“You went to Duke with Savannah?” JP says. “I’ve known her forever. She’s great.”
“That’s exactly what she told me about you!” Vivi says with a grin.
Vivi thinks maybe JP will take her to Surfside or Nobadeer or Madequecham, which is where people their age hang out, but instead he drives her down a long sandy road to a beach that is completely deserted. It feels like a secret.
“Is this where you bring all of your unsuspecting victims?” Vivi says, because it would be easy enough for JP to kill her here and send her floating out to sea. （She wonders if this would make a compelling short story, something in the vein of Joyce Carol Oates’s darker work. “Beach Date,” she could call it.）
JP says, “My friends hang out at Nobadeer but I wanted to come here because it’s quiet and we can talk.”
JP plants an umbrella in the sand with great seriousness and intention while Vivi admires the rippling muscles in his arms and back. She slips her sundress over her head and feels JP’s eyes lingering on her body. His gaze is so intense, it’s as if he’s resting his hands on her waist.
It’s like they’re in a Harlequin romance novel, she thinks. Except it’s real.
JP asks if she wants to go for a walk and when she says yes, he reaches for her hand. It’s the first time he’s touched her and it’s…electric. There’s chemistry. Vivi hasn’t held hands with a boy since Brett Caspian in high school, but she doesn’t want to think about Brett right now.
She asks JP about himself. He grew up with his mother and grandparents in Manhattan, went to the Trinity School and then to Bucknell, where he majored in fraternity. （When Vivi laughs, he says, “No, really, I was president of DKE and it took up all my time.”） He, like Vivi, just graduated and needs to figure out what to do with his life—but before he worries about that, he wants to squeeze every last drop of juice out of the summer.
“I’d rather be in Nantucket than anywhere else,” he says. “And I’m aware that real life does not take a break for the summer, so this is probably my last chance to be free and irresponsible.”
“Couldn’t you just stay here?” Vivi asks.
JP laughs. “Spoken like someone who has never seen this island in the middle of January.”
Vivi would like to see Nantucket in January—quiet and blanketed in snow or even gray with a howling wind. She doesn’t care. She loves it and that love is starting to feel unconditional. She can easily see working at the dry cleaner’s year-round and maybe finding a nicer rental. There would be lots of time to write. “What about your dad?” Vivi asks. “Are your parents divorced?”
“He was killed in a Chinook crash in Vietnam while my mother was pregnant with me,” JP says. “So I never knew him.”
Vivi envies the insouciance with which JP announces this. He could have been telling her he grew up on the ninth floor of his apartment building. “I’m so sorry.”
“Can’t miss what you never had,” JP says, and this time Vivi detects a hint of bravado. It couldn’t have been easy for him to grow up without a father.
Vivi shocks herself by saying, “My father is dead too.” She knows JP’s next question will be What happened? and she nearly heads him off by telling him what she always tells people when they ask, which is car accident. But instead, she says, “He killed himself in the garage. Carbon monoxide poisoning.” Her voice sounds calm and emotionless, and for the first time in her life, Vivi feels like an adult. Since she left Parma, she has kept the truth about her father private from everyone except Savannah. She feels ashamed because of both how her father died and the fact that he’s dead. In a world where people are meant to have two parents, she feels lopsided, defective.
JP squeezes her hand. “Were you close to your dad?”
“Yes.”
“What about your mom? Are you close to her?”
“No.”
“But she’s still alive?”
“Yes. She lives in my hometown.”
“Where’s that?”
“Parma, Ohio.” Vivi takes a deep breath of the salt air. She’s starting this relationship off on the right foot by talking about that which she normally keeps secret. At Duke, she often just told people she was from Cleveland.
When they turn around to head back, JP takes Vivi’s face in his hands and kisses her. She is worlds away from Parma.
Things get serious quickly. For their second date, JP reserves a table at 21 Federal; it’s an elegant restaurant in one of downtown’s “antique” homes. The place is legendary; the Hamiltons talk about it all the time—the famous people who eat here, the infamous locals who populate the sometimes-rowdy bar scene. The ma?tre d’ greets JP with a bear hug, then leads him and Vivi up the creaky back stairs to a cozy, wood-paneled room with one candlelit table at a window overlooking charming cobblestoned Oak Street.