Rich and Pretty(5)

“Fuck me, it’s like a museum in here.” Lauren sits on the edge of the bed, her bed. She seems to swear more under this roof, shades of her adolescent self.

Sarah laughs. “A museum to the excellence that is me.” She’s got a pipe in her hand, glass, emblazoned with colorful daisies. “Exhibit A.”

“Exhibit A is trials, not museums.”

“Do you want to get stoned or not?”

“Where did you even find that thing?” Lauren recognizes it, vaguely, studies it with revulsion but also fondness, like a hideous sweater that once made you feel beautiful.

“The jewelry box, in the little drawer, next to earrings you shoplifted from Bloomingdale’s, I think?”

Lauren knows just which earrings Sarah is referring to. “You had pot hidden in here, too?”

Sarah hands her the glass pipe and a tiny, lime-green lighter. She shakes her head. “That, believe it or not, is from the personal collection of Mr. Henry ‘Huck’ Thomas.”

Lauren is holding her breath, feeling the smoke build in her lungs and then it’s in her nose, as if by magic, and her mouth. She opens it, and it escapes—mere wisps. She’d imagined more. “You’re f*cking kidding me,” she says with a cough.

“I’m f*cking not, my dear.” Sarah has taken off her shoes, folds her feet up under her body so she’s in a sitting position but still looks very attentive. “Arthritis. Doctor’s orders.”

“Oh?” Lauren is coughing more. It’s been a long time since she got high.

“Too much hand shaking maybe?” Sarah smiles. “Poor Papa. A decade plus on I’m still dipping into his stash.”

“Kents, that was his brand, right?” Lauren remembers: Sarah, in the other room, distracting him with some nonsense about their school day while Lauren searched the blazer, hung on the back of a dining chair, helped herself to two or three. She passes the pipe and the lighter back to Sarah.

“You were good, Lolo. Nerves of steel. Unafraid of shopgirls at Bloomingdale’s, unintimidated by the man of this house.”

“They say everyone is good at something,” Lauren says. She wants to take her shoes off, but also doesn’t want to. She doesn’t want to get too comfortable in this room. The poster of the Van Gogh at MoMA, the jumble of madras belts on a peg on the back of the door; it’s too familiar and too foreign, a country she visited once, but doesn’t want to go back to. She’s outgrown this.

The little flame flickers out of the lighter, rising higher as Sarah inhales in one, two, three gulps. She sets the glass pipe onto the piece of glass that Lulu had cut to protect the antique nightstand from rings from the diet soda the girls drank religiously at age fourteen. “Fuck, actually, I’m pretty stoned.”

“I’ll open the window,” Lauren says. She’s feeling stifled. She pushes aside the curtains, trimmed in a pale green grosgrain that complements the headboards, slides the window up.

“That helps,” Sarah says. She’s risen from her bed, stands behind Lauren, rests her chin on her shoulder. Muscle memory: the two of them joined, if not at the hip, then physically, always—hands held, hot mouths at ears trading confidences, knees pushed together in the backseats of taxicabs. Like infant twins, happily entwined in their crib, they could never stand to be apart. While Sarah showered, Lauren would sit on the floor of the bathroom and talk to her, though the splash of the water on tile made it hard to hear.

They breathe in the hot city air. It is better, somehow. Sarah sits back on the bed, idly fiddling with her skirt, which pools up around her waist like a deflated life preserver. Lauren sits on the bed opposite, almost knee to knee.

“So what’s new?”

“Nothing’s new,” Lauren says. “What’s new with you? What made you decide to sneak away from your parents’ party to get stoned alone on a Thursday night?”

“You said it, my parents’ party,” Sarah says. “That’s reason enough. I mean, Dan’s not here, and I knew you were coming and was sort of in the mood for a trip down memory lane.”

“Cool,” Lauren says.

“Cool?” Sarah says, teasing.

“Shit, trip is right.” Lauren shakes her head, which feels fuzzy, thick.

“It’s that medicinal shit,” Sarah says. She starts to giggle. She has a very charming laugh, Sarah does, a girlish giggle that can grow into a very big guffaw. She alone could record a laugh track for a sitcom. Her laugh is that varied, that infectious. “You didn’t call me back.”

“I didn’t?” She is not good with the calling back, Lauren knows this about herself. Isn’t it enough to hear the message, to think about the person calling? She knows it is not.

“Sorry.” Lauren is not good at apologizing. She is not being insincere though. This is the kind of thing that bothers Sarah.

“I’m used to it.”

“It’s just. I’m here! I came. Sorry.” Now, annoyance: Sarah gives in to injury so easily.

“I know, you come through,” Sarah says. “Even if you’re too busy to call back. I know how it goes with you. It’s always something. Or, you know, someone.”

“No someone.” This, another peeve of Sarah’s: the suggestion that she’s been supplanted, that sex outranks her. And a peeve of Lauren’s: this dance around. Just ask, she thinks. Sarah wouldn’t though; conversationally, she bobs, she weaves, she suggests, she retreats. This is recent, recent-ish, Sarah’s way of talking to Lauren, as blunt and transparent as using simple grammar and a too-loud voice when speaking to cabdrivers or waiters for whom you assume English is a second language.