Genuine Fraud(9)

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On her winter break from her first year at Vassar, Imogen had rummaged in Gil Sokoloff’s file cabinet, looking for her adoption records. They weren’t hard to find. “I guess I thought reading the file would give me some insight into my identity,” she said. “Like learning names would explain why I was so miserable in college, or make me feel grounded in some way I never had. But no.”

That day, Immie and Jule had driven to Menemsha, a fishing village not far from Immie’s Vineyard house. They had walked out onto a stone pier that stretched into the sea. Gulls wheeled overhead. Water lapped at their feet. They were the same height, and as they sat on the rocks, their legs were tan in front of them, shiny with sunblock.

“Yeah, it was total poop,” said Imogen. “There was no dad listed at all.”

“What was your birth name?”

Immie blushed and pulled her hoodie up over her face for a moment. She had deep dimples and even teeth. Her pixie-cut bleached hair showed her tiny ears, one of which was triple pierced. Her eyebrows were plucked into thin lines.

“I don’t want to say,” she told Jule from inside the fabric. “I’m hiding in my hoodie now.”

“Come on. You started the story.”

“You can’t laugh if I tell you.” Immie lifted the hoodie and looked at Jule. “Forrest laughed and then I got mad. I didn’t forgive him for two days until he brought me lemon cream chocolates.” Forrest was Immie’s boyfriend. He lived with them in the Martha’s Vineyard house.

“Forrest could learn manners,” said Jule.

“He didn’t think. He just blurted out the laugh. Then he was super sorry afterward.” Immie always defended Forrest after criticizing him.

“Please tell me your birth name,” said Jule. “I will not laugh.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

Immie whispered in Jule’s ear, “Melody, and then Bacon. Melody Bacon.”

“Was there a middle name?” Jule asked.

“Nope.”

Jule did not laugh, or even smile. She put both her arms around Immie’s body. They looked out at the sea. “Do you feel like a Melody?”

“No.” Immie was thoughtful. “But I don’t feel like an Imogen, either.”

They watched a pair of seagulls that had just landed on a rock near them.

“Why did your mother die?” Jule asked eventually. “Was that in the file?”

“I guessed the basic picture before I read it, but yeah. She overdosed on meth.”

Jule took that in. She pictured her friend as a toddler in a wet diaper, crawling across dirty bedclothes while her mother lay beneath them, high and neglectful. Or dead.

“I have two marks on my upper right arm,” said Immie. “I had them when I came to live in New York. As far as I knew, I’d always had them. I never thought to ask, but the nurse at Vassar told me they were burns. Like from a cigarette.”

Jule didn’t know what to say. She wanted to fix things for baby Immie, but Patti and Gil Sokoloff had already done that, long ago.

“My parents are dead, too,” she said, finally. It was the first time she’d spoken it aloud, though Immie already knew she’d been raised by her aunt.

“I figured,” said Immie. “But I also figured you didn’t want to talk about it.”

“I don’t,” said Jule. “Not yet, anyway.” She leaned forward, separating herself from Imogen. “I don’t know what story to tell about it yet. It doesn’t…” Words failed her. She couldn’t ramble like Immie did, to figure herself out. “The story won’t take shape.”

It was true. At that time, Jule had only begun to construct the origin tale she would later rely upon, and she could not, could not tell anything else.

“All good,” said Imogen.

She reached into her backpack and pulled out a thick bar of milk chocolate. She unwrapped it halfway and broke off a piece for Jule and a piece for herself. Jule leaned back against the rock and let the chocolate melt in her mouth and the sun warm her face. Immie shooed the begging seagulls away, scolding them.

Jule felt then that she knew Imogen completely. Everything was understood between them, and it always would be.





Now, in the youth hostel, Jule put down Our Mutual Friend. There was a body in the Thames, early in the story. She didn’t like reading that—the description of a waterlogged dead body. Jule’s days were long now, since news had gotten around that Imogen Sokoloff had killed herself in that selfsame river, weighting her pockets with stones and jumping off the Westminster Bridge, leaving a suicide note in her bread box.

Jule thought about Immie every day. Every hour. She remembered the way Immie covered her face with her hands or her hoodie when she felt vulnerable. The high, bubblegum sound of her voice. Imogen rolled her rings around her fingers. She had those two cigarette burns on her upper arm and a scar on one hand from a hot pan of cream-cheese brownies. She chopped onions fast and hard with an outsize heavy knife, something she had learned to do from a cooking video. She smelled like jasmine and sometimes like coffee with cream and sugar. There was a lemony spray she put on her hair.

Imogen Sokoloff was the type of girl teachers never thought worked to her full potential. The type of girl who blew off studying and yet filled her favorite books with sticky notes. Immie refused to strive for greatness or to work toward other people’s definitions of success. She struggled to wrest herself from men who wanted to dominate her and women who wanted her exclusive attention. She refused, over and over, to give any single person her devotion, preferring instead to make a home for herself that she defined on her own terms, and of which she was master. She had accepted her parents’ money but not their control of her identity, and had taken advantage of her good fortune to reinvent herself, to find a different way of living. It was a particular kind of bravery, one that often got mistaken for selfishness or laziness. She was the type of girl you might think was nothing more than a private-school blonde, but you’d be very wrong if you went no deeper than that.