***
The club is hot and loud and crowded, the wallpaper vaguely baroque; they get their drinks and settle in, Junie drifting off to say hello to some girls she knows who sell expensive condos on the Hollywood Channel while Kit and Olivia pose for selfies in front of a neon sign that saysFOR SHAME. “This is good,” Lilly announces, downing her champagne perhaps more quickly than necessary. Isobel is here, perched on a balcony up in the VIP area,her shoulders bare and sharp-looking. “I’m glad we did this.” Mari nibbles her hair in reply.
Lilly waves to Isobel, who smiles tightly before turning her attention elsewhere. She pulls out her phone and pretends to send a text. The truth is now that they’re here the whole errand feels deeply and abruptly ridiculous: the dresses and the crowd and the angling to be photographed, the bottle service they certainly cannot afford. Probably she should have suggested a movie night instead.
Finally she peels off to go to the bathroom, slipping neatly past two girls doing lines off the backs of their manicured hands and shutting herself safely inside a stall. She’s just about to flush when she hears the door swing open, a cloud of Dior wafting in. “—the most pathetic,” a woman’s voice is saying. “Did you see that, like, all five Benedetto sisters are floating around out there?”
“Oh my god, yes,” a second voice agrees, this one vaguely familiar. “In Forever 21’s most glamorous evening wear.”
The first one snorts. “There goes the neighborhood, et cetera.”
“It’s fine,” a third voice says—Isobel’s, Lilly realizes suddenly, high and musical and the slightest bit French for no discernable reason. “I mean, you know it’s only a matter of time before one of them does something to get kicked out and banned for life. Just make sure you don’t wind up in any photos together for them to splash on every conceivable social media site as supposed proof of how people still tolerate them and you’ll be good.”
Lilly frowns, sitting down fully dressed on the toilet and trying to ignore the familiar drop in her chest. It’s not so much that her feelings are hurt. Sure, they are, a little, but she’s heard plenty of way meaner stuff before, both in the bathroom at Saint Ann’s before homeroom and in the opening monologue of the GoldenGlobe Awards. It’s not a big deal. It’s just that it gets tiring sometimes, being a national punch line. It’s just that there was a time when she thought Isobel was her friend.
For a moment she thinks about bursting out of the stall like the Kool-Aid Man and embarrassing them, granting herself the small pleasure of watching their contoured faces go white, but in the end it feels like a lot of work for nothing. It’s her own fault, probably: it was silly of her to come out to begin with, to think this would solve June’s broken heart or her own restless boredom, the feeling that she forgot to do something important and now it’s too late.
All at once Lilly is exhausted—the noise and the warm crush of bodies, the thump of the bass in her spine. She thinks she might beg off, get an Uber and spend the rest of the night at home, but when she goes to let her sisters know she’s leaving, she can’t find them. They’re not at the bar or camped on the low cluster of couches or behind the rope in the cordoned-off VIP area—which, not for nothing, she doesn’t think they’d actually be allowed into anymore. They’re not fighting a minor pop star and her entourage in the alley outside the club.
Where are you???she texts the group chat, a strange flush of panic buzzing through her. For one truly unhinged moment, she feels like she might be about to cry.Did you leave???
Finally she spots them in the center of the dance floor: all four of them clustered together, luminous in the strobing lights. They look like a frolic of fairies, a tangle of sequins and limbs.
“There she is!” June hollers as Lilly approaches, unsteady with relief at the sight of them. “Come dance!”
Lilly shakes her head, jerking a thumb toward the exit. “I think I’m actually going to—”
“No way!” Kit interrupts, grabbing Lilly by both hands and pulling her into the circle. “Stay with us.”
So: Lilly stays.
They dance for a long time, sweaty and breathless: their arms wrapped around each other, their hair in each other’s mouths. For a while Lilly forgets how little she has to show for herself, after everything. For a while she just feels... glad.
“Hey,” someone says, pointing his finger in their direction; when she turns to look it’s an actor she recognizes vaguely from a handful of Christmas movies on Netflix, handsome and affable and drunk. “Aren’t you—?”
“Sisters?” Lilly supplies, gathering them tight around her as she bares her teeth in a smile. “How’d you guess?”
***
Their uncle Lou and aunt Veronica come from New York for Christmas, descending on Pemberly Grove with a panettone fresh out of a Bay Ridge bakery and a dozen brown paper shopping bags from Bloomingdale’s. Lou and Dominic grew up together back in Newark; Lou was a silent partner in the Meatball King back in the early aughts, but instead of spending the returns maintaining the lifestyle to which his daughters had quickly become accustomed, Lou quietly invested his portion in some tech startups out of Silicon Valley, and now neither he nor Veronica have to work ever again. Instead the two of them spend most of the year traveling in Europe and South America, splitting their time at home between a Craftsman in Carmel and a tony apartment in Brooklyn Heights.
It’s a cozy, boozy holiday, Veronica dragging them all to the seafood market so she can make the Seven Fishes and everyonestaying up late to watchThe Godfather, a Benedetto family tradition. They get dressed up and go to the Festival of Carols, drink champagne from juice glasses around the pool on Christmas morning. Olivia posts a photo of herself in a red and white bikini and a Santa hat on Instagram, and it gets four hundred thousand likes. It’s the first Christmas Lilly’s felt like herself in a long time, and if there’s a tiny part of her that can’t help but wonder if it’s the last one they’ll spend in this house, well, she does her damnedest to put the idea out of her mind.
She pulls June into the pantry beside a couple of forgotten meal kits, which have begun to emit an odor all of them have tacitly decided to ignore: “How you doing?” she asks, plucking a bag of red and green M&M’s off the shelf and holding it out in June’s direction. June’s been shining it on, bingeing Hallmark movies and making pizzelles with the rest of them, though Lilly can’t help but notice that she hasn’t actually eaten any of them.
Now she waves off both the candy and the question. “I’m fine,” June insists, and her smile is almost convincing. “I promise. Honestly, we were barely even dating. If I were Taylor Swift I probably wouldn’t even bother writing a song.”
“Okay.” Lilly takes a breath, and then she says it. “Junie,” she begins quietly, “you’re getting a tiny bit thin.”
Right away June’s shoulders straighten, her eyes flashing wary and hot. “I said I was fine, Lilly.”
“June—”
“I’m the big sister, all right?” she asks, brushing past Lilly and out into the kitchen. “I know neither one of us acts like it, but it’s true.”
Lilly isn’t buying it, and apparently neither is Veronica: “Whydon’t you come back East with us after New Year’s, Junebug?” she suggests later that evening. They’re drinking Manhattans around the fireplace, which keeps flickering out intermittently and filling the room with the unmistakable smell of a gas leak. “Do some shopping, see some theater.”
“Eat at a restaurant that doesn’t have microgreens on the menu,” Lou puts in, patting his gut.
