“You sound awfully sure of yourself,” Cilla said.
“I know things,” Bea said loftily. “Besides, who wants to be tied down in university or right after it? Use your brains, ladies.” She poked at the papers. “And be more careful. You know how he feels about gossip.” She narrowed her eyes at me specifically. “Not everyone is so American about letting it all hang out all over the place.”
And with that, she marched right on past us and boarded a waiting bus.
“Do you think she’s really going to Swindon, or she just needed to make an exit?” Joss wondered.
“I think that bus actually goes to Newcastle, so good luck to her either way,” Cilla said.
“She does not like me,” I said.
“Pay her no mind,” Cilla said, waving her hand dismissively. “She’s twitchy when it comes to him. Her mother is Emma’s best friend, so she’s seen a lot of his life firsthand.”
“It probably doesn’t help that you’re juggling Nick and Clive,” Joss added.
“I’m not juggling anyone,” I protested. “Nick and I just hang out sometimes, which I think is specifically because he knows I’m not trying to date him. He’s like…a brother.”
Both girls chortled.
“Anyway, he’s with India!” I protested. “Or whoever. One of these girls.”
“I think he’s mad for Gemma,” Joss said, unwrapping her scarf as if the gossip warmed her up. “Apparently, he proposed to her on her family’s reservation when he was really young, and that’s where he spent his gap year.”
“See? India, Davinia, Gemma, maybe even Bea for all we know,” I counted off the prospects on my gloved hand.
Cilla shot me a knowing look. “I hear you two laughing in your room until the wee hours. You think we don’t notice, but we do.”
“Nick is taken,” I said. “And I don’t want to be.”
Cilla raised a russet brow. “Don’t you?” she said. “You’re with Nick most days, and when you do open your bedroom door, Clive is waiting. Sounds taken to me.”
“Whatever you do, definitely don’t keep seeing Clive.” Joss yawned. “He’s such a slave to the Palace.”
“Says the girl whose father gives Eleanor her mammograms,” Cilla said.
“Clive can’t be that much of a slave to the Palace if he wants to be a reporter,” I said.
Joss shook her head. “The media is an indentured servant. Tank says—”
“Tank is as thick as one,” Cilla scoffed.
“And Clive is lovely,” I said defensively. “You’re friends with him, too, Joss!”
“I’m friends with a lot of people I think are too boring to snog,” Joss said.
“I don’t think anyone ever really wants to end up with a bloke they call ‘lovely,’” Cilla added. “My great-great-aunt married one, and the man made her so potty that eventually she poisoned him, and to get revenge his spirit possessed a garden rabbit that stared at her through the bedroom window for years.”
“Why didn’t she just poison it, too?” Joss asked.
Cilla looked at her as if she were crazy. “It wasn’t the rabbit’s fault.” She then turned to me. “My point, Rebecca my love, is that it’s hard to be free and clear for whatever comes along when you’re not making any room for anything to come along.”
This profundity was interrupted by the halting growls of a bus carefully turning into the station’s tight entrance. Within twenty seconds of the doors opening, Lacey hurtled out of it and threw herself right at me. We shrieked and hugged for five full minutes, as startled-looking passengers waited by the luggage hold for their bags.
“This is amazing!” Lacey crowed. “The scenery is amazing. This bus station is amazing. That chocolate bar I bought at Heathrow was amazing.” She looked at Joss, who was wearing crookedly stitched pleather leggings with homemade knee socks over them that read Welcome to Soxford in cross-stitch. “Those socks are amazing. England is fucking amazing.”
“Oh, I like you,” Joss said.
“It’s so good to have you here,” I said, squeezing Lacey again. “Come on, let’s get back. I think Gaz is hoping you’ll want to party away your jet lag.”
“Great! I can’t wait to meet Gaz,” Lacey said. “And…everyone.”
“You mean Clive?” Cilla asked innocently, as we began to head to the parking lot. “If you haven’t heard, he’s lovely.”
Lacey turned to me. “So you’re officially not into him.”
“Told you!” Cilla was triumphant. “She’s clearly the smart one.”
“Great. I already regret introducing the two of you. Maybe I should send Lacey back,” I said, but I didn’t let go of my sister the whole walk to the car.
*
I showed Oxford off as proudly as if I’d discovered it myself, and Lacey was a satisfying audience. She loved the juxtaposition of Oxford’s old architecture with its zebra-striped crosswalks and drugstores and Starbucks and McDonald’s. She loved the slim alleys that opened into unseen pubs, their patios and flower boxes and famous meat pies kept secret from the streets. She loved the small piece of the Bodleian Library that she could see, and the archaic rule that new students and visiting researchers had to recite a vow of good behavior just to venture into the parts she couldn’t. She loved the beef-flavored potato chips, and the shrimp-flavored potato chips, and the chicken-flavored potato chips. She even loved Clive. Our first night unfurled in a pleasant whirl of introductions and jokes and pints. Gaz proposed, Cilla smacked him for being lecherous, and Clive was chivalrous to a fault, even carrying Lacey to my door when she joked she was afraid she’d fall asleep walking up the stairs.
“I can’t figure out why you’re not in love with him,” Lacey said fuzzily.
“Because he’s lovely, I guess,” I said, mostly to myself.
As usual, Lacey was a rock star. Where I’d originally been the one who piqued everybody’s curiosity, I was old news now, and she’d packed her A-game for this trip, dazzling everyone with the infectious fizzy energy she always pulled out whenever she wanted people to fall in love with her. It was a trick I could never help but to admire, like a spectator, and it worked in Oxford the way it had always done. Joss proclaimed her a genius after a lengthy three-hour discussion of fashion. Cilla liked her because they shared a tendency to shoot straight with me (which translated to a lot of ribbing about Clive). And Bea ignored her except to note that she had better taste in shoes than I. It pleased me, how much everyone liked Lacey—I felt like the person who’d brought the most popular dish to the potluck—but there was also the smallest sense that I’d lost something that had been wholly mine.
“You do sort of look alike,” Clive mused. “Lacey’s teeth are straighter.”
“Different noses. Lacey’s ends in that little ski-jump bit,” Gaz narrated.
“And Bex is more angular. Everywhere,” Clive said.