“That’s not like you,” Mom said lightly. “You like to know...”
“Everything?” I supplied.
Dad laughed. “At least you know yourself. We did one thing right.”
“Give yourself some credit. You did atleasttwo things right,” I teased.
When I hung up, I let out a huge sigh. Whoever said telling people about a betrayal meant there would be no going back was right. This felt permanent, and there was something about permanence that was both comforting and sad.
I straightened in bed, wincing against the snarl of pain in my knee. The angle of the anchor stool had rendered my joint stiff. Typically, I felt no soreness when holding still, but everything else regularly ignited it. Bending, straightening, rolling over in my sleep. Walking. Running. I plucked the clear flimsy bag from the ice bucket, then palmed a loose baby aspirin from my purse and dry-swallowed it.
“Nice,” I commented to my reflection in the mirror. Abathrobe and wet hair was a vulnerable look, but the ice machine was only two doors down. Bag and key in hand, I pulled open the heavy hotel door.
In the hallway, Natalie smirked beneath sconce light. Her eyeliner was impeccable, her lips nude, her beautiful hair untamed. “I leave you for one week, and this is what I get?” she said, and then her face changed when she saw mine.
I burst into tears and folded myself into my best friend.
Nine
If there was one thing I would always thank the universe for, it was Natalie Kim. She was the vivacious and affably flighty antidote to my groundedness. Where Nat loved real spontaneity, I enjoyed planned, curated adventure. Natalie arrived at NYU with gobs of money, and I trailed in with the tips I’d earned the last few summers. She introduced me to Korean barbecue, and I didn’t take offense when she spit out the clam chowder I brought back from Legal Sea Foods.
For most of our first semester, we were polite roommates. Natalie left wet towels on the floor but encouraged me to borrow her high-end clothing, a net win. She partied with other legacy kids (“every night but Mondays!”) and managed decent-to-great grades.
I, on the other hand, reserved my nights out for weekends. To keep up the strength in the muscles supporting my rehabbing knee and mitigate any desire for late nights, I ran on either Saturday or Sunday. Unlike her massive closet, I favored the capsule wardrobe game; my department store basics were fine for New York layers. When I called home one weekend in October, Mom said it sounded like we had a perfectly fine living situation.
But I craved someone to fill the gap Caleb had so recently left behind. Someone to whisper secrets with in the dark, to bear the parts of me that weren’t sad-family-origined.
Then, just before Thanksgiving, Natalie was in and out ofbed all night with a UTI, her face pinched and wan. When I offered to pick up her antibiotics, she’d burst into tears and told me her period was late, so I added a store-brand pregnancy test to the bag of Bactrim at Duane Reade. I’d spent a full minute debating if I should’ve selected the name-brand pink box, calculating what I had left for the term in my checking account. Utility won, as it always did with me. Paying twice as much for a plastic stick one peed on wasn’t a great investment. Nor would it change the outcome.Practical, Natalie had muttered.
Back then, I didn’t think of myself as practical so much as analytical. I assessed the situation and filled the role. I had tagged after Sabrina with puppylike adoration; I wore silly wigs and told jokes and conversationally tap-danced around my grieving parents; I explored and ran and shouted with quiet, curious Caleb.
In a tiny voice, Natalie had asked me to take the test for her, using a red Solo cup of pee.
That was how me—new-to-New-York Olivia Adler, with a Chemistry of Life test to study for, with a dead text exchange with Caleb, with a knee that throbbed and a sister who haunted me, dipped a pregnancy test stick in a cup of pee for the first time. I’d maybe never been more nervous in my life. Tension had ripped through my fingers as I flipped it over. One line.
“It’s negative,” I’d yelled, and Natalie threw her arms around my neck, and we jumped up and down screaming, then went out for karaoke, despite Natalie’s UTI.
By the time winter break rolled around, we were equal in one thing: our loyalty to one another. Now, over a decade had gone by, through more and more negative pregnancy tests, through romances and family troubles and finally, Wells, here was Natalie, there when I needed her.
Natalie emerged from the shower smelling of her signature lotion. She had once told me it was scented with cherry bark and bergamot, and I had no reason not to believe her, though it wasn’t like I could identify bergamot out of a lineup.
“Tell me about the bachelorette,” I said after I’d recounted everything Wells and Soulmail.
“It was Palm Springs.” Natalie put down her fork. She had ordered a shaved-vegetable pasta dish, a bottle of Sancerre, and a crisp baguette with butter. “If you’ve been to one there, you’ve been to them all.” Comfortingly dismissive as usual. When I mulled over wedding details, she had reminded me more than once that if people really cared about how napkins were folded, then they weren’t worth being around. But she also had this magnetic aura of chaos. Natalie regularly climbed from the sort of massive credit card debt that would gift me with a permanent furrowed brow. She slept peacefully and yet could pull all-nighters with finesse; she dated multiple people at once or none at all, and neither had much impact on the barometer of her happiness.
“I haven’t been to one there.”
“Oh, right. You missed Jay’s for Wells’s cousin’s wedding.” Natalie made a face. “What a weasel. I still can’t believe you didn’t tell me earlier.”
“I wanted to, but everything just happened so fast.”
“My newly illustrious bestie.” She finger-combed my hair, then began to braid it. “You haven’t been single in an eon.” The stud earrings she’d scored from a boutique near Battery Park were jammed into her lobes.
My stomach flipped at the wordsingle, stricken with a loaded realization. It was possible Natalie and I were soulmates. It would be perfect. Poetic. I couldn’t bear the amount of hope coursing through me.
“That’s true. But now... Natalie, have you opened yours?”
She gently tugged a section of my braid. “Yeah,” she said. “Do you really think they’re real? I saw your video of the makeup artist and the driver, along the rest of the internet.” She paused. “That was... honestly, pretty intense.”
