The Things We Do to Our Friends(41)

That snapshot, alongside anything else I could glean from Imogen, would be enough.

“Clever girl,” Tabitha said to Imogen, and I could see Imogen melt a little, even offering a tentative smile—never completely immune to Tabitha’s charms and forgiving her for earlier.

Imogen hummed a song and Tabitha joined in tunelessly, pulling Imogen into an ungainly waltz around the room. I didn’t recognize it. A song or hymn from when they were younger perhaps. Although they didn’t mention school much, sometimes their history together leaked through into the present. Long sleepovers, midnight feasts and pillow fights—as innocent as anything. Imogen enjoyed it; she mellowed in Tabitha’s arms.

Then Tabitha turned her attention to me, came so close I could smell beyond her skin to something sourer.

She pulled my hair back, running her hands through the roots and smoothing it out at the ends. Like an animal grooming her offspring, purposeful instead of gentle.

“We’re going to make you into everything he wants, and then it’s up to him. In this whole thing he absolutely has agency. You understand that, don’t you? You’ll be amazing.”

Her words were rushed. Her eyes were bright.

I wondered if she was almost jealous, like she wanted to do this herself. I basked in the praise and adoration as she dressed me up like a doll.





32


We can’t help gathering information on our friends. Everyone does it. Even if we don’t think we’re storing it all away, we do it instinctively.

Back then, I didn’t really notice some of the things that perhaps would have helped me more. At first, I was so focused on myself and how I was coming across to them. However, the more time we spent together over a long and tepid summer, certain facts became apparent.

As I’ve said, there were no boyfriends or girlfriends on the scene. No mentions of the more attractive people in our tutorials or classes, and no staggering home drained and hungover in the morning, still in the clothes from the night before. After a year, that seemed a little unusual, but if you looked closer, it became more explainable.

There was Ava’s methodical productivity. Ava tried to pare back certain aspects of herself, but it was the chinks in her armor that were so appealing to me. Like her dismissal of anything American on a surface level, then, deep down, an almost childish love of those wrapped sugary sweets. Candy canes that came out around October and were sucked on deep into January. Bright pink Jell-O set in lumpish shapes that made your mouth hurt it was so sugary. She was private to a fault, quietly and almost intellectually interested in fashion but not shopping. She organized everything with efficiency. When she laughed or smiled it was like her face wasn’t quite used to it and the muscles took a while longer to move those expressions into place.

Imogen and Samuel were less focused on it all. The inner circle just about, but beyond that they had their own lives. Imogen’s favorite thing to do, when she wasn’t preoccupied with Tabitha, was fuss over Samuel: she laughed at his jokes for too long; she always asked him where he’d been, who he’d been with. It was the saddest little crush, and the more he batted her off with barely a thought, the more she rushed around after him. She obeyed Tabitha, of course, and there was a fondness, but also a sneering hostility. In return, Tabitha treated her like an annoying younger sister. It was a brittle kind of intimacy.

With Samuel and me, whatever we were together, it had become easier. I’d started to think his feelings had never really existed, not really. He just liked to flirt, to shock me because I was newer to the group. He would throw out playful remarks to see if anything came back, but he was never particularly bothered if it didn’t.

The crushes that underpinned the group were never fully in focus, because the business was the nucleus of it all—they just existed in the background. Everyone was held together with bonds made stronger by juicy infatuations that waxed and waned. We played and we dressed up and we flirted with each other almost as something to do. And I was happy about it, I think. At the time, at least. As much as I loved it when it was just Tabitha and Ava and me, as a larger group we were safer. A three is always so difficult.

And what about me?

My commitment to Tabitha wasn’t a secret; at some points I thought I’d do anything for her. But my love affair at that time was larger and more expansive. Part of it was Edinburgh, where I could be whoever I wanted to be, walk the streets as an observer. I went to pubs, old-man pubs where the ceilings were low and there was folk music in the evening. I wandered around the Botanic Garden, where I could stand in a towering greenhouse. The city belonged to me: I’d earned it.

And finally, Tabitha. The sun we orbited around; we’d die without her rays. With Tabitha, if you peeled away all the layers, you could even get past her distrust of men, which surely came from more than just her father’s affair. You could go below, deeper, and under it all you found a single-mindedness that I agreed with in the most part. She possessed a unifying belief that we deserved something different, something that would mark us out. She said we could make our own luck, and I believed her.

I collected scraps of information as if I was stockpiling food for a disaster or saving away my paychecks for an emergency, a natural accumulation.

I hoarded the fragments to use as some kind of currency later, kidding myself that I knew all of their secrets.





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