concept: hiding from the idealistic rich folks becomes a sport. blair cameron’s reputation is her gold mine; jj maybank has never been afraid to get his knuckles bloody for anything. what’s a more chaotic pair than a girl who has all she could want but is never satisfied, and a boy whose most prized possessions are the sky and the sea?
a series of one-shots preceding valley of the dolls. does not follow the storyline of the show. all are inspired by various songs off the taylor swift albums evermore and folklore.
august: our story starts with a girl and a boy, their face basked in sunlight as they sipped on daiquiris and, for a moment, it seemed the line between the rich and the poor has faded into stardust (paper can be brutally heavy when it is stained with lipstick).
illicit affairs: in the wake of their newfound feelings, blair and jj are prepared to do anything in order to keep their clandestine meetings under wraps as autumn rolls in.
the last great american dynasty: jj is working a wedding at the country club and has no choice but to watch blair from afar as she bathes in all the riches he could never give her . . . holding the hand of a boy who can.
‘tis the damn season: as christmas settles in, blair and jj drive out to the cameron’s lakeside lodge for the weekend to bask in misty quiet the december snow so-generously offers.
mirrorball: following the surprise reemergence of her mother at her father’s birthday party, blair stains her dress with red wine and breaks down in the bathroom. jj is there to pick up the pieces, confronted to a side of the lavish girl he had never witnessed before.
invisible string: the window is always left open for the only person who felt the dire need of slithering through it way after midnight. following a fight out by the beachside, blair has her hands full with an injured jj and bloodstains on her carpet that seemed to have flocked in the shape of a bold, red string from the windowsill to the bed.
long story short: a drunken jj reminisces his failed, past relationships and comes to the conclusion that the girl he would like to spend his forever with is the one with the champagne glass, pressing a cold cloth to his forehead.
all too well: after blair abruptly cuts things off with jj on a warm april night, he finds himself struggling to pick up the pieces, finding a piece of her in everything he sees, smells and does. neither of them quite believes that this is the end . . . but the next page is blank.
summary: jj is working a wedding at the country club and has no choice but to watch blair from afar as she bathes in all the riches he could never give her . . . holding the hand of a boy who can.
word count: 2.7k
The parties thrown by The Island Club were tasteful, though a little loud, and the post-wedding celebration thrown mid-November was no different. With the crystalline chandeliers, far too big to be hanging from ceilings no matter how high without being considered a security hazard, and the bars lined with all kinds of unpronounceable liquor, something about it threw the guests back in time. As the music swelled, it was the ‘30s again and the shimmering dresses were reflecting the bright, disco-like-lights. The pool might as well be filled with champagne; it couldn’t make anyone drunker.
It was on a whim that Marjorie Wilkins and Owen Fischer had decided to get married and, within half the evening, everyone was invited. All the residents of Figure Eight, that is. The only way a Pogue could ever step foot at an event as lavish as a Super-Kook wedding was either as a server running with platters of bite-sized-entrées, a caterer who did not get the deserved credit, or a Goddamn janitor that would run around the unsatisfied old folk the entire night.
JJ Maybank was unlucky enough to be part of the group, damned with having to distribute whiskey glasses all night long. When he stood in front of the mirror twenty-minutes before the celebration, he had cursed his entire family line because he was poor and they were rich, and because he could not operate the bowtie his boss was forcing him to wear during the event. He slicked his hair back slightly and used Kiara’s makeup on a nasty bruise on his cheekbone, where his father’s touch had broken blood vessels and caused red to blossom all the the way from the bridge of his nose to the slope of the bone. It burned; he cursed. He was doing a lot of that lately.
Of course, though he was amid the lively crowd, all he could do was watch from afar. It was in moments like those that he missed the summertime and simply waiting tables for half-a-day, which usually didn’t run too late because they wanted all the best servers for when night dawned upon the island—so they could wait the poker games, of course. JJ was cold in his rented tuxedo, all black-on-black, and couldn’t stop stealing glances at the people in the heart of the action.
Because right in the middle stood the girl he could not get out of his head, a girl that had covered every inch of him like ivies around a stone house. Blair Cameron was dressed in grey, a shimmering, shining low-cut dress that stretched all the way above her ankles. A slit tore the fabric to her mid-thigh. She walked skillfully on the highest heels she owned, stilettos that matched her dress. With her hair pinned at the back of her head, leaving rebel strands to frame her refreshened and beaming face, she looked like a figure straight out of a daydream. And if he could get drunk on the warm, sugary vanilla perfume she had sprayed on the sides of her neck, he would. Truthfully, he’d shed his skin for so much as a taste of her dark lipstick.
He planned on stealing glances all throughout the night, and he knew she’d look back whether she was conversing with people she found a little loud-mouth or dancing with her sisters in the limelight. An obstacle had walked through the door as he filled up the rich folk’s champagne glasses however, and it was then that JJ Maybank discovered that his greatest enemy, his deadliest rival, was no more than a handsome boy with slicked-back hair in a sharp suit.
Now, the blonde boy knew that Sage Okamoto would be his downfall from the moment he saw his arm slither around Blair’s waist. She had pretended to be unbothered, but he could see the slight discomfort in her shoulders from where he stood. It made him want to smash a plate or two, throw them across the room and watched as they shattered against the wallpaper-covered wall.
He was the son of a very wealthy man, Sage, and he oftentimes hooked Rafe Cameron up with the greatest weed Figure Eight could access. Sometimes, when he’d lay with Blair on the rooftop of the country club (which he happened a couple times, and she never told JJ about it), he’d say: “I’m thinking about stepping up my game. Selling more expensive shit, you know?” And she had always known he was talking about drugs. In truth, she understood why he wanted to build an empire that would force him away from his father’s, but that didn’t mean she approved of it. So she’d always tell him some bullshit about how he was too good for that and no one would trust a well-mannered boy with a pretty face like his.
And then he’d lean in to kiss her but she’d pull away—when she got back to her house and JJ sneaked in through the window, she’d keep it all in the pit of her stomach.
So he watched them then with his jaw clamped shut, tight. “Aren’t you the sweetest pair!” a woman exclaimed as she twirled the lace hem of her glove with the fingers of her other hand. She stood between them, arm hooked through her husband’s, traces of red lipstick on her falsely-white teeth. “This island’s greatest legacy, I believe. Because, let me tell you”—then she leaned in towards them, barely glancing at the newly-married couple—“it certainly isn’t them.”
Blair had laughed simply to be polite. She was not enjoying that conversation the slightest. She held a tight grasp on her purse and the other on the collar of Sage’s suit, selling it as she believed her father wanted her to. “Don’t be mean, Belinda. Marjorie and Owen were meant for each other,” she commented with a bright but all-too-fake smile.
“She was supposed to marry rich,” added Betty Marsh as she inserted herself into the conversation. Her husband, Blake, wandered off by the sweets table with Belinda’s own, Sebastian, where they would pretend to listen from away.
“Yes, yes. Instead, she fell for a boy who can’t even provide her with the most basic of things. She’ll have to wear last season clothing for the rest of her life, you know,” Belinda pointed out.
JJ didn’t mean to pry, but he could not resist the impulse. So he made his way to the bar and pretended to be filling up the shots. What a great trophy husband he’d make.
“She fell in love,” Blair insisted, throat dry. “Money shouldn’t matter if you are.”
Belinda let out a bellowing laughter, so greatly superficial. “Money always matters, sweetheart. It’s simply not enough for the woman to provide, she must marry a man who can spoil her. I very much enjoy Sebastian’s gifts every weekend, over an expensive steak or salmon dinner.”
“Believe me, she might think she’s satisfied with the little things now, but not having it all will get old very quickly,” was what Betty added. She had lipstick on her teeth too, peach.
Sage had leaned in softly, so close his breath fanned on Blair’s cheek. “Good think Blair has someone that’ll spoil her and then some,” he teased, making the women laugh before they were on their way to annoy their husbands again.
JJ slammed the bottle down so harshly on the counter that the bartender that chastised him couldn’t sworn he cracked a hole in the marble. He left everything right there on the table, then fled the party like there was nothing holding him back. And, really, there wasn’t.
He thought long and hard about what the devil’s spawns were telling the girl he believed was the love of his life, so much he had actually created a knot in his own stomach thinking about it. It was killing him, that entire ordeal. For the longest time, he convinced himself that he would somehow find a way to climb all the social ranks separating him from the top before he got on one knee, but he was slowly beginning to realize that there were simply too many steps to that staircase.
With his prospects and his academically skills, JJ would go nowhere. Really, the furthest he’d make it is off that island and onto another one, where he’d spend his evenings by the sun. He had never planned on having a place for money—especially an excessive amount—in his simplistic future and now he had to pay the price. Now, because his father was a fuck-up and what little fortune they had left, his mother had taken with her when he was three, he’d never be able to be with the girl he valued most. JJ never thought he’d be the kind of guy to get attached, and now he couldn’t find it in him to cut the string.
It was only when he reached for his phone to call his friend for a pick-me-up that he realized he had left it inside, in the employee room, inside the same locker he hooked his coat and hat. So there he stood, freezing, ankles-deep in bright, white snow, vulnerable as ever under the ivory moonlight.
“JJ!” he hadn’t spun around the first time, but did so the second time she yelled out his name to find her not too far behind, still in her open heels and short dress, bare arms exposed to the icy cold that had already reddened her skin. “JJ, what the hell happened in there?” she questioned, brows furrowed in confusion.
His hands immediately shot to the collar of his suit’s jacket, and he shrugged it off in instants before crossing the laborious distance between them and draping it over her shoulders. “Blair, do you want to freeze to death?”
“No but, clearly, you do!” she exclaimed, quickly looping her arms through. “Why’d you run off like that?” Her teeth were clattering and every breath created a cloud of smoke that made her look identical to her mother whenever she’d smoke cigarettes on the front porch.
And he couldn’t stop the words from rolling off his tongue. In truth, it wasn’t a roll as much as it was a Goddamn boom. “Because I’m a fucking Pogue! I’m a Pogue, Blair Cameron, and I’m not meant for these types of events. I’m not rich or intelligent or witty or whatever the fuck these irritating people are. I don’t drink cognac. Hell, I don’t even know how to pronounce it!” He scoffed as tugged him further from the club’s entrance. It hurt him. “There’s a reason why you’re hiding me, Blair, why you don’t want anyone to find out. You’re ashamed of me.”
“I am not,” her mouth fell open but her words were stern. “Maybank, get in my car,” she stressed. It was the first one in the parking lot. “Now!”
All of a sudden, he was the one who felt ashamed. For all he had done and for all he planned to do. Because, for so much as a brief moment, he wanted to walk up to the window, pull her into his body, and kiss her. Right there, out in the open for everyone to see. He wanted Sage to envy him and he wanted her brother to run out and punch him in the face. He wanted to get his knuckles bloody for her and prove that he deserved her.
But all he could do was silently get in her car.
He stared out the window, jaw clenched, and the inside of his mouth tasted like metal. She shut the door gracefully after her, but he could feel the anger and hurt radiate off her skin as she sunk into the leather. Her arms were wrapped around herself in a foolish attempt to try and regain some bodily warmth; his fingers were folded in his lap, knuckles white.
“What you said is bullshit and you know that,” she stated. Blair didn’t even allow him to question himself on the subject. “I’m not ashamed of you, JJ, I’m ashamed of them. You heard the way they speak, the way they view things. I don’t want to give them the opportunity to think about you like that.” She tried to meet his gaze, but his eyes were fixated on the snowed-in beach. “I’ve never killed a woman with a stiletto and I’d like to keep it that way.”
He smiled meekly at her joke, but still said no words. She sighed, laced her fingers through his restless ones.
“What’s going on, JJ? Tell me,” she pled softly, and he squeezed his eyes shut.
“I don’t like the way he was looking at you,” JJ whispered, lowering his head. A tuff of blonde hair obstructed his vision as tears clouded his eyes. Blair pursed her lips and squeezed his hand. “Sage,” he clarified, “he looks at you like he knows he’ll be spending the rest of his life with you.”
Blair shook her head and chuckled drily. “I don’t like him like that. We’ve been friends for the longest time, and I’m only with him to—“
“Satisfy your father?” JJ interrupted, eyes finally meeting hers. There was a storm within his cerulean irises, a Goddam tsunami. “See, that’s exactly what I mean. I can’t give you fancy gifts or buy you a car or a house.”
“Good, because I can give myself fancy things and a car and a house,” Blair laughed. She made him feel like his words were the most stupid thing a human being could ever utter. “None of that matters, you know that. I’ve told you time and time again that I don’t care.” Her emphasis hit him like a punch to the stomach. “I like the way I feel around you. I like that I can be me without ever having to think about the public eye. I like you, I really do.”
He frowned and repeated, but as a question: “You ready do?”
“I really do,” she confirmed. Blair leaned towards him and pressed their foreheads together. “Remember what you told me? We can do this for as long as we wanted. Do you still want it?”
“Yes,” he replied. No hesitation.
So she smiled widely and connected their lips, giving him what he had longed for the entire night. His fingers tanged in her hair in an instant and he tipped her chin with his other hand as she balled up his button-down with her own. She muttered that he’d mess up her lipstick, but that only made him kiss her harder. When they finally pulled away, breathless with smiles on both of their faces, they both were as warm as one would be in the summertime.
Another grin, and she grabbed his hand. “Let’s go,” she said as she opened her door, nodding towards the wide entrance of the club. It looked like a chalet, almost, under the thick snow. The soft flurries made the moment magical. “I’ll save you a dance.”
He jumped out of the car and shut the door behind him, with no anger this time. He brought her hand to his lips, pressing them against her knuckles softly. “You better.”
She fanned at her face, pretending she was going to faint. So he grabbed a fistful of snow and tossed it at her face.
When she had finally made her way back to the ballroom after fixing up her makeup (and making out with her secret boyfriend) for half an hour in the bathroom, she had resumed her superficial activities as though not a single thing had happen. And when the lights were off and everyone had gone back home, Blair and JJ had gotten their dance in the dead center of the room and made the most of it like only they knew how to. Perhaps Betty and Belinda were right: Blair was the woman of the next American dynasty . . . But he’d be her last man.
summary: in the wake of their newfound feelings, blair and jj are prepared to do anything in order to keep their clandestine meetings under wraps.
word count: 2.2k
The ache for autumn was finally satisfied when September rolled around and the humid air turned crisp overnight. The leaves would not be green for long; it wouldn’t be too long now before they died again, just as they had every single year, and brought along the vanilla-sugar-scented early-fall haze.
Blair had pulled out her very first sweater of the year: an ivory cardigan lined with royal blue, a little loose on waist and wide on the sleeves. The flame of a pumpkin-spice candle was still burning on her nightstand, besides a mug of still-warm, half-drunk black coffee. The scent would have drowned the room if it wasn’t for the open window over her bed, with sheer-curtains blowing with the cool wind and dying flowers on the windowsill.
She had made sure nobody saw her slip out of her room, and she felt wrong, so Goddam out of place like she was partaking in a clandestine ordeal or planning the biggest heist of the century. It was the same offsetting feeling, the same blinding rush, as sitting in the backseat of a car with a boy you liked, inching closer hesitantly, afraid to break the bubble that kept in all those fleeting feelings. Whenever she walked across the island to meet up with the boy in question, she’d spray on perfume that she brought only for him, so she would leave no trace of her real self (of her superficial self) on the path.
They couldn’t meet at her house and they couldn’t meet at his. She lived in a monster-mansion, the kind with statues and pools and a private sector of the marsh to top it off, and he and his father could barely pay for rent for their tuna-can-like house. Her walls were spacious windows and his were a dull, chipping grey. They were too afraid that it would kill whatever flame they were trying so hard to keep alight, that sparked from a single glance and, though it died more often than autumn leaves would in the upcoming month of October, it somehow managed to stay on. They left it like a light announcing each other’s presence, but to their own eyes only.
He was wearing a plaid jacket and a pair of slightly-dirty jeans. He spent hours in his small closet as he usually did whenever they were supposed to meet, trying to find something to wear that didn’t scream “Lowlife Pogue!” as the rich folk labeled him. So he spent hours drowning his clothes in detergent (the kind he knew she liked that he spent most of his spare change on at the supermarket), which meant, when she finally caught sight of him between the reddening trees, she smelled fresh linen before anything else.
They had been meeting four times a week by Battery Jasper, then walked up to the disheveled wall where they spent hours and hours, taking turns between talking, kissing, and simply taking in the silence as they sat with her head on his shoulder. He’d brought her flowers a couple of times, with a messily chopped stem and petals that were falling apart. All throughout summer, Blair would sometimes bring along wine bottles filled to the brim with strawberry daiquiri, the reason they had even met in the first place, and JJ would sip happily at it as he gazed at the Cameron girl, possibly the only Kook he ever could stand. Well . . . Stand was one hell of a word to describe it.
That evening was just like every single one that preceded. Blair would teasingly say “What can I get you today?”, and he’d feign annoyance and roll his eyes, but his arms would already be slithering around her waist, pulling her body closer. He was warmer than she was, which he noticed when she quickly nuzzled her cheek in the crook of his neck, seemingly trying to syphon the warmth his jacket offered that her lavish cardigan could not.
“Are you cold?” he asked softly, brushing a strand of feathery-gold hair from her face.
She shrugged and deplore, “A little bit” but he knew she was freezing as another gust of wind crashed against the reddening trees and their interlaced bodies.
So he shrugged his jacket off and stood in the cold with nothing but a T-shirt and her hands on his chest and, somehow, it seemed to be enough to keep him warm on that misty, late-September evening. When she asked him if he was cold, brows furrowed, his own jacket draped over her shoulders, he shrugged. “I’m all right,” he said. She believed it was a lie he was whistling between his teeth, but he truly was.
“Battery Jasper?” she wondered out loud, looping her arms through the sleeves of his jacket. Slowly and somewhat shyly, he had been bumping his fingers with hers for the past minute, hoping she’d get the hint and intertwine their fingers. “Or we can walk to the old dock,” she proposed.
Blair grabbed ahold of his hand innocently, pretending that she didn’t feel the way his breath hitched when she rubbed her thumb against the back of his hand. “I go where you go,” JJ smiled, a boyish grin. His freckles cut like sharpened knives over still-sun-kissed skin. She pressed her tongue against the inside of her cheek and shook her head. His arrogance, undoubtedly, would be the death of her. But, then again, the two smuggest teenagers on the island were conducting a string of clandestine meetings all over. They were bound to leave a trace in the dirt.
“You’re crazy,” she told him softly, her teeth clattering ever-so-slightly. Blair did not handle cold well; on the contrary, she was made for poolside evenings and sunbathing half the day.
The boy bumped his shoulder against hers and laughed under his breath. “You’ve seen nothing yet, Blair Cameron.”
“I’m supposed to be the madwoman,” she pointed out. After all, that was how most people spoke of her. Maybe it was because she is a powerful girl in a world build for men, or maybe because of the legacy in her name that gave her half of the island, that she did not know what to do with. “What a dreamy status!” Blair exclaimed under her breath, her irony dripping off the words like poison.
“I don’t think you’re crazy, Blair, just surrounding yourself with bad people. Like, jealous people who make up rumors about you then kick it in their monster-houses,” he shrugged. He didn’t have to say names for Blair to understand who exactly he was talking about.
She came to halt, which automatically stopped him, too. Her eyes bore into his ocean-salt ones, and they automatically softened when he understood just how much the whole ordeal affected her. Blair and JJ didn’t engage in clandestine affairs and longing states just for the hell of it. The Cameron girl’s relationship was her gold mine, her most prized possession, her own little dreamland she could hold in the palm of her hand. The entire time, he thought that she was simply embarrassed to be with a lowlife Pogue like him, a boy who couldn’t even afford fresh flowers from a kiosk on the boulevard, but it had turned out that she was just afraid—terrified, to be precise—that the story would ruin the image she had so meticulously crafted. Scared of how her parents would react and what her brother would do. Scared that her inheritance would be blown to dust within minutes. And she had grown to love the boy, she did, but she couldn’t make anything of it.
They spoke a secret language unknown to everyone else, and it came in the form of longing glances, anonymous text messages and windowpanes sliding open at ungodly hours of the night. And though both wanted more than anything to hold hands on sidewalks instead of kissing in cars, they would take that secret to the grave and pray it wouldn’t carve itself on their headstone. It was a dangerous game they were playing, a gamble that was sure to leave no survivors, yet they enjoyed it. They did, they loved it. It was the epitome of teenage-hood; if it’s allowed, then it isn’t really fun, is it?
To defuse the situation, doing everything he could to keep the bomb ticking a little longer, he brushed a strand of her hair off her forehead and smiled lovingly. “You look beautiful today,” he complimented. Her lips downturned into a frown-like-smile. Loving turned to longing. “What’s wrong?”
“How long do you think we can keep this up, JJ?” she asked softly, clinging onto the fabric of his shirt at the abdomen. All of a sudden, he felt so cold it cut his bones like shards of glass.
He walked over to a flowery slope under a tree and let himself fall into the faintly-green grass, over dry orange autumn leaves. “I think we can keep this up for as long as he want,” he replied, genuine. “I think we can spend years hiding it. I think we can get married abroad, Yucatán is the dream, and no one has to know where we went or what we’re doing. I think that we can do this whole affair thing forever.” Think, think, think. That word was making her stomach flip. They weren’t sure of anything. “But you gotta want it, Blair, I know I do.”
“I want it,” she whispered because it was the only thing she could say. She couldn’t marry him but she also couldn’t leave him there, not in a million years. That teenage boy and his dimpled-smile had made a God-forsaken mess of her, made her feel things she’d never felt before, see colors she didn’t even know existed. So it was all she could say and she said it twice. “I want it.” And she wanted to say it, but she was too busy admiring the way his face lit up at her words.
“Come sit,” JJ held his arms out, with a beaming smile, a bright grin. “Battery Jasper’s too far and you’re cold.”
“And it’s pretty here,” Blair added, taking his hand and settling besides him. He leaned back against the trunk of the tree that stretched out above them and wore all kinds of gorgeous autumn colors, and she laid her head on his chest. She did not speak of the way his heartbeat quickened, which she could feel under her freezing fingertips. All she did was look like she always did, like there were words on her tongue that she did not want to let roll off. But this time she did, and she brought her delicate hand up to his face as she did so. “You’re very beautiful,” she complimented him, and he was taken aback by it.
“Really?” JJ breathed out, brows furrowing softly. He had been called pretty before, or handsome or hot or cute . . . But never beautiful. It felt odd. It lingered in the air. “No one’s ever called me that before,” he spoke his mind, and then it was her time to frown.
“You’re beautiful,” she repeated, as if to satiate his desires. As if to make up for all of the things the other girls did wrong, hoping it would make up for her wanting their relationship to be but a secret horribly heavy to carry.
He brought his hand to the back of her head, his fingers threading through her hair. “Look at us,” he joked, “the Outer Banks’s most beautiful couple. We’ve gotta be breaking charts. If . . .”
But he let his sentence die before his words betrayed his promise. He promised he didn’t mind—he did. Blair buried her face into the crook his neck and pretended he had never spoke to begin with. A gust of wind made them both shiver, but it was only a partial factor as to why they were both suddenly so cold. It was not winter yet, but they were freezing. Surely, the sun was dying right above them.
Then she broke the ice, speaking first. “This won’t last forever, JJ,” she told him. It was an attempt to convince both him and herself, feeling into the scenarios she lived in her dreamland. “We might”—emphasis on the we—“but this won’t.”
“We will,” JJ corrected. Then, content, pressed his cheek against the top of his head and let himself bask in the peaceful silence that engulfed them.
For them, the illicit affairs would be their lifeline. As long as the string isn’t broken.
summary: our story starts with a girl and a boy, their face basked in sunlight as they sipped on daiquiris and, for a moment, it seemed the line between the rich and the poor has faded into stardust (paper can be brutally heavy when it is stained with lipstick).
word count: 2.4k
On that warm August morning, the Island Club had been brimming with life: olive martinis at the bar, sipped-on by joyful women with pinned up hair and pristine tennis skirt; men conversing loudly around the breakfast table, digging the heels of their golf shoes in the freshly-chopped grass, vibrant as ever; teenagers by the clear-water poolside with their (secretly) alcoholic juice and their mouths smelled of weed and berries. The seasonal burst of life dawned upon the island every year, beginning in July and stretching until late-August.
Of course, to the residents of Figure Eight, the country club quickly became the designated summertime hangout spot—where the boys flaunted their family’s newest sports car and the girls plotted their destruction on the tennis field, sipping on bottles of tequila they passed off as water. In reality, that little bubble was a very close equivalent to a glass ceiling, but it was never the satisfied people that saw the misery within the many mundane resorts that passed off as heavens. Though Outer Banks was said to be Paradise on Earth (it was on the sign, for God’s sake), it seemed to be the opposite for many.
JJ Maybank was one of those people. He was but a boy with too much bottled-up anger and a tendency to use his fists for words, and it had been a miracle he even got the job in the first place. The blonde boy was obscenely out of place, and the rich folk seemed to think he looked almost indecent in the uniform. When he rounded the tables, they’d make sure he knew he wasn’t welcomed around the club, wether they showed it with mumbled vulgarities or physically, by bumping into him brutally as he picked up the food from the counter. He grew more and more heinous with the passing days. JJ, being the die-hard Pogue he was, did not particularly enjoy spending his days drowning within people who viewed themselves as superior, swearing uncomfortably in his dress-clothes, and he had begun to lose sight of the surface. If only, he sometimes thought, he was one of the boys in the swimming pool, with jewelry the price of his rent and award-winning-smiles.
He found a certain comfort in the last hour of his Saturday shifts, since he ended at noon and spent the rest of his day slumming it in the South Side, back in his regular clothes, surfboard tucked under his arm. There was thirty minutes left on the clock and he was resisting the urge to rip off his apron and drive off, ruining the perfect garden as he went. Twenty-eight minutes. It was rather calm that morning, and his boss (whom he unsurprisingly despised) was on his second day of vacation in the Maldives, with his wife and three children. So JJ hadn’t received the level of criticism he was usually exposed to, which made him feel uncharacteristically light. Though he craved the moment he’d walk away, it gnawed at his guts a little less.
The sun had swelled and its light was vividly brighter. A girl sat alone at the table by the bar, where a couple of girls were sharing a glass of red wine, laughing loudly and smiling superficially. She had a book in her lap but she was having a hard time focusing on the words, and there was a bowl of split figs in a porcelain plate besides a glass of strawberry daiquiri on the table in front of her. She looked so authentic in comparison to all the others, JJ observed. As a matter of fact, he had been noticing her for quite a while now.
The mystery wasn’t who she was because if there was one thing the population of the Outer Banks knew for sure, it was her Goddamn name. Blair Cameron, she introduced herself to everyone with that pearly smile of hers that put all others to shame. She was the kind to always let people know who she was and where she came from, and omitting her last name during first introductions was something she simply did not do. The Camerons were quite a powerhouse in the Outer Banks, the jewels of the North Side, if you may. A charismatic man, his four children in whom he took tremendous pride, and women that came and went with the seasons.
So, yes, he had known Blair Cameron long before he even accepted the job as unsatisfied waiter. He knew many superficial things about her like how she often took up shifts herself even tho she couldn’t possibly need the money—he heard her once tell her sister, Sarah, that it was more about the concept than the riches. She wanted to be more independent to the eyes of the same rich folks he was avoiding, he guessed everyone had their preoccupations. He also could count on the fingers of his hand all the superficial information, useless things, people spoke of her, like how her favorite color was purple and how she was a madwoman at tennis. How she never wore the same thing twice and hoped to one day take over the family business. How well she could handle her liquor and how easy it was for her to coax people into keeping her company whenever she was lonely.
In the few weeks of him waiting tables, however, JJ had gathered information on her that he supposed not many people knew, or even any at all. For instance, she had begun to slide cigarettes after her mother, over the phone, mentioned that she found it elegant, but cursed herself for doing so every time she sat alone. On the first of July, his first week on the job, JJ stumbled across her devouring a plate of strawberries by the poolside way before anyone had entered the doors of the club. “For good luck!” she toasted, then never spoke to him again. JJ didn’t observe her with intent to harm, not to ridicule her or expose her or such bullshit, but more because he wanted to understand exactly what it was about her that made her so attractive, irresistible to the public, it seemed. She was the life of the party wether she knew the crowd or not, and she had the impressive quality of lighting up a room by simply stepping inside.
Whatever. She had taken too much of his brain. The weather was too hot and a sheer coat of sweat was layered over the nape of her neck. She had finally found the motivation to finish her page and, engrossed in her reading, had signaled for the nearest waiter for a refill of her drink. He was the only one on the floor at that time, so he swallowed his pride and rounded up the table to stand besides her. She looked up at him with emerald eyes, lips curling into a radiant smile. His stomach flipped. Whatever.
“What can I get you today?” JJ asked, trying to remain as professional as he could. His tiny pad in one hand, he tapped the pencil against the paper with the other. Blair noticed his uncomfortable nervousness, but didn’t comment on it.
She held her glass up, French-manicured nails tinkling against the stem. “Refill, please,” she replied. He went to note it down, only to notice that it would be quite useful. Blair Cameron’s favorite drink, he could remember. She chuckled when she paused, looking at him through her lashes. “And get yourself a drink, for God’s sake. You look more hysterical than Wilders, and he’s on his second divorce,” she added, and pointed to a man sat by the bar, wearing a suit and already drunk on old wine (it was not even noon).
“Funny,” JJ mumbled, shaking his head. He drew his jaw tight, feigning irritation. In truth, he quite liked her voice; he believed he could listen to her talk for hours and not get tired of it, which, of course, was not something he would admit to anyone anytime soon. “You know, you’re a lot more creative than those old folks. Their insults are pretty primitive.”
“Well, they’ve lived long enough to cohabit with cavemen, it seems,” Blair said. His shoulders shook with a soft laugh that he had desperately tried to hide, but it only made her smile even more. She put the glass back on the table and flipped her book upside down besides her. “Sit,” she offered, “I’ll get my drink later.”
JJ looked around nervously, making sure that it was him she was talking to. Why would she want him of all people to sit across from her, to converse with. “My shift isn’t done,” he nearly stuttered.
“My father’s best friend owns the club, you’ll be fine. I want company and you seem like the most pleasant person to be around right now,” she insisted.
He hesitated for a minute, then gave in and took up the empty chair. There was a sip left swooshing around in the bottom of her drink, and she offered it to him nonchalantly, as if it was every day that she sat with strangers and let them have the last sip of her favorite drink. “I don’t do fruity drinks,” he declined. In truth, JJ was astonished with how easy it was to talk to her. He expected some type of cold, closed-off brat with a superiority complex and a poisonous tongue. Instead, she was wearing a bright sundress and inches closer to him so that their knees brushed under the square table.
“Try,” Blair insisted. She had a way of being that seemed so, so genuine: she could ask you to shove the knife in your own chest and you would, there was no argument there.
So, as she requested, he did. At first, he found the sickly-sweet taste heinous. He was only ever used to the cheapest of beers, anyway. As he looked up from inside of the glass and searched for her eyes, he found them crinkled shut as she laughed loudly, one hand curled over her chest, fiddling with the pearl hooked inside her chain, and the other stretched out to pull the glass from his calloused hand. “Before you break it,” she had managed between laughs. Suddenly, the flavor became enjoyable and he found himself laughing along, timid smile moulding into wide grin.
Now, Blair knew her fair share about the boy, too. His best friend, John B, worked on their boats and the other, Kie (Kiara for the technical), used to be her sister’s best friend the previous year, right before it all blew up in flames. She knew that he had only gotten the job on a technicality, because the only other person that had applied didn’t show up, and that he lives on the other side of the island with a father known to be a violent drug addict and a spiteful man overall. She could tell that he didn’t like his life and tried way too hard to blend in with the popular crowd, though she could tell he’d rather be secluded, sat by a dock somewhere in the south, sipping on foamy beer and basking in the silence.
Blair was the type of people to never be satisfied, to yearn for everything that she lacked and take for granted the things that she had. Her strong personality made her a rather unpleasant opponent, so she was used to having everyone she had ever met force themselves on her good side by any means necessary. She was a walking nightmare dressed as a vibrant daydream, assuming that everything and everyone is hers to lose. It is a well-known fact that whoever holds the hand of the queen (of the Valley of the Dolls) cannot possibly make it out with all their organs intact. Especially the heart, never the heart.
On that August Saturday, for the first time ever, JJ didn’t run out of the country club just as the clock struck noon. The moment had slipped away into a laugh as their own merged to create a summertime symphony, comforting and ecstatic all at once. They talked for what felt like hours, exchanging thoughts they had never shared with anyone else before, sharing glasses of strawberry daiquiri. Eventually, it had grown on him. She inched closer with every story, and though her cheeks were flushed and eyes brighter than they had been in the morning, she was still so freakishly composed it dumbstruck.
The pair of them was Icarus, flying far too close to the sun, praying they wouldn’t get blinded. And when Blair finally stood up, excusing herself after the buzzing of her phone became insupportable, it was almost like the bubble shattered and JJ was left at the table to pick up the shards of glass, hoping he wouldn’t get cut.
In the vacant room he routinely changed in (mostly so the others wouldn’t come across his things and vandalize whatever little possessions he owned), he tore his apron off a little more delicately than he usually does. He tossed it onto the bench, only for a piece of paper to fall out of the pocket. On it: a number written in bright lipstick. He assumed it was hers, who else could have managed to sneak it inside of his apron without him noticing? He had only let his guard down for half an hour, anyway.
That day would be the first of many, the introduction to the beautiful yet tragic story that was that of Blair Cameron and JJ Maybank. And if someone had told them things would end in flames from the very moment they met, of course they would have believed it. Nothing about the circumstances told a happy, linear story. But, in every lifetime, Blair would have invited him to sit and JJ would have complied. August sipped away like the liquor at the bottom of the glass.
Keeping things under wraps would soon become a sport.
