The Girls Are All So Nice Here Read online

  Dave came in his pants, which was both a disappointment and a relief. I slipped out as he snored beside me, sneaking through serpentine hallways until I was back in Butts C, splashing water on my face in the bathroom. Sully was barefoot in the hall when I emerged, wearing shorts and a hoodie, probably fresh from leaving a different boy.

  “Showtime,” I said, returning the wink from that first party, the one I was suddenly sure was meant for me. I couldn’t stop smiling as I entered my room, with its neon-green Post-it gleaming on the door—You can do anything!

  Fucking right, I thought. I had never felt more alive.

  NOW

  To: “Ambrosia Wellington” [email protected]

  From: “Wesleyan Alumni Committee” [email protected]

  Subject: Class of 2007 Reunion

  Dear Ambrosia Wellington,

  The ultimate blast from your past is just around the corner! Don’t forget to bring a camera, scrapbooks, photo albums, yearbooks, and Wesleyan memorabilia to reflect on the old memories—and make new ones. And remember your red-and-black best for your class dinner!

  Sincerely,

  Your Alumni Committee

  Her name is on every reminder email, nestled underneath the Alumni Committee, bold in a way she never was. Flora Banning, forever a joiner, protestor of non-vegan cafeteria food and organizer of movie nights. I’ll inevitably have to see her face when Adrian and I arrive on campus, her white smile and complete lack of wrinkles—her moisturizing rituals were a masterwork of skin-care dedication. Of all the people I’m going to see, I’m the most terrified of her.

  But that’s only because someone else—someone who suspects the very worst about me—won’t be at the reunion.

  I google Detective Tom Felty—now Captain Felty—on my work computer while I finish the leftovers of an overpriced salad I got for lunch. I look him up periodically because it makes me feel safer to know he’s in Middletown, far away from me. His blue eyes spear me through the screen, as if he knows where I am. I still hear his barrage of questions in the police station. Did you notice? Were you aware? He wanted me to self-immolate. I never did.

  I’m too wired to go right home, so I head to the gym in our building after work, sneaking in the back entrance, where old Mrs. Lowe always wedges the door open with a piece of wood to carry her groceries inside. I don’t want to risk running into Adrian in the lobby. When he and I signed our lease, we thought we’d work out every night instead of sinking into the couch and turning on the TV.

  I put in effort when we started dating. I’d shave my legs and hack away at any hint of pubic hair that strayed from the anemic landing strip I maintained like my personal secret garden, and we met up to jog in Astoria Park every weekend. We moved in together quickly, and that was when things deteriorated. When Adrian started leaving the door ajar when he took a shit and gained a bit of weight, a soft paunch over the front of his jeans. “Dad bod,” he joked, except there were no kids, and he wanted there to be.

  And I stopped trying so hard, too. Adrian didn’t care if I didn’t put makeup on. He didn’t notice when I did. For once in my life, something was easy. But it wasn’t natural. I didn’t know who I was when I wasn’t trying to be someone else.

  I step onto the treadmill, stretching out my arms. Adrian once offered to get us a treadmill of our own. “Then you can run and I can write,” he said. When I asked where it would go, he wasn’t able to answer. Our apartment is seven hundred square feet, with just an arched doorway separating the kitchen from everything else, our bedroom attached like a tiny tumor. Twenty-three hundred dollars a month to have no space of my own, to brush my teeth over a pedestal sink furred with my husband’s beard hair.

  I start running, jerking up the incline to burn more calories. The TV mounted on the wall across from me plays a local news channel, the latest crime stories. It makes me think of the footage from Dorm Doom, all of us girls huddled outside Butterfield C, straw-pale legs quaking in the grass, a young cop telling us to stay back from the fluttering yellow tape. I had no idea I’d soon be facing Felty’s artillery fire of questioning. It was my role of a lifetime.

  My feet pound and I increase the speed to seven, heat radiating from inside my body. For the hundredth time, I fantasize about bailing on the reunion. Hadley and Heather won’t stop asking me what I’m wearing to the dinner, and they’re already making plans for us to have photos taken outside the wood-frame house on Fountain Avenue that we shared senior year. And then there’s the note, already fused to my brain. We need to talk.

  Why now? Why the reunion? Why hasn’t she tried to contact me once, and why wasn’t she around the times I tried to find her? No Facebook, no Instagram, no social media presence at all.

  My sweaty finger increases my speed to eight. Her words chase me. We need to talk about what we did that night. They morph into other things she should be saying. We need to talk about what we became that night.

  I have no idea what she’s like now. But then again, I never really did. She was barely more than a stranger the entire time. A friendship that lasted just a few months, one that was built on the idea of us more than the reality. But my skin is still raw where she grafted herself to me, and I can so easily conjure an alternate dimension where we’re those girls, the inseparable ones.

  Sometimes I let myself live in that alternate dimension, just for a minute, the two of us in Hollywood, reading scripts, sun-streaked and starry-eyed. And sometimes I like it better than this one.

  * * *

  Despite my constant pleas for Adrian to lock up, the apartment door is open. Adrian is on the couch in his sweatpants when I return. Our faux-suede couch from the Furniture Market, the first piece of furniture that was ours. The day we bought it, I didn’t care that it was cheap, because we were happy.

  I take in the detritus around me—a pizza box and beer bottles on the counter; white-handled Wüsthof knives cast carelessly into the sink; socks and papers strewn on the floor. “Didn’t you have the day off? You could have cleaned up.”

  I expect his typical refrain of Chill, babe, which I hate, because whenever I get like this—uptight and irritable—it’s a reaction to his being the opposite. But he doesn’t tell me to chill. Instead, he turns around and holds up a photo. “Who’s this, Amb?”

  I squint at the image he’s waving around and tighten my ponytail with trembling hands. “Where did you get this?” I march over, plucking the photo from his fingers.

  “I was looking for that screenwriting book you bought me last Christmas. The one about saving a cat. Some book was on top of it and I picked them both up, and this fell out.”

  He’s lying. He was snooping, but I can’t exactly call him out. I chew on my bottom lip.

  “John Donne.” I force myself to laugh.

  “Who’s John Donne? An ex?”

  “He’s one of the most prominent metaphysical poets,” I say. “The book is full of his poetry.”

  “Oh,” Adrian says. “But you know I’m asking about the guy in the picture. Why do you have it?”

  “He was just a guy. Someone from a long time ago.”

  “A boyfriend, then,” Adrian says, almost jealous, which would be a welcome respite from his perpetual state of man-child chill if not for the deadly quagmire he has wandered into. “From college?”

  “Not exactly,” I say quickly. He narrows his eyes. “I mean, I guess so. The book was from a class we had together.”

  “Will he be at the reunion?” Adrian puts his beer on the coffee table. “This isn’t a big deal. We’re married. You think I care that you had boyfriends before me? I had girlfriends before you.”

  Which he told me about in detail. The crazy one who tried moving her stuff into his dresser drawers after dating for a week. The one who was obsessed with meeting celebrities. The one who still slept with a stuffed rabbit, which remained on the bed during sex. The one who only ever wanted to watch Leonardo DiCaprio movies. It was like he wanted me to know it was always
their fault, never his, and see how normal he was? See how lucky I was that he got out of that thicket of girls unscathed?

  “We were together,” I say. I need to hear how it sounds out loud, my sick little fiction. “He won’t be there, though. He’s actually—well, he’s dead.”

  “Oh, fuck.” Adrian claps a hand over his mouth. “What happened to him?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t want to talk about it right now.”

  He nods. “I mean, sucks that the guy is dead, but you freaked me out with this photo. I thought there was some meaning behind it. Especially since I found this tucked in the same book.” He pulls out the envelope, my name in her calligraphy.

  “Did you open it?”

  “I’m sorry. I was curious. But what did you do that night? What night?”

  I shouldn’t get angry. Adrian thinks he has seen me angry, but he has only seen the diluted version.

  “It’s just an inside joke,” I say. “Something one of my friends gave me.”

  He studies me for a beat too long, then picks up his beer. “Was it serious? You and him?”

  The photo cartwheels between my fingers, corners poking into my palm. I don’t look at him and I can’t bring myself to look at Adrian. “Serious enough. But I moved on. I forgot I even still had that book. I haven’t looked at it in years.”

  Adrian’s eyes crinkle up. “I bet you were such an adorable poetry nerd. I hope you didn’t get made fun of. Even if you did, wait till we show up. All the mean girls are gonna be jealous.”

  Oh, sweetie. We were the mean girls.

  I take a sip of his beer. He pictures me trudging across a leaf-starred campus, backpack turtled on my back, always studious, never late for class. He has no idea.

  I can’t change what we did. What I did. I turned into a monster, but the world knows exactly how to make monsters out of girls who want what they can’t have.

  The boy in the picture—he won’t be at the reunion. I made sure of that. Just like I made sure that his girlfriend won’t show up, and that I’ll never see either of them again.

  THEN

  Long-Distance Dave was my gateway drug. I was certain that my boldness with him would link me to Sully, imbue me with a mystique that she would recognize as the counterpoint to her own. But for days, nothing changed. A few times in class, she would hold my gaze, but she didn’t talk to me again until a party at Beta that weekend.

  I wanted male attention, so I drank a lot, wore very little, and danced, letting my hands rove across my body. Lily from Butts C was with me, having been ditched by her own friends, her pale cheeks rosy from vodka consumption. I sensed people watching us and hiked up my skirt even higher. Then a voice that didn’t belong to Lily entered my ear and a cold set of hands clamped down on my collarbones.

  “You don’t have to do it, you know,” Sully said.

  “Do what?” I tried to turn around, but she held me in place, her fingers pinching my skin.

  “Bleed for their entertainment.”

  This time, she spun me into her. “You think they like you. Or want to be with you. But they’re just looking for something to keep them entertained.”

  “The boys, you mean.” They surrounded us, in packs, former sports kings with predatory eyes.

  Sully barked out a laugh. “No, not them. The girls, you idiot.” She said idiot softly. “They pretend they’re so edgy and up for anything, but it’s all a performance. Or even worse, they act sweet, then talk behind your back. Kind of like your roommate.”

  Flora, with her Post-its. The one on our door today had said, Kindness costs nothing. She had been quieter than usual since the night of Long-Distance Dave. I knew she was judging me.

  “Fuck them,” I said.

  Sully pressed her thumb into my chin and didn’t break eye contact. “You’re not nice, are you?”

  I didn’t know if it was a question or a statement, but I had the same answer. “No.”

  “Good. I hate nice girls.”

  We hovered like that, me trying to capture the source of her magnetism like trapping a butterfly between my hands. Her pupils were massive—she was obviously high—her lips red, hair swishing. But all of that could have been imitated by other girls, even by me—and in the coming weeks, I would do my best. What made Sully impossible to say no to wasn’t about how she looked. It was how she made you look at yourself. Her kamikaze attitude, the life it pulsed into everyone around her. You didn’t know what she was going to do, or what you would do when you were with her.

  “I know what you need,” she said, sweeping her hand across my collarbone. “You need to get fucked.”

  I nodded. She didn’t know—nobody here knew—that Matt was the only boy I’d ever slept with. The idea of sex with someone new was simultaneously exciting and terrifying. It could be the emotional bloodletting I needed, a ritual necessary to purge the memory of Matt’s betrayal.

  “Yeah. I was just thinking that.” I wouldn’t shrivel under her stare. Maintaining Sully’s attention would require constant upkeep.

  “I have just the guy,” she said, pointing with a long finger. “Him. With the Stones T-shirt. He needs to get laid too. Go forth and conquer.”

  It wasn’t an order—it was more like a challenge. I took it.

  “He” was Murray, a stoner with tufty blond facial hair, Wesleyan’s low-hanging fruit. Two drinks later, we were back in his room, kissing, which would quickly lead to more. I was suddenly overwhelmed by the idea of allowing a stranger inside me. He hasn’t taken me on a date, I thought frantically. He doesn’t even know anything about me. They were supposed to know us—it was the price of admission. But Sully was right. I was done being anybody’s entertainment.

  “I don’t do this kind of thing often,” I said, trying not to shake as his fingers pushed into me. It was a line I hoped was the perfect mix of adventurous and apologetic. I understood that I had to somehow be both.

  “Yeah,” he snorted. “I can tell.” I couldn’t tell what I had already done wrong.

  I would have gone through with it, the sex, but Murray’s dick had other plans. He blamed the cocaine. Just like with Dave, I felt a gush of relief. I had never attached any particularly special meaning to sex, but I knew that having it at Wesleyan would assign some kind of meaning to me. It was a line in the sand, what I would or wouldn’t do. Maybe it meant something that my first two attempts at a conquest ended in apologies. But I wasn’t in the mood to look for signs from the universe. The embers of my post-Matt humiliation still burned hot.

  “How was it?” Sully asked me the next morning in class.

  “He couldn’t get it up,” I said, a hangover assaulting my skull. At first, she just stared, and I immediately regretted my admission. Then she cupped a laugh in her hand and slid her coffee cup my way.

  “Same thing as when I tried fucking him. He actually tried to put it in me soft. At least he’s good with his tongue, right?”

  I nodded, unsure if it was some kind of test, and even less sure if I had passed or failed.

  I wasn’t a person who gave up. I decided that sex without emotion was exactly what I needed. And a week after Murray, I finally found it with Drew Tennant, a guitarist I flirted with after watching his band perform at Eclectic. Sex with Drew was a lot like sex with Matt—sweaty and perfunctory, a crescendo of grunts and tangled sheets. I still brought him back to our room another day when Flora was in class, pretended to come when he did, as if it were that easy.

  Pathetically, what I liked best about Drew was the moment after sex when he lay with his arm around me, spent from his efforts. The heat of his skin against mine was satisfying in a way that sex with him never was. You need to leave, I willed myself to say, but he beat me to it. “Gotta go,” he said, buttoning his jeans over the rich brown expanse of his ab muscles. “Study time.”

  I never even found out what he was studying. The last time we hooked up, I stood on my tiptoes and kissed him at the door, and when he pulled away, he looked at me like h
e had no idea who I was.

  Sully kept inviting me to parties, where I would only ever see her briefly, across a crowded room, long hair swishing like a pennant, her vanguard of followers constantly regenerating. She was always doing something in excess—drinking, dancing, drugs, her lips on someone new—and that’s why everyone luxuriated in her. She did what they wanted to but wouldn’t. Whenever her eyes flicked to me—and they did, without fail—I knew I was still being tested somehow.

  Flora existed in her own quarantine, separate from Sully’s gravitational pull. “Sloane goes out every night. I wonder how she gets any work done,” she said one evening, obviously waiting for me to fill the silence with my own judgment. I shrugged. Flora was trying to pull me in her direction—the note on our door that morning had said, Be yourself! Everyone else is taken!

  The gap was closing. I wasn’t a city girl or an old-money golf-club princess, but I also wasn’t a suburban nobody like Ella Walden, with her too-tight jeans and frosted makeup and braying laugh. I fit in with the cool girls. Until the last Monday in September, when I found out that Lauren had a power I didn’t. A social pull so gossamer-fine I didn’t know it was there until my strand had been snipped.

  “I meant to ask, are you going to Lauren’s thing this weekend?” Flora said, folding her shirts into perfect pastel squares. “It was nice of her to invite everyone, but I have a huge paper due. Too bad, because I love the Hamptons.”

  My chest was a sinkhole. I struggled to breathe.

  “I don’t know,” I choked out. “I’m not sure what I’m doing yet.” I wasn’t going to tell Flora that Lauren had excluded me on purpose, for reasons I didn’t fully understand. We’d sit together at lunch every once in a while, occasionally swapping party stories. I had just seen her the day before, and she hadn’t mentioned the Hamptons.