“You have a good night,” she began to advise the dog. “But don’t take drinks from men you don’t know. And don’t stay out too late.”
The Lab blinked, wetly exhaled, and closed her eyes. Caroline took that as a dismissal.
After patting the dog’s head in farewell, Caroline wove through the crowd of much drunker people on her way to the front door, stepping around couples dancing or making out in dark corners. She found her SUV on the street outside and turned off the music to match her mood.
Graduate students mostly lived in the wooden Victorian houses that ringed the university, but Caroline’s apartment was in a high-rise a little farther away, down Commonwealth Avenue. Not a lot of the students drove to campus, but she was still not comfortable walking alone at night in the city, if she was supposed to get comfortable with that.
She parked in the underground garage and dragged her feet to the elevator. Some packages were stacked neatly on her doormat in her third-floor hallway; she’d ordered a new cake pan and the dried currants she couldn’t get at the grocery store down the block. She tried and failed to get excited about spending Saturday baking. She didn’t have anything else on her calendar for the next day. She’d hoped the party would change that.
Caroline gritted her teeth and tossed her keys in the cereal bowl on her countertop, where her keys and sunglasses went. Talking to strangers was a thing she was not good at, unlike beer pong. It was as if everyone else was speaking a different language, one she’d never learned. Her classmates stared at her as though they couldn’tunderstand what she was saying if she tried to have a conversation with them about anything more personal than Excel shortcuts, and she didn’t think her Texas accent was at fault. She had nothing to connect with them over.
She was boring, probably, compared to her classmates. Unlike them, she’d never really done anything—except get pretty good at tennis. And nobody wanted to hear about tennis. Even Caroline’s college teammates hadn’t wanted to talk with her about tennis. And what else was there to her? What else could she say?Good evening, did you know the fast-food milkshake machines are only broken because nobody wants to spend four hours cleaning out all the fermenting dairy bits from the dispenser nozzles? Hey, stop walking away! I’m fun.
Caroline hung her dress back up in the closet and changed into sleep clothes. In her favorite tangerine tank top and matching underwear, she flopped onto her bed, not bothering to turn on the overhead lights. She grabbed her laptop where it was charging on her nightstand, then clicked over to a dating website. Caroline had signed up two months ago, upon her arrival in Boston, but without any success so far. While several people in her area were very eager to send her photos of their genitalia, she had yet to field a proposal to meet anyone in person under a scenario more elaborate thanhang out at my place and see where the night takes us. She knew better thanthat, at least. Even if she didn’t already suspect that sex, like beer, was overhyped by advertising agencies, she knew that getting naked with someone was not a viable launch strategy for a friendship or a relationship.
In the six months since her grandmother’s passing, Caroline had discovered that some problems could be solved with money. She’d applied to MBA programs andnot worried about the tuition. She’d moved into an apartment that her father didn’t have a key to, and she had every confidence the doorman wouldn’t let him in if he somehow discovered the address and drove up to confront her.
She remembered the wonderful day she’d discovered that she had enough money to orderanythingover the Internet. She’d bought some good stuff. The exact beehive-shaped cake pan used by the Barefoot Contessa. Custom women’s size 10–12 socks with Irish setters printed on them. NetflixandDisney+. But her life, if anything, felt smaller than it had before. Before, she’d had tennis and her family, at least, and if the limits those two groups put on her had sometimes felt so constricting that Caroline had wanted to scream and kick and flail against them, at least they’d kept her too busy to be lonely.
Caroline grabbed her pillow to her chest and rolled over, staring at the bare walls of her apartment. The unstructured expanse of the weekend loomed ahead of her like a minefield. Every time she screwed something up, even if it was just a baba au rhum cake or the deadline to join a study group, she heard her father’s voice in her head:You can’t possibly handle this much money. This is just going to get you into trouble. I don’t know what the hell my mother was thinking.
Whathadher grandmother thought she was going to do with two million dollars? The things Caroline wanted weren’t really available for Amazon Prime delivery. It wasn’t as though she could go on Etsy to order a sophisticated boyfriend and an exciting social life to be drop-shipped to Boston by Ukrainian artisans. Her father’s insistence that she spend most waking moments of her previous two decades with a racket in her hand was amuch bigger obstacle to her goals than her lack of funds had ever been. While everyone else had figured out how to elegantly segue from the Black-Scholes model to windsurfing and dinner parties (if that was what her classmates were doing on the weekends—she didn’t actually know), she’d been mastering a backhand smash.
Tucking her fists under her chin, she decided to be rigorous about it. Perhaps she could Six Sigma her social life and transition from a person who had to sit with the dog at parties to a person with exciting plans on her calendar. So what if she’d made no inroads with her classmates? She couldn’t dwell on sunk costs. This was a strategic development problem at base, and she was enrolled in a prestigious MBA program devoted to teaching her methods of solving it. It was only a matter of applying the principles she’d studied and following the program those rules dictated: if she was keeping too much cash in reserve to meet her growth targets, the accepted solution was to make capital investments. There was no reason not to start living that big life as soon as possible.
She looked back over at her laptop, a bad idea beginning to prickle at the base of her skull.
She had enough money to buyanythingover the Internet.
Chapter Two
Adrian did his best to ignore Tom’s anxious shuffle around the kitchen when the other man arrived home before his usual hour on Saturday night. Adrian didn’t react. He didn’t ask why his roommate was home early. Privacy was only an illusion within the 750 square feet of their poorly insulated Brighton apartment, but it was an illusion Adrian strove to maintain. He could offer Tom that much, at least.
Unlike Adrian, Tom had a regular work schedule and an active romantic life, so Adrian did not comment on Tom’s comings and goings. (The latter mostly took place away from the apartment, thank God, because the walls were very thin. Adrian had unintentionallyheard thingsin college while sharing a double dorm room with Tom, and he didn’t care to review the progression of Tom’s technique during the intervening years.)
Adrian kept his gaze focused onPBS NewsHouras Tom put the evening’s leftovers away in the fridge and paced. Tom was usually a chatty guy, which Adrian might enjoy at the end of a quiet day like this one. But Tom’s silence was telling. It was a sign of more bad things to come for Adrian.
Adrian had therefore begun to worry even before Tomran a hand through his shaggy black hair and announced, “We need to talk.”
These were ominous words. Not least because Adrian had recently uttered the same ones to commence the conversation with his ex-fiancée that had left him single, unemployed, and squatting in Tom’s second bedroom. If Tom’s typically cheerful expression had turned so serious, Adrian assumed his roommate had an unpleasant piece of news to drop and did not want to discuss, say, whose turn it was to take out the trash: Adrian’s turn, always Adrian’s turn, because Tom was a slob who expended all of his cleaning energies at the high-end Greek restaurant where he was a waiter.
Adrian flicked off the television and rolled to a seated position on Tom’s couch, which had been serving as Adrian’s base of operations since his late-night eviction from his home of five years. He schooled his features into an attitude of mild interest as Tom mixed a drink, added half a jar of maraschino cherries to it, and worked himself up to whatever he had to say. Tom rolled up the sleeves of his dress shirt over furry, muscular forearms and leaned back against the peeling linoleum counter.
“So, you know you are welcome to stay here for as long as you like—” Tom began.
Adrian sighed. Of course Tom wanted him gone. Even though Tom’s apartment was cleaner than it had ever been, and Adrian made himself scarce whenever Tom had dates over, no self-respecting adult wanted his former college roommate camped out indefinitely in his second bedroom, and it had been two weeks.
Adrian had thought he would have more time though. After all, ten years ago their situations had been reversed,and Tom had been the one sleeping on the couch and pondering how he’d fucked up his life so thoroughly.
“When do you need me out?” Adrian interrupted him.
His friend’s thick, straight eyebrows jolted.
“I wasn’t going to ask you to move out,” Tom said too quickly.
“Okay,” Adrian said, nonetheless beginning to calculate how many nights he could afford at a motel before he had to prevail upon friends who owed him fewer favors than Tom.
Tom’s shoulders slumped before he consciously straightened them. He mixed a second drink for Adrian and carried it over to the sofa. He set their drinks down amid the tangle of Adrian’s printed notes and revisions and sat next to him.
