The Girls Are All So Nice Here Read online

  “I remember my five-year reunion,” says Ryan. I hate him for bringing the conversation back around. “We stayed in the dorms and got shitfaced. I was planning to hook up with this girl I used to be obsessed with, except I barely recognized her under the bad plastic surgery.”

  “My dorm room was awesome,” Adrian says. “It used to feel like a palace to me.”

  The palace of pussy and weed. Adrian fully copped to being a slut in college. He even told me his wake-up call was when chlamydia sent him running to the campus nurse, fearful his dick would fall off from overuse. It’s one of his many anecdotes, which never failed to entertain me when we were dating, even when I suspected some weren’t entirely true. Adrian is a bartender. He’s used to listening to other people’s stories. It’s only natural that he tries to pass some of them off as his own.

  “The dorms were full when I called,” I say. “I already booked us a hotel.” Not one of the ones recommended in the email, but one farther away from the school, outside of Middletown, a more expensive Uber ride.

  “Bummer,” Adrian says at the same time Billie says, defensively, “Can you blame her for not wanting to stay there?”

  “What do you mean?” Adrian asks after a silence that lasts too long.

  “Amb’s roommate—” Billie starts.

  I cut her off. “My old roommates are going, too. Hadley and Heather. It’ll be great. Is anyone getting dessert?”

  Billie purses her lips. She is very aware that I haven’t told Adrian about my other roommate, so I don’t know where she’s trying to take the conversation. Her forehead would be furrowed if it weren’t for her recent Botox injections.

  I’m afraid of what Billie will bring up next, but then her cell phone chirps and her attention is diverted. “Fuck. It’s my mom. She says Beckett’s refusing to sleep.” She drains the last of her wine. “I guess that’s our cue to leave.” Ryan waves the waiter over, scribbling in the air with his index finger and thumb pressed together.

  The waiter is mercifully fast. Billie’s on the phone with Beckett, telling her, “Mommy and Daddy will be home soon, go to bed for Nana, sweetie.” I chug the rest of my drink, and that’s when I see her. It’s not actually her, though. It never is. Deep down, I know this, and yet I keep seeing her, in different places.

  In a summer dress with tights, a slick of lipstick when she wants to feel fancy. She watches me on my commute to work, fish-belly-white hands pressed against smudged train windows, getting off with me at Bryant Park. She’s holding an iced coffee in the lobby of my office building, watching me take the elevator to the twenty-fourth floor, where the hive of Brighton Dame buzzes, where I complete my transformation to basic PR bitch. Her glare, the moment our eyes meet, splits my skull. The question she wants to ask. Why?

  The therapist my parents made me see the summer after freshman year told me something I never forgot. “You went through a trauma,” she said, a string of words she was paid generously to dole out. “You wish there was more you could have done. But maybe you’re scared to let things go because you aren’t sure what to hold on to otherwise.”

  Secretly I was impressed that she had dug all that insight out of my silences and nods. The truth wasn’t that I held on to things. It was that I clutched them in a death grip.

  I wish I had done a lot more, I told her. It was what she expected to hear. The reality is that I wish I had done so much less.

  “Amb,” Billie says, smoothing the lace skirt puckering around her thighs. “Call me later. We should talk.”

  When we hug goodbye, the girl is coming out of the ladies’ room, still staring at me, silently judgmental. She hates my lipstick. She doesn’t think red is my color. And she’s right. It’s forever hers.

  THEN

  My first week at Wesleyan was a twisted treasure hunt, different spots on campus marking the spoils. The girls were my new language to study, the campus my personal geography project. Stoli and Sprite in various rooms in the Butterfields, which I soon started calling “the Butts” like I heard others do. Olin Library, all pillars and light, where my body buzzed like a live wire when I tried to concentrate on my first assignments, too acutely aware of the people around me. MoCon, affectionately dubbed the Mothership, hulking over campus like a watchful sentinel atop Foss Hill, where we ate most of our meals, lining up for a perpetually wilting salad bar, my hands hot as I scanned the tables for Flora or even Ella, because at least I didn’t have to impress her.

  And my home base—our room, Flora’s half impeccably neat. She had every color of nail polish lined up in a rainbow. “Don’t even ask,” she said. “Just take whatever you want.” I did, but not right away.

  I had tacked up pictures of me and Billie and, pathetically, left up the one of me and Matt—the only one that had survived becoming origami in the aftermath of our breakup. We wouldn’t be together again—not until a drunken mistake the next summer, although I didn’t know it at the time—but I needed to look desired, because being wanted was the local currency.

  I hated seeing his face on my wall, but it was a necessary reminder not to give out my trust so easily. I wouldn’t be blindsided again. I wouldn’t be the girl who believed her boyfriend when he canceled plans to go to a party because he was sick. I wouldn’t be the girl who went to the party with Billie instead. The most humiliating moment of my life, when I drunkenly staggered into the basement and found Matt’s head between Jessica French’s legs.

  The worst part wasn’t even that carnal image, burned indefinitely into my brain. It was that I stood there, shell-shocked, unable to find my voice. That’s not Matt, I tried telling myself, except of course it was. Instead of hurling at him the wrath he deserved, I slunk away unseen, cannibalizing myself for my flaws, the ones that drove him to pastel-perfect Jessica French. Of course he cheated, I told myself. I’m not special. Every compliment he had doled out detonated in my brain. He had never meant any of them.

  When Billie found me, I was a waterlogged mess on the front porch. She hugged me tightly and unleashed hell. “Fuck him, Amb. Seriously. Break up with him, and be really fucking savage about it.”

  We went back to Billie’s house and planned the epic breakup speech I would use, all the ways I’d hurt him. I turned off my phone and barely slept all weekend. Matt acted like nothing had happened when I saw him at school on Monday, putting his hand on the small of my back and kissing my cheek. I couldn’t muster the right words, so I pathetically repeated his I love you, hating myself more with each syllable.

  “Are you feeling better?” I finally managed, blinking back tears.

  “Yeah, way more like myself,” he said. “I figured you were sick too, since you never called me back.”

  Now was the time to unfurl my prepared speech, but it was stuck in my throat.

  “I wasn’t sick,” I said just as the bell rang.

  I told myself I’d call him and end things that night, justifying the delay to Billie by saying it would be easier over the phone, but I didn’t get a chance to before his text arrived. I think we should stop seeing each other. I’m really sorry, but I need to focus on school. It was a fresh stab wound.

  I finally retaliated. You’re a pathetic excuse for a boyfriend if you can’t even break up with me in person. I know what you did. But it was too late. My words had lost their impact. From that moment, I decided to use boys the same way they’d been willing to use me. If none of them mattered, I couldn’t get hurt.

  At Wesleyan, I cleaved to whatever invitations came my way, not wanting to be chained down to Flora, who barely went to any parties, even though girls fluttered into our room to invite her. Every night before she went to bed, her phone would swell with Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing”—Kevin’s ringtone—and they would proceed to talk for almost an hour, hushed tones punctuated by the occasional soft laugh.

  When I was in our room during the calls, I put my headphones on and pretended not to listen, but I couldn’t help but overhear. They were the most banal
conversations, peppered with anecdotes about every single thing that had happened to Flora on that given day. MoCon’s lasagna, lacy noodles hard around the edges, gasp, not vegan friendly. The vegan hot chocolate her sister sent her in a care package. Something one of her professors said. Something I said. My name came up a lot. Just wait till you meet Amb. She’s so nice!

  I tried to reciprocate her enthusiasm, but it felt like an inconsistent performance. To me, being nice was as naïve as being trustworthy, which had gotten me nowhere. Flora must have known the power she was giving people to hurt her. There was a danger in being too soft in a world that required a protective coating.

  I wasn’t going to be soft again. Not when girls like Jessica French existed, smiling to my face and betraying me behind my back. As much as I hated Matt, I might have hated them even more. I was a joke they were all in on.

  So I worked on my coating instead. I copied the styles of the girls from our dorm, girls prettier and more fashionable than me: Gemma with her ripped jeans and oversized flannels, and Clara with her miniskirts over tights, and even our RA, Dawn, whose curly auburn hair rippled down her back in a twisted current, miraculously shiny and frizz-free.

  Before classes started each day, I fastidiously flat-ironed my hair and painted my face with tools from my Bobbi Brown arsenal. I resented how my clothes fit, everything so intentionally tight. My flaws were magnified in every mirror.

  But I could overcome them. I was an actress, and I had come to Wesleyan to learn. I was pretty enough with the right makeup and thin enough with the right diet, but I wasn’t enough to run off to Hollywood and live in my car, blow-drying my hair under hand dryers in fast-food restaurants between casting calls. I needed to truly learn the craft.

  I had feigned shock when my acceptance to Wesleyan came in the mail. I wasn’t surprised, but I felt the need to pretend I was, and I didn’t understand why. It would be years before I realized that girls weren’t supposed to own their ambition, just lease it from time to time when it didn’t offend anyone else.

  I was confident that I’d act in college, until I got to Wesleyan and met Dora from one of the other Butts, who’d already performed on Broadway, and Sienna from down the hall, who had shot a TV show pilot over the summer, and realized exactly what I was up against. I had planned to get a role in one of the Theater Department’s fall plays. But fear of rejection, suddenly a white-hot certainty, made me skip the auditions. I told myself I’d try out next semester. By then, I would have studied the competition and found a way to stand out.

  I didn’t know how right I was.

  Flora wanted to be a psychologist and to work with troubled kids. She had already become a guru for the other girls on our floor, doling out tampons and boyfriend advice, leaving colorful Post-its on our doors with scribbled affirmations. You can do anything! You’re amazing!

  She paid special attention to me, wearing her syrup smile as she braided my hair, wanting to know my high school stories, maybe as an excuse to bring up hers. She talked a lot about Kevin, whom she’d met at the Fairfield country club where their dads golfed.

  “Long-distance is hard,” she told me. “But we’re both patient. We make it work.”

  “Why didn’t you apply to Dartmouth too?” I asked one day while we ate dinner at MoCon. “It’s just, you must miss him a lot.”

  What I really meant: Long-distance relationships don’t work. Or else, they only work if neither person is jealous. And Flora, as much as she claimed to trust Kevin, was jealous. There was no other way to explain the nightly calls, more frequent than bowel movements, and the ringtone itself. She didn’t want to miss a thing he was doing.

  “I didn’t get in,” Flora said. It was the first time I’d heard resentment in her voice. “I got rejected. I could have gone to the University of New Hampshire to be closer, but Kevin thought Wesleyan would be a better fit for me.”

  “He obviously wants what’s best for you.”

  “Yeah. He didn’t try to talk me into moving there.”

  I could tell she wished he would have.

  Years later, I pictured high school Flora, sprawled on her king bed in her Fairfield mansion, private school uniform adhered to her perfect body, pamphlets for colleges spread out in front of her like a fan. The world, literally at her fingertips. She looked at the Wesleyan brochure and cast it aside. I considered how her life would look today if she had.

  * * *

  I formally met Lauren’s insane roommate, the other girl living next door, during an icebreaker at the start of the semester. She was in two of my classes, Acting I and Introduction to Playwriting. She probably had the same acting dreams as I did, and she was a girl I could absolutely never compete with—a graduate of the Spence School in New York City who had dabbled in modeling and spent part of her childhood in France.

  Her name was Sloane Sullivan, but she told everyone to call her Sully. Her parents had obviously taken one look at their wailing pink bundle and known she would grow into a certain kind of girl. I had been saddled with ten syllables in total, Ambrosia Francesca Wellington. It didn’t even have the decency to abbreviate well, so I was Amb, a pathetic amputation that most people assumed stood for Amber. I rarely corrected them.

  Sully had her pick of friends. She could have been one of the preppy Butterfield bitches as easily as a WestCo hipster, because something about her defied categorization. She skulked down the Butts hallways in fishnets and Docs one day, wore sweatpants and a men’s button-down to class the next, smoked joints with flagrant disregard, and was never not surrounded by people, girls and boys trailing her like a cape.

  She had no reason to talk to me, because her charisma had already pulled in enough followers. But her boredom and my need for attention intersected at a party at Nicolson Hall, known as the Nics, a couple weeks into the semester.

  “This party sucks,” she said, migrating over to where I stood with Lauren and Flora, who had actually taken a night off from Kevin to join us. “I get bored easily. I think we should liven things up.”

  “Oh god.” Lauren shook her head. “Please don’t.”

  “I wasn’t talking to you,” Sully said. “I was talking to Ambrosia from Pennington. And you guys.” She pulled Gemma and Clara over. “See that guy over there? The one wearing those god-awful khakis? That’s Long-Distance Dave. He’s the most pretentious asshole in this room, and that’s saying something.”

  “You mean Dave Holman,” Clara said. “He’s in my stats class.”

  “He won’t shut up about his girlfriend at UCLA,” Sully said. “It’s annoying. Let’s do something about it.”

  Nobody took her bait. Except me, because I was hungry to set myself apart. Besides, I did know Long-Distance Dave. He lived in Butts A and whined constantly about Leslie. The way he said her name, so cotton soft, made my blood curdle.

  “He’s a dick,” I said. “What do you want to do?”

  Sully fixed her gaze on me. It was like being anointed. The other girls were silent, waiting for Sully to give me her orders. But it was like they no longer existed, and I did.

  The music got louder. Sully leaned in and her mouth buzzed against my ear. “I want you to get him to cheat. Tonight. Prove that he’s the same animal as the rest of them.”

  I don’t know why she didn’t just do it herself. If anyone was capable, it was Sully. I was keenly aware that my reaction would somehow define the rest of my semester, but I didn’t realize just how much.

  It didn’t feel like a decision at all.

  “Fine,” I said.

  Her fingers brushed my cheek. “Showtime,” she whispered, almost too soft to hear.

  “Amb,” Flora said. “I’m heading back in a few. Do you want to come with me?”

  I knew she was trying to give me an out, but I didn’t want it. “I’m going to stay,” I said.

  I caught the judgmental flicker, the pinch between her eyebrows. Somehow, her disapproval emboldened me.

  When she was gone, I knocked back a shot
of tequila and advanced on Long-Distance Dave. Sully and the other girls watched. It was a performance, same as being onstage at Central, except with a much more critical audience. I knew that flashy displays of skin would be lost on Dave. The slaughter had to be more subtle. My tears, when they came, looked real.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, concern in his chocolate-brown eyes. “You look so upset.”

  “It’s my boyfriend,” I said, burying my face in my hands. “He just told me he can’t do long-distance anymore. He said we never should have tried.”

  Dave’s hand was reassuring on my back. He offered me a tissue. I leaned into his salmon-pink shirt instead and felt him stiffen against my closeness. “That sucks, Amb. But you’re better off without him. He doesn’t respect you.”

  “The fucked-up thing is, he was always trying to convince me I was doing things wrong. Like, every guy I talked to, he asked me about. He was paranoid.” I stretched the word into something grotesque. The same way I knew, from snatches of Dave’s conversations, that Leslie did. Leslie, who in my head became pink-lipped Jessica French.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. An apology on behalf of all men that meant nothing.

  I dug in. “Do you have any idea what that’s like? When somebody doesn’t want to believe you, even when you’re not doing anything wrong?”

  “Yeah, sometimes I do,” was what he offered up, and it was enough.

  It took another half hour and one more cascade of fake tears for Dave to ask if I wanted to go somewhere quiet to talk. We ended up back in his room, which smelled like Axe body spray. He wrapped a blanket around my shoulders. I shrugged it off.

  I don’t know how long I sat there before Dave started hinting about Leslie’s flaws. I don’t know what time it was when both of our heads hit his pillow, exhausted from our heart-to-heart, but not too tired for me to tuck myself under his chin. And not too tired for his dick to be hard in his jeans. He moaned when I touched it through the fabric, his lips finding mine in the dark. Even though I wasn’t the least bit attracted to Dave, with his bad skin and weak chin, I was strangely turned on by the time I climbed on top of him, bulletproof with power.