Imogen shrugs. “It’s not an insult,” she says. “It’s just not how you normally dress, that’s all.”
She’s not wrong, I guess. Back in high school I was always drawn to brighter colors: flowy purple tank tops or neon-yellow jeans, a pair of bright-red cork-heeled sandals I found while trailing her through a questionable secondhand shop outside of Star Lake. Sometime last fall, though, my entire wardrobe started to feel slightly ridiculous. I don’t know how much of that is just a function of growing up and how much of it is more pointed—a line of sartorial demarcation between the old me and the new one. I guess I hadn’t reallythought about it. “It’s faster to get ready,” I tell her, trying to sound casual. “If all my clothes match all my other clothes.”
“It’s very Steve Jobs,” Imogen teases. “Very business school.” Then, off my wide-eyed expression: “What? It’s a compliment!”
I snort. “I’m sorry, how is ‘you look like Steve Jobs’ a compliment, exactly?”
“Oh, shut up.” Imogen shakes her head. “You look good. And, speaking of compliments, can I just say that I’m really glad you decided to come on this trip?”
“Oh yeah?” I ask teasingly. “You missed me that badly, huh?”
“I mean, obviously.” She shrugs. “But even beyond that, I don’t know. I just feel like maybe it’s good, a chance for you to get out of your normal routine or whatever. It seemed like maybe there wasn’t a whole lot of room in your life for, like,whimsy, after everything that happened last year.”
I bristle at that a little bit, I can’t help it, even though I know she’s only trying to look out for me. “I mean, I don’t think it’s that there’s not room for whimsy,” I tell her. “I just kind of like things more planned and organized now, that’s all.” Then I grin. “You know, like Steve Jobs.”
It’s good to catch up in person after months of texts and Gchats, both of us talking as fast as we can: about the on-campus apartment I’m going to live in this fall with my roommate, Roisin, and a bunch of other girls we know;about her mom’s yearly cancer scan, which—thankfully—came back clean; about Sabrina Hudson, who just posted an expletive-laden Instagram update excoriating the paparazzi camped outside her DJ boyfriend’s house.
“That girl should read a book,” Imogen says with a sigh, and I shrug noncommittally. I don’t know why I feel weirdly defensive of Sabrina—after all, she’s a millionaire celebrity with every advantage in the world and, in all likelihood, nobody to blame for this ugly circus but herself. Still, I guess I know what it’s like to have outsiders speculating smugly about how you’ll next manage to embarrass yourself with your own bad behavior. I know what it’s like to have people rooting for you to fail.
“What’syourboy situation, PS?” I ask, sitting back and pulling one leg up onto the tottery love seat, wrapping my arms around my knee to ward off the damp Irish chill. Imogen broke up with Jay, her boyfriend from Star Lake, halfway through this year; back in the spring she declared a dating sabbatical, but I’m not sure if it stuck or not. “Is that what you were being cagey about before, when you were saying how much you like it here? I thought I got a distinct whiff of, like, Saint Paddy’s–type sexytimes.”
“Oh my God, stop!” Imogen exclaims, then claps a hand over her freckly alabaster face. “We’ve been dating all summer,” she admits, peeking at me from between two fingers. “His name is Seamus.”
“Oh my God, naturally.” I laugh. “What’s he like?”
He’s a mechanic, Imogen tells me; he lives with his family on the other side of the village, in a house with three elegant setters. “He feels older than us, does that make sense?” she asks, face alight with a rosy flush. “I mean, heisa little older than us, he’s twenty-two, but it’s also more than that. I don’t know.” She shrugs. “He’s serious. He makes me want to be serious, too.”
“Well, don’t get too serious,” I tease. “I like you the way you are.”
“Uh-huh.” Imogen makes a face. “Anyway, you’re definitely going to meet him while you’re here, and I have a bunch more stuff to tell you about him, but first you go,” she says. “Please tell me all the things about Handsome Ian, but also more importantly please tell me what British drugs you were smoking that made you think it was a good idea to invite—”
She breaks off as the back door creaks open and Sadie pokes her head out, then startles a bit—probably at our abrupt, wide-eyed silence. “I’m sorry,” she says, holding a half-empty wine bottle up like an offering. “I don’t want to interrupt anything. I was just looking for some fresh air.”
“You’re not interrupting anything,” I promise, scooting over to make room for her on the love seat and somehow managing not to fling myself to the floor and writhe in agony at the idea of Ian and Gabe now alone in the kitchen together, cooking dinner. “Come sit.”
“You sure?” Sadie hesitates another moment, andimmediately I feel like a bitch for not having invited her out here in the first place. Imogen must, too, because she motions Sadie closer.
“Yes! Come!” she says. “And bring that wine.”
I keep expecting it to be awkward around Sadie, but Imogen is the most gracious of hostesses, and the truth is the conversation feels easy: we cover Sadie’s terrifying org chem professor and Imogen’s fellowship portfolio and the internship I had over the summer, as a glorified errand girl at a social media startup in a high-rise at the Seaport in Boston. I got coffee and made copies, but they also let me sit in on strategy meetings and help proof presentations to investors.
“It was really cool,” I confess, thinking of the buzzing, frenetic energy in the clean white offices, the tall windows looking out over the harbor. “They offered to keep me on for the fall so that maybe I could get a few credits, but I need to see if I can make it work once classes start again.”
Sadie nods. “You’re a business major, right?”
“She is,” Imogen answers for me. “After graduation she’s going to make a trillion dollars founding all-female tech startups and selling them to Google.”
I snort. “Oh, is that what I’m going to do?”
Imogen shrugs. “Just a suggestion. I’m calling it into the universe. Power of manifesting, et cetera.”
Sadie smiles a little uncertainly, but that’s just Imogen: all crystals and smudge sticks, an altar to the Goddess setup at her mom’s house back in Star Lake. “Do you like it?” Sadie asks me. “The major, I mean.”
“I do,” I tell her truthfully. I like the math and the logic and the strategy, the orderliness of it all. “I mean, my classes are all kind of bro central, but other than that.”
“Ugh, you’re probably sitting there surrounded by every boat shoe in Boston,” Imogen says ruefully. “Is there any kind of women’s organization?”
I raise my eyebrows. “What, like a support group?”
