Graham bumped my shoulder with his fist. “I’ll never replace her friends.” He took a sip straight from the slim bottle. “You know our Hamptons friend, Kara Sullivan? She said the same thing.”
“Really?”
He nodded. “But she’s jealous ofyou.” He jabbed a thick finger in my direction. “I told her Shaila can have more than one best friend.”
I thought of Nikki, too. How we were all just orbiting aroundShaila, vying for her affection and interest. How did we determine she was the most deserving?
“You know she couldn’t live without you guys.” Graham turned and looked me in the eye. “For real.”
The thought comforted me in ways I didn’t know I needed. I wondered if Nikki had ever talked to him like this.
The conversation shifted to our families, Jared and Rachel, mostly. Then Graham took another sip and started talking about Muffy. “You should see the hellhole my mom had to claw out of to get her flat, bony ass all the way to Gold Coast. Pathetic.”
“She’s not so bad,” I said, trying to recall a time I hadn’t seen her wearing a matching sweater set.
“Only reason she got out is because she met my dad at a Buffalo Wild Wings when he was on a business trip.” Graham took another sip. “She could smell his Goldman Sachs business card, I bet. Started calling herself Muffy. Murdered Monica and all her ‘trash’ relatives, as she calls them,” he said, using air quotes. “Ridiculous.”
I let out a nervous giggle, but Graham shook his head. His tone had changed.
“Not funny, Newman,” he said, staring me dead in the eyes. “Now she walks on eggshells all the time, so scared of making one wrong move and becoming Monica again. We’re all just hanging on by a thread.”
At the time his words were whatever—weird. I chalked it up to the alcohol, mostly. Now they seem like a premonition.
What do you think?
Rachel’s texts beckon me and the little blue cursor blinks over and over.
You in?
I think about the people here, the people I thought were my home. Now Nikki and Quentin avoid me at every turn. Marla’s barely made eye contact with me, even though I know she’s curious about Graham’s innocence, too. Henry keeps flashing his puppy dog eyes at me in the hallway, even when Robert gives me the middle finger. Mom and Dad are disappointed in me, scared I won’t deliver on their investment. Jared sneers at me every time he sees me, breathing fire through his nose. Adam’s been MIA. What else do I have to lose?
I’m in.
—
Rachel’s a good driver, better than I remember or expect. Assured. Gentle. She lets the silence sit between us as bare trees whip by on the Merritt Parkway and the speedometer climbs past seventy. Snowbanks have frozen over into little mounds of ice, and we’re the only car on the road as far as I can see. Saturday, 8 a.m., in the dead of January must be an unpopular time to hightail it to western Connecticut.
“Pass me one?” she says, without taking her eyes off the road.
I reach into the greasy paper bag in my lap and pull out a mini powdered donut, still slightly warm from when I picked them up from Diane’s. Rachel’s one request. Just like old times.
She pinches one with two fingers and lets the sugar fall on her chest like snow. She makes no move to brush it off. “Ugh,” she moans with a mouthful of flour and butter. “Nothing like pow-do. ” She pops the rest into her mouth. “I miss that place.” Even though her voice sounds chipper, Rachel looks like shit. Her skin is pale and her thick wavy hair hangs in stringy ropesdown her back. Her eyes are fixated, obsessed, and her sweater is baggier than anything I can ever remember her wearing. Little moth holes prick each sleeve.
“Can I ask you something?” I say.
“You already did.” Her mouth curls up into a smile. “Shoot.”
“Why aren’t you at school?” It’s what I’ve been wanting to ask her since she invited me to her place in the city, so far from Cornell, where she was supposed to be in the middle of her junior year. “Don’t you have another year left?”
“I graduated early. Stayed there every summer. Took six classes a semester. Worked myself into the ground. It was the only thing that made me feel better... like I was normal,” she says, shaking her head. “But everyone knew. They looked at me likeIwas the one who was accused of murder. I couldn’t escape this shit there.” Rachel sighs and props one elbow up on the window, leaning her head against her palm. “You know, you’re the only person I’ve talked to in three years, besides Graham, who really knew me before, who knew what we were like. But now, everyone I work with, my new friends, my girlfriend, Frida—to them I’m just Rachel. No one knows shit.” She smiles. “It’s so freeing.”
“So, why?” I ask. “Why start all of this now?” I really want to ask,Is it worth it?
“What would you do?” she asks. “If your entire hometown assumed you, too, were guilty ofsomething,anything, just because of who your family is? If your whole life was turned upside down by the people you trusted most in this entire world? Because that’s what this is like.”
“But everyone’s going to know,” I say. “All the new people in your life. You’re going to be in thenews, probably.” The originalarticle I saw didn’t mention her, but if this was real, if Graham wasactuallyinnocent, Rachel would be front row center.
Rachel smiles again but her eyes mist over. “He’s my baby brother,” she says quietly. “Don’t you have a little brother?”
