Anna Pitoniak - Necessary People

“So what’s the story?” I said. “Are you back for good?”

“I don’t know,” she said, sitting back on her heels. “But it’s Christmas next week. I can’t ditch my family at Christmas. Do you think they’re pissed I’ve been gone so long?”

“Let’s do this over breakfast,” I said. “Come on. I’ll cook.”

She had no plan beyond the present moment. Maybe she was back for good. Maybe she’d leave again after the holidays. The only thing she knew was that she needed some rest. A break from the cycle of travel and party-hopping, and the relentless performance of fun. A few weeks of peace and quiet—was that too much to ask?

“But that won’t satisfy Anne,” I said. “She’ll want specifics.”

“Anne is a pain in my ass,” Stella said. “This is good. What is this?”

“Parmesan and thyme.” Simple omelets were a staple. On a budget, eggs were a miracle. “See, I could tell that was just the low blood sugar talking.”

She laughed. “I missed you.”

“So stay,” I said, with a surge of hope. “Remember the plan? The two of us, together in the big city?”

She wrinkled her nose, folded her napkin into a careful rectangle, stood up and started rinsing our plates. Neat behavior was her method of avoidance. Stella once scrubbed our entire dorm bathroom to postpone breaking up with a clingy boyfriend.

“Or not,” I said. “That’s cool, too.”

“I just don’t know what I want,” she said. She stood at the dishwasher, plates in hand. Instead of slotting them at the edge, she put them in the middle of the empty bottom rack. This was the behavior of a sociopath, or someone who grew up with housekeeping staff. “You’re lucky,” she added. “You always knew.”

“Lucky?” I said. “I’m barely making minimum wage.”

“But you love it. I can tell.”

“How?”

“Come here,” she said, and dragged me into the living room, where a mirror hung above the mantelpiece. We stood in front of it, side by side. “Look. Your skin is clear. You lost weight. You’re not biting your nails. You look tired and you need some concealer for those under-eye circles, but that’s easy to fix.”

In the mirror, I saw that she was right. I hadn’t noticed it myself. Stella and I had always existed at distant ends of the continuum. Roughly the same height and the same coloring, but she was a hundred times more beautiful. Exquisite features and perfect blond hair, compared to my plainness and dirty-blond hues. A vast gulf remained, but the past five months had brought us slightly closer together.

“Well?” she said. “You must be happy there, right?”

“I guess so.”

“See?” She cocked an eyebrow. “And therefore I have to hate you.”

In the afternoon, a guy showed up at our door: the person Stella had called that morning. He was tall and preppy, a cable-knit sweater beneath his faded Barbour jacket. Stella explained that they’d gone to Rye Country Day together, and now he worked in finance. “This is Violet,” she said to him. “Don’t worry. She’s cool.”

Stella dipped a key into the bag of white powder, sampling the wares. She sniffed a bump of cocaine, smiled, and widened her eyes. The preppy guy lined up several small plastic bags on the coffee table, along with half a dozen orange pill containers. After counting Stella’s money, he looked satisfied and impressed with his own efficiency.

“Men have it so easy,” Stella said, after he left. “Did you see him? Everyone trusts a guy who looks like that. That’s why it’s so easy for him to get refills.”

“Really,” I said, watching as she cut a line of cocaine. “Is that the story.”

“Plus both of his parents are doctors. I would kill for that. Easy access.”

I laughed. “Your father literally runs a pharmaceutical company, Stell.”

It wasn’t that I was innocent to her habits. She’d done plenty of this in college—at parties, to sober up, to help her endure all-nighters. But it wasn’t even 3 p.m., the living room bright with sunlight. Whatever her reasons, it didn’t seem like she was doing this for fun.

“Stop it,” she said, wiping her nose as she sat up.

“Stop what?”

“Stop giving me that look. You’re so judgmental, Violet. Has anyone ever told you that?”

“You have, plenty of times.”

“Do you know what our problem is?” She went into the kitchen, filled a glass with water and ice, and took a long drink. “Violet, do you know what it is? I just realized it. Take a guess.”

“I have no idea.”

She pointed a long index finger. “You’ve got the dirt on me, but I don’t have any on you.”

“Oh, come on.”

“I’m serious,” she said, her color rising. “You see me doing bad things, but what about you? You’re so perfect. You never do anything bad. You could blackmail me if you wanted. But I could never do that to you. This is fucked up, Violet. The power dynamic is all fucked up.”

This was Stella on the upswing of a buzz. She drew connections between disparate dots and then got excited by her own intelligence. It was like a game to her. My job wasn’t to be offended. My job was to play along. I kept a straight face, because if I smiled she would think I was mocking her. But I was happy. This dynamic felt strangely like home.

“Explain it to me,” I said. “Between the two of us, you’re the one without any power?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, yes, that’s exactly right.”

“Even though your family is worth, like, a billion dollars?”

“That’s not the point.” She tipped the last of the water into her mouth, crunching on an ice cube. Her phone vibrated. She scanned the screen, then glanced out the window. “Actually, this is perfect,” she said. “The weather is perfect, and we have time to walk.”

“To where?”

“Dinner,” she said. “My friend who lives in Brooklyn Heights. He’s having a dinner party and we’re going. We can walk across the bridge. Just in time for sunset.”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “It’s a school night.”

“What?” Stella squinted, like I was speaking another language.

“Work tomorrow. I have stuff to catch up on tonight.”

“You said they barely pay you minimum wage. You can’t be that important.”

I laughed. “Harsh.”

“Come on,” she said, tugging my arm. “I’ll let you borrow something to wear.”

Stella’s friend lived in a brownstone that backed up onto the Brooklyn Heights promenade. The older woman who owned the building liked that this young man was an artist, that he reminded her of her bohemian days. He rented the top floor, with its gabled windows and creaky floors and spectacular views of Manhattan, for a pittance.

While Stella made the rounds, kissing the cheeks of friends-of-friends, I wandered into the kitchen to get glasses of wine. The counter looked like an old master still life: verdant vegetables, a pile of lemons, bundles of rosemary, a chicken on the cutting board. The host was in the other room, talking about his new work. Dinner was still hours away.

These friends knew me, dimly, as the girl who lived with Stella. They were polite enough, but I always found the conversation slippery and difficult. The usual questions—where you live, what you do—went nowhere. You couldn’t effort your way into their world. But even though Stella had been away for months, her reabsorption into the group was instant. No one at the party bothered her with the tedious details: What’s the plan? Are you back for good? What are you going to do? To them, it didn’t matter. Their intimacy was elastic. Stella was Stella, no matter where she was in the world.

“You stayed at Le Sirenuse when you were in Positano?” one girl asked.