The Things We Do to Our Friends(31)
Finally, Tabitha flung herself down on the grass next to me and placed a cold hand on my stomach, then squeezed her body up against mine.
“I’m so, so glad you came, Clare. Why don’t you rest up, have a nap? Dinner tonight—we’ll talk about le projet?”
The project. I wished she’d stop calling it that in her terribly over-the-top French accent.
23
As instructed, I had a long nap. In general, rest was difficult to get—I had become more and more convinced that I was ingesting the mold in the room, but when I’d asked Tabitha, she’d brushed the whole thing off. What are you talking about! There’s only a speckle of it!
The sound of laughter woke me. They must have been down on the terrace, and I heard a wild shriek. Bottles clinked. Something smashed and there were low coos and the sound of sweeping. I could have laid there for a while longer and listened, but then the screech of chair legs against stone and a surge of curiosity forced me up, and I climbed out of bed to watch from above as they walked over to the back of the garden. Tabitha peered up at my bedroom, squinting, searching for me. It was time to join them.
Downstairs, I weaved through a path that had been cleared from mess down the main artery of the house as a route from place to place. Stepping outside into the evening, it was still, and hot even though the sun had set. In the darkness, the grime on Minta’s house had faded away and the overgrown grass was romantic instead of chaotic, pressed close against the outbuildings around the house.
They sat at a long table under the trees covered with what looked like a floral bedsheet. There were tiny glass bottles, each filled with a single wildflower. Runny cheese and bread on a thick board. As I approached, Tabitha filled her glass so it overflowed and red drips soaked into the tablecloth. She wiped them in a juddering stroke with her index finger and then she sucked on it, long and hard. She beckoned for me to sit.
There she was, in prime position at the center of the table, with Imogen next to her. At that moment I was struck, not for the first time, by just how disagreeable Imogen looked, with her mouth pursed tightly. Samuel observed me and his expression was impossible to read. Then Ava approached from inside the house, carrying a huge dish, steam rising from it. It was filled with risotto. It felt repulsive. I felt repulsive, but there was nothing I could do apart from sit there and wait.
When Ava served it, she gave us huge portions, far, far bigger than we could possibly eat in one sitting. Dishing it out, then bringing over more bottles of wine for the table.
Finally, she sat down too.
Tabitha poured me a glass, handed it to me, and then she began. “I’ll jump right in. I have an idea. I’d like to ask you a question first. How much do you make at the bar?”
She was drunk, I could tell, speaking so loudly. I didn’t respond. Tabitha didn’t get messy like this, not usually.
“Come on! Humor me? We’re all friends and we should be able to speak about money! They always say there’s three things you don’t talk about, sex, religion, and politics, don’t they?” She leaned forward. I could see she wasn’t wearing a bra and I averted my eyes.
“It’s not true, though, is it?” she continued. “We could talk about those all night, who’s fucking who, who supports who, and we’d die of boredom—nobody would care. But money…money is different.”
I glanced at the others. Imogen looked like she was about to pass out. Samuel gave undue focus to the plate in front of him.
“It’s just a part-time job. It’s minimum wage,” I said.
“I thought so. And have you thought about what you’ll do when you graduate?”
In all honesty, I’d thought about it a lot. About them—never about myself. My personal trajectory seemed to trail off as much as I hoped it would stay close to theirs, but their futures were easier to imagine, the fabric of their lives still woven together with weddings and reunions and dinners. Often as I lay in bed at night trying to sleep, my brain and body still wired from my shift, I’d think of them. Ava would be back in the U.S., in a white-walled office. In a black suit and bonier with age. The fixer for some huge conglomerate, perhaps doing something not entirely legal. For Imogen, something to match her scrappy perseverance. I’d always imagined her as a high-end estate agent, flustered in a tight skirt, tumbling out of her SUV with a million sets of keys to show clients some crumbling heap in the Home Counties. In the evenings, she’d return to her own tidy country house, thinking it vastly superior to the ones she showed all day. Samuel was in a boardroom, playing an undetermined role, in a smart suit. Not wearing a tie—he would regard that as a little gauche—his expensive shirt straining to hide the gut that would grow as he reached his thirties, eyes glazing over a complicated pie chart, instead choosing to dazzle his audience with a wolfish grin and an outlandish anecdote.
Sometimes, when we lay in bed, Finn asked what I was thinking about and my thoughts would come to a halt, because of course there was no way to describe these odd trips into a predicted future. I knew what Finn would have said: You’re obsessed with them all, but they’re not like you, not like us, and they’ll drop you in a heartbeat.
I never told him.
These futures played out in my mind like exaggerated sketches; university never felt like it was the place for them. They didn’t participate in any of it enough. I got the sense that they were all waiting for the next part of the journey.