The Girls Are All So Nice Here Read online

  “Drink up,” she said, her voice flat.

  I despised the mug in that moment, and Flora for cursing me with it. I figured any headway I had gained in my cruelty to Ella had been lost with an ugly piece of porcelain. I was too scared at the time to understand that Sully wasn’t disappointed. She was jealous.

  Several drinks and a bump of cocaine later, as the two of us stumbled up Foss Hill toward the Nics, Sully was quiet, and I had to break the silence. “I haven’t had an orgasm from a guy either. None of them know how to use their dicks.”

  She threw her head back and laughed, exposing her milky throat. “Are you serious? That’s so sad. I’m the easiest person to get off. I was just making up shit so we could get rid of Ella.”

  For a second I hated her. The clothes that hung perfectly on her body and the hair she never had to wash and her grades, the way she didn’t have to work for anything. She was the opposite of the cool girls from Central, forever trying to cultivate an image.

  But mostly I just hated myself. For always slipping, just when I finally thought I had a solid foothold. For my defective body and sluggish brain. I would have to sharpen everything.

  “Mission accomplished,” I said. “Now I just have to do something about Flora. She’s always judging me. Us.”

  Sully knocked against my shoulder but didn’t link her arm in mine like she usually did. “Yeah. She’s so goddamn fake. Girls like that are actually the easiest to corrupt.”

  Ella would have become wallpaper, someone in the background of my college scrapbook with a try-hard smile and dated clothes, if not for what we did. But she unwittingly played a role.

  Maybe she’s playing a very different one now.

  NOW

  To: “Ambrosia Wellington” [email protected]

  From: “Wesleyan Alumni Committee” [email protected]

  Subject: Class of 2007 Reunion

  Dear Ambrosia Wellington,

  If you’re having trouble relaxing, consider joining us for sunset yoga overlooking Foss Hill. And be sure to gather your energy for the Class of 2007 cocktail reception and party afterward at Eclectic. It’ll be like you never left campus, or the Wesleyan spirit never left you!

  Sincerely,

  Your Alumni Committee

  Hads and Heather want me to come back to Bennet for drinks in their room after lunch, but I promised Adrian I would show him around. I take him to Olin and the observatory and we walk down Foss Hill, where a bunch of people in Lululemon are doing yoga, to Fountain Avenue. I point out the wood-frame house where I lived with Hads and Heather during senior year. I tell him I used to study there and hang out with friends there and eat lunch there. I don’t tell him what I really did here and there.

  “Sully seems cool,” Adrian says when we’re heading back. “Too bad you guys didn’t stay in touch. What happened?”

  His assumption is completely wrong. We didn’t lose touch. There is no us.

  I give him the most generic, harmless answer. “We just grew apart.”

  He slings his arm around me. “What about the girl you lived with freshman year? Is she here too?”

  She’s here. I already saw her twice and pretended I didn’t. “I don’t know. These people—” I start, but I stop myself before I say more.

  “What, babe?” Suddenly, his grip on me feels just right—tight but not possessive, loving but not smothering. I lean into him and want to tell him how freaked out I am, but I don’t.

  “Nothing,” I say.

  We eventually make our way to Bennet to meet the others. The last thing I want to do is attend another Wesleyan party, but Hadley and Heather are talking like it’s going to be so much fun and I’m swept along, arms linked in theirs like we’re careless again, even though I never was. Being careless, like everything I did, was calculated.

  The reception is being held in the Hewitt courtyard and at least has the decency to have an open bar. I’m not going to let Adrian’s whispered you could bes stop me.

  We pass a bunch of older alumni on our walk over, a reunion for a class from before our time. I would never want to show up like that, so far away from who I used to be. Especially when Flora would look the same, preternaturally young and beautiful. You’ve aged well, I would muster up the courage to say. You haven’t, she’d reply.

  I stop walking when I see a tall figure with immaculate posture and a familiar long stride. Along with a familiar uniform.

  “Amb?” Heather says, turning back. “You coming?”

  I suck in a sharp breath. I would recognize Officer—Captain—Tom Felty anywhere. Except now he’s three-dimensional, not hidden safely behind a computer screen. I realize, with a pang of fear, that I’m not even surprised to see him here—almost like I knew he would find me when he wanted to.

  Please don’t see me. I spent years wanting to be the opposite of invisible, but now I wish I could disappear. I can’t explain to Adrian why I know a police officer. I can’t tell him that I still have Felty’s business card at home, kicking around in an old wallet.

  Now his hair is almost all white, but his face hasn’t changed much, just hardened around the edges. The blue eyes are the same, arctic and intense. If I weren’t terrified of him, I would probably think he was sexy.

  He never thought Sully had anything to do with it. He somehow knew it was me, even though he never had the evidence he needed to prove it.

  Felty could easily be the one who wrote the note in my purse. He could have learned calligraphy. I’m finally going to get her, humming merrily as he dropped the envelope in the mail. I know exactly why this case meant so much to him.

  His revenge could be almost fourteen years in the making.

  “I’m coming,” I say, trailing behind the girls, focusing on the back of Adrian’s curly head. Felty is mercifully silent as I pass by. Maybe he hasn’t seen me.

  Then I make the mistake of turning back right before the crowd in the courtyard swallows us up, and those eyes are staring straight at me. There’s no hint of a smile, no indication that the past is in the past. Because it’s not. I walked right back into it.

  THEN

  If Wesleyan was my universe, Sully was my passport, dragging me not just to regular parties but ones I never would have heard of otherwise. It was like she felt the pulse of campus itself, slender fingers throbbing over Wesleyan’s veins. People told her things, wanted her places, maybe because they knew she was up for anything, her excess almost mythical already. She was right when she told me she got bored easily.

  Sully was the reason I ended up at the Tomb during the second week of October, answering a bunch of random questions posed by two hooded figures at the entrance. I later learned that only members of the Skull and Serpent society had keys. I liked being part of something exclusive, something not everybody knew about, Sully and I dancing on a ledge in the dark. It was elevated from the regular party scene. This was life with Sully—VIP access, skipping the line, her connections spiderweb sticky.

  “Dance with me,” Sully said when we finally left at dawn. She held her heels and spun in circles, tilting her face to the sky. “Where can we go now? I’ll text Buddy and see who’s still partying.”

  “I can’t. I have to sleep before class.” Really, I was itching to get back to my room to check my email, where I knew a message from Kevin would be waiting.

  Sully stopped abruptly and grabbed my wrist, pulling me in, our arms tacky with sweat. “You’re different. Don’t think I haven’t noticed. It’s a guy, isn’t it?”

  Her crimson-lipped mouth curved downward, pouty and disapproving. I was afraid to tell her about Kevin, afraid it would mean the end of something.

  “You’re the last person I expected to get sucked in by one of these idiot guys.” She pulled away to light a cigarette. “Hypnotized by dick. I thought you were like me.”

  “I am.” In that moment I needed Kevin to not be one of the idiot guys. “It’s not like that. He’s—well, he’s not one of them. He goes to
Dartmouth.”

  She yawned and typed something into her phone. She was already moving on. I had to reel her back in. I had to impress her.

  “He’s Flora’s boyfriend.”

  I was scared when my words landed. I had no idea how she would react, if she would be impressed or disgusted or worse, bored.

  But her smile glittered in the dark. “You slut. Fuck him yet? Does Flora suspect?”

  I pulled my hair into an elastic on top of my head. Sully had convinced me I could wear it like that and not look stupid. “Not yet. And no. She has no idea.”

  My feelings toward Flora darkened by the day. She was the worst kind of girl, the kind who intentionally made you sunshine-blind in the prism of her perfection. Don’t even ask. Just take whatever you want, she had said when we first met, but I was sure she didn’t mean it. She just wanted somebody to monitor, an obedient house pet.

  I tried every day to break into her laptop and read about Clarissa, my fingers skittering over her keyboard when she was in the shower. But I never managed to guess her password. In my frustration, I stole a picture of Kevin from Flora’s wall collage, a recent one that had appeared there, partially covered by a magazine clipping about depression, which she was studying in one of her psych classes. I hid the photo inside my John Donne book. It seemed fitting. John Donne was like a mutual friend, the one who’d set us up.

  “So what are you going to do about it?” Sully said.

  I shook my head. “I don’t know.” I didn’t tell her about the emails, about how real our connection was.

  “You have to commit to it.” Sully passed me her cigarette. “We’ll figure something out.”

  She didn’t force the issue of going to another party, and when we got back to the Butts, she kissed my cheek. “You better not forget I exist.”

  “Never,” I said. When I washed my face, I saw that her lips had left a red mark.

  The truth was, I sensed Kevin’s growing distance. His responses that week had been slower to arrive and less effusive. He said things like, It would be different if u were here. And I responded, I wish I was. I tried to mimic his tone instead of gripping tighter, which was my instinct to stop someone from slipping away.

  That morning, as my buzz swelled into a hangover fog, one email waited for me in my inbox. Kevin had sent it two hours ago. My frat’s doing a party this weekend and all I can think is how I’d rather be with u. reading some JD or something

  Instead of replying right away, like I always did, I let the message marinate. Flora’s voice was in my head, but it wasn’t annoying anymore. It’s not all that far. Less than three hours. I could go to the party and surprise him. It would be the ultimate test to see how he really felt about me.

  I stared at Flora, sleeping on her back, hands at her sides in her manicure gloves, hair twisted off her face. Our Best and Friend mugs were both on her desk, which meant she had washed them and brought them back from the kitchen. Flora, always tidying up after me. But I was about to make a disaster she would never be able to clean up.

  * * *

  In our Introduction to Playwriting class the next day, we talked about the hero and what happened when the hero fell. Ogden gave a big speech, raising both fists in the air. “To truly destroy a character, you have to know him inside out. You have to know what means the most to him. Take that away, and you can do anything to him. Kill him off, even. Because he has already lost everything that matters.”

  Sully raised her hand. “So you’re saying the only way to dismantle someone is to take away what they love.”

  He clasped his hands together. “Yes, precisely. We’ve talked about seeing it prominently in Othello. It becomes even more interesting when you take away your hero’s morals, along with what he loves. Which, generally, manifests as a person. The love interest.”

  I was sick of hearing about the love interest, comparing myself to that girl. People told us that comparison was the thief of joy. But the real culprit was competition. They never talked about what happened when we wanted the same thing.

  “You seemed really interested today,” I said later in MoCon, Sully with a mass of lasagna and me with a burrito that would inevitably upset my stomach. “Do you have an idea for your play?”

  She used her fork to pry congealed cheese off her plate. “Not really. I was thinking more about your situation.”

  “My situation?” The burrito was nearly the size of my forearm, stuffed into its shell like a swaddled baby. The first bite would leave a neon oil slick on my chin, but I was too hungry to care.

  “Yeah. With Kevin. I mean, we can eliminate the problem pretty easily.”

  I kept grinding beef and maggots of rice between my molars, because that was preferable to actually speaking. When I swallowed, I wiped my mouth with a napkin that came away orange. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, it’s not that hard to make a guy forget about his girlfriend. It’s funny, how they like to pledge their loyalty to one girl. Well, it’s not funny, because usually it only happens because a girl makes them do it. Like, she wants legitimacy for sucking him off at a party, so she asks him if she’s his girlfriend. And he says yes, because he wants to get sucked off again.” She paused to spear a chunk of lasagna, digging her fork through the flesh of the noodles so savagely that I looked away.

  She was describing me, the way I clung to the idea of boys in little ways, even the ones I wasn’t supposed to care about. How I so easily believed everything Matt ever told me. How I let Hunter call me Amber and didn’t correct him, how I had shown up at Drew Tennant’s door minutes after his hey, wanna hook up text came in.

  “Anyway,” she continued, “we’re the same to them. We have the same parts. It’s what we do with them that matters. Why do you think so many guys give in to temptation? Why do you think bachelor parties are, like, a billion-dollar industry? They’re pretty much founded on the idea that every man will cheat. It’s just a question of when.” Red sauce stuck to the corners of her lips.

  “So you’re saying we get Kevin to cheat?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying.” Sully dropped her fork, where it settled on her plate with an indignant clatter. “I mean, I’m sure he’s cheated on Flora already. It’s not hard for any guy to keep his dick perpetually wet.”

  “But even if he does cheat on her, Flora gets off looking even more angelic.” I could picture her tear-blind face, her pretty sobs, her mourning impeccably neat.

  Sully wagged a finger at me. “Ah, you’re wrong. I’m not done. The other half of my plan is to have her do the same thing.”

  I barked out a laugh. “Yeah, right. Who would she cheat on him with? She probably considers masturbation cheating. It’s not going to happen.”

  But Sully wasn’t deterred. She smiled her Cheshire cat smile, the one where the edges of her mouth turned all the way up.

  “Let me take care of that. You focus on the other part.”

  So I did. I told her about the party at Kevin’s frat, how he had practically invited me.

  “Well, that’s it. We’re fucking going.” She leaned back in her chair.

  I saw myself with Kevin at Dartmouth, a gauzy fantasy that curtained off the rational part of my brain. I would run to him and throw my legs around his waist the way girls did in movies. He’d hang on, as if I weighed nothing, and kiss me so frantically that maybe our mouths wouldn’t even meet. Lips on eyelids, cheeks, forehead, hairline, the clash of teeth. Messy and soft and meaningful, probably underneath a dramatic willow tree, and that tree would be our tree, and maybe he would even propose under it one day. The ring he slipped on my finger would be a solitaire, at least two carats, and the band would be an anemic halo of diamonds struggling to hold its weight.

  People thought girls’ bodies were our deadliest weapons. They had no idea about the mountains our imaginations could move.

  “Why are you helping me?” I said. “I mean, I’m sure this isn’t much fun for you.”

  She slapped the table s
o hard that I almost jumped. “Are you kidding? It’s you. Of course I’m going to do anything I can.”

  Sully wasn’t capable of sweet, but I still savored her words. It’s you.

  I should have known it was never really about me at all.

  That night, she knocked on my door and whispered something in my ear as Flora clacked away on her laptop. “I got us a car.”

  * * *

  I skipped my Friday classes to pack. I hoped to avoid Flora, but she came back from her morning class early, her usual smile missing in action. My eyes darted to my packed suitcase, the elephant in the room. She knows.

  “Hey,” she said. “I’m having such a bad morning. Poppy and I had this huge argument last night. I told her Kevin was coming for Halloween, and she said it was like I couldn’t have fun without him. Like he doesn’t want me to go out unless he’s here.”

  My mouth was dry. I never considered that Flora was boring because Kevin made her that way.

  “It’s so not like that.” Flora perched on her bed. “She just doesn’t understand. She’s fourteen. She’s never had a boyfriend.”

  “Kevin doesn’t seem controlling.” I regretted my choice of tense—I should have said Kevin didn’t. I had only met him once.

  “Whatever,” Flora said, her pained expression morphing into a smile. “I don’t want to dump my bad mood on you. I’m just emotional. I blame Aunt Flo.”

  “Aunt Flo is the worst.” I considered what Sully would say about a girl who called her period Aunt Flo. “Sometimes it’s terrible being a woman.”

  Flora slumped against her pillow and sighed, theatrical. “Yeah. I would trade these ovaries for a ball sack most days.”

  The words ball sack coming out of Flora’s mouth were so shocking that I laughed, an actual laugh, and Flora joined in, and for a minute it felt like we were real friends. Why had I decided not to like Flora? Was it because she had Kevin or because she had everything else? Maybe I had made up the halo over her head. She was just a girl, same as the rest of us, trying to figure life out.