The Girls Are All So Nice Here Read online

  “Good,” she said, leaning her cheek against my shoulder.

  I didn’t consider how dangerous it was that our existence was founded on her well-cloaked fear. That there wasn’t anything to lose until she was afraid of losing me.

  NOW

  To: “Ambrosia Wellington” [email protected]

  From: “Wesleyan Alumni Committee” [email protected]

  Subject: Class of 2007 Reunion

  Dear Ambrosia Wellington,

  Now that you’re back, your old dorms are a great place to start the festivities. Remember the debauchery that went down? We all went a little crazy back then. Let’s see who can still party like there are no consequences!

  Sincerely,

  Your Alumni Committee

  We’re staying on the first floor at the Nics, in a two-room double, the same setup I had with Veronica in sophomore year. I text Hadley and Heather to ask which dorm they’re in, but they don’t reply.

  As soon as we’re in our room, Adrian presses me against the door. I kiss him back, but I don’t close my eyes. And that’s how I notice that the inner door leading into the second room is ajar.

  I rub Adrian’s shoulders and slip past him, nudging the door open. I see the suitcase in front of the twin bed, a black-and-white checked pattern on wheels. Someone else has been here. Someone else is staying too.

  Adrian pokes his head in after me. “Looks like we have a roommate.”

  “I thought Wesleyan didn’t assign roommates,” I murmur, but I should have seen it coming. I turn to face Adrian, my body hot and clammy at once. “I’m suddenly not feeling well. Maybe we should go.”

  Adrian fuses a kiss to the top of my head. “I think you’re just nervous. But you shouldn’t be. You look hot.” His lips trail down my neck. “We can’t go. It hasn’t even started.”

  Exactly, I want to say.

  The door to the hallway swings open with a click and there she is, exactly the same as I remember her. Sully.

  Her hair is still long and she’s teenage skinny in dark jeans and a tank top. Her eyebrows are her signature heavy slashes, lips curved in a perpetual smirk. She has the nerve to look shocked, her eyes wide, like she’s as surprised as I am that we’re in the same room. She leans against the doorframe, scuffing her ankle boots.

  “So it was you who sent it.” Hearing her speak is the most jarring part. I forgot how her voice sounded—its hypnotic pull, the spell its range cast on everyone.

  Then I actually process what she said. “No. I didn’t—” But I can’t say more, because Adrian is standing beside me, expectant, bridging the gap with his predictable handshake.

  “Sent what, babe? Hey. I’m Adrian, Amb’s husband.”

  Sully’s mouth forms a megawatt smile. “I’m Sully. Nice to meet you. And she didn’t send anything. It’s an inside joke.”

  “Wait. So you guys know each other?”

  “You could say that,” she says. “We both lived in the Butts, freshman year.”

  “Roommates?” Adrian says.

  “We should have been,” Sully answers before I can. “We did everything together.”

  “Cool,” Adrian says. “I want to hear all about it.”

  Sully flicks a glance at me, and I know what she’s thinking. You naughty girl. You haven’t told him anything.

  “You will,” she says, lilting, flirtatious, so Sully. “You have all weekend to hear about the trouble we got into.”

  Adrian starts telling one of his own stories—one I’ve already heard about his freshman-year roommate, who made money by writing essays for other people—and I stare at Sully, at the contours of her face. I’m not scared as much as unbearably sad, lamenting the reality Sully and I were supposed to share. Getting photos in our graduation gowns, moving to LA and going to auditions, being each other’s date to the Oscars. It’s not just all gone—it never happened.

  “Adrian,” I say. “I think I left my charger in the car. Do you mind getting it? The parking lot is basically right behind us.”

  “Yeah, babe. No worries. I’ll let you guys catch up a bit.” He pulls on a baseball cap and heads out, car keys jingling in his hand. I almost don’t want him to leave—I should be keeping him on a very tight leash—but it’s more dangerous in this room right now than outside of it, my past blistering between us.

  Sully pulls the door shut behind him and arches her back against it. She reaches inside her purse and fishes out a lipstick. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you wanted to get me alone.”

  She’s talking to me in the same tone she did back then. Amused, never serious, even when she should have been. Her eyes sear into me. The crazy thing is, I can feel myself being freshly drawn into the trance she creates, even though I know what she’s capable of.

  “I got this.” I grab my purse and extract the note from its envelope. “You need to come. We need to talk about what we did that night. What is there to talk about? You made your feelings about it pretty goddamn clear.”

  She turns her back and strides into her room. I watch her unzip her luggage and rifle through it, emerging with an envelope. “Explain this.” She presses it into my hands. I open the card, even though I know what it’s going to say.

  The same note, with the envelope addressed to her. Sloane Sullivan, in calligraphy. I catch a glimpse of her address—Manhattan. My heart skitters. She’s nearby—we could have passed each other on the street so many times.

  “I didn’t write this,” I say.

  “Well, neither did I.”

  We stare at each other, each seeing who will uncoil and strike first. I finally relent. “Nobody else was there.”

  She laughs, sharp and humorless. “Everyone else was there. Are you kidding me? Half of those girls saw you go into the bathroom with him. The other half thought they saw me.”

  “But it’s been so long. Who would send this now?”

  She shrugs. Her jawline is sharp, her neck thin. “I guess whoever did wanted to get us in the same room together. And needed a good reason for it.”

  I shake my head. “How did they even know we’d show up this weekend?”

  “Because they knew we’d come for each other,” she says, as if she never sloughed me off like dead skin.

  “What do they want from us?” I stare at my jeans, dizzy. Sully is right. Everyone else was there. We weren’t careful.

  Somebody knows. Somebody has known for a long time.

  “It’s pretty obvious,” Sully says. “They want the truth.”

  THEN

  My emails with Kevin continued over the weekend, details about our lives fired back and forth like a conversation. What had started as an experiment—or so I told myself—was quickly becoming addictive. Kevin was hundreds of miles away, but my interactions with him were more substantial than the ones I’d had with any boys on campus.

  I learned that Kevin had struggled with his weight as a preteen until he tried out for football, the origin of his metamorphosis. I liked picturing young Kevin, soft-shelled, unaware of the power he was coming into. He told me he had woken up early that morning to write and asked if maybe one day I would read the story he was working on.

  I know u will be honest with me. U have the best sense of humor. Whoever said girls cant be hot and funny and smart at the same time never met u ;)

  Where my confidence had been stripped to marrow in the aftermath of Matt, Kevin was gently adding layers, building me back up. I told him about the acting roles I wanted. Not America’s sweetheart, the endearingly clumsy girl who made men fall in love, but gritty, ugly parts. A shaved head, wasting away for one role, fattening up for another. A chameleon, they would call me.

  U would be great at that, he wrote. Just don’t forget me when you become this huge movie star OK? I ignored the U. He was holding up a mirror to me, but instead of pointing out my flaws, he was highlighting the good things.

  I saved the emails in a KM folder in my inbox, which I revisited daily to read our e
ntire exchange. It surprised me that what I thought must have been hundreds of messages was in reality only a handful.

  The one subject that hadn’t come up was Flora. I wanted to inject her into a message, just to see what Kevin’s reaction would be. Maybe Flora was a floodgate. Once I brought her up, we would both start throwing her flaws into the void. I would tell Kevin about her thinly veiled judgments. He would admit that being away from her was freeing.

  Two nights in a row, Kevin was on the phone with Flora and emailing me at the same time. Maybe I should have been insulted, but I was exactly the opposite. Girls compete against each other, like the sunflowers my mom tried to plant in her garden, the ones that never grew. She planted them too close together and they all vied for the same sun, choked green stems and sulking yellow faces. Flora was wilting, and I was about to be in bloom.

  When a certain question came up, my body thrummed. How are u single?

  My high school boyfriend cheated, I typed quickly. I don’t trust guys. I almost stopped myself from sending it. I didn’t want my value in his eyes to diminish—I needed the version of me that Kevin saw to actually exist.

  His response made me tear up. Hes an idiot Amb. Seriously u r so amazing and cool and if he didn’t see that he doesnt deserve u. Don’t settle for something less.

  On Monday, I told Billie about the emails but not who Kevin actually was. I called him Buddy, just like Sully called her revolving door of boys, the floppy-haired ones she hooked up with who kept coming by Butts C, waiting for her to acknowledge a connection that wasn’t there. They craved her the same way they only needed one taste of me. But I didn’t care anymore. I meant something to Kevin.

  “You need to see him in person,” Billie said. “I mean, great that you guys email, but don’t you want to meet up? I can’t believe you haven’t run into him yet.”

  “It’s a big school,” I said. It really wasn’t, but I didn’t want to say that he went to Dartmouth. Part of me wanted to tell her everything. Billie would be wary that Kevin had a girlfriend, but she would be happy I’d found someone I felt good about. But I stayed quiet, because I was afraid she would think of Kevin as just another cheating Matt.

  “Okay,” Billie said. “But one day someone won’t reply, and then what? Emails are too easy to ignore. If it were me, I’d do something to make sure he wasn’t forgetting about me.”

  Suddenly it was like I had gotten in too deep, too fast. Nothing could actually happen with Kevin. He was Flora’s boyfriend. But what I had with him felt so real, and the idea of giving it up made me sick. Maybe this was my love story, and it just wasn’t going to be easy.

  “I’ll see,” I told Billie. “Maybe you’re right.”

  That night, Kevin sent an email that seemed like a sign. He wrote: It’s crazy how much u get me. If u were here we would hang out, too bad u aren’t doing theater here. It was a turning point. I could back away, or I could finish whatever it was I had started.

  I rewrote and erased the same words several times before settling on something I liked. Something that demanded he answer. We aren’t all that far away—maybe I can visit sometime.

  I waited for his reply, but it never came. He was awake—Flora was still talking to him. I writhed with nerves and irritation. How did she have so much to say?

  I convinced myself he was crafting the perfect response. When Flora finally hung up, I knew it was only a matter of time before his message came in. The more time passed, the more certain I was that he was writing something meaningful.

  “Want to watch a movie?” Flora said, reaching for her slippers. “It’s nice that you’re staying in tonight.”

  I wanted to retaliate somehow, but it wasn’t the time to strike a blow. I fixated on her nails, shrimp pink with white dots.

  “I have a lot of work to do. Another time, though.”

  I must have refreshed my email a hundred times that night, clicking obsessively, my fingers stiff on my keyboard. I was pissed off more at myself than at Kevin—why was I so hung up on him, of all people?

  When I woke up in the morning, my laptop was between my back and the wall like a neglected lover. Adrenaline surged through my body, making me shoot up like a human exclamation mark. His message would be waiting for me.

  But nothing was there.

  By the third day, the wait was driving me insane. He was still talking to Flora; her voice was the soundtrack to my nights as I attempted to study. In a recurring fantasy that played out in my head, Flora would be stunned silent by Kevin’s sudden declaration that he wasn’t in love with her anymore.

  Sully dragged me to a party in Clara’s room, all of us drinking Stoli and smoking pot, Sully twirling around, convincing me to go with her to a different party when she got bored. No matter how much she claimed to think the lacrosse boys at Beta were terrible, she kept going back to them. Maybe she craved validation just as much as the rest of us.

  “Who are you going to hook up with tonight?” she said. “What about that Jordan guy? He said you had nice tits.”

  Jordan, who had indeed told me I had nice tits, passed out shortly after my bra came off. Another Wesleyan boy who didn’t see me.

  “I’m really tired,” I said. “Maybe I should just go home.” Suddenly I was exhausted. I had been at Wesleyan less than two months and it felt in that moment like years.

  My excuse prompted a glare. Sully wasn’t used to being told no.

  “What? You can’t leave me. We’ll only stay another hour.” Her nails dug into the skin on my arm.

  “It’s just—I don’t know, I guess I don’t want to party right now.”

  I wanted to tell her about Kevin, but I knew I couldn’t. Boys were her accessories, something she swapped out as often as her underwear. She wouldn’t understand.

  “You’re right,” she said, nodding, and I let relief momentarily flood me. “This party sucks. Let’s do something totally crazy. Have you had a threesome before?”

  I gaped at her. “No. Have you?”

  “Of course.” She dragged her thumb across my lip. “With Evie and this guy. We took a bunch of ecstasy first. It wasn’t a big deal.” She stared at the ceiling and adjusted her choker. “I told her about you, you know. I think she’s jealous.”

  It was the verbal equivalent of a whip on my skin, keeping me climbing, letting me know that the stakes would always get higher. I was sure Sully wished Evie were here instead of me.

  “I can’t tonight,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  She finally let go of my arm and pulled her hair over her shoulder. “I guess I’ll find someone else who actually wants to hang out with me.” The steel in her voice was unmistakable.

  “You know I do,” I said. “I think I’m stressed about midterms. We can do something tomorrow, okay?” I realized as I said it that I never spearheaded our plans.

  “Maybe,” she said quietly before turning away.

  I left her at Beta, slinking back to Butts C by myself. It wasn’t a fight, exactly, but I had done something wrong, smudged a line I hadn’t even fully known was there. With each step, I fought the urge to turn around.

  Flora was still awake when I got home, cross-legged on her bed in her fleece pajamas. “Amb. You’ll never believe this.” Her voice trembled.

  This was it. Kevin had dumped her and she was in denial, because Flora wasn’t capable of sadness or anger.

  “What happened?” I said, suddenly breathless, desperate to check my email.

  “Kevin wrote a short story about me.”

  It was less a punch in the gut and more a total disembowelment.

  “Apparently he’s always loved writing, but he never told anyone. So today he sends me this email explaining how his creativity is getting stifled, and he needed to not be afraid of what would happen and write what was in his heart. Isn’t that the most romantic thing you’ve ever heard? Anyway, he attaches this story he’s working on and asks if I’ll read it, since it’s about us. Well, he didn’t say that, and the girl in the st
ory is named Clarissa, but she’s me. I swear, I actually died.”

  I wish you had. I would never get so lucky. It was a terrible thought. I willed my face into the appropriate degree of interest.

  “And you know what? The story is actually really good. The way he described me? Like, the depths of his feelings are seriously infinite.”

  I wanted to wrap my hands around Flora’s dainty neck and choke the infinite out of her.

  “I can’t believe he kept this from me, that he wants to be a writer. But nobody else knows. It means a lot that he told me first.”

  It took every cell in my body not to scream in her face that he didn’t tell her first, he told me first.

  “What made him start writing?” I asked, needing to say something.

  Flora stared at her fingernails. Tiny pink hearts, painstakingly applied to each one. She had way too much patience. She even slept in manicure gloves—they sat next to her bed, in the prestige position most of us gave to our phones or boxes of condoms.

  “He said he finally asked himself what was holding him back and couldn’t come up with a good enough answer for not trying.”

  What’s holding you back? He hadn’t asked himself that question. I had asked him.

  That was when I realized Clarissa might not have been Flora at all. She was me.

  “That’s amazing,” I said. I was already putting it together. Kevin wasn’t going to send me the story first—it was too much, too soon. So he’d sent it to Flora, her softness the ideal dress rehearsal for his creation.

  “I can make us hot chocolate,” she said. “I didn’t expect you home yet. Is everything okay with you and Sloane?”

  I didn’t want vegan hot chocolate in my Friend mug or tiny hearts on my fingernails. I wanted to pick off her niceness like a scab, certain there was something bloody underneath it.

  “Yeah. We’re fine.” I sat down on my bed and reached for my laptop. I had to see what my own email held. When there were no new messages, I wanted to hurl the computer at the wall. “I’d love to read it sometime,” I said. “I’m a sucker for love stories.” I twitched with the urgency to see his words.