Ms.

Daisy Fabrega-Caraveo
East Egg, New York

Dear Daisy,

They said no. More exactly, Papá said he didn’t think it was
a good idea, and Mamá said I’d go to that godforsaken city
over her dead body, and even in that eventuality, her alma
would haunt me into staying in Wisconsin.
Dais, this might be the best chance I ever get. How
many New York finance men do you think loiter around
Beet Patch? If he hadn’t blown a tire, he never would have
stopped.
Ever since my parents helped me become Nicolás Car-
aveo, I’ve been wondering how I was ever going to pay
them back. If I take this job, I could. Papá could stop fixing
things around here with string and axel grease and have
them properly repaired. Mamá could buy the medicine she
needs. She still gets that cough but won’t see to it because
she says the roof’s hanging on by its last shingle and that we
need to save for the day it lets go.
And before you say anything, I know you’ve tried to help,
and I know they won’t take it. You’re always good to them. —-1
That dress on Mamá’s birthday, the hat and boots for Papá —0
—+1

34
 at Christmas. And they love you for caring so much, but I
know they draw the line at you giving them money and that
they’re going to draw it forever. So it’s got to be me.
And it’s got to be me anyway. What they did for me,
Daisy . . . I have to find a way to repay them. I have to do
this for them. I could make real money in New York. Maybe
not real money to you, not like Tom has, but enough to
make a real difference here.
Daisy, if you tell me to forget this, I will. You’re the one
who told me to tell them I was a boy, and when you did I
thought you’d dropped your good sense to the bottom of the
pond, but I did it, and you were right.
So what should I do now? What would you do?
Nick

Mr. Nicolás Caraveo

Beet Patch, Wisconsin

Dear wonderful Nick,

You just leave everything to me.

Your favorite cousin,
Daisy

-1— Mr. and Mrs. Agustín Caraveo

0— Beet Patch, Wisconsin
+1—

35
Dearest Tío y Tía,

By my lights, this letter finds you in a quagmire of a decision.

One which I, your favorite niece—don’t pretend I’m wrong,
and don’t worry, I’ll never tell my sisters or primas—am
writing to help you solve.
As you know, your Nicolás and I have kept in touch by
letter all while I was in Chicago and then when I came to
New York. I know all about what a genius he is (he hates
when I use the word, but we all know it’s true). He’s so pain-
fully modest, I had to pry from him that the school had run
out of math classes for him by the time he was fourteen. So
you can imagine what quicksteps and waltzes I had to per-
form to get him to tell me what happened with the stockbro-
ker. (Is it really true that he offered Nicky the job because of
some trick with a chessboard? I couldn’t make sense of that
part of Nick’s letter.)
Tío y Tía, I know you worry about sending your dear
boy east. But the thing he’ll never tell you is just how badly
he wants to go. He wants to put that head for numbers
to good use, and he’ll never leave the farm unless you tell
him to.
Just consider it. I’d look after him myself. I may only have
a year on Nicky, but it’s enough for me to play the big sister.
And I hope you won’t fault your favorite sobrina the slight-
est presumption, because I already found the sweetest little
cottage for him. Close enough to the train into the city but —-1
with plenty of space around, no neighbors crowding him. —0
—+1

36
 And he’d be near me, just across the sound! You could skip
a stone between us.
Please let him come to New York? I promise, he’ll have
the gayest of times.
Yours, with deepest affection,
Daisy

-1—
0—
+1—

37
 CHAPTER I

“West Egg.”
At the conductor’s call, I shuddered awake, becoming
aware of three sensations at once. First, the soreness from
folding myself against my seat. Second, the leaf-green light
of the world outside. Third, the indentations left on my
palm from the chess piece I’d been holding, off and on, since
Wisconsin.
Before Papá saw me off at the station, he’d given me some
advice, knowing I’d think about it as the scar line of railroad
tracks wound east.
“Recuerda esto, Nicolás,” he said. “The world may look
at you and see a pawn”—he pressed a carved piece of wood
into my palm—“but that just means they’ll never see your
next move coming.”
I didn’t uncurl my fingers until we were almost to Chi-
cago. But I could recognize the shape by touch, the contours
of the felt coin at the bottom, the pillar base, the notches of —-1
the horse’s head. It was a knight, in deep-finished wood. —0
—+1

38
 My father had just left his own chess set incomplete in
service of making his point. He’d have to add in a saltshaker
now.
Papá had always been one to give advice, even back when
he thought I was a girl. But last winter I had told him and
Mamá that I was boy. I said it in halting words, as though
admitting an awkward, inconvenient fact, like a sweater
a relative had knitted me didn’t fit. And ever since he and
Mamá had given me my new name and the shirts and trou-
sers to go with it, he’d been working twice as hard at this
dispensation of wisdom, like a priest administering Commu-
nion at double speed.
I put the wooden knight in my pocket, the shape of the
whittled features still pressed into my fingers.
The West Egg station had a plain, unadorned look not so
different from where I’d started. But around the edges was
the glint of wealth—there, in a freshly painted bench, or
over there, in a square of well-tended violets.
It was the possibility of such wealth that had lured my
cousin away from Wisconsin in the first place. Her efforts
had gotten her an emerald ring, the promise of an eventual
New York engagement, and money to quietly send back
home to her family in Fleurs-des-Bois, a town little different
from Beet Patch except in name.
I rubbed sleep from my eyes as I got off the train, squint-
-1— ing into the lemon-meringue light. So I didn’t recognize the
0—
+1—

• 2•

39
woman on the platform until she flung her arms wide and
yelled, “Nicky!”
At the sound of my cousin’s voice, I braced for her shock.
She knew I’d been living as the boy I was for a while now.
But if the few relatives I’d seen were any indication, no
amount of explaining in letters could prepare them for the
cropped hair, the suspenders, the hands in trouser pockets.
Daisy threw her arms around me, the smell of lilies drift-
ing off the brim of her hat. “You’re here, and you’re so
impossibly handsome; I refuse to believe it.”
I tried to arrange my face into something other than being
stunned, but it resisted.
Daisy’s skin was a few shades lighter than the last time
I’d seen her, as though she’d spent months in a window-
less parlor, or tried those awful tricks of lightening it with
lemon. Her once-dark hair was now pale as honeycomb.
When the light hit it, it looked the same shade as masa,
frizzing at the edges from how she must have bleached it.
“I know,” she said. “Don’t I look wonderful?” She twirled,
her skirt a whirl of yellow. “I’m a brownette now!”
I didn’t mean to check for who might be staring, but I did.
Anyone who was—men rushing for their cars, old ladies
conferring about the afternoon—looked charmed for having
witnessed Daisy’s turn.
“A what?” I asked.
Daisy stopped spinning. “They call us brownettes.” She —-1
—0
—+1

• 3•

40
 led me away from the station’s bustle. “Us girls of light-
brown hair and intermediate coloring.”
She stopped in front of an open-topped roadster in a color
I’d never seen on a car, like the sheen of a blue-gray pearl.
“Don’t you adore it?” She posed alongside, flipping up a
buckled shoe. “The first man tried to sell me a color called
florid red, can you imagine? He said it was perfect for
women with the Latin kind of coloring.”
I opened my mouth to remind her that she had once been
a woman with a Latin kind of coloring.
Except she wasn’t anymore.
My cousin Daisy looked white.

-1—
0—
+1—

• 4•

41
 CHAPTER II

As Daisy drove, the leaf-filtered light spilled over her

bleached hair. The wind twirled a chiffon scarf away from
her neck.
“You’ll just adore the cottage, Nicky.” She reached across
the seat and tapped my upper arm. “It’s divine.”
The sun slipped through the leaves in fragile ribbons, and
in the distance, a great mansion loomed beyond the summer
trees. If an Irish castle had an affair with a cathedral, that
might be the house that came from it.
Daisy slowed the car, suggesting that the house down the
lane was the cottage, and that the castle-cathedral held my
nearest neighbor.
“U-um,” I stammered. “Daisy?”
“Oh, I know,” she said. “Garish, isn’t it? I don’t know
who he is, but they say his money is fresh as lettuce and just
as soft.”
“What if the man who lives there doesn’t like having a —-1
neighbor like”—I gestured to myself—“me?” —0
—+1

42
 “He’ll never know, Nick.” Daisy cast me a glance from
under her hat brim. “You’ve invented yourself splendidly,
right down to the walk.”
“I—I didn’t”—again, I stammered—“I meant someone
brown,” I said. “People like that are used to us serving their
food and cleaning their floors, not being their neighbors.
What if he doesn’t like me right on his property line?”
“Then I’ll simply ask Tom to have him killed.” Daisy gave
that high bell ring of a laugh. “He won’t notice you. No one
looks at anybody anymore. They’re too taken with them-
selves.”
The turn of Daisy’s head, and the salt perfume of tide-
water, made me look right.
An ocean I had never seen was so close I could have
thrown my suitcase into it from the car. The piercing blue of
the water, paler and greener than Lake Michigan, stretched
out toward another finger of land across the bay.
“I’m just over there.” Daisy pointed. “At night you can
see a little green light—I had that put in there, don’t let Tom
take credit for a second. That’s how you’ll know it’s me. I’m
practically in the next room from you.”
Boughs of juniper brushed the sides of Daisy’s car as we
came to a stop. The cottage looked sweet enough to be
made out of gingerbread, and I felt the unease of having
invaded some feminine space, like Daisy’s old lace-curtained
-1— dollhouse.
0— We were barely out of the car before her shoes were tap-
+1— ping across the flagstones.

• 6•

43
 “Don’t you adore it?” she asked.
An arch of roses and trailing blossoms framed the front
steps. Neat yellow awnings topped the windows. Inside,
pale blue light from the water and pale yellow light from the
sun brightened the antique wood and dust-dulled carpets.
Apples and oranges gleamed to a higher shine than their
pewter bowl, like they’d been waxed. A short vase burst
with roses that matched the ones along the front walk. I
imagined my cousin cutting the roses, speaking endearments
to the thorns pricking her fingers.
Daisy Fabrega-Caraveo made things beautiful, starting
with herself, her efforts then billowing ever outward. Any-
thing close enough for her to touch came away dusted with
perfume, talc, and magic.
She darted around the house, showing me the biscuits and
coffee she’d tucked into the cabinets, a teapot in the same
understated blue as the bay, the crisp linens on the bed. Her
shoes clicked out her excitement with the clarity of a tele-
gram.
She clasped my hands, dark eyes wide and serious as she
said, “Nicolás Caraveo, I have a question to ask you, and I
demand you tell me the truth.”
When it came to Daisy, such an introduction could pref-
ace anything, from What do you think of the Temperance
Union? No, I mean it, what do you really think of it? to Tom
says I look like Marion Davies, don’t you think I look a little —-1
like Marion Davies? —0
“Are you still using elastic bandages to bind?” she asked. —+1

• 7•

44
 “Well, yes,” I said, conscious of the sheen of travel sweat
under mine right then.
“Nicky,” Daisy said with high, sparkling concern as she
riffled through her handbag. “You could bruise a rib that
way.” As though producing a magician’s rabbit, she held up
a white garment with laces on two sides.
“It’s called a Symington side lacer, and it’s a wonder,” she
said. “I wear it right under a fitted chemise. All the girls with
chests like mine wear them. And I see no reason a boy like
you can’t use one for your purposes. It’s a world safer than
what you’re doing. And I found plain ones special for you.
You can wear them right beneath your undershirt. They’re
terribly comfortable, you wouldn’t believe.”
“You wear them?” I asked.
“Of course.” Daisy shimmied one shoulder, then the
other. “The fashion of the moment doesn’t like us girls with
curves, so we have to flatten ourselves out. No more cor-
sets pushing up heaving bosoms. It’s considered garish these
days to emphasize our chests, so we do what we must. It’s
not as though the dresses will change for us.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I was uncomfortable enough binding
down the body I had so I could be the boy I was. I barely
understood Daisy doing it to be a particular kind of girl.
“Give it a few years.” She flapped a hand, and her polished
nails gleamed like the inside of a shell. “It’ll all change again.”
-1— She folded the side lacer and another like it and tucked them
0— into the top drawer of a high dresser. “Anyway, I bought you
+1— two. I ordered more, so if you like them, there are three more

• 8•

45
on the way to you. They’re very boring, the most boring ones
they had. Just plain white and tan and beige. Mine are much
more interesting. Pink satin and peach lace. I’d fall asleep
while dressing if I had to wear ones like yours.”
“I think I’ll manage to stay awake,” I said.
“And first thing tomorrow we’re getting you fitted for a
proper suit,” she said.
“That’s really all right,” I said.
Her letters spoke of bold East Egg men wearing orange or
fairway green. I’d rather stay with the secondhand suits I’d
come with.
“Oh, don’t worry,” she said. “Nothing bright. Maybe
navy or gray. Though I’d love to see you in something two-
toned. They’re doing that now, you know. Jacket different
from the trousers, or vest different from the jacket. You’d
look very sharp, I think.”
Our cousins said a lot of things about Daisy. That she was
vapid, shallow, pretty as an angel and stupid as a basket. But
Daisy had never flinched at who I was. And she showed a
consideration that was hard to come by, one held as much in
the plain cloth of the side lacers as in the roses trimmed and
arranged in delft-blue vases.
“I’m glad you’re here,” I said.
She pulled a millinery flower from her hat and pinned it to
my shirt. “I’m glad I’m here too.”
—-1
—0
—+1

• 9•

46
 CHAPTER III

The sun threw silver coins across the water as Daisy drove
us from West Egg to East Egg.
“Tom’s just mad to meet you,” she said. “He doesn’t know
any of my friends except the ones I’ve made here.”
“Friends?” I asked.
Daisy kept her eyes on the road. But I noticed the slightest
pursing of her lips, the same tell as when she used to lie to
her mother about whether she was wearing rouge.
“Daisy,” I said, my voice low under the roar of the engine
and the snapping current of the wind. “Does Tom know I’m
your cousin?”
She flashed me a guilty smile, as though she’d swiped a
finger of frosting off a cake. “Tom doesn’t know me as any-
one other than Daisy Fay. As anyone other than, well”—she
glanced down at her dress, her newly pale forearms—“this.
So if you don’t mind the tiniest lie, could we not tell him?”
-1— “What will you say when he asks how we met?” I asked.
0— “Don’t you worry,” she said. “I’ve got it all figured out.”
+1—

47
 My neighbor’s castle could have vanished in the shadow of
the Buchanan estate. Grass so green it looked dyed carpeted
the ground from the beach to the marble-pillared mansion.
In the distance, against the sculpted hedges, Tom Buchanan
sped forward on a horse.
“He never realizes I’m alive when he’s playing polo,”
Daisy said.
“You can play polo with yourself?” I asked.
Daisy cackled. “Playing polo with yourself. Doesn’t that
sound indecent?”
So many people dashed around the mansion I thought
there might be a party going on until I realized they were
all workers in uniform. One man rushed to open Daisy’s
door. A woman with a ballerina’s posture walked around
the side of the house, bearing a stack of what I took to be
tablecloths. Two men carried in fish on snowdrifts of ice.
I tried to catch a few of their eyes by way of greeting. But
the older, more polished ones looked at me as though I had
just failed some test, and the younger ones looked away as
though intent on not failing ones of their own.
Daisy led me from the car around to an ivy-veiled stretch
of the mansion. She regarded a white wrought-iron table
and its candlesticks with mournful disdain.
“Candles, always the candles,” Daisy said. “Tom thinks I —-1
like them.” —0
—+1

• 11 •

48
 “Don’t you?” I asked.
“When it’s dark, yes. But it’s summer, so it’s practically light
until midnight.” She snuffed one out with her fingers. “It’s such
a pity Jordan couldn’t join us. Tournament in the morning,
you see. She’s just a paragon of virtue—the face of an actress,
the self-discipline of a nun. At least if there’s not a party she
can’t miss. Anyway, you two will get on like an engine and a
purr, you just wait. I can feel it. I know these things, Nicky. Go
on, sit down. You’re not waiting for the queen.”
Daisy held up an amber bottle. “Wine?”
“Where did you get that stuff?” It was a tactless way to
ask where she’d bought illegal alcohol, but the question had
tumbled out.
Daisy smiled. “Corner drugstore.” She poured into a fac-
eted glass and offered it.
“No, thank you,” I said.
“A young man of such virtue.” Daisy’s voice blended with
the splashing of wine into crystal. “Didn’t I say you and
Jordan would be a pair?”
Tom came in from the polo match with himself, smelling
of sweat and leather and distilled musk, as though the exer-
cise had made his cologne stronger. He was tall and wide-
shouldered, as I’d expected, but his manner had an air of
boredom.
He noticed me and said, “Oh,” with casual consideration,
-1— like Daisy had left out some fundamental fact about me.
0— I was forever gauging strangers’ reactions to me, both to my
+1— brownness and to the kind of boy I was, though the former

• 12 •

49
was much more obvious than the latter. The vacant registering
in Tom Buchanan’s face made me sure it was my brownness,
but even that was fleeting. He seemed to forget me as fast
as he’d seen me. He had the look of a man who thought he
always deserved to be somewhere better, as though the world
should come up with something more worthy of him than
acres of rosebushes and a sunken garden and a marble terrace.

Over dinner, Daisy’s shimmering chatter saved me from

having to talk much or often.
“Tom, you have to see the cottage,” Daisy went on. “It’s
the perfect little dream.”
“Thank you,” I said, in as deferring a way as I could to
Tom.
“It was nothing,” Tom said. “The family that owns it are
friends of my parents. No one uses it much anymore. High
time someone blew the dust off.” In one long swallow, he
drained half a glass of wine. “Though if you want to know
the truth, I doubt we’ve done you any favors. You have a
dreadful neighbor. Some Gatsby fellow.”
“Gatsby?” Daisy’s eyes followed a candle flame. “What
Gatsby?”
“That’s who bought that carnival palace,” Tom said. “The
eyesore. You’ve seen it. You can’t miss the thing unless you —-1
look straight up.” —0
“Who is he?” I asked. —+1

• 13 •

50
 “New money.” Tom took a bite of his steak and kept
talking while chewing. “Reeks of it. You can smell it all the
way across the sound.”
“What does he do?” I asked, and knew instantly that it
was a crude question in rich company. It was the sort of fact
you waited for someone to offer rather than asking.
Tom snorted a laugh. “I heard he might’ve been some kind
of child spy during the war. But here’s the thing I meant to
warn you about, Nick.” He pointed the tines of his fork at
me. “He throws these god-awful parties every weekend. You
can hear the damn jazz all the way across the bay.”
“No, you cannot,” Daisy said. “You’re imagining it. I told
you you’re imagining it.”
Tom kept both his fork and his eyes on me. “Ten to one
you’ll be swimming across to us just to get away from the
noise.”
Daisy turned her gaze on me. “Don’t you love the cot-
tage?” She set a hand over mine, her fingers cool and smooth
as cream. “I thought it looked just like the little house your
mother kept on the estate.”
“The what?” I asked.
“Oh, you remember it, don’t you?” Daisy asked. “It had
climbing roses just like that.”
“Who’s his mother?” Tom asked.
“Nicky’s mother was one of my family’s maids, Tom,”
-1— Daisy said, as though reminding him.
0— As though she’d told him this lie before.
+1—

• 14 •

51