“Jordan!” Daisy cried, clasping on to my arm. Her sharp nails dug hard into my bare shoulder, but I didn’t know what to do any more than she did. We stared at the twisting thing uncoiling beneath our feet, and we could both feel its hot and rancid breath in our face, smell the blood of an acrobat child who had flown over the heads of thousands of people but never slept in a proper bed.
In a panic, I threw my scissors down onto it, and when that did nothing, I slammed the book it came from flat on top of it. That had an effect: it burst into greedy flames, a roar of denial and rage whooshing up from the ground, causing us both to shriek in surprise.
We were perched on my bed now, and I was hanging on to Daisy as if this weren’t a mess entirely of my own making. I almost started crying but then Daisy reached over to my bedside table, where Thomasina left me a tall glass of water every night. She picked up the glass and to my eyes, she spilled the water almost by accident over the flames. The orange flames ebbed back down with a high and angry hiss, and dirty gray steam came up in pillowy clouds. Daisy and I had ended up holding hands tightly, our heads bent within inches of each other as we stared down at the smoldering mess that had been a walking, living paper lion.
“Sorry,” I muttered, half-tearful, but she gave me a game grin.
“It’s all right, it was just fabulous—”
Then the door burst open, Mrs. Baker and Daisy’s mother in front with a half-dozen well-dressed adults behind. I reached for something, anything that might have made them believe it wasn’t my fault, but Daisy was faster than I was.
She burst into loud shrieking tears, going from silent to a pained and tragic howl in less than a moment. Shoulder to shoulder, I could feel her shaking, and I realized with a kind of silent surprise that she was not faking at all.
There was a roar in the background, and then Mr. Fay was busting into my sugary-pink, smoky room like a bear into a beehive. He caught Daisy up in his arms, and she clung to him as tightly as he grabbed on to her. They murmured back and forth in a language I later learned was entirely their own, a cipher of shared blood and beauty, a remnant of some Victorian magery Mr. Fay had learned at Yale.
He bore the quaking Daisy from my room while Mrs. Baker bent down, putting fingers gingerly against the sodden mess of what had been my lion. My terror pulled back to reveal a surprising kind of grief—it had lived and now it was gone.
Mrs. Baker rose, wiping her fingers on one of my handkerchiefs lying by and giving me an impatient angry look. As I said before, she was a woman of few and stingy words. Those words would be thrown like sharp rocks at me in the morning, but for now, she only turned to her guests, shepherding them back to the relief of the sitting rooms and the good port.
Before she left, she turned off my bedside lamp with a hard click, and closed the door after, leaving me in a darkness that purred with fury, that smelled like soggy cotton and burned paper.
CHAPTER THREE
I do not like to make a habit of admitting my mistakes.
When I mentioned Gatsby in Daisy’s own house, in front of her own husband, there was nothing in my mind that connected him with Lieutenant Jay Gatsby. That man was fresh out of Camp Taylor with a commission purchased with the very last of his money from Dan Cody and only one pair of decent shoes. The eager young lieutenant had a wondering hungry eye, and the beautiful man in the lavender suit pin-striped in gray had obviously never been hungry a day in his life.
They had the same pale eyes, the same generous and mobile mouth, the same way of carrying their weight as if it were nothing at all, and yet you would never think they were related, let alone the same man.
Of course, the young lieutenant from Camp Taylor still had his soul, and by 1922, Jay Gatsby of West Egg had no such thing.
It was only the year before when the society madcaps went about with a single nail painted slick black, the mark of someone with infernal dealings. It was so fashionable that Maybelline released Chat Noir, its deluxe black nail polish that promised a devilish long-lasting gleam. In the later part of 1921, it seemed as if half of Manhattan’s twenty-five-and-under set must have made some kind of infernal pact or another. In 1922, the fad was mostly played out, but a little bit of tackiness was permitted in the very rich.