Tim Murphy - Christodora

Her mother was cuddling up next to her, asking about her day at school, and, mmm , were they sharing a frozen hot chocolate like they usually did?

“Yes,” said Milly, “but I have to go to the bathroom first; I’d been waiting for you to get here.”

Walking toward the back, Milly could hear how loudly her mother was talking to the waitress, as though she wanted the whole restaurant to hear. In the back, at the payphone, Milly called her dad’s office, waited for his secretary to put him on the line. Somewhere deep down, she’d broken in two again, just as she had last year. But for now, she put herself above the shock and the humiliation and the knowledge of what the next few days (weeks? months?) would be like. (Well, actually, she thought about Francelle, and how grateful she was that Francelle was not only loving but the same person every day.)

“You need to come to Serendipity,” she said when her father came on the line. “Mom’s breaking down again.”

There it was on the plate, in a pool of syrup, a final fat blueberry that had escaped the finished pancake. Milly speared it with her fork and raised it to Jared’s lips.

“You have it,” she said.

“No, Millipede, you have it.”

Milly held the blueberry between her lips, leaned forward, and shared it with Jared — the two of them laughing as they each bit the berry to pull away their half, kissing all the while. The entire transaction took just seconds; they were certainly not the kind of people to engage in ostentatious and drawn-out public displays of affection. But the whole affair had caught the eye of the mid-fortysomething woman sitting across from them in the restaurant, who turned to her companion, another fortysomething woman.

The first woman said, “I don’t think I can do any more Sunday brunches at this place.”

Her friend looked moderately alarmed. “Why? We love this place.”

“I can’t watch another beautiful, bedheaded Gen-X couple come in here with their whole drowsy Sunday vibe of we-just-had-amazing-sex-and-now-we’re-going-to-drowsily-walk-around-the-Chelsea-Flea-holding-hands-before-we-go-home-and-have-more-sex.”

To which her friend laughed. “Oh, them,” she said. “Yes, I’d noticed them.”

“You just missed the blueberry make-out trick, unfortunately.”

Her friend glanced the way of Milly and Jared. “I don’t think they’ll make it to marriage,” she said.

Friend #1’s eyes narrowed. Now they were playing one of their favorite single-friends games: Prognosticate the Fate of the Happy Couple before You. “Why not?”

“Look at him!” Friend #2, the harder-bitten of the duo, exclaimed. “Have you watched him run his hands through his lush head of hair? He’s so full of himself. He’ll get tired of her. She’s too needy. You can tell.”

“Oh, nooo,” said Friend #1. “You have not been sitting from my vantage point. He’s crazy about her. I saw the doggy eyes.”

And on and on they went, and how amusing and perhaps disconcerting it might have been for Jared and Milly if they could have heard the prognostications made about them by two lonely strangers in a crowded Sunday brunch spot. But this wasn’t the case, and Milly and Jared sailed out of the Chelsea nouveau diner as bedheadedly as they’d arrived, back out into the garbage-scented steam of their first postcollegiate New York summer. They were on this side of town, and not in the East Village, because they were meeting friends from school at a new park along the Hudson for some sort of Frisbee/picnic thing, hastily arranged the day before via a batch of messages left on answering machines. This was their life now, Jared having achieved his goal of Milly and hence free to pursue his myriad other goals, and Milly forever glancing over her shoulder, trying to identify the shape-shifting unease that cast a shadow over their happiness.

At any rate, when they arrived at the picnic, they met someone they’d never seen before, a brunette commanding the crowd on a cluster of blankets under one of the few trees on the pristine grassy expanse. Her name was Drew: tall and skinny, hair the color of dark chocolate brushed back off her face like a boy’s, an assertive nose dotted with freckles, big white teeth that were just slightly and adorably chipmunk-like in the front, a skeptical West Coast drawl, and ten toenails painted deep red like Chiclets glinting on perfect, bare feet. She was a fact-checking friend of Colleen’s from Vanity Fair , but she was really a writer who woke at six each morning to work on her novel before heading to work.

When Milly and Jared arrived, the gang was discussing Václav Havel’s resignation as president of Czechoslovakia. The conversation devolved into puns on his name.

“Václav Havel resigns wearing a—” Drew paused. “Sparkly balaclava.” Her fey lisp and her timing were flawless. Everyone laughed. Those were the first words spoken by Drew that Milly ever heard.

Colleen introduced them. “Drew, this is Milly and Jared.”

“Oh!” Drew pealed with delight. “This is the Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner of the new millennium you told me about! So nice to meet you.”

She sat up on the blanket and crawled forward a few paces to shake their hands, which was when Milly spied the breasts peeking from beneath Drew’s shoulder-strapped vintage green floral sundress: two small but wickedly full, darkly nippled orbs that all but whistled from their shadows, Why, hello, Millicent! Milly felt that feeling she had felt periodically since she was twelve and acted on only twice, in college, and not very deftly at that: girl desire. Her eyes caught Drew’s; the glint was unmistakable. But wait? Was Drew conferring the same glint on Jared?

Milly collected herself. “Umm,” she began a reply, aiming to seem game. “How about the Kiki Smith and — um—”

Drew followed her eyes minutely, rapt. “Who is Kiki Smith with, anyway?” she asked. “Is she married, or with—?”

Nobody seemed to know, though Jared’s friend Asa said that a friend of his parents’ had just bought a Kiki Smith sculpture.

“Well, anyway,” Milly continued. But what did she want to say? She kept bouncing her eyes ridiculously between Drew and Jared, who seemed to wait amusedly for her to finish her thought. “I mean, Lee Krasner? Give me some credit.”

“Lee Krasner is awesome ,” said Drew.

So that’s how it began. Drew began spending a lot of time with Milly and Jared, the three of them out late with their high school and college friends, the fledgling filmmakers and painters and actors and, of course, the endless editorial assistants. And it would always end up that Jared and Milly and Drew would stay out the latest, at some East Village dive like 7A or Blue and Gold, talking drunkenly and intensely about, oh, how could Bret Easton Ellis even put himself in the same category as Donna Tartt just because they went to college together, or who was really more subversive from a gender-deviance point of view, Sinead O’Connor or k.d. lang or even Prince. Or, ironically, they’d put “Man in Motion,” the theme from St. Elmo’s Fire , on the jukebox and then recast the movie with themselves and their friends (and Drew would laugh and be like, “Oh God, no!” when Jared and Milly would cast her in the Demi Moore part). Or they’d make up names for one another’s memoirs. Jared’s, because he was an installation artist, would be The Boy with the Blocks: The Jared Traum Story . Milly’s: BrushStrokes: A Life , then, beneath, in smaller type, The Millicent Heyman Story .

Drew’s memoir would be Prose in the Fast Lane . Milly came up with that one, which they all had a good laugh over. Milly had never had a friend quite like Drew before. Most of her friends she’d known so long they treated her like a little sister, with affection but also a certain carelessness, whereas Drew was attentive, solicitous, always wanting to know how Milly was — how was her work? Her relationship? And Drew entertained Milly; sometimes Milly sensed, with both confusion and delight, that Drew was almost performing a certain kind of wisecracking, all-knowing, tough but goodhearted best girlfriend, like in old movies. Drew seemed happy to perform like this for Jared as well, which turned Drew into a subject of enchantment and fascination for both members of the couple.