The Girls Are All So Nice Here Read online

  “I’m Ambrosia. From Pennington. In New Jersey.”

  She opened her mouth to say something, but Ella spoke first. “Pennington! No way. I’m from Morristown. We’re practically neighbors. We should look at yearbooks later. I bet we have friends in common.”

  I bit my lip hard, wishing I hadn’t said Pennington and wishing Ella didn’t exist. The girl at the head of the table wasn’t even looking at me anymore. She had moved on to a boy beside her, sweeping an arm over his shoulder.

  “That’s my roommate. She has zero attention span,” said the girl on my other side, a freckled brunette named Lauren whose room was next to ours. “We went to Spence together. She’s insane.”

  I wanted to know what she meant by insane. “What’s her name?” I asked, but my question went unanswered. Lauren was already talking to someone else about where to get decent weed on campus. The only person who wanted to talk to me was Ella. Between mouthfuls of food, she told me about her senior prom and her cat named Freddy as I feigned interest. It would have been easy to fall into a groove with her, to flesh out our similar backgrounds. But I didn’t want to go back to where I came from.

  When Lauren’s insane roommate got up and left, followed by Clara and a couple of the guys, I swallowed my disappointment. I wanted to be part of that group. I stared at the can of Diet Coke in front of me as Gemma from Saint Ann’s whined to Flora about her boyfriend at Yale and how much she missed him.

  “I know it’s hard,” Flora said. “But he misses you too. Look at you. How could he not?”

  It wasn’t even what she said but how she said it. So genuinely nice. My spine prickled. Flora, in her babyish Mary Janes and high collar, was fitting in better than I did. She knew how to be herself—it seemed like everyone did. I only knew how to imitate other people.

  Lauren surveyed Flora with interest. I was sure she would tear into her later with her roommate. But when the group broke apart, Flora gave her a hug. At first, Lauren stiffened, but Flora said something I couldn’t hear—something that made Lauren’s bored expression curve into a smile.

  Later, when we were back in our room, I hung up dresses I realized were tacky and cheap as Flora unpacked photos of high school friends and her boyfriend, cheeks obscured by acne, even in grainy black and white.

  “This is Kevin,” she said, holding a photo close enough to kiss it. “He goes to Dartmouth. Second year.”

  “He’s cute,” I said, even though it was a horrible picture and he really wasn’t.

  “He’s the best. I’m sure you’ll meet him. He said he’d come to visit me all the time, when he can get away from school. It’s not all that far. Less than three hours.”

  I imagined he had already cheated on her and she just didn’t know it yet. Boys made us idiots. My mom seemed certain that I would find “someone special” at college, the same way Toni had met her boyfriend at Rutgers: Scott, with his impeccable manners, such a good guy. But the idea of a storybook college romance just seemed unattainable.

  “What about you?” Flora continued. “You have a boyfriend, right?”

  I stared at the photos I had deemed good enough to occupy the space on my corkboard. There was one of me and Matt, his easy smile and the slug of his arm across my shoulders. I resented the fact that Flora assumed I had a boyfriend as some kind of certainty. I almost wanted to tell her the whole ugly story but decided against it.

  “No,” I settled on. “There was a guy, but it’s complicated.”

  “Complicated,” she echoed, as if she didn’t understand the word.

  I had lost my virginity to Matt the summer before senior year. Billie had already given hers up and I wanted it gone, my stupid hymen, the arbitrary line drawn between girls who’d had a penis inside them and girls who hadn’t. But the decision to have sex was about more than that. At the time, I honestly thought Matt would be not only my first but my last. It’s always going to be us, he had said, his arms wrapped tightly around my waist at a school dance, my face hidden in his neck.

  “You’re so lucky,” Billie used to whine. “He’s, like, too good to be real.”

  But he was real, and he was mine. He was in my junior-year drama class and later claimed that he took the class just to ask me out—I’ve seen all of your plays. You’re so talented. I let myself thaw and trust him when he picked me up for our first date, brandishing flowers for me and a handshake for my dad. His fingers, when they veered under my clothes, were gentle, his voice questioning. The boys Billie and I had previously orbited around didn’t know we existed unless they were drunk and wanted something. I wasn’t used to being treated well because I didn’t even know what it felt like to be noticed.

  I knew other girls wanted Matt, but he never even looked at them. He only saw me. After his basketball games, which Billie and I diligently attended in our Central colors, it was me he swept into a sweaty hug, me he kissed at parties in front of everyone. Forever, he liked to say when we were in his bed after school, fan whirring lazily overhead. You’re my forever.

  I had no reason not to believe him.

  “I ended things,” I told Flora, savoring the surge of power that accompanied the lie.

  “Well, I’m sure there’s somebody better for you here.” She grabbed my hands. “Can I paint your nails like mine? Then we can match for the party tonight.” Hers were cardinal red and black, Wesleyan pride already.

  I was embarrassed by my nails. They were never the same length, rarely ever painted, and when I did take the time to do them, I always picked the polish off. But Flora was reaching for a pink nail file, so I let her knead my fingers between hers and watched her work. When she was done, she helped me choose an outfit—a low-cut blue dress from Forever 21, wedge heels handed down from Toni.

  “Are you sure I look okay?” I asked. I felt cheap and greasy, my hair too brassy, my skin fake-baked. Worst of all, I felt average.

  “You’re beautiful,” Flora reassured me. “That dress makes your eyes pop.” Her words provided the smallest bit of warmth.

  The party that night was in Butterfield A, in a double belonging to girls with fake IDs, which I soon learned most people already had. I spent most of the night with my back against a wall drinking vodka Sprite from a paper cup, watching girls take their turns retreating to a corner to dip their heads over a locker mirror, where I glimpsed neat lines of cocaine. I was too afraid to try it, and nobody offered anyway. The only drug I had tried in high school was weed, and all it did was calcify my paranoia that people were talking about me into a too-tight exoskeleton.

  I saw Gemma from lunch flitting around the room in jeans and a white T-shirt that offset her peachy tan, simple but stunning. I suddenly felt ridiculous, sausaged into my dress, my makeup heavy-handed. Gemma’s eyes met mine just for a second before landing on my colorful little LV. Eyebrows raised, she turned away from me toward Clara and her nondescript brown bag. My purse was a misstep. The girls here didn’t flaunt their labels like status symbols. What had reigned at Central was all wrong now.

  Flora left early after sipping from the same water bottle all night. “Kevin is calling me at ten. Want me to come back and get you after?”

  “I’ll be fine, but thanks,” I said. I didn’t want to be the drunk girl she cleaned up after.

  Lauren and her roommate showed up when Flora left—fashionably late, except only Lauren was fashionable. Her roommate, the insane one, was wearing boxers and a ribbed tank top, no bra, as if she had just woken up. I downed another drink as she beelined for the cocaine, then started dancing in the middle of the room, grabbing a boy by his shirt. I saw the way she pulled back just a bit when he tried to kiss her, and noticed how she tilted her head, pushing her hair back to show her neck, grinding her hips into his crotch. His face grew more pained as hers got more playful, and the shriek of her hyena laugh was the loudest sound in the room.

  I watched him go from wanting her to needing her. It was a transaction, her sucking power from him like a vampire. It was performance art. She
had done this before, owned boys. When she finally let him kiss her, it was because she had already drained from him whatever she needed.

  She pulled away from his urgent mouth long enough to look directly at me and wink. I smiled, then immediately hated myself for it. She had noticed me staring and would tell everyone how creepy I was.

  I fixed my eyes on the ground just in time for someone to spill a drink on my purse. “Sorry,” the guy said without even looking up at me. I felt myself deflate.

  I unzipped the dripping purse and slipped my phone out. Then I left the purse on the floor, slumped beside the wall. I wouldn’t need it anymore. Billie would be horrified, but Billie wasn’t here and wouldn’t understand.

  When I stood back up, I realized how drunk I was. I shuffled over to Lauren and Gemma, hoping to gain entry to their conversation, but they either didn’t notice me or didn’t want to. I bobbed to an invisible beat and pretended not to care.

  “She already fucked his friend,” Lauren said. “It’s some kind of game.”

  A shiver ran up my arms. I didn’t know the rules, but I wanted to play too. A scan of the room told me what I already knew. Lauren’s roommate was gone.

  Whoever was in charge of housing assignments had gotten it all wrong, because that girl should have been my roommate. Whoever had matched me with Flora instead would be to blame when Butterfield C became Dorm Doom.

  NOW

  To: “Ambrosia Wellington” [email protected]

  From: “Wesleyan Alumni Committee” [email protected]

  Subject: Class of 2007 Reunion

  Dear Ambrosia Wellington,

  Your ten-year reunion is less than a month away! There’s probably somebody you’ve been meaning to connect with—now is the perfect time to reach out. If you haven’t joined our Class of 2007 Facebook group, we encourage you to hop online and log in. You might be surprised by who you find.

  Sincerely,

  Your Alumni Committee

  I don’t tell anybody about the reunion. Not my mom when she calls to ask if Adrian and I are coming up for Pennington Day, or Toni when she texts me photos of Layla, my two-year-old niece. Not even Billie, whom I message about everything—Billie, who knows more about me than anyone else in my life. She would encourage me to go. But she doesn’t understand. Her past hasn’t yielded casualties.

  Hadley and Heather, the only girls from Wesleyan I keep in touch with, ask me in our group chat if I’m going, and I tell them I have something else planned for that weekend. Boo, Hadley says. Justin will be sad without Adrian to talk to. I check the mail in our building every day to snatch any potential notes before Adrian has a chance to see them. Adrian doesn’t ask many questions, but when he gets curious, his need for answers rivals that of a six-year-old. Why. Why. Why. It’s not even the insistence that I hate most. It’s his simplicity, the very quality that I was once drawn to. His belief that there’s a solution to every problem.

  No more notes arrive, and I honestly think I got away with it. Then the past finds me in the last place I expect it. At the Skylark, where Adrian occasionally meets me after I’m done with work, making his rare pilgrimage away from the soft shell of Astoria and its craft beer. The Skylark is my favorite Midtown bar, my own glittering nest on top of New York. We’re sipping our drinks—a martini for me, just one, Adrian likes to say, just in case—when Tara Rollins appears at our table. Tara from Wesleyan, who was assistant editor for the Argus and now works in book publishing.

  “Ambrosia!” she squeals. I haven’t seen her since Heather’s bachelorette party—a boozy weekend on the beach in Sag Harbor where Tara tearfully admitted to cheating on her husband with a fellow editor—but here she is, and already, Adrian is standing up and pumping her hand with embarrassing vigor.

  “Look at you. You look great! Please tell me you’re going. It wouldn’t be the same without you.” As if we were ever anything beyond party acquaintances.

  “Going where?” Adrian says.

  Tara laughs. “The reunion, of course. You’re coming too, aren’t you? My husband wouldn’t miss it.”

  I gulp my drink, smile intact as vodka burns my throat. Your husband misses a lot.

  “Reunion?” Adrian makes the word an open wound. I stare at his tanned forearms, the brush of dark hair creeping up to the sleeves of his plaid shirt. “I didn’t know—”

  “I just haven’t had a chance to talk to you yet,” I say, sparing him the humiliation. “It doesn’t matter anyway. I don’t actually want to go.”

  Tara knows why but plays dumb. “Of course you want to go. Everyone will be there.”

  “It’s our anniversary weekend,” I explain. “We’ll be doing something special to celebrate. Three years.” Now is one of those times I wish I had a bigger ring to flash.

  “No way,” Adrian says. “We can’t miss your reunion. We can do our anniversary anytime. It’s just pizza on the patio anyway.” He smiles up at Tara, all little-boy charm, as if she’s going to be impressed with our low-key date night.

  “Exactly,” Tara says. They start talking like I’m not even there. It takes less than a minute for Adrian to mention his novel and less than two for Tara to mention Butterfield C. Anger surges through me. I want to protect Adrian, not just from the truth but from Tara’s inevitable judgment of him, of us.

  “I got pretty wild back then,” she says with a laugh. My eyes search the room for a waiter who can bring me a second martini. “But of course, not as wild as Amb.”

  “You must have the wrong girl,” he says, reaching for my wrist. “This one kept her head down and studied.”

  I can’t look at Tara because I know what I’ll see there. She kept her head down, all right. She’s a time bomb, and I need to get rid of her before she detonates.

  “Fine,” I say, fingers closing so tightly around my glass that I picture it shattering. “We’ll go.”

  It’s only once I say those words out loud that the truth hits me.

  I do need to go. Not for Tara, not for anyone else, but for her. Because maybe she knows something that will absolve us. I keep picturing her wherever she is, taking the time to write such careful calligraphy—so unlike her; she was always in a rush. But she summoned me for a reason, and I need to know what it is.

  * * *

  I said We’ll go, but I didn’t mean we. I rack my brain, scour the Internet for reasons to leave Adrian behind. Maybe this will help our marriage. I can face the past, shed my dead skin, and come back with some of the gratitude I used to feel for my husband instead.

  I find a weekend writing workshop offered at NYU, excitedly presenting it to him as a great opportunity to take his craft seriously. “Consider it my anniversary gift. Just imagine how much writing you’ll get done,” I gush. He’s almost ready to enroll when he notices the date.

  “Not this time,” he says. “There’ll be another one. Hey, should I get a suit for your reunion?”

  A message comes in from Hadley. Are you guys signing up to stay in the dorms?

  I imagine it. Adrian beside me, holding hands on Foss Hill. Maybe it wouldn’t be that bad. We see Hadley and Heather and their husbands every couple months for dinner and drinks, and the boys retreat so deep into their conversations about sports and action movies that they forget we’re even there. Hadley and Heather know that I haven’t told Adrian about Dorm Doom—at my engagement party, I said I didn’t want to taint what Adrian and I had with all those awful rumors, and they gave me sympathetic hugs and promises of It’s not our business, we’d never say anything. I could get through a weekend at Wesleyan. We could.

  I let the idea marinate, cautiously. Adrian brings it up again when we’re out for dinner with Billie and her husband, Ryan, in Brooklyn. We’ve been making that hour-long commute from Astoria with decreasing frequency, and they never come to us because of the kids. He grabs my hand when we sit down, a small gesture that makes us a team, the way married people are supposed to be.

  “Amb’s reunion is going
to be sweet,” he says through a mouthful of steak after our main courses arrive. “Ten years. Makes me wish I had graduated.”

  “Reunion?” Billie says. I take a swig of wine, the second glass Adrian didn’t want me to order. I can feel her eyes on me, the hurt there that I didn’t tell her myself. “Wait. For Wesleyan? And you’re going?”

  “Yes,” I say quickly. “I thought I told you about it.”

  “You didn’t,” Billie says. “You must have forgotten.”

  She knows I didn’t forget. I picture the blue glow of Billie’s face at the Hamilton Manor when we were drunk at Central’s senior prom, her cold hand wiping tears from my cheeks. Matt’s here. With her. Don’t look. Fuck them, it will always be us.

  I grapple for something else to talk about. “Your last post was so cute. The girls are starting to look so much like you.”

  Her pinched expression relaxes, but I’m not off the hook. She’ll message me later tonight, wanting me to spill, like I’m a drink teetering on the edge. “Oh, yeah. I had to bribe Sawyer with cookie dough to get her to sit still. I’m mother of the year, didn’t you know?”

  Billie hasn’t technically worked since Ryan got promoted to some kind of private banking job in the Financial District and she had Beckett. But she calls herself an “influencer.” Her online persona—a blog called GurlMom that turned into an Instagram account with a following of nearly thirty thousand—is nothing like her real self. She’s a paragon of the #2under2 contingent, moms who wear their babies like clingy purses over skintight yoga pants. They worship Billie and the state of blush-pink staged flawlessness she embodies.

  I don’t have Instagram for that reason. Because I don’t want to cultivate a #nofilter life, a pastiche of fake smiles. I learned at Wesleyan that people don’t envy the girls who are the smartest and prettiest. They envy the ones who are smart and pretty without trying. Unlike Billie’s, my attempt at effortlessness played out live. There was no delete button, no way to undo.