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  To CGM,

  who was still looking at the stars

  So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent.

  —F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, The Great Gatsby

  I am a self-made man, born with my two hands.

  —JOE STEVENS, “Ghost Boy”

  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 Caraveo, 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 axle 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. That dress on Mamá’s birthday, the hat and boots for Papá 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

  Mr. and Mrs. Agustín Caraveo

  Beet Patch, Wisconsin

  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 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 painfully 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 perform to get him to tell me what happened with the stockbroker. (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 have only 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 slightest presumption, because I already found the sweetest little cottage for him. Close enough to the train into the city but with plenty of space around, no neighbors crowding him. 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

  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 Chicago. But I could recognize the shape by touch, the contours of the felt coin at the bottom, the pillar base, the notches of the horse’s head. It was a knight, in deep-finished wood.

  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 trousers to go with it, he’d been working twice as hard at this dispensation of wisdom, like a priest administering Communion 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, squinting into the lemon-meringue light. So I didn’t recognize the 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 drifting 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 windowless 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 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.

  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 branches 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 of 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 neighbor like”—I gestured to myself—“me?”

  “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 themselves.”

  The turn of Daisy’s head, and the salt perfume of tidewater, 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 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 dollhouse.

  We were barely out of the car before her shoes were tapping across the flagstones.

  “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. Anything close enough for her to touch came away dusted with perfumed powder 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 telegram.

  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 preface 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 like Marion Davies?

  “Are you still using elastic bandages to bind?” she asked.

  “Well, yes,” I said, conscious of the sheen of travel sweat under mine right then.

  “Nicky,” Daisy said with high, sparkling concern as she rifled 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 corsets 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. “It’ll all change again.” She folded the side lacer and another like it and tucked them into the top drawer of a high dresser. “Anyway, I bought you two. I ordered more, so if you like them, there are three more 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 have rather stayed 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, lovely as an angel but 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.”

  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 anyone 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?”

  “What will you say when he asks how we met?” I asked.

  “Don’t you worry,” she said. “I’ve got it all figured out.”

  * * *

  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.