“They’re lawyers,” Ruby said, disgusted.
Olivia noticed for the first time that Ben wore two small gold hoop earrings, one in each ear. Girls must love that, too. Those earrings and all his talk about hating the bourgeoisie.
“And what do you do, Ben?” Olivia asked him, sounding the way her own mother used to twenty years ago when longhaired boys came to pick her up for dates. If Ben only knew that many of those boys, with their torn jeans and rolled joints and American flags sewn on their jackets, had become lawyers and businessmen and investment bankers.
“I go to school.”
“I told you that,” Ruby said. “Except he’s not in a fraternity.”
They both scowled over the very idea of that.
Then Ruby added, “But he did tell me to stay there.”
“Figures they’d have fleas,” Ben said, still scowling.
“So your parents are where in Westchester?” Olivia asked.
“Bedford Hills,” Ben said. “I heard that’s where that movie The Stepford Wives was based on. And that is my mother to a tee. Zombie Mom. She takes classes on how to arrange dried flowers or make wreaths. She sits around planning her garden on graph paper.”
Olivia narrowed her eyes. “I thought she was a lawyer.”
Ben didn’t miss a beat. “That’s my stepmother who’s a lawyer. You got to have like two sets of parents and all these stepbrothers and half sisters and shit. My old man is classic. He leaves my mother for a junior partner in his firm after my mother put him through law school and gave up her own life and blah, blah, blah. Then my mother marries our dentist. Can you believe it? He’s been in all of our mouths.”
“That is so creepy,” Ruby said, wrinkling her nose. “When he told me that, I like almost puked, you know?”
Olivia tried to sort through the information, the lies from the truth. They were a good match, Ruby and Ben, full of wild ideas and large imaginations. Full of bullshit, too, Olivia reminded herself.
Ben said, “We’re in the phone book. My father’s John Adams—”
“They’re related to the real John Adams,” Ruby said, and again her voice swelled with pride.
She had a name and a town. Tomorrow, she would get to the bottom of this. She was comforted by the John Adams part; no one would make up something as ridiculous as that.
“I didn’t believe him when he told me that,” Ruby was saying. “I was like, ‘Right. You’re related to a President. And I’m the Pope.’ But it’s true.”
“Abigail Adams brought ice cream to the United States,” Ben said. “Did you know that? She tasted it in France.”
Olivia wanted them to stop talking, to stop plying her with information. She had read somewhere that liars gave too many details, to convince you they were not lying.
“Listen,” Ruby said, suddenly serious. “I won’t tell you where my parents are. They kicked me out when I told them I was pregnant. They don’t want me or this baby. You got to believe me, Olivia. You know the A&W? Where you found me? I lived near there.”
That was true. All of it. So why didn’t she feel any relief? Maybe that wouldn’t come until she actually had that baby in her arms. Until she saw the last of Ruby.
Ruby kept talking, adding details, answering questions that Olivia didn’t even ask.
“The way Ben and I met was so cool,” Ruby said. “We used to buy pot from a guy in Ben’s dorm. And one day, Betsy and I are waiting for this guy and I see Ben and, like, I almost die. He’s so gorgeous, right?”
Ben laughed, obviously pleased with this description of himself.
Ruby said, “Then the guy comes and everything and I keep thinking about Ben. I mean, I didn’t know his name or anything, but I’m like, I’ve got to meet him. So we get high with this guy and he tells us he’s going to this poetry slam and do we want to go—it’s in Providence—and we figure that sounds cool, so we go. And Ben reads his poetry. I almost died when I saw him. It was like karma. And then I heard his poem and I was like, This is it.”
Ben took over the story. “And while I’m up there, I see her with Jamie—”
“The guy,” Ruby said.
“And I see her and I start hoping she’s not with with him, you know. She had this green leotard thing on, and these turquoise beads, ropes and ropes of them, and her waist was about this big.” Ben made a small circle with his hands.
“Can you believe it?” Ruby groaned.