Page 6 of Rivals to Lovers
“Whenever I’ve dreamed of the Hill, I cannot say I’ve imagined singing teapots,” Mo said. “It’ll be a different kind of magic.”
Sloan lay on Mo’s bed, kicking her legs as she paged through one of Mo’s issues ofThe New Yorker. She usually scoured the cartoons and then cast the magazine aside. “I think you’d be better off shredding three thousand dollars in cash, getting it wet, and then papier-mâché-ing it all over your body than trying to shop at this point.”
“Right, because I definitely have that much money, for sure. Just sitting around under my bed.”
Sloan rolled on her stomach and pretended to feel around underneath. “How deep?”
Mo laughed.
Mackenzie sat on the bed next to Sloan, holding Mo’s suitcase on her lap. “You need a swimsuit,” she said. “And maybe some tennis whites? Do you have tennis whites?”
“I do not play tennis. Do you think Estelle Morgan-Perry plays tennis?” Wikipedia lacked details about Estelle’s hobbies.
“There are lots of people who use wheelchairs who play tennis,” Sloan pointed out.
“Listen, I don’t know much about Ms. Morgan-Perry, but I do know she is in her eighties,” Mo said.
Sloan flicked another page of the magazine. “Tennis is a lifelong sport. Like golfing, at least my dad says.”
“Cannot believe you actually listened to something your dad said,” Mackenzie said.
“I can pack my gym shorts.”
“In case she makes you run laps or climb a rope,” Sloan said. “Or there’s a literaryHunger Gamessituation. How’s your archery?”
“Shut up, Sloan,” Mo said, throwing a pair of gym shorts at her. Mo had been intimidated by Sloan when they first met. Her roommate had the kind of face and stature to remind people of a living doll. She was tall and thin, with rich brown skin. Maureen wasn’t stylish or dramatic; she was just—Mo. Middle height, pale, with dishwater-blonde hair. Sloan had once told Mo that Mo looked like if Iowa was a person. Mo thought that was vaguely offensive, but she couldn’t defend herself, really. She did look like about 90 percent of her high school graduating class.
Mackenzie intercepted the gym shorts before they could hit Sloan and tossed them in Mo’s still uselessly bare suitcase.
Mo sighed and folded a white blouse. “I might look awful, but I hope my words will speak for themselves.”
Mackenzie patted her arm. “If she doesn’t love it, she’s wrong.”
But as much as her roommates reassured, Mo knew they couldn’t protect her from the weekend to come.Protectwas too strong a phrase, probably, when there weren’t deadly predators or noxious poisons on the horizon, just a few days at a stately home in Greenwich. The home of her literary idol, no less. The home where her favorite writer had walked the halls, dreamt, and written the best book of all time.
The Proud and the Lostwas a 1929 novel that followed Eliza Wirth, a nineteen-year-old woman from high society who, after taking to the flapper lifestyle for a year, was basically kidnapped by her parents. They attempted to reintegrate her into polite society and its norms. Clive, a man she’d run with in her flapper days, had also been living this double life, though he returned by choice to his manor estate. When Clive married Eliza, they had to come to terms with personal versus societal expectations for the rest of their lives. For Clive, the freedom of his youth was sowing his wild oats before he could become what his parents assumed he always would be. After they had a baby, Eliza realized she could not conform, even when allowed to do so with the man of her dreams. But could he really be the man of her dreams if he couldn’t understand her dreams? Paralleling many other novels featuring young heroines in the early part of the twentieth century, the novel ended with Eliza’s suicide—or at least whatwas always interpreted as her suicide. Her car ended up in a ditch.
In the original version, at least.
E. J. Morgan had been a phenom of her time—histime, people had assumed, as the novel was accepted for publication without checking the gender of its writer. E. J. had been a young wife living in Connecticut, and once it was revealed a year after its publication to have been written by a woman, the novel became a touchpoint about wealth, power, gender, and cultural expectations. It only grew in popularity after its release, and now it was impossible to graduate without reading the novel for some English course or another.
Maureen had discovered it earlier than high school—too early? Maybe. She readThe Proud and The Lostfor the first time the summer she turned thirteen while staying with her grandparents. Her parents usually shuttled Maureen and her younger sister Anna to the farm in the county next to theirs for at least two weeks a summer to get the girls out of their hair for a while. Other kids had summer camp; Maureen and Anna had feeding troughs and mucking and the county fair. Anna had always had an affinity for animals, which was probably why she worked with dogs now, but Maureen? Nope. She’d been lucky that her grandparents didn’t make her do much choring—they were a modern enough hog operation to hire staff and didn’t depend on the labor of grandkids. Even though she wasn’t forced to work, it was hard to really play either. At home, Mo would have spent the time playingThe Sims, but her grandparents didn’t have a computer. Modern business or not, they still did paper records all the way until Mo’s grandpa passed away.
Before that summer, Mo had enjoyed the freedom to run around with Anna, swing in the tire swing, or trail along aftertheir grandmother as she did various errands and gardened. At thirteen, though, Mo didn’t want to do anything except lie around and feel feelings, feelings that suddenly felt too big for her body. She wanted someone to talk to but, failing that, would accept watching other people talk. Books fed that need. Her grandma had a few on her shelf: the Bible, of course;The Complete Works of William Shakespeare; some assorted Western novels, andThe Proud and the Lost.
Maureen read the novel twice over the course of those two weeks, and though she’d started reading because of boredom, by the end of the first chapter, she was hooked. And how couldn’t she be, with Eliza in the boardinghouse, rolling her fishnets over her calves for what she didn’t know would be the last time before her parents shoved her into the back of a Mercedes?
Since that summer, Mo had read the novel more than fifty times, so much so that her early writing efforts were stilted E. J. Morgan knock-offs. Once she started reading more broadly and writing more stories of her own, Maureen found her own sure footing with a voice that wasn’t from 1929. Even today, though, Morgan’s novel—her only novel—was a favorite. When Mo turned nineteen, she’d gotten a haircut like Eliza’s from the cover of the edition her grandma owned. Eliza’s hair in the picture was black, whereas Mo’s was a fawny blonde. She’d kept it short for years like that, but ever since beginning her adaptation ofThe Proud and the Lost, she’d been growing it out. She could mark the time—two years—in terms of growth of her blonde, past-shoulder-length cut.
Mo’s life had never been the same since she read the novel for the first time, and now she dared to compare her book to her idol’s. She shivered, running her hand over her measly collection of clothes hanging in the closet. “My dresses are mostlyfrom Target. I feel like wearing a Target dress would be worse than wearing no dress.”
Mackenzie laughed. “I mean, notnodress. I don’t think it’s that kind of party.”
In the end, Maureen packed too much of what she was sure was the wrong thing. Every item she placed in the suitcase rebelled against its inclusion—unfolding from its neat square—except her manuscript. She’d had her book printed at the print shop down the street and enjoyed the heft of it. Beforehand, she’d read through it an additional time and changed about three words. What if those three words were the ones that made Ms. Morgan-Perry—Estelle—fall in love with it, though? Yuri had also emailed the full manuscript to Estelle’s assistant so that she could read it in its completion after the weekend was over. Yuri told Mo this was her chance to meet Estelle and let Estelle really meet her project. A whole weekend felt excessive, but if that was what it took for Estelle to understand that Mo loved and respected her mother’s work well enough to write in conversation with it, then so be it. Amy, her boss, hadn’t been thrilled that Mo would miss a weekend, as the wedding season was starting, but Mo promised to make it up with double shifts the next week if she needed to. Anything to give this book a chance.
Mo knew she didn’t have enough of a platform to be an automatic bestseller. She wasn’t well known and didn’t have a zillion Instagram followers. Her short stories had gotten awards that no one cared about outside of a small group of twenty people she loved on the internet, but she hoped that E. J. Morgan’s daughter would see something in this retelling that spoke to her. The whole situation felt like an extended job interview, or a corporate retreat, except one for a very small corporation.
Mo finally shoved the last thing inside the suitcase, and Mackenzie zipped it closed. “You have deodorant? Toothpaste? Toothbrush?” she asked. She was so used to working around children that sometimes she became mom-ish without realizing it.
