Nantucket Summer

Chapter 1

Matti Bernard stared at the package in the mail, the crisp ivory envelope. The swirling font read her name and the coveted school crest started back at her. She'd been waiting for this letter for four and a half years. She had craved this moment, willed for it to come. Yet now, her future determined behind a curtain, she couldn't seem to make it move forward another moment because no matter what the letter said it would bring her pain.

"Matti, open the damn letter," her best friend of 14 years, Max, demanded from his classic position sprawled across her white rug that was laid perfectly on her dark mahogany floors.

As usual his Sperry clad feet were rested up on her large bay window's little white bench. She starred at the scuffed edge of it, dirtied from years of him tossing his heals up there. Some how she by looking at those marks, the consistency of them, the fact she knew they would always be there, just like her fiends would always be there, she ripped open the gorgeous ivory paper, the tear slicing straight through the letters that spelled Miss Matteline Elise Bernard.

She then held the thick folded ivory paper in her French manicured finger tips. However now that she started opening it she couldn't stop. It was like sailing a ship, getting it out of the harbor is the difficult part-Then she read the first sentence-unless you hit a storm.

A hand over her mouth she turned to Max and her other best friend Hartley, with quavering fingers and tears in her large blue eyes she thrusters it in the air and Max actually moved quickly for once to grab it from her.

"Dear Miss Bernard, we are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted to Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a Business undergraduate!" He read off the words, his voice raising in volume as he went and cadence getting quicker as the excitement in her room grew.

Hartley threw her arms around Matti and Max carefully set the letter down before joining the group hug however both friends quickly pulled away when they realized Matti was not laughing but instead crying.

Suddenly the excitement flew from the room like a vacuum had appeared and all three were still. Matti quickly pulled her tears away from her eyes and looked away, busying her self with tidying her already tidy desk.

Max and Hartley knew this move all too well and flanked their friend quickly. "Why the hell are you crying?" Hartley exclaimed in her usual brash manner.

"You know I can't go, my dad has made it very clear there is one college I'm allowed to attend..."

"Columbia," Max finished her sentence.

Matti nodded sadly and pushed the bittersweet paper away from her sight. "So I suppose Columbia is where I'm going. But I mean its not a bad school, it's only just behind MIT. Most kids don't even get that option."

Matti knew she was fortunate. She lived a blessed life in the high end area of West Chester, New York. Her father was the classic Wall Street tycoon and her mother was the classic high powered wife. She was from money unlike Matti's father who made his own however Diane Bernard was not one to leech off of those around her. After attending medical school at Harvard she made a living for herself as a reputable OB/GYN now however she owned a lovely bakery in town to keep herself busy. Matti had always admired her mother's audacity and drive to turn away from her family strings and make a name for herself. This was just one of the many things Matti and her father did not see eye to eye on.

Hartley sighed, pulling at the ends of her lightly used designer sweater. Unlike Max and Matti she was not from a high class family, matti would have traded all her money to be part of a middle class family if they were as supportive as Hartley's. She had worked through high school to make the top tear not because she wanted to like Max and Matti but because she had to if she was to attend her dream school, University of Boston. In the end she'd received her scholarships and it had all paid off.