Rumaan Alam - Rich and Pretty

“Come on, Lauren.”

“What come on?”

“I’m not stupid. It’s okay.”

Lauren doesn’t say anything.

“I’m just excited that it’s finally happening, we’re getting married, and my friends are going to be there, even if they’re secretly wishing they were the ones in the ridiculous white dress with everyone looking at them.”

“Do you want me to be in charge of Meredith? I’ll get her trashed, make sure she doesn’t say a word to you the whole night.”

“She’s harmless,” Sarah says. “She’s so deep in the pit of her own despair she has no idea what else is going on.”

“You won’t know what’s going on either. Isn’t that what people are always saying? Like their wedding is just a blur of kissing relatives and posing for pictures and eating terrible cake? That’s what I always hear it’ll feel like.”

“Posing for pictures.” Sarah’s face darkens. “We need a photographer. I need to add that to the list.”

“Forget about the list for a minute.” Lauren knows all about Sarah and her lists. “They call them mandingoes. A mandingo?”

“Who does what?” Sarah is confused.

“Guys from the islands who fuck old white ladies? Get their groove back.”

“Christ, is that a thing? That’s terrible. And that word sounds suspiciously racist to me. I wouldn’t mention that in mixed company.”

“Mixed company is genders, not races,” Lauren says. “Like if we were talking about asshole waxing or something, that’s a non-mixed-company conversation. As in, you can only talk about that with ladies. Boys can’t handle waxed assholes.”

Sarah doubles over with laughter, or would if she were standing. She bends her body, almost fetal. Her laugh is loud; it’s always loud but louder, significantly, when she’s been drinking. “Fuck,” she says. Catching her breath. “Let’s have another drink.”

Lauren opens the minibar, weighs the options. “Brown or clear?”

“Brown, I think? Nightcap. Is there ice?”

“There is ice.” Lauren fills two of the glasses, which are fitted with little paper sleeves so you know no one’s sipped from them. She drops the emptied miniature bottles onto the table, their tiny metal caps into the trash can, where they land with a ping.

“Thanks.” Sarah sits up and accepts the tumbler, a half inch of amber inside. “After-party.”

They clink their glasses together. Lauren gestures over her shoulder at the terrace. “Should we go outside or something? I mean, since we’re in a tropical paradise, et cetera?”

“Fuck the tropics,” Sarah says. “I’m so comfortable.”

Lauren shrugs, steps up onto the bed, and sits, legs crossed, in what was once called Indian style but she knows, because of a friend who teaches middle school, is now referred to as crisscross applesauce. Settling down, this feels familiar, that stab of déjà vu. It’s elusive, it slips away. Something then, about this: a room this temperature, a bed once freshly made, a glass of something to drink, even the suggestion of the ocean just beyond because when you are near the ocean it’s always present.

“Are you tired?” Sarah asks.

“No.” Lauren shakes her head. “Actually, I feel weirdly, bizarrely awake.”

“So do I.” Sarah stares up at her. “This feels familiar. I remember this, somehow, the two of us, doing nothing, just sitting somewhere in the middle of the night and the night didn’t seem to matter and we were just wide awake. Do you know what I mean?”

“Sleep is wasted on the young.” It’s uncanny how this happens, sometimes: how Sarah can seem to see what Lauren is thinking, then give voice to it, then look to Lauren to hear her confirm it, to acknowledge that she’s — what, read her mind? Impossible, but it seems to happen. Lauren resists admitting that they are thinking the same thing. She prefers to think of them as wholly separate people.

“We were never tired,” Sarah says. A trace of awe.

“You make it sound like we’re in our fifties,” Lauren says, chiding.

“Tell me you don’t feel a little bit old these days. Just a little bit. Ever so slightly.” Sarah’s tone is confessional.

“Maybe.” Lauren considers this for a moment. “Like, if you’re thirty-two and you haven’t yet bought a sofa, a real sofa, there’s something vaguely sad about you.”

“You’ve bought a sofa,” Sarah says.

“I don’t feel vaguely sad,” Lauren says.

“Good.” Sarah pauses. “You probably think this whole thing is stupid.”

“What whole thing?”

“This.” Sarah gestures at the room around them. There’s a skill-less painting on the wall to the left of the bed: a sailboat. “Tropical weekend getaway with the girls. Hen party, that’s what they call it in England. Hen party. Hen pecked. There’s something sexist there, isn’t there, women as fowl?”

“I thought maybe there was some implied double entendre there,” Lauren says. “The opposite of cock, you know. But I don’t hate this. The tropics! What is there to hate? I’ll take this over Thanksgiving. Why did I never consider this before, actually? Destination Thanksgiving. It’s sort of genius.”

“But I bet your family misses you.”

“Maybe.” Lauren doesn’t like to discuss her family with Sarah. Lauren knows and understands the nuances of the Thomas familial life. She knows the private language they speak at home. Sarah does not know the Brooks family way of life — even Lauren feels she no longer knows the Brooks family way of life. She prefers it this way.

Sarah is staring at the ceiling. In profile, Lauren can see a trace of Lulu in her. Something about the way she holds her head, like she’s posing for a photograph, but it comes to her naturally. At her chin, though, she turns back into her father, masculine, decisive, no longer Lulu, without whatever you call that quality that isn’t quite beauty but is something approaching it.

“My mom wanted to come this weekend,” Sarah says.

“No.” Lauren shakes her head.

“She did.”

Lauren laughs. “Of course she did.”

“A girls’ weekend, she just kept saying that, over and over again, finally I was like — Mom, you’re not one of the girls,” says Sarah. “I felt bad, but can you imagine if she’d tagged along?”

Lauren can, actually.

“Well, I’m glad you’re not hating this. I’m half hating it,” says Sarah. “But this is fun, just lying here like this, away from Meredith’s travails.”

“Maybe we just need to sleep? Like even though we’re not tired. Tomorrow is another day and all that jazz? We’ll get pedicures and order shrimp cocktail and eat lunch on the beach and do whatever.”

“Read a book? That’s what I feel like doing, reading a book. I feel like reading a book and thinking about nothing.”

“Or talking about nothing.” Lauren drains her glass. “That’s what you want. To sit with our feet buried in the sand because it’s cool and the sun is hot, and you want to talk but not about anything. About the weather. About what there is to talk about. About things you saw on the street. About whatever you heard on NPR.”

“That is what I want.” Sarah nods. “How did you know?”

“That’s what everyone wants,” Lauren says.

Knowing it all is a condition of being twelve.So it was something (strange, noteworthy, unfamiliar, odd) that at twelve, Lauren realized that she didn’t actually know Sarah, didn’t understand her. She had thought otherwise for some time; they’d been acquainted for a whole year, after all, a long damn stretch no matter how old you are. Sarah was not quite pretty but was quite popular, by whatever alchemy determined popularity. At twelve, popularity is as powerful a force as you can imagine, and it conferred on Sarah something like authority, the province of grown-ups. Sarah spoke; people listened.