“It’s working,” Jane had said.
“Maybe you’ll go to school somewhere else,” Kiran said. “Somewhere far away. It’s healthy to get away from home.”
“Yeah. Maybe.” Jane had always lived in that small, upstate university town, surrounded by students whenever she’d stepped outside. Tuition was free for faculty kids. But maybe Kiran was right, maybe Jane should have chosen a different school. A state school, where the other students wouldn’t have made her feel so . . . provincial. These students came from all over the world and they had so much money. Jane’s roommate had spent her summer in the French countryside and, once she’d learned that Jane had taken high school French, wanted to have conversations in French about towns Jane had never heard of and cheeses she’d never eaten.
How disorienting it had been to attend the classes she’d watched enviously through the windows her whole life, and wind up miserable. In the end, she’d spent most nights with Aunt Magnolia instead of in her dorm room, feeling like she was living a parallel version of her own life, one that didn’t fit her skin. Like she was a puzzle piece from the wrong puzzle.
“You could be an art major somewhere,” Kiran said then. “Didn’t you used to make cool umbrellas?”
“They’re not art,” said Jane. “They’re umbrellas. Messy ones.”
“Okay,” said Kiran, “whatever. Where do you live now?”
“In an apartment in town.”
“The same apartment you lived in with your aunt?”
“No,” Jane said, injecting it with a touch of sarcasm that was probably wasted on Kiran. Of course she hadn’t been able to afford that same apartment. “I live with three grad students.”
“How do you like it?”
“It’s fine,” Jane lied. Her apartment-mates were a lot older than she and too pompously focused on their abstruse intellectual pursuits to bother with cooking, or cleaning, or showering. It was like living with self-important Owl from Winnie-the-Pooh, except that their hygiene was worse and there were three of them. Jane was hardly ever alone there. Her bedroom was a glorified closet, not conducive to umbrella-making, which required space. It was hard to move around without poking herself on ribs. Sometimes she slept with a work in progress at the end of her bed.
“I liked your aunt,” Kiran said. “I liked you too,” she added, which was when Jane stopped thinking about herself and began to study Kiran, who had changed somehow since she’d last seen her. Kiran had used to move as if she were being pushed by at least four different urgent purposes at once.
“What’s brought you to town?” Jane asked Kiran.
Kiran shrugged, listless. “I was out driving.”
“Where are you living?”
“In the city apartment.”
The Thrashes’ city apartment was the top two floors of a Manhattan mansion overlooking Central Park, quite a distance away for someone who was just “out driving.”
“Though I’ve been called home to the island for the spring gala,” Kiran added. “And I may stay awhile. Octavian is probably in a mood.”
“Okay,” said Jane, trying to imagine having a gazillionaire father, on a private island, in a mood. “I hope you have a nice time.”
“What is that tattoo?” asked Kiran. “Is it a squid?”
“It’s a jellyfish.”
“Can I see it?”
The jellyfish sat on Jane’s upper arm, blue and gold, with thin blue tentacles and spiral arms in white and black reaching all the way down below her elbow. Jane often wore her shirtsleeves rolled up to show a glimpse of the tentacles because, secretly, she liked people to ask to see it. She pushed her sleeve up to the shoulder for Kiran.
Kiran gazed at the jellyfish with an unchanging expression. “Huh,” she said. “Did it hurt?”
“Yes,” said Jane. And she’d taken on an extra job as a waitress at a diner in town for three months to pay for it.
“It’s delicate,” said Kiran. “It’s beautiful, actually. Who designed it?”
“It’s based on a photo my aunt took,” said Jane through a flush of pleasure, “of a Pacific sea nettle jellyfish.”
“Did your aunt ever get to see your tattoo?”
“No.”
“Timing can be an asshole,” Kiran said. “Come get drinks.”
“What?” said Jane, startled. “Me?”
“After you get off work.”
“I’m underage.”
“So I’ll buy you a milkshake.”
*
That night, at the bar, Jane had explained to Kiran what it was like to budget for rent, food, and health insurance on a part-time bookstore salary; how she’d sometimes believe in absentminded moments that Aunt Magnolia was just away on another of her photography trips; about the detours she found herself taking to avoid the apartment building where they’d lived together. Jane didn’t mean to explain it all, but Kiran was from the time when life had made sense. Her presence was confusing. It just came out.
“Quit your job,” Kiran said.
“And live how?” Jane said, irritated. “Not everyone has Daddy’s bottomless credit card, you know.”
Kiran absorbed the dig with disinterest. “You just don’t seem very happy.”
“Happy!” said Jane, incredulous, then, as Kiran continued to sip her whiskey, seriously annoyed. “What’s your job, anyway?” she snapped.
“I don’t have a job.”
“Well, you don’t exactly seem happy either.”
Kiran surprised Jane by shouting a laugh. “I’ll drink to that,” she said, then threw back her drink, leaned over the bar, reached into a container of paper umbrellas, and selected one, blue and black to match Jane’s shirt and her tattoo tentacles. Opening it carefully, she twirled it between her fingers, then presented it to Jane.
“Protection,” Kiran announced.
“From what?” Jane asked, examining the umbrella’s delicate working interior.
“From bullshit,” said Kiran.
“Wow,” Jane said. “All this time, I could’ve been stopping bullshit with a cocktail umbrella?”
“It might only work for really small bullshit.”
“Thanks,” said Jane, starting to smile.
“Yeah, so, I don’t have a job,” Kiran said again, holding Jane’s eyes briefly, then looking away. “I apply for things now and then, but it never comes through, and I’ll be honest, I’m always kind of relieved.”
“What’s the problem? You have a degree. You had really good grades, didn’t you? Don’t you speak, like, seven languages?”
“You sound like my mother,” said Kiran, her voice more weary than annoyed. “And my father, and my brother, and my boyfriend, and every damn person I talk to, ever.”
“I was only asking.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m a spoiled rich girl who has the privilege to mope around, feeling sorry for herself for being unemployed. I get it.”
It was funny, because those were Jane’s thoughts exactly. But now, because Kiran had said it, she resented it less. “Hello, don’t put bullshit in my mouth. I’m armed,” Jane said, brandishing her cocktail umbrella.
“You know what I liked about your aunt?” Kiran said. “She always seemed like she knew exactly what she was going to do next. She made you feel like that was possible, to know the right choice.”
Yes. Jane tried to respond, but the truth of it caught in her throat. Aunt Magnolia, she thought, choking on it.
Kiran observed Jane’s grief with dispassion.
“Quit your job and come home with me to Tu Reviens,” she said. “Stay awhile, as long as you like. Octavian won’t mind. Hell, he’ll buy your umbrella supplies. My boyfriend is there; you can meet him. My brother, Ravi, too. Come on. What’s keeping you here?”
Some people are so rich, they don’t even notice when they shame others. What value was there in all the deliberate, scrabbling care Jane put into her subsistence now, if a near-stranger’s indifferent invitation, born of boredom and a need to pee, made Jane more financially comfortable than she could make herself?
But it wasn’t possible to say no, because of Aunt Magnolia. The promise.
“Janie, sweetheart,” Aunt Magnolia had said when Jane had woken extra early one morning and found her aunt on the stool at the kitchen counter. “You’re awake.”