deal with.Each woman has come to The Retreat for different reasons. Each has her secrets to hide. And at the end of this weekend, only one will be left standing.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Also by Sherri Smith and Available from Titan Books

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Three Days Earlier . . .

Friday

Katie

Ellie

Ariel

Carmen

Katie

Ellie

Ariel

Carmen

Saturday

Katie

Ellie

Ariel

Carmen

Katie

Ellie

Ariel

Carmen

Katie

Ellie

Ariel

Carmen

Katie

Ellie

Ariel

Carmen

Katie

Ellie

Ariel

Carmen

Katie

Ellie

Ariel

Carmen

Katie

Ellie

Sunday

Ariel

Carmen

Katie

Ellie

Ariel

Carmen

Katie

Ellie

Ariel

Carmen

Katie

Ellie

Carmen

Katie

Ellie

Katie

Ellie

Katie

Ellie

Katie

Katie

Acknowledgments

About the Author

theRETREAT

ALSO BY SHERRI SMITHAND AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

Follow Me Down

The Retreat

the

RETREAT

Sherri Smith

TITAN BOOKS

The Retreat

Print edition ISBN: 9781785654060

E-book edition ISBN: 9781785659720

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: August 2019

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Copyright © 2019 Sherri Smith. All Rights Reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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For my bold and brilliant daughter, Rowan—don’t do any of the things the characters inthis book do and you’ll probably be okay.Love, Mom

This place had made a killer out of her.

How about that for a testimonial! The retreat really did deliver on its promise of a complete transformation. She’d arrived a failure and was leaving a total success.

Everything she’d hoped to accomplish here had been checked off. Her core was stronger than ever, her joints looser, and she’d achieved a level of mindfulness that made her certain she could manifest any reality she wanted, simply by thinking about it really hard.

Most important, her head was finally quiet and that sad stinging in her chest was gone. The disguise she’d been hiding behind had been shed, and her true nature was now out in the open. She was awake, balanced. The sky should be ablaze with fireworks because she fucking loved herself.

A wheeze, a gurgle, then a sudden gulp of air and kicking feet.

She rolled her eyes and pressed harder on the tree branch, hoping she’d hear the conclusive snap of a windpipe and she’d finally get to move on. “Just die already,” she said in a tired voice, then at last, it was quiet. No more movement. She waited a beat to be sure she’d really finished the job this time. Even took a moment to appreciate the inky beauty of moonlit blood as it oozed and pooled on the rocks. The peaceful silence after death. Finally, she was living in the moment.

She climbed out of the ravine, and as she started back toward the retreat she blissfully sang: “One, two, three, four bodies are left on the forest floor. Oh wait, make that five. Five, six, seven, eight, I feel pretty great. One, two, three, four, I am a perfect warrior.”

She always knew she could do it. All she had to do was believe in herself.

When people fail, it’s their own fault. It comes down to laziness and a lack of self-discipline. You have to be willing to suffer to achieve your goals. You need to accept a certain level of agony if you want to become your best self. It’s as simple as that.

There were no witnesses either. Or at least, no credible ones. No cameras or nearby neighbors to report when the screaming started. Just the black sky.

What would she say? About the trail of bodies in the woods? Anything. She could say anything at all.

She was the last girl standing.

THREE DAYS EARLIER . . .

FRIDAY

Katie

Katie jerked awake, eyes popped open at the foreign trill of an alarm set at full volume. She bolted upright, startled and confused, as if a gun had just gone off in her bedroom. First thing she did was assess where she was, which was the waking habit of not only a drinker but also a clinically diagnosed sleepwalker, thank you very much. Her Sphynx cat mewed his displeasure at being disturbed, needing her body heat like a kitty-vampire.

Katie sank back down into the bed.

She was not an early riser.

Her mornings, and sometimes afternoons, were usually spent sulking in bed, thinking about what other people were doing, daydreaming she also had someplace important to be, then happy she didn’t because she was prone to hangovers. She said it just like that—I am prone to hangovers—like they were allergies and she was helpless to fend them off.

When she did finally get up, the remainder of her day was just as aimless.

That there was the lifestyle of the previously rich and famous.

Katie lived off her trust fund—a fast-deflating cushion of money she’d earned playing the loveable kid detective Shelby Spade. A monthly allowance was doled out to her by an accountant named Mr. Walt Maloney. He’d been managing her money since she was seven years old when she was already flush with commercial earnings. He was a paunchy, smiley man with spiced meat breath—she’d called him Baloney-Maloney as a child—who’d say things like, “And to think, all this money and you haven’t even hit the double digits yet,” in a way that wasn’t entirely nice.

Now he called her every few months about her extra withdrawals, to ask her if she knew what a drain was. “Go into your bathroom, fill your bathtub, then pull the plug. That little hole at the bottom of the bathtub, y’know where all the water goes? That’s a drain. I know it looks like a lot of money, but not at this rate. You need to start making deposits, topping it up in some way. This money could be a nest egg that lasts you the rest of your life if you manage it well. You tried college and a few other things—is there anything else you want to do? What comes next for Katie Manning?”

What to do next? Now that was the question, wasn’t it?

Katie had been working since she was four years old. By the age of seven all the way through to a geriatric fifteen, she was Shelby Spade, Kid Detective and already the official family meal ticket for her brother, heavily Botoxed stage mom, and disappearing father. Her mother, of course, pushed her to keep acting, giving her the usual speech that she was a natural performer right out of the womb, which was really just Lucy’s way to justify selling off Katie’s childhood. But Katie knew her red hair, cutesy chipmunk cheeks, and freckled nose did not translate well into adulthood going by the roles she was offered—mostly soft porn or murder victims because people like to watch self-piteous, spoiled ex– child stars get either fucked or murdered—and then of course there was the scar.

But before delving into an existential crisis—she had all weekend to do that—she should probably get up first and pack.

She’d meant to do it the night before, but somehow she just hadn’t.

Katie did a floppy roll out of bed, wandered over to her closet, pulled out her suitcase, and started tossing in Lycra pants, matching tank tops, and pullovers, tags still on, purchased solely for this trip.

Just one suitcase—she wasn’t going to pull a Lacey Evans, who brought nine suitcases to summer camp in season 1, episode 11. This pathetic mental reference to Shelby Spade’s mean-girl enemy refreshed Katie’s self-loathing.

She was twenty-seven now, the age when celebrities (and yes, she used celebrity loosely) died from their bad habits. Their tender, bloated, black-hole bodies, where nothing was ever enough, simply gave out. And here she’d cynically muse about how the long-dead Shelby Spade franchise would get a bump in revenue, maybe even a reboot with some other, cuter girl to replace her.

Just last week, she saw her face in one of those “Stars you loved as a kid—where are they now?” clickbait sideshows. It read:

Just admit it—if you were born in the ’90s, you probably owned a Shelby Spade lunch box or doll or duvet set or gut-wrenching perfume. For seven seasons Katie Manning played the adorable—and, let’s face it, annoying as hell—Shelby Spade, Kid Detective. Her signature line, “I’LL SOOOOOLVE IT,” had us all glued to our TV sets to follow squeaky-clean Shelby’s slapstick sleuthing to solve banal crimes from stolen P&J sandwiches to missing library books. This was the orderly world of Shelby where all wrongs were righted and evildoers spent a month in the “hole,” also known as detention. It was a balm to the budding adolescent’s growing confusions about the world at large.

Katie skipped over the part about the Incident that derailed her life.

Katie then went on to attend the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU but dropped out after her first year. She spent her free time club-hopping and making it onto TMZ.

Just when it seemed Manning had finally drifted into obscurity (aside from her overactive Instagram account), she resurfaced again last year when an award-winning director cast her to play a Hooters waitress and girlfriend to a suspected killer in what would have been a career comeback (though it probably wouldn’t be much of a stretch for Miss Manning if anyone remembers how well she filled out her trench coat in that last season of Spade).

But then, she recently doled out a highly offensive tweet that resulted in her being fired. The part was recast, and Manning was forced into hiding or at least online banishment (bye-bye, Instagram shots of Manning’s hairless cat).

Shelby Spade would not be impressed and would probably sentence Katie Manning to the longest after-school detention EVER!

What the clickbait missed was that Katie was depressed. Profoundly depressed. The most interesting thing about her was over a decade old. Obviously, she wanted a better answer to the Whatever happened to question than being a walking ex–child star cliché. What to do next? It had plagued her since the series ended. Oh, sure, she’d come up with dozens of things she’d like to do in theory: open a cupcake shop or a clothing boutique, run a catering business, become a doctor who had love affairs with other doctors around all that sickness and death. Once she even thought about becoming a writer because of the loose hours, but she knew she’d be all the torture without any of the talent.

She’d latch onto these new ideas with adolescent intensity but no follow-through when it became clear that these careers lacked the effortlessness and polish that they do on TV.

She’d go back to doing what she always did—living off her past success, drinking, spending money on things that gave her a short thrill, sometimes watching herself on YouTube until her skin started to prickle and aimlessness rolled over her like a panic attack.

So when her brother’s fiancée started going on about a wellness retreat up in the Catskills, especially one that was legally allowed to administer ayahuasca ceremonies because the guru running it was an ordained shaman—well, why wouldn’t she go?

Why wouldn’t she want a complete overhaul of her shitty self over a single weekend?

A month ago, Katie wouldn’t have been interested in a retreat. She would have been panicky-pissed for even being asked. It was too much like an intervention. But her life had gotten especially messy lately.

Her last boyfriend had cheated on her; she’d intercepted a text with A souvenir, so you’ll always remember last night. Attached was the female equivalent of a dick pic—a headless torso with a mannequin-thin waist inside Walker’s grungy bathroom.

Hey, cheating assholes of the world, don’t eat greasy, sauce-laden chicken wings and swipe your passcode if you don’t want to leave a traceable outline that your girlfriend can use to break into your phone.

After finding this out, Katie had fled to Nate’s apartment downstairs. Her brother was always good about putting her up when she was feeling especially histrionic. His fiancée, Ellie-Rose (yes, she’d introduced herself that way, pretentious hyphen and all—Katie was certain that set the unfriendly tone between them), attempted to whip up some late night comfort food consisting of kale and brown rice soup. Katie ended up drinking all the red wine instead.

She could only piece together that, for unknown reasons, she felt compelled to use her last lucid moment before passing out on her brother’s couch to tweet a bad joke about lesbians. The tweet put her in a virtual pillory, and the masses came out with an especially gleeful hatred reserved only for spoiled, self-piteous ex–child stars. This sudden thrust back into the limelight also resurrected her old stalker, who drew shaky portraits of her like he was masturbating with his free hand. She was always in her signature Spade fedora, naked, and restrained with a bizarre patchwork of ropes. Now in addition to being depressed, Katie was also disturbed.

Profoundly disturbed.

* * *

So a retreat was an easy sell. All Ellie had to say was that ayahuasca tea was like ten years of therapy in a single cup—and she would know because she’d tried it before—and, well, Katie loved a good shortcut. Tip back a cup of cure-all tea, hallucinate, let your life play out like a film before your dilated pupils, check off exactly those places where things went wrong, and bang, you have all the answers for what to do next. A full mindscape. Or something like that—either way, it wouldn’t be the first time she’d felt like the answer was at the bottom of a glass.

She immediately called on her old college besties. Their attempts at having annual reunions were getting increasingly difficult (Everyone is so busy but me), so there was no better time to force one on them because it was Memorial Day weekend and there was no way she was going to have a good time with just Ellie-Rose. She downloaded some Enya songs to get into the mood for a new age retreat. She bought a ridiculous amount of Lycra, which she was now finishing packing. Facecloths. Her pillow. She needed to bring her own. She couldn’t bring herself to use hotel-issued facecloths or pillows; it had something to do with the scar on her cheek, an irrational fear that she could get an infection—as if it were still an open wound.

Katie showered, dressed, zipped up her suitcase, put it by the front door, and looked at it with a flash of satisfaction at her organizational skills, like she’d just completed the blueprints to a high-rise, before grabbing it again and clomping down the steps to her brother’s place.

Katie’s only sound financial investment was buying her Brooklyn townhouse. She’d it converted it into two self-contained units. The third and fourth floors were hers, while Nate had the main and garden levels. He paid a nominal amount of rent, which Katie accepted because it made her brother feel better about himself, but now that he’d moved his girlfriend in, she was having second thoughts. Ellie had taken over the garden level for her jewelry-making hobby, which wasn’t really a hobby since she sold her wares on Etsy, and yet as far as she could tell Ellie wasn’t even helping pay part of the “nominal” rent.

Her usual hostility, whenever she suspected she was being used, fizzed bitter on her tongue like aspirin. But Katie had to swallow it down since she was about to spend the weekend with Ellie.

As she reached the final bend in the banister, she had that frequent childish urge to slide down it, to please an audience that no longer existed. “Yes, way, we’re going on va-cay!” Katie hollered, doing her little shoulder dance as she barged her way through her brother’s unlocked door. If storm clouds hovered over her when she was alone, they turned into cannons popping confetti when she wasn’t. She put down her suitcase and handed her brother instructions on how to take care of her cat—no easy feat because Mr. Dick Wolf needed his daily hairless-cat version of body butter and at least one sweater change, which usually left her with a few bleeding scratches. He was not a nice cat, but what could she say? She had a soft spot for ugly, misunderstood animals.

“You’re forty minutes late, Katie. Ellie texted you three times. I knocked on your door twice.” Nate was standing there in a crisply ironed, checkered button-down shirt and beige Dockers. Since meeting Ellie, his style had shifted from jeans and ironic T-shirts to something a preschooler wore on picture day.

“Really? I didn’t hear you or my phone.” Not true, but Katie hated being rushed. It made her anxious. She moved into the kitchen, grabbed a pancake off a tinfoil-covered plate, took a bite, and immediately spit it out into the garbage. “Oh my god, this is awful! Seriously, how can pancakes be gluten-free? It’s like taking water out of clouds.”

He gave her a you’re ridicu lous shake of the head and dropped his voice. “Listen, Katie, be nice, okay? Just try to get along with Ellie.”

“What the fuck? I’m always nice to Ellie.” She hated that her future sister-in-law set her brother on her like this. They’d have a single exchange—Katie would maybe say hello or something—and somehow Ellie would twist it all up and Nate would call her and ask, “What did you say to Ellie? She thinks you hate her.” They just had nothing in common. Ellie completely lacked any sense of humor. Or at least Katie’s brand of it. Whenever they talked, it was all jagged edges, and Katie could always sense how hard Ellie was trying to be nice.

“You know what I mean. Just tone it down a bit. Get to know her. She isn’t going anywhere. You know that, right?”

“I do, yes.” Katie softened at the sight of how in love her brother was with Ellie. “I am going to some flaky, guru-led retreat, Nate, to get to know your fiancée better. You can’t say I’m not trying. Hopefully when we return, we will be bonded and totally zenith like the TV made out of fake wood in Grandma’s basement.”

Nate rolled his eyes. “You’re not as funny as you think you are.”

“Probably not, and that explains why your fiancée always says, ‘That’s so funny,’ in lieu of just, y’know, laughing.” Then Katie imitated Ellie’s nasally puff of air that she passed off as laughter.

“Katie.” Nate’s voice went up.

“Just kidding, Nate. I will make sure Ellie has a wonderful weekend, and I will woo her like she comes with a dowry, ’kay?”

“Thank you.” Nate reached over and squeezed her shoulder. Katie patted his hand, then grabbed some milk out of the fridge, saw that it was coconut milk, and put it back. “I really hope this experience brings you two closer.”

“Me too. Now don’t you have any real food in your place?”

“You’re here. Finally.” Ellie emerged from the back bedroom, and immediately Katie felt like a garden gnome next to Ellie’s runway-model height. Katie was just brushing up against five foot two like her own body stopped growing when she was twelve to extend the shelf life of her child-actor cuteness.

Worse, Ellie also made her feel childish with her cool self-control. Even now, Ellie looked perfect, as usual. It was as if she’d walked off an Anthropologie billboard. Summer scarf, tights, and a belted tunic. Her butterscotch hair tumbled over her shoulders in wavy curls meant to look natural but that had to be premeditated and shellacked into place. When she wasn’t this perfect version of artsy college student, then she was the perfect sexy coed, always in oversized Columbia sweatshirts and shorts so short, Katie could only guess she had them on. It was too affected. It reminded Katie of pulling outfits from the Spade wardrobe: the nerdy girl wears glasses, the mean girl a cheerleader’s outfit, and an Anthropologie getup for a wellness retreat. Katie didn’t trust it. Her wariness only deepened when their mother loved Ellie on sight because she was so “marketably” beautiful. Lucy was always mentally plotting a family reality series that she had yet to convince Katie to do.

This would be the first time Katie would spend any time alone with her future sister-in-law. This girl who disappeared while they drank beer and watched a Rangers game to work on her jewelry line; hunks of wood and resin, glass baubles filled with something plucked out of a field, all inspired by the environment. She drank herbal teas all day long, wore dresses as her comfy home clothes, went to yoga (and here she’d once corrected Katie—one does not do yoga, or go to yoga; one practices it), and talked about gluten like it was a terrorist. Her skin was so perfect, Katie fought the urge to jab her to check it wasn’t latex. She’d been watching her brother float after Ellie like she had a golden lasso wrapped around his dick. But how well did he know her? She was a complete stranger eight months ago, and now he wanted to marry her?

It was another reason Katie agreed to the trip; she was going to be Nate’s sober second thought.

“Are you ready?”

Katie smiled hard at her. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

Ellie

Ellie planted one last, lingering goodbye kiss on Nate’s velvety lips. This would be their first weekend apart. “Ew, gross. Get a room or let’s go! We’re late.” Katie, clearly squeamish, gave a stage-effect groan and drummed on the dash. This from the girl who’d made them late.

“All right, you two, have fun. But not too much fun.” Nate gave his sister an Old West squint. “You. Don’t get my fiancée into any trouble.”

“Oh, Nate,” Ellie said in her twinkly English accent as she ran her hand over his forearm before pulling away from the curb, veering a little too far into the other lane, which yielded rapid-fire honking from an irate cab driver.

Katie leaned out the window, hand cupped to mouth, and shouted, “She’s British, not deaf, asshole!” She plopped down into her seat, almost losing her oversize sunhat that took up her entire side of the vehicle. “Wait, you know what side to drive on, right?” Katie liked to make jabs at Ellie’s Britishness.

Ellie smiled tightly at her sister-in-law-to-be. “Of course; I just didn’t expect that you’d get something so big.” For some reason, Katie had thought it would be prudent to lease a mammoth black Escalade to go up to a retreat that bragged about its eco-sustainability. She’d arranged to have it dropped off and now Ellie was driving because Katie, for some inexplicable reason, hadn’t been able to get to the DMV to renew her license, which expired the day after she leased this monster. No excuse or apology was offered unless you counted a deadpan I forgot. Good thing Nate was there to sign for it.

“So we’ll head right to LaGuardia first,” Katie said, all nonchalant, then snapped her gum. She slid on some mirrored sunglasses to go along with her ridiculous hat.

“What? Why?”

“To pick up Ariel. Then we’ll get Carmen.”

Ellie had no idea what she was talking about. “Are you giving them a ride somewhere?”

“Yeah, to the retreat.”

“You invited your friends?” Ellie’s mouth gaped with outrage.

Katie looked at her as if she were senile. “I told you that.”

“No, you certainly did not.”

“I swear I did.”

“No. I would have remembered that. I’d thought this was going to be just us.” Ellie felt sucker punched. This changed everything she’d planned for the weekend. Their weekend. Rather than apologizing for this rude intrusion, Katie just kept repeating that she was sooo sure she’d told Ellie, as if through sheer repetition she could make something true.

“It’s just Ariel and Carmen,” Katie finally added, like it mattered.

But of course, Ellie thought. Of course Katie had to invite along members of what she referred to as her girl squad—an ever-changing ragtag group of other daytime drinkers and hangers-on—because she didn’t want to be alone with Ellie. It confirmed what Ellie had long known, something she’d complained to Nate about. Your sister doesn’t like me.

“I went to college with them,” Katie said because she frequently liked to reiterate that she’d briefly attended college—as if a year of theater compared to Ellie’s graduate studies in environmental sciences.

Ariel. Ellie knew that name. Katie said it a lot around Nate, making his neck burn bright red, which made Ellie fairly certain Nate must have slept with this Ariel at some point.

Unbelievable. What are we, five minutes into this trip? And already the Katie Manning circus has taken hold.

She should turn around, run back to her fiancé. Katie probably expected her to do just that. Hightail it back to a very disappointed Nate so Katie could put her arms up over her head and claim that she’d tried but that Ellie was the one who’d bailed.

Whenever Ellie felt like she couldn’t take Nate’s sister for another second, she thought of her as that slightly bewildered-looking girl playing Shelby Spade, and she could pull it together. Adapt. Ellie knew going into it that it wasn’t going to be easy this weekend. She gripped the wheel harder. “LaGuardia, you said?” Nate had waited for his second date with Ellie to reveal the identity of his sister, and he’d told her with the same gravitas as if he were telling her he was HIV positive. Apparently, Nate had put up with a whole stable of ex-girlfriends who’d wanted nothing more than to hang out with their preteen hero Shelby Spade and enjoy the accompanying fringe benefits of being friends with a celebrity (to which Ellie could personally attest was not much). When she’d told him her mother wasn’t keen about owning a television, and she had no idea who he was talking about, well, Ellie believed that sealed the deal with him right then and there.

* * *

Their first date hadn’t really been a first date but an interview—then again, was there really a difference between the two? Ellie had walked in with her résumé for a waitressing job at Nate Manning’s new restaurant and had left with a boyfriend. Or least that was how she loved to answer the “how did you meet” question.

It was September and she’d been in New York exactly forty-eight hours. She had her hair up in her best artsy blond bun and was wearing a sleek, sleeveless black jumpsuit with just the right amount of plunge in the neck. Not too desperate but enough to offset the glasses. She softened her startling blue eyes with sexy reading glasses she picked up last minute at CVS. And yes, she referred to her own shade of blue eyes as startling. What could she say? She knew what she looked like.

The restaurant was a week away from its grand opening, and the flooring was still being installed. It was an upscale gastropub jammed with flat-screens, a mix of cozy booths and round tables, exposed brick, and twenty-two-foot ceilings. She sat at the bar while Nate stood behind it, glancing over her résumé.

He asked her the usual interview questions over the intermittent buzz of a circular saw and random hammering. She drew his attention first to her brief stint as a runway model, telling him that while she did not have any direct waitressing experience, she did have impeccable balance.

He liked this. Then she made sure to tell Nate she was never serious about modeling but making the world a better place, and that’s why she was finishing her graduate degree at Columbia. Her focus area was human impact on the environment. Nate looked genuinely impressed. Beautiful with substance—if she ever started a perfume line, she’d call it that. Nate asked her more questions about her studies, and she was ready with a bouquet of less sanctimonious-sounding answers.

“So if I hire you, am I really helping out the world at large?”

“I think that’s an accurate statement. And if you hire me, I’ll bring major composting skills to the position.” Ellie smiled, and took off her glasses.

Nate flicked his eyebrows and smiled. Oh, that smile, with its slight gap in the front teeth, a smile that had been goofy when he was younger but now gave him a slightly dangerous look. She’d go so far as to call it disarming, that gap.

She’d later tell him that he looked much better now than he did in those old Tiger Beat pictures, and she meant it. She’d done her research on him. Nate was the pinup who was probably never pinned up much. The guy who balanced a basketball on his index finger in a good-guy pose because he wasn’t good looking enough to be broody—he was too happy, too open-faced, too jug-eared, not that she said this to him. For a while, like other siblings of established child actors, Nate scored a few guest spots on Shelby Spade, but it didn’t go anywhere for him; his restaurant was aptly named Underdogs. All that remained of his stunted glory days were those Tiger Beat shots and a few archived online questionnaires about what he wanted in a girl.

Your fave food: Anything Italian. (Check. Ellie made a mean lasagna.)

What you like in a girl: A good sense of humor (Didn’t they all say that?), a nice smile. I have a soft spot for blondes and English accents. (Ellie had just highlighted her hair and spoke with a crisp London accent, so check and check!) And someone who cares about making the world a better place. (Check! Check! Check!)

“So should I expect a call, or are you saying I’m hired on the spot?” Ellie tucked a strand of blond hair behind her ear, never breaking eye contact. The interview was going so much better than she could have ever expected.

“It depends.” Nate looked away first. Another glance at her résumé. Then he made a proposition: if she could start working right then, she was hired. See, he needed someone to taste test some cocktails, because, he said, every good restaurant needed a signature cocktail you couldn’t get anywhere else.

So Ellie stayed and taste tested a gag-worthy fleet of neon cockatils that were either too bitter, too tart, or too sickly sweet. Nate worked behind the bar like a frenzied chemist until he finally handed her something good. Really good. When she told him so, he looked stricken. He’d forgotten exactly what he’d put in it. Nate tried another three or four mixes but didn’t get it exactly right, and so she got up and joined him behind the bar.

The work crew left, and they spent the rest of the night trying to replicate whatever Nate had made, getting messy drunk in the process—one of those rare occasions Ellie let herself drink too much. It wasn’t until the sun started to come up and shot into the restaurant, lighting up one side of their faces like phantom masks, that Nate grabbed her and kissed her, his lips tasting of sugar rim and whiskey. He pulled back and looked at her. “Who are you?”

Ellie could have easily answered, I’m the girl you described in Tiger Beat; I’m the girl of your dreams, but she instead kissed him back, and he cleared the bar of shot glasses and lime wedges. A bottle of bourbon shattered on the ground. He lifted her up and parted her knees.

Afterward, she wanted to call someone. Her mom or her sister. Let the details spill out of her like a schoolgirl. Her stomach tripping over itself.

And then Ellie met Katie.

The worst thing about Nate was his sister.

* * *

They didn’t actually get on the road until the afternoon. Four and a half hours after they’d left the apartment, all because Katie could not make adequate arrangements to meet her friends. She did not check airport arrival times, so they had to wait inside LaGuardia, wilting in its soupy, warm, Cinnabon-flavored air that tickled the back of Ellie’s throat.

When they returned to the parking lot, Ariel tossed in her suitcases and cooed over the Cadillac SUV, and it was suddenly clear Katie had rented this tank just to spark envy.

They had to fight traffic back to pick up Carmen at a client’s apartment. When she parked, Ellie went to turn off the car, but Katie insisted they keep the missile of an engine running to unnecessarily pump out its noxious pollutants, just to keep the AC going.

“How is Carmen?” Ariel asked gravely from the back seat.

“I don’t know; I hardly see her anymore. I mean, she has like four kids now.”

“Your friend has four children?” Ellie asked. She couldn’t picture Katie having a friend with that much responsibility, who couldn’t go out and party with her every night, or Katie enduring all the mundane details mothers shared about their children. Unless the friend wasn’t a very good mother.

“No, no. They’re her siblings, but she’s practically their mother.” In the fifteen minutes they waited for Carmen, Katie explained how Carmen had been in her last year at NYU and already armed with a scholarship to attend med school at Dartmouth when her hard-partying, bipolar mom walked out for a plumber and hadn’t paid a dime of child support since. Carmen was forced to defer school for a year to work and help out, but she never went back to finish her undergrad degree and lost out on her scholarship. Now Carmen was a home-care worker, caring for her siblings and her Parkinson’s-afflicted dad, crammed into a crumbling three-bedroom duplex on Staten Island.

Ariel made a sad clicking noise. “It’s the cycle of poverty,” she said just as Carmen came hustling out of the apartment building, still in her scrubs and peeling off latex gloves, which she tossed in a garbage bin. Ariel and Katie jumped out of the SUV and greeted their friend with a round of screechy “missed you so much” that went on for several minutes. Ellie turned the music up, then cranked it back down when they got back into the car. “Did not want to spend a second longer in there than I had to,” Carmen said without explanation as she jumped into the back seat and placed a wrist full of colorful reusable grocery totes at her feet that were obviously doubling as luggage.

* * *

But now, finally, finally, finally, they were jostling along on the highway, a car full of four instead of two, Ellie feeling like a chauffeur as Katie fiddled with the console’s buttons, yanking the volume up and down on some yodeling electronica they were listening to.

“It’s just so nice we’re all together again. Woot! Girls’ weekend!” This was the third time Ariel had said some version of this in the last five minutes.

Ellie kept catching Ariel’s eyes on her in the rearview mirror. Like Ariel was studying her face and probably realizing she’d never stood a chance with Nate.

Ellie felt better now that she’d seen her. She was a chubby, eager-to-please girl attired in a matronly floral-patterned dress who laughed way too much and way too hard. She was from some Midwest town where middle school pregnancy pacts and deep-fried Mars bars were probably made with equal zeal. She overly used the banal word weird and said things like geez Louise and holy mackerel.

If Nate had slept with her, it had to have been out of sheer laziness. Some drunken encounter at one of Katie’s parties.

“I’m excited for the massages,” Carmen added as she changed out of her scrubs in the back seat and pulled on frayed jean shorts and a stringy tank top. She pulled her brown hair up in a bun so high it nearly grazed the roof of the SUV. How many blind spots was Ellie going to have to contend with?

“Yeah, but check out these workshops.” Katie read from her phone. “‘Unleash your inner warrior and create the life you’ve always wanted by tapping into your true potential.’ And here we’ve got your usual buffet of yoga, meditation, hypnosis, art therapy, aura readings, breath-work and an adventure course—whatever that means. All brought to you by an integrated psychiatrist-shaman named Dr. Dave, ordained by the Church of Brazil, and his wife, Naomi, who is a creative nutritionist. Again, whatever either of those things mean.”

Katie was playacting right now, pretending this whole trip was a lark Ellie had talked her into, when really she was probably mentally pleading that the retreat would work. That she would return a completely different person. Surely her friends knew too that she wouldn’t be there if she didn’t want to be.

No one could make Katie do anything she didn’t want to do; otherwise, she’d have a job or some semblance of responsibility. Ellie had planted the seed, yes, had even nudged Nate to nudge Katie with a dire warning that her lifestyle of binge drinking and promiscuity was going to get her killed. Ellie stayed in the other room and eavesdropped on Katie’s tear-filled acknowledgment that she was a former child star with nothing left, that everyone hated her after her Twitter bomb, and she would do anything to be different. So Katie could act as if she were on board just to trip out on a psychedelic tea, but Ellie knew better. Deep down, Katie was hoping for a transformation.

“The Sanctuary has mainly four- and five-star reviews on Trip Advisor, and most of the comments were people saying how life-changing their experiences were and that they couldn’t wait to go back,” Ellie added, hoping it would help Katie out of her little act of reluctant attendance.

“Well, I have done my own research into the retreat,” Ariel said with a certain amount of intrigue, and Ellie waited for her to reveal something seedy or damning about the retreat. “And oh my goodness, Dr. Dave is sooo hot,” the girl gushed, her entire body twitching like she’d inserted a vibrator.

“I mean, yeah, the dude’s attractive. That’s kind of a prerequisite for a guru, yeah? But seriously, that Instagram account of his? What is up with people’s victory posturing? Like, what?” Carmen said as her fingers danced over the screen of her own phone. “Like, look at this.” She wagged her phone back and forth. “Did Dr. Dave just win a Nobel Peace Prize? Did he cure cancer? Did he finish a marathon? Nope. Just got up, picked out hipster-chic workout clothes for the day, and walked down to the beach with a camera. It’s so narcissistic. And, like, how serene, living-in-the moment are you if you’re pausing to take a selfie?”

“I just want to trip out on the magical tea,” Katie said when she was finished laughing at Carmen’s tirade like she didn’t post her own victory poses, like that one time she’d organized her closet. “Ellie drank the tea and had a fab experience.” And like that, Katie handed the conversation baton over to Ellie.

Ellie was surprised; she didn’t think Katie had been listening when she’d told her the very true story of when she’d backpacked with a friend in Peru and experienced the tea with a real shaman. How she’d hallucinated and purged—emotionally and physically—until it felt like her guts were splitting. Yet when it was over, her life path emerged like a yellow brick road. “Ayahuasca is completely life-changing.” Ellie took another breath, trying to put words to an experience that transcended language.

“Oh my god, pull over!” Katie screeched, cutting her off. Ellie swerved, thinking she was about to hit something, but Katie had her phone out—not that she ever put it away. “We need to get a picture of us with that!” Katie pointed at a giant roadside advertisement.

Ellie waved them on, refusing to join in—she said in case a car came and she had to move the Escalade. Really, she felt like a mic had been ripped from her hands as she watched the trio of these woo-girls pose with Big Dick’s Landscaping.

They piled back in, and for the next three hours Ellie tried to follow along the tangle of inside jokes and old college memories passed among Ariel and Carmen and Katie, but she ended up spending the entire road trip with a perma-grin on her face while having no idea what they were talking about.

The only other time Katie tried to include her in the conversation was when she asked her to say zebra.

Ellie shrugged and pronounced it the British way, “ZEB-ra.”

“Now say cocksucker.”

“I’m not saying that.”

“Pleeease, it’s so funny with your accent. Listen to this. C’mon, Ellie-Rose, just do it! Say cocksucker.”

Ellie gave in and said it. A round of laughter. Katie loved to pretend Ellie’s accent was adorable so she could openly mock it. Apparently, the same could be said about her full hyphenated name, since this was the first time she’d heard Katie use it.

Katie then requested for her to say out loud:

Tit-fucking.

Hairy balls.

That zebra cocksucker just tit-fucked me with his hairy zebra balls.

“Wow, and it still sounds like you’ve just asked me to tea.” Followed by a genuine squeal of teary-eyed laughter. She also called Ellie Downtown Abby, and Ellie never corrected her. There’s a reason stand-up comedians do thirty-minute sets; they’re exhausting after that.

The GPS directed them through a series of turns and winding roads until the road that led to the Sanctuary lolled out of the thick, dark trees like a tongue. Once they’d turned onto the driveway, it took a full minute to reach the lodge.

It was a massive, chalet-style lodge with a stone façade and dark blue trim, perched on 160 acres of wooded lakefront land. It blended so perfectly with its surroundings that it almost seemed to be outfitted with camouflage.

There was also a smaller guest cottage on the opposite side of the barn that Katie had complained was already booked when she’d reserved their room. At the time, Ellie had thought the guest honeymoon cottage was a bit much just for the two of them, but now it made sense since Katie had been booking for four.

They pulled into the circular flagstone driveway and parked.

The girls slid out of the Escalade, slammed their doors shut, and stretched. Finally able to breathe real air and not the fuzzy scent of a Glade clip-on, Ellie took a deep breath. She basked for a second in the gentle tinkling of wind chimes and other whistling and moaning wind contraptions—of which there sounded to be plenty—a balm to her ears after listening to blasted music and shrill voices. “Aw, look at you; you’re meditating already.” Katie clucked her tongue, and then before Ellie could avoid it, Katie pounced and took a group shot. Tap, tap, tap, and she was loading it to her freshly reactivated Instagram account. “It’s like a show of bravery to reactivate,” she told her friends. Of course, it also looked good for Katie Manning to appear so reticent, that her first post-tweet pic was of her at a wellness retreat.

Ellie tried to tamp down her anger at being displayed online without her permission. Up until then, she’d managed to evade any association with Katie’s social media.

They grabbed their bags from the trunk, bumping and dragging their oversize suitcases—except Carmen, who looked downright spry, bags swinging at her wrists—up the driveway and onto the porch. The lake was shining under the afternoon sun like tinfoil. On the dock was a girl doing a headstand on a yoga mat. Her bloodred face matched her red headband and was aimed toward the house like she was waiting for someone to notice her. Her Cancun-style braids dangled from her head like Medusa snakes, and her substantial armpit hair rustled in the wind. The girl lifted up one hand and stayed like that for a few seconds, showing off her strength before flipping down onto her feet. She made a heart shape with her hands.

“Oh, wow, I can smell the patchouli from here,” Katie wisecracked. Ariel laughed again, harder than the joke warranted. Ellie got the feeling that Ariel acted as a portable version of canned laughter for Katie. An unpaid ego groomer. Or maybe paid, considering Katie did foot the bill for both her friends to be there. Airfare and all. Ellie knew this, because her friends kept thanking her for the trip. Katie brushed it off as no big deal, but Ellie knew that she was blowing through her money.

Nate told her so.

He kept a careful watch over Katie’s finances.

Now Ellie felt her skin prickle with another wave of defensiveness, but just as quickly, she shook it off. If Katie wanted to spend the weekend belittling the retreat, there was nothing she could do about it. Katie was there. It was a first step in what Ellie had lately abbreviated to Project Katie. That was all that mattered.

Ariel

Under a haze of unrelenting giddiness, Ariel was still laughing about the patchouli comment when the door to the lodge opened. Standing there were the owners, operators, and married couple, Naomi and Dr. Dave Lundgren. Both were sun-kissed and dressed in long, white, flowy collarless shirts.

“Welcome, welcome.” Dr. Dave held the door, and he was so tall that Ariel easily passed under his arm. Always an awkward thing for a grown woman to do—pass under a man’s armpit to enter a place.

“We’re so honored to have you here.” Naomi smiled with preternaturally white teeth marred only by a black fleck between her front two teeth that Ariel guessed was a chia seed. She clasped her hands in front of her, pressed her bare feet together, and offered an Eastern bow. Her hair fluttered forward like a cascading waterfall; it was styled in what Ariel knew only as a bowl cut.

Katie stepped inside, tried returning Naomi’s bow, and broke out into a new round of laughter when they bumped heads on the way down.

“I admire your energy, girls,” Dr. Dave said about their little slapstick routine. Ariel would have bristled at girls like she always did when a man called her one, but not with Dr. Dave. Maybe it was because he was younger than his wife by at least a decade; he was maybe in his late thirties. Early forties at the most. Somehow that made it okay. Or maybe it was because Ariel felt smitten.

It was weird to see Dr. Dave in real life after watching hours of him talking on his YouTube channel. It was the same way she’d felt about Katie when she’d seen her for the first time in real life. There was something surreal about it, like animation that had been superimposed into the real world. Back in college, it had taken a long while to not view Katie as a hypercolored, flawless celebrity. She would just look at her with complete wonder until Katie would grow surly and tell her she was creeping her out.

At first, Ariel only clicked through the videos so she could better see where she was going—Dr. Dave recorded himself in different parts of the retreat—and to understand why Katie had wanted to come to this place. But he was easy to watch, with his chiseled jawline and his Nordic ice-blue eyes and that deep, throbbing voice that kind of put her in a lull.

Of course, this was before Ariel learned they were attending this retreat ironically. That Katie wasn’t taking it seriously at all, only pretending to so she could make fun of Ellie’s new-age beliefs before the marriage—which Ariel couldn’t hear about without her stomach going eely.

“It is so wonderful,” Naomi said, her eyes going dewy. She had all the perkiness of a Zumba instructor. Ariel would know, because she’d spent the last year thinking Zumba was the answer to her extra weight. It wasn’t.

Then Naomi went in for a hug, like the bow wasn’t enough.

Ariel was not a hugger. A lot of people assumed otherwise, she knew, because rather than resting bitch face, Ariel suffered from resting super-approachable face. She came across like a jolly fat girl, but she didn’t like to be touched unless she explicitly invited it. However, being Minnesotan, Ariel was polite more than anything, and so she hugged back. “Thank you, and I admire your welcoming techniques,” Ariel said awkwardly, giving Naomi a hard, drumming back pat, which was universal code for the hug to end.

Dr. Dave then swooped in for his own hug. A button on his shirt scraped against her cheek and nose. Ariel started laughing again. Really laughing. She thought she was going to lose control for a second and just drop to the floor, giggling, because it was her reaction any time she felt awkward. She would picture herself being mugged or being held at knifepoint by a rapist and start to titter away, her entire body vibrating with nervous laughter. “You think this is funny, bitch?” And her throat would be slit just to shut her up, and she’d be murdered with some idiotic grin on her face.

Ariel touched her cheek and tucked her hair behind her ears.

She took a moment to look around while Dr. Dave and Naomi made the rounds, hugging Carmen and Ellie tightly as if they were long-lost family members who they were generously putting up for the weekend. It rang a little false, considering how much the rooms cost. Before Katie was even done asking Ariel if she wanted to come to a retreat in upstate New York, Ariel was googling it, looking at the room rates, enlarging the aerial views of the sprawling 160 acres of lush green, the fruit trees and vegetable garden, the charming wood swings and hammocks.

It looked like an exclusive country club.

This was the perk of being best friends with a celebrity.

Ariel missed Katie. The whirlwind quality of her. Her fairy godmother–ness. One minute she’d be standing in her boxy apartment trying to overpower the fried smell of Shakopee’s only Boston Pizza with Febreze, and the next thing, Katie called and she was twirling around like she’d just won some sweepstakes contest.

She missed Carmen too, even if they weren’t as easy around one another without Katie sandwiched between them. She missed their little threesome. She missed college, when they were still sky-high on their potential. On their special-ness. When they had yet to open that first nesting doll of adult disappointment and failure.

Ariel didn’t make it in New York past that first summer after graduation. She couldn’t afford the necessary rounds of unpaid or insultingly underpaid internships to get hired by a decent advertising agency. Her parents called and checked on her as if she were a plummeting investment; they were so baffled that college graduates weren’t rewarded with jobs once they graduated.

So she went home, tail between her legs, and eventually got a job as an event planner at a Holiday Inn—it was as glamorous as it sounded—with the goal to save up and return to the Big Apple. That was five years ago, and now she didn’t even have the Holiday Inn job to show for it.

She knew she was too young to already be living in the past, but she was anyway.

* * *

While all the hugging was going on, Ariel peeked into the living room and had to stop a squeal from bubbling up in her throat. It looked even better than it had online—the high ceiling crisscrossed with exposed beams. The dark, shiny wood. The way the room stretched on and on into a dining room with a wall of windows to gaze through at the lake, so sparkly that unicorns could drink from it.

It was beautifully decorated. A rustic coffee table with a stack of three leather-bound books topped with a seashell. A knee-high bronze horse sculpture next to the fireplace. A dark-and-stormy-night oil painting hanging on the mantel. Four chairs with ornate, rolling wood backs. And the pillows! So many throw pillows! Blues and reds and herringbone all arranged just so on the couches, a combination of colors and patterns and fabrics that shouldn’t make sense but somehow did, a big middle finger to the simple plebeian tastes of purchasing furniture in matching sets. Ariel was always awed by interior design that didn’t match.

She inched farther inside the room. It looked like it’d been ripped from her Pinterest Bohemian Dream Room board. A pinned Williams-Sonoma advertisement. Ariel’s insides quivered like they always did around nice things. It’s Pinterest perfect.

A middle-aged woman with gray-brown hair with one of those zany stripes of purple meant to announce a lingering youthful wild streak was sitting down on the floor in front of the coffee table. Ariel almost didn’t notice her. She was gripping a canary-yellow colored pencil and pressing it hard onto a page. “Helloooo. Oh, coloring, nice.” It was all Ariel could think of, because what did you say about coloring? The woman’s head snapped up, and now Ariel could see her face. It was a contorted mask of grief. The woman looked like she was crying, weeping on mute. Her mouth, opened and puffy, emitted an airy sound. Almost soundless, like air being let out of a tire.

“Sorry.” It was all Ariel could say as she backed out of the room.

* * *

“Let’s show you all to your rooms so you can get settled. Orientation starts at 5:30 sharp in the main room.” Dr. Dave did not offer to carry anyone’s bags as he led them up a wide, creaky staircase.

It was much warmer on the second floor. Too warm. As if the air-conditioning couldn’t make it up there. Dr. Dave flung open the doors to two side-by-side rooms. “I call them the Blue Bliss Room and the Green Serenity Room,” he said with a schmaltzy flourish, as if he were presenting the penthouse suite of some Las Vegas tower. The girls shuffled forward and looked in each room. Ariel sensed Ellie behind her—or really over her; she was so damn tall.

So this was Ellie. The bride-to-be was finally unveiled. How many hours had Ariel scoured the internet for a picture of her just out of curiosity? She was pretty, if you were into perfect, heart-shaped faces devoid of any character.

Her stomach was knotted the entire drive up. She’d always been holding out hope that maybe on the handful of weekend trips to New York City she’d made since college, something would happen again between her and Nate. Not sloppy drunk sex but something sober and real. And then it would be Ariel living with Nate, right below Katie, and they would be one big happy family.

She couldn’t picture Nate happy with Ellie. She was snooty. She didn’t try to engage with them even though Katie kept trying to include her in the conversation.

Ariel had stared at Ellie on the ride up and wondered if she knew about her and Nate, until Ellie caught her in the rearview mirror and aggressively held her gaze until Ariel looked away.

“Oh, I love these rooms,” Katie gushed. “It kind of feels like you’re staying with some old eccentric English aunt, hey, Ellie-Rose? I am gonna take the Blue Bliss one because it sounds like a fun cocktail.”

Ellie smiled. “Not my aunt, she likes her knickknacks. But spartan surroundings certainly help to declutter the mind.”

Dr. Dave nodded. “That’s the idea, all right.”

Ariel rolled her eyes. She thought the rooms were too bare. Though she’d studied the pictures online, she’d just assumed that certain amenities had been left out on purpose, as part of the “unplug and relax” Valencia-filtered marketing scheme and that just outside the frame was a flat screen and minibar. But the rooms were much plainer than she’d expected. Almost stark with two twin beds and mismatching blue homemade quilts. A blue vase with a daisy. A water pitcher on a gold embossed plate. All shabby chic and quaint but practically empty.

Her phone suddenly jingled. She pulled it out of her purse. Dr. Dave made an audible sigh.

It was her dad calling. She hit Silent.

“Then I guess this is our room,” Ellie said cheerily and followed Katie into the room, brushing too hard against Ariel to be an accident.

“Oh, I thought . . .” Ariel’s voice went sticky in the back of her throat. She’d thought she’d be sharing with Katie. They were best friends. She hadn’t seen Katie in over a year!

Ariel stood there a second too long, about to push her way inside and cut off Ellie’s confident toss of her suitcase onto her bed, when her phone lit up again. Her dad. Ariel dismissed the call.

Then she received a text before she could even put her phone back in her bag. Her dad had never texted her before.

the police just left here! what have you done ariel!!? call home now!

Ariel’s heart did a panicky hiccup out of her chest. The air went clammy.

Carmen bumped canvas bags past her. “Guess that makes us green and serene.”

Ariel turned her phone off, slipped it back into her bag, and followed Carmen to the other room.

“Good! I’m glad the room speaks to you. Sometimes, I feel the rooms themselves pick their guests.” Dr. Dave tipped his head back like he was mind-blown, and Carmen whispered in Ariel’s ear that she got the feeling Dave was mind-blown a lot.

Carmen

Twenty minutes later, they were all tumbling down the stairs into a living room that reminded Carmen of some kind of lodge, where a secret society of powerful men with goblets of brandy in hand met to make decisions for the rest of society. Maybe it was the antler chandelier hanging over the dining room table or the massive stone fireplace, where evidence of some despicable act could easily be burned to ash. Either way, there was something about this place she already didn’t like. Maybe it was her ingrained suspicion of people with money. Maybe she just distrusted unbridled displays of happiness without the obvious help of pills or alcohol.

How am I even here?