Excellent Reads

The smiling boy visited Sunnybrook Yachts in the summer of 2017, after the value of Bitcoin had reached an all-time high, having tripled in five months. Sunnybrook is the largest yacht brokerage on Canada’s east coast. Its clients tended to be surgeons and litigators and C-suiters who travel from Toronto and Paris and Hawaii to summer in Nova Scotia; their wives wear silks and Manolos and perfect fingernails that cost $300 yesterday at the salon. The smiling boy stood out. He wore a wrinkled golf shirt, cargo shorts, and beat-up Birkenstocks, and he was obscenely young, with sandy hair and pale skin that appeared not to have seen sunlight since puberty. He was accompanied by a girlfriend who drove her own Jeep. They struck the yacht salesman as a couple you’d less likely see at Scaramouche than in a Walmart parking lot. Most conspicuous was the odd way that the young man always seemed to be smiling. It was a gentle, unflappable smile. It put strangers at ease; it made him seem lighthearted. It was difficult to imagine that this particular trait was contrived, but later, after it was revealed that nearly everything about him was a work of pure contrivance, you had to wonder whether the incessant smiling was just another part of the act.

Archive link: https://archive.ph/YeSPK