Rich and Pretty(39)

“She did.”

Lauren laughs. “Of course she did.”

“A girls’ weekend, she just kept saying that, over and over again, finally I was like—Mom, you’re not one of the girls,” says Sarah. “I felt bad, but can you imagine if she’d tagged along?”

Lauren can, actually.

“Well, I’m glad you’re not hating this. I’m half hating it,” says Sarah. “But this is fun, just lying here like this, away from Meredith’s travails.”

“Maybe we just need to sleep? Like even though we’re not tired. Tomorrow is another day and all that jazz? We’ll get pedicures and order shrimp cocktail and eat lunch on the beach and do whatever.”

“Read a book? That’s what I feel like doing, reading a book. I feel like reading a book and thinking about nothing.”

“Or talking about nothing.” Lauren drains her glass. “That’s what you want. To sit with our feet buried in the sand because it’s cool and the sun is hot, and you want to talk but not about anything. About the weather. About what there is to talk about. About things you saw on the street. About whatever you heard on NPR.”

“That is what I want.” Sarah nods. “How did you know?”

“That’s what everyone wants,” Lauren says.





Chapter 12


Knowing it all is a condition of being twelve. So it was something (strange, noteworthy, unfamiliar, odd) that at twelve, Lauren realized that she didn’t actually know Sarah, didn’t understand her. She had thought otherwise for some time; they’d been acquainted for a whole year, after all, a long damn stretch no matter how old you are. Sarah was not quite pretty but was quite popular, by whatever alchemy determined popularity. At twelve, popularity is as powerful a force as you can imagine, and it conferred on Sarah something like authority, the province of grown-ups. Sarah spoke; people listened.

Lauren had nothing, at twelve. Her chest as flat as those of the boys who made a big show of stripping out of their shirts during their basketball games—what, it was hot! Her hair, unremarkable; makeup, forbidden—hell, pierced ears were forbidden. Plus she didn’t know any of these kids, didn’t understand the things they talked about: the Hamptons, their big sisters’ drug dealers, their mothers’ plastic surgery, their fathers’ indictment or promotion or book deal. One of her classmates came to school daily with a bodyguard; this was never remarked upon, which drove her insane. Who were these people?

Sarah was an ambassador from this strange world. Lauren could not understand Jonah, the boy whose father was running for mayor, or Kathe, the girl whose stepfather had three Oscars on his mantelpiece, or Bee, the girl whose portrait appeared in W, but she thought she could understand Sarah. Little kids arrive in this country speaking only Vietnamese and after two weeks of Sesame Street they’re telling their parents how to pay the gas bill. You can learn, and Lauren tried to, studying Sarah, listening to her, mistaking the chemistry between them for comprehension.

By seventh grade, they had worked up to regular Friday nights together; eventually, they convinced Lauren’s parents to let her take the train home alone, rather than having her mother trek into the city to fetch her, which often entailed a quiet cup of tea in the kitchen, Bella Brooks’s fingers tightening around Lulu’s white porcelain cups, garishly painted with birds. Lauren listened intently and began to understand: that Barneys was better than Bloomingdale’s; that East Hampton was better than Water Mill; that Daniel was the nice one, William the mean one, with respect to the Jones twins; that the cool cigarette to smoke was a Camel Light, if you were a girl, and a Marlboro Red, if you were a boy, and American Spirit, if you were a hippie.

One night at Sarah’s, after enough of the same had happened that Lauren could think of them as just another fact of her existence, a new development: Sarah, armed with Lulu’s credit card, took them out to dinner. A few caveats pertained—the restaurant had to be nearby, on a preapproved list, so there was the Indian on the corner or the Bangladeshi opposite, the sole difference between the two the presence of meat on the menu of the latter. There was the Chinese place, which had been called Jade Garden, then closed and reopened unchanged save the name, Forbidden City, which they found hilarious for a reason she can’t remember now.

At twelve, Lauren got comfortable. She understood how to get by in conversations, she knew that there were boys who thought she was pretty, and that was one of the more important things. Then one night, around Thanksgiving, that’s why she’s remembering it now, something about this time of year, even here, in the tropics, she found the photograph of Christopher, tucked away, largely forgotten in one of Lulu’s many photo collages, this by the guest bedroom, then occupied by William Li, the Chinese graduate student who had come to stay for three months.

“Who’s that?” Lauren’s curiosity. He was cute, whoever he was.

“Oh.” Sarah matter-of-factly sipping a soda through a straw. “That’s my brother, Christopher.”

Never, in the year plus, a mention of this brother. Lauren wasn’t even sure how to ask the question.

“He’s dead,” Sarah said, still dispassionate.

The story took a long time to learn. Lauren knew by that point that you don’t ask questions, you don’t demand details, you don’t ask for clarification: You dance around, you act, you feign understanding. This tactic worked at school and it worked, over time, with Sarah, and Lauren got to some understanding about Christopher, ghost brother, eleven years Sarah’s senior, dead when she was only seven, and in the second grade.