“Exactly. Poor Luis here is getting worked to the bone getting this place in shape. I’m coordinating with each department head—skin, nail, hair, and massage—to make sure we ace the service aspect. Mostly everything else is up to us. It’s going to be a nightmare. Anyway, we can talk more about that throughout the day—I’ll probably need to lean on you a lot.” Luis looked up and I saw that he had a cut on his left cheek, a bruise on the underside of his arm. I wondered if he had gotten into a scuffle. His mood seemed sour and he frowned as he worked. I would have to ask Clara more about him—why he seemed to make her nervous, what secrets she thought he kept.

“Sure, let me know what I can do.” She studied me for a minute, a little smile coming into her face. “What?” I asked.

“You’ve got some bounce in your step. You get laid or something?”

“Definitely not. I’m working on a project.”

“What kind of project?”

“My mom’s neighbor has this stash of portraits in her house, just sitting there. Of Atlantic City throughout history.”

“Sounds depressing.”

“No, they’re amazing. A bunch of them are soldiers and staff from this old hospital—apparently the biggest World War II hospital in the country was here?”

“Here here?”

“Right on the boardwalk. It was one of the old hotels, and then a hospital, and now the original building is part of Resorts. I can’t make out the signature, but I want to see if I can find out who did them. Let me show you photos of it,” I said, clicking on the browser window. Emily hadn’t closed her last tab, and it was open to her homepage on her Sallie Mae account. Account Balance: $57,433, it announced, in a strangely cheerful yellow typeface.

“Oh, uh. Sorry.” I pulled my hand away from the mouse, and she reached over to close the tab.

“No, I’m an idiot for leaving that up.” She flushed. I made $11 an hour at the spa, and maybe she earned a little bit more, but probably not much. I would have been one of those people, too, buried under student loans, if we hadn’t received a settlement from the accident. It made me queasy to think about it. As though what had happened to my father had a price. I knew he was thrilled that I had ended up at Vassar, that he and my mom had planned to help as much as they could. And then, my senior year, when that check finally came in, and that balance shrunk to zero, I could only feel the kind of guilt that made it impossible to eat anything for the rest of the week.