Nantucket Blue

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Book: Read Nantucket Blue for Free Online
Authors: Leila Howland
Tags: Fiction - Young Adult
Nantucket ,” he said with a tight jaw and an over-the-top snob accent.
    I laughed and nodded as if I were a native, too. Then I made a mental note not to buy a T-shirt with Nantucket written on it. I didn’t want to piss off the locals.
    “Avery, come back here!” Here was the mother of the Lilly Pulitzer girl—in a skirt that matched her daughter’s dress.
    “No!” Avery stuck her tongue out at her.
    “Avery, if you don’t get back here right away,” she stammered, “Theresa will get very mad at you.” Disgust flashed across the face of a short, round Hispanic woman before she remembered herself and leaped to coax the girl off the viewfinder.
    “Why would you want to be a servant?” Mom had asked when I’d accepted the live-in babysitting position it had taken me less than twenty-four hours to be offered.
    All it took was a morning on the Web site for the local Nantucket newspaper, The Inquirer and Mirror , and a few e-mails before a woman named Mary Ellen called my cell asking if I’d be available to start on Monday. She was the house manager—basically a butler—to a wealthy family in Boston who was already on Nantucket. She’d heard of Rosewood. She actually knew Miss Kang from college. If I could hop on a bus and meet her that afternoon in Boston, and if my references checked out, I’d be on a ferry Sunday. I met her in a crowded Starbucks on Newbury Street.
    “Oh, you’re perfect,” she said when we spotted each other. “Caroline is going to flip over you. And you can swim?”
    I nodded. Obviously.
    “And please tell me you drive. Do you drive?” I nodded. What seventeen-year-old doesn’t drive?
    She told me that it paid eight hundred dollars a week for eight weeks. Eight times eight was sixty-four! For a half a second I thought I was going to be making sixty thousand dollars (math is my worst subject), but when I got to six thousand four hundred dollars it was still an awesome amount of money.
    “It’s not easy, though. You’re on from the minute the kids get up until they’re dead asleep. If they wake up in the night, it’s your problem.”
    I nodded, grinning. Eight hundred a week ! It turned out the father was the famous national news anchor for CNN, Bradley Lucas. He seemed a little old to have kids who needed a nanny, but he was famous. Mom would definitely let me go now. There were three girls, and three nannies rotating shifts around the clock. She told me that one nanny, a local Nantucket girl, hadn’t worked out and they were “in a pickle.” Then she bought me an iced tea, took a map of Nantucket out of her purse, and drew a path in blue pen from where the ferry would drop me to the house on 25 Cliff Road. At the bottom she wrote her phone number.
    “Should I have the Lucases’ number as well?” I asked.
    “No,” she said, chuckling to herself. “You need anything, call me. My cell is on all the time.” She gave me money for the ferry ticket and an extra fifty for “my time,” and told me that she’d be out there in a week.
    I was thrilled when I told my mom. But she wasn’t.
    “Babysitting again?” Mom asked as she ate the last bite of moo shu pork from the carton. “I thought you hated babysitting.”
    “I don’t hate it,” I said. “I just don’t love it.” Mom leveled me with a look as she sipped her wine. “I want to go to Nantucket, and there’s no other way. Besides, I’d be a servant here, to Andrew King.”
    “That’s different,” she said. “You wouldn’t live with the Kings. You don’t want to live in anyone’s home. It’s beneath you. They’ll think they own you.” She finished her glass of white wine and poured herself another. “And what if that news anchor is creepy? He’s too smooth, and he has that hairpiece.”
    “If he tries anything, I’ll call the Law Offices of Snell and Garabedian,” I said, using the name of a criminal law firm whose ad, which featured two meaty guys holding up a golden set of scales in front of

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