Джули Салливан - Friends and Strangers

“I’m gonna call him,” Isabella said, taking her phone from her pocket.

“Let’s wait on that,” Sam said.

“Fine, then I’ll call Toby.”

A guy she’d met on her junior year abroad, who broke it off with her right before they left and got back together with his ex, raising the question of whether they’d ever broken up in the first place.

One of the drawbacks of a single-sex education was that the pool of men one had, even to think about, was unbearably small. They kept males around and alive in their imaginations far longer than any normal woman would. It was like prison or war in that way.

Before Clive, Sam’s only college relationship was with Julian, a sweet but odd guy who worked in the campus library.

He was an aspiring poet working toward a degree in literature at State, where, he took pains to explain, he had chosen to go only because he got a free ride. In addition to his library job, Julian had three internships—one with a translator in New York City, remotely. One at an indie publishing house in town, and one at the three-college literary journal, Ambit .

He told her he ran a writers’ group; that she ought to come sometime.

“When do you sleep?” Sam asked.

He laughed, but she was genuinely curious.

Sam liked chatting with him in the library. But she was caught off guard when he asked for her number.

“Aww, he likes you,” Isabella said at the time.

“I’m not attracted to him,” Sam said. “His hair looks like a Brillo pad. He has a wandering eye.”

“He’s allowed to check out other women,” Isabella said. “You’re not even interested in him, what do you care?”

“No, his eye literally wanders. Like, drifts to the side.”

“Oh.”

It turned out Isabella was right. Julian did like her. Sam tried to like him back. They kissed a handful of times. His tongue felt slimy and too large for his mouth. Sam told Isabella that it reminded her of a clam trying to escape its shell. From then on, Isabella referred to Julian as the Mollusk, which amused Sam and made her feel bad at the same time.

They went to dinner, to the movies. He was the kind of guy she should like, and yet. He wrote her a poem for their one-month anniversary. Sam found it revolting. It was too much. When Julian asked what she thought of the poem, she told him it reminded her of T. S. Eliot. She could tell right away he was disappointed. She supposed he wanted only to sound like himself.

Sam told Julian she needed to focus on her studies. For a while, he texted her whenever he got drunk and pleaded with her to reconsider. Sam never responded.

Ever since, when she saw him in the library, she hid. She had previously studied on the main floor, which was flooded with sunlight. But after their time together, she worked in the basement, because she knew he never went down there.

Isabella flopped onto her bed.

She insisted she wanted to get back to the party and make out with Rosie Simmons, a senior who resembled a young Leonardo DiCaprio.

“Later,” Sam said.

“Disco nap!” Isabella said.

“Good idea. Take off your shoes, at least,” Sam said.

She pulled the trash can close, in case.

Isabella fumbled with the button on her jeans.

“You look like a fourteen-year-old boy trying to get a girl’s pants off for the first time,” Sam said. “Except they’re your own pants.”

Isabella moaned.

“I’m too tired,” she said. “Can you do it, please?”

“You’re annoying,” Sam said, but she complied, pulling the jeans down from the ankles. “I need a crowbar for this. Pajama pants?”

Isabella shook her head. A minute later, she lay passed out in her tank top and underwear, looking like an American Apparel ad. Sam took the blanket she kept folded at the end of her own bed and draped it over Isabella’s bottom half, not as much for warmth as to avoid the possibility of Clive seeing her impossibly narrow thighs on the off chance she hadn’t woken up by the time they returned.

Sam looked in the mirror. Her stomach flipped.

“More lipstick!” Isabella demanded, without opening her eyes.

5

THE VAN SOUNDED LIKE A rocket ship about to launch.

Sam clutched the steering wheel. She imagined breaking down on the side of the road in her short sundress, which was inappropriate for both the hour and the season. She had worn it because it was Clive’s favorite.

Her heart pounded as she drove along the dark highway. She pictured him, hurtling through the air overhead, about to touch down in America for the first time. Six months ago, she hadn’t known he existed, and now he was her person.

At some point sophomore year, Sam’s friends started talking about where they planned to spend their junior year abroad, as if it was a foregone conclusion. Sam had never considered the possibility. Lexi applied to a program in Brazil. Ramona wanted to be in Nepal. Shannon’s fellowship included an all-expenses-paid year in Paris.

“Come with me, Sam. Your financial aid will transfer, I think,” said Isabella, who had already decided on London and didn’t need one cent of financial aid.

Sam got excited, looking at the websites of schools in Scotland, Ireland, France. She went to a question-and-answer session at the International Studies Office and took notes. When the woman running it said, “Expect to spend ten to fifteen thousand on top of your usual school costs for the year,” Sam closed her notebook. She understood that there was no way she was going.

Her parents had told her to go to a state school, like they did. By the time she was a senior, they would have three kids in college. If Sam wanted more, she would have to pay for it. For reasons she could not articulate then or even now, she wanted more.

Ultimately, her brother and sister stayed closer to home and went to their parents’ alma mater. Brendan wasn’t sure what he wanted to do yet. Molly wanted to be a teacher. Set against their ambitions, Sam worried that hers seemed indulgent.

She got a small scholarship and a work-study position. She took the rest out in loans, in her name.

“I’m worried you’re too young to understand what this means,” her father said as he watched her sign the forms. “I’m sorry. I wish we could have done better by you, Sam.”

“You’ve done great by me,” she said, and it was true. She hated making him feel otherwise.

Only after she got to college did she realize that she should have considered not just the cost of affording the school, but the cost of living among the kind of people who could easily afford it. Her friends might decide on a whim to go out for sushi if they didn’t like what was on offer in the dining hall. Sam wouldn’t join them. She knew from experience that Lexi and Isabella would order one of everything, and while she might get miso soup, the cheapest item on the menu, inevitably, when the bill came, someone would say, “Why don’t we just split it?”

The summer after sophomore year felt like any other summer. Sam slept in her childhood bedroom with its ballet-slipper wallpaper. She babysat on the weekends. On weekdays, she temped. Her longest gig was at an ad agency called Fleischer Boone. Her main job was to answer the phone and say “Fleischer Boone” in a professional-sounding voice.

Maybe a quarter of the time, it was her twelve-year-old sister, Caitlin, prank-calling her. “Fleischer Boone,” Caitlin would yell in an exaggerated southern drawl, before hanging up and doing it again. “Fleischer Boone! Our chicken is finger-lickin’!”

Any spare moments that summer were spent with Maddie, Sam’s best friend from high school, who was pre-med at Clemson. They walked the streets of their hometown free of the angst they’d felt before going to college. They were detached, observant. Visitors from a foreign land.