“I’m fine. Thank you.”
Scarlett put the dress on her bureau and sat down on her bed opposite. She waited until Lola had folded everything to her satisfaction and sat down, squishing the pile of panties between her hands, like a delicate pastel accordion.
“We were at a benefit at the Natural History Museum tonight,” she said. “Some friend of theirs rented out the lobby for something—I don’t even know what—and everybody paid about a thousand bucks to be there. There was a girl named Boonz there. I’ve seen her at a few things. She dates this other guy from Durban. She walked right up to me, like she wanted to make small talk, because there’s nothing else to do at these things. And do you know what she said to me?”
Scarlett could have come out with a few amusing possible answers that Spencer would have loved, but this was definitely not the time.
“She said, ‘Don’t you have a second dress?’ I kept waiting for her to laugh, to show that it was some kind of weird joke. But she didn’t. She said, ‘You’ve worn that every time I’ve ever seen you.’ And she smirked and walked away.”
Scarlett felt a flush coming to her cheeks. There was no reason for someone to cut Lola down. Lola, who could be one of those snotty and horrible people, but who never, ever was.
A few tears dribbled down Lola’s cheeks.
“I barely know her. There was no reason for her to do that. She just had to make a point of the fact that I wear this one dress a lot, because they get rid of them after they’ve worn them one or two times. I was trying not to cry, and I looked up at the dinosaur skeleton, and all of a sudden, I just had this horrifying image of…forever. Being around these people for the rest of my life. I put down my drink and walked out.”
“Good,” Scarlett said. “You should have. Did Chip leave, too?”
“He followed me out,” she said. “He tried to make me feel better. He said that he would get me a new dress. And that’s the problem. The solution is always going to be ‘buy another one.’ The people are always going to be the same. They’re so smug, and most of them are so stupid, and they think they deserve everything they have. They’ll never have to work, never have to do anything they don’t want to do. They can’t understand not having money. They see it as a flaw. Chip doesn’t…but I just realized he’ll never, ever get it. He would never get that, to most people, getting a dress like this is a huge deal.”
She looked at the once-beloved dress, now lying limply on the bureau.
“He wanted to take me out somewhere else. Go downtown to a club, or over to the boat, and I just wanted to come home. We pulled up, and I broke up with him. Just like that. I always thought that was what I wanted. I always thought that’s where I wanted to be—with the people who really lived that life. And then I didn’t anymore.”
There was a knock at the door, and Spencer let himself in, slightly more subtly than normal. He dropped down next to Lola and leaned low over his knees to look up at her downturned face.
“You must be thrilled,” she said. “You don’t have to lie.”
“I wouldn’t. But I’m not saying a word. I was nice to him. And I will be even nicer to you, and your weird underwear sandwich.”
“Thank you.” Lola set the pile of perfectly folded panties on her bedside stand, then reached over and gave his hand a little squeeze. “I appreciate it.”
Both of them sat there watching Lola, waiting for something dramatic to happen, but nothing did. She sniffed a little, straightened the underwear pile, then stood.
“I should go tell Marlene,” she said. “And then I’ll tell Mom and Dad. About this, about the job. Might as well. I just broke up. They aren’t going to kick me when I’m down. I’ll be back in a minute.”
She floated off, closing the door quietly behind her.
“Did you see that?” Spencer said in a low voice. “That’s not what you look like when you break up with someone you really like. Remember when Gillian broke up with me last year, during our final production?”
“Which one was Gillian?”
“The one with the really long red hair. She broke up with me right in the middle of The Music Man.”
“I remember,” Scarlett said. “You sat in your room for three days over the long weekend and got drunk on that Johnnie Walker you stole from her apartment and told Mom you had the flu, except you smelled like booze. And you threw up a lot. And you never changed your clothes.”
Spencer nodded, not even a little taken aback by the description.
“Exactly. That’s what it feels like. I know.”
“Didn’t you go out with her best friend a week later?” Scarlett asked.
“That’s not the point…”
“And she broke up with you, so it’s not really the same.”
“All right. That was a bad example. Do you remember Emily, from junior year?”
“From The Glass Menagerie?”