Total pages in book: 118
Estimated words: 113923 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 570(@200wpm)___ 456(@250wpm)___ 380(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 113923 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 570(@200wpm)___ 456(@250wpm)___ 380(@300wpm)
“Unless you’ve been a drug kingpin this whole time—I’d be totally sympathetic if you were—where the hell does a twenty-year-old get that kind of cash?”
“You’re going to think it’s silly,” she says, stopping to stare at the ground.
I’m getting a little nervous. Suddenly, I’m wondering if I’d be okay if she told me she was a camgirl or something. Or worse, if she asked me to join her essential oils pyramid scheme.
Fortunately, she works up the nerve to spit it out before my imagination really takes off.
“You remember that time you showed me the funny boyfriend story? The one where the girl was looking for tampons in her date’s mom’s bathroom?”
My eyebrows fly up. What does that have to do with anything?
“Yeah …”
“I built that website. BoyfriendFails. Which spun off to GirlfriendFails.”
“Wait, for real?”
She shrugs. “Yeah.”
Holy shit. “And you made all this money from that?”
Another embarrassed shrug. It confuses me, because what is she so shy about?
“Mackenzie, that’s badass,” I inform her.
“You don’t think it’s stupid?” She looks at me with these big, hopeful green eyes. I’m not sure if I should feel like a dick that she thought I’d judge her for this.
“Hell no. I’m impressed. When I was twenty, I was still burning mac and cheese.” I mean, I’m still burning mac and cheese.
“My parents hate it.” Her voice grows sour. As it does every time the subject comes up, but more so lately. “You’d think I got a tattoo on my forehead or something. They keep waiting for me to ‘grow out of it.’” She makes angry air quotes, kicking sand. “They don’t get it.”
“What’s not to get? Their daughter can’t even rent a car yet but she’s already a self-made millionaire.”
“They’re embarrassed. They think it’s crass and silly high school nonsense. And, whatever, maybe it is. But what’s so wrong with that if it makes people laugh, you know? Far as they’re concerned, my business is a distraction. All they want for me is to frame a respectable degree and marry rich, so I can be like Mom and sit on charity boards. It’s about appearances. It’s all fashion to them.”
“See, that sounds dumb as hell.” I shake my head, because I truly don’t get it. Rich people buying status symbols to impress other rich people who bought the same status symbols to impress them. A vicious cycle of waste and pretension. “Hundreds of thousands of dollars to a university just for looks? Fuck that noise.”
“I didn’t even want to go to Garnet—it was the only way they’d support my gap year so I could have the time to build my apps and expand the business. But since I got here, all I’ve been thinking about is tackling a new challenge, finding a new business venture that excites me as much as my websites did when I was first launching them.”
“Well, you know what I think? Do you, and to hell what everyone else thinks.”
“Easier said than done,” she says with that familiar tone of trepidation.
Daisy brings us a small hermit crab hiding in its shell, which Mac takes and sets back in the sand before finding another stick to throw instead.
“Yeah, so what?” Where she’s concerned, her parents have always been a daunting obstacle to realizing what she really wants out of life. For someone with every advantage, that’s bullshit. She’s stronger than that. “If you want it bad enough, fight for it. Take the bruises. What’s the worst they can do, cut you off? If you’re honest with them about how much this all means to you and they still don’t support your dreams, how much are you really going to miss them?”
She lets out a soft sigh. “Honestly, sometimes I wonder if they love me at all. Most of the time, I’m a prop or a piece on a board in their larger game of strategy. I’m plastic to them.”
“I could bore the hell out of you with crappy family stories,” I tell her. “So I get that. It’s not the same, but trust me, I get feeling alone and unloved. Always trying to fill that void with something, anything else. I can almost forgive my dad for being a mean bastard, you know? He had an addiction. It turned everything he touched to shit. Eventually killed him. I wasn’t even that sad about it, except then all we had left was our mom. For a while, anyway, but then she split too. The two of them couldn’t get away from us fast enough.” My throat closes up. “I’ve spent so much time scared that I’ll turn into one of them. Afraid no matter what I do, I’m fighting against the current and I’ll end up dead or a deadbeat.”
Fuck.
I’ve never said those words out loud before.
It’s terrifying how much Mac brings out of me. How much I want her to know me. It’s terrifying how I don’t feel in control of my heart that’s racing to catch her. To keep her. Worried that at any moment she might come to her senses and ditch my ass.