The Smart One

Chapter 4





Right from the start, Cleo knew she wanted to go to a college with a campus. She wanted green lawns and trees. She wanted a quad with brick buildings and college kids reading books on the grass. Basically, she wanted to go to college in a picture.

“Why?” her mom kept asking. “Why narrow it down before you even start looking?”

“Because,” Cleo said. She left it at that. Cleo had grown up in New York, lived on the Upper West Side her entire life surrounded by buildings and people, and she was ready for something different. There was no explaining to Elizabeth why she wanted—no, needed—a campus. She couldn’t say that she was craving greenery, that she imagined herself walking across grass, wearing a backpack, while leaves fell in front of her. She couldn’t say that she wanted to go to a school that had a campus because that was how she’d dreamt it would be. Elizabeth was not a dreaming woman, and would never understand.

Cleo also couldn’t say that she wanted to go somewhere different, somewhere no one else from her high school had even considered going. She’d listened as the guidance counselor had listed all the usual colleges, and she’d pressed the woman for more options until she’d come up with some.

When she stepped onto Bucknell’s campus, she knew it was the place for her. Their tour guide was a cute girl named Marnie, with a brown ponytail and a raspy voice. She was the kind of girl that looked like she always had a party to go to. Marnie laughed as she pointed to all the brick buildings, told them that she was a philosophy major (which made Elizabeth snort), that she was from Quakertown, Pennsylvania, and that her boyfriend was on the baseball team. “He’s the pitcher,” she said proudly, like they should all be jealous. Cleo found that she was.

After the tour, she and Elizabeth went to have lunch in Lewisburg, at a little place called Maya’s Café. Cleo tried to contain herself as they walked down Market Street, even though she wanted to point at the old-fashioned movie theater and squeal. Elizabeth didn’t like squealing and wouldn’t be amused.

They each ordered a BLT and as they waited, Elizabeth pointed to the glossy brochure and then ran her finger down it, like she was trying to read it a different way. “I’ve never even heard of this school,” she finally said. “You should keep exploring other options.”

“Okay,” Cleo said. She took a sip of her Diet Coke and slid the brochure back across the table toward her. She didn’t want Elizabeth touching it.

“I mean, my God, it’s small. What did they say? Nine hundred people in the freshman class.” Elizabeth shuddered, like this was unthinkable.

There was no point in arguing. Cleo knew she’d end up at Bucknell, but she also knew it wouldn’t happen by pitching a fit. She was only a junior. She would go on other college visits, she’d pretend to consider them. And when it came time, she’d make her choice and Elizabeth would let her go.

CLEO’S DAD WAS “NEVER IN THE PICTURE,” which was a phrase she heard her mom use once, so she stole it and used it whenever anyone asked questions. She found that it shut them up right away. There was something final and not quite nice about it. He was “never in the picture,” as if to say, don’t ask anything more.

Even if people had asked questions, Cleo wouldn’t have been able to answer them. Her mother told her that her father had been someone she worked with in Chicago at the Board of Trade, when she was “right out of college and dumb.” Once, when Cleo pressed for more information, her mom said, “He had a wife and a family and he wasn’t interested in a new one.” Cleo never shared that information. Even if her own mother wasn’t ashamed that she’d had an affair, Cleo found the whole thing humiliating. She was constantly afraid that her classmates would find out, that she would let it slip one day that her mom was a homewrecker.

After Elizabeth got pregnant, she moved to New York and got a job at a consulting firm, where she worked long hours and loved every minute of it. When Cleo was younger, she’d hated to listen to Elizabeth on work calls—she was always pushing people to do what she wanted, always sounded so angry and annoyed. Cleo knew why everyone caved around her, why Elizabeth just kept rising at the company. A coworker of Elizabeth’s once told Cleo, “Your mother is a force to be reckoned with,” as if Cleo didn’t know that already, as if that wasn’t the most obvious thing in the whole world.

Elizabeth was different from other mothers—Cleo knew that from the time she was about four. Some of the other mothers who worked hugged their children tightly when they dropped them off at school, declared how much they’d miss them, and surprised them by showing up early and taking them out of school for the day.

When Elizabeth dropped Cleo off, she’d walk her to the door, give her a light pat (usually on the head or back, sometimes on the arm), and walk away quickly. The few times that Cleo whined or clung to her, Elizabeth had been annoyed. “I have to go,” she would say. “That’s how it works. You stay here, and I have to go.”

It wasn’t that Elizabeth was a bad mom—she was just different. Cleo never felt bad for herself or imagined that she was missing out on anything. Mostly, she just wondered how they were even related.

“If I’m adopted,” Cleo said once when she was twelve, “just tell me now. I can handle it.”

Her mom had looked up from the computer, serious, and for a moment Cleo thought this would be the big reveal, when her mom admitted everything. Then Elizabeth had thrown her head back and laughed. Cleo had been insulted. “It’s not funny,” she said over and over, until Elizabeth was able to talk.

“I promise you, you’re mine. You’re not adopted. I grew you, I gave birth to you. Sorry, kid. This is it.”

Elizabeth wasn’t a liar, and she certainly wasn’t one to lie to protect feelings, and so Cleo didn’t argue. (Though she was deeply disturbed by the idea that she’d been “grown” by Elizabeth, like a plant or a sea monkey.) As she got older, Cleo could see that she looked just like Elizabeth, almost identical, really, and so she tried to ignore the thought that her real mother was living somewhere else.

How else could she explain the differences? Elizabeth was entirely unsentimental. She barely kept photographs, let alone souvenirs or letters or any sort of memorabilia. Cleo kept it all. She kept every birthday card she’d ever gotten, even the ones from people she didn’t like. When she tried to throw them out, she found that she couldn’t—they looked so sad in the trash, the balloons and smiling animals staring up at her, and so she ended up pulling them back out and putting them safely in a box.

Cleo saved tests and old notebooks, papers that she was especially proud of, notes from her classmates. She saved the cap from the first beer she ever drank (a Miller Lite). She hated to give away clothes, even if she never wore them or they didn’t fit anymore. It seemed so mean to just discard them, like they had feelings and would be hurt when boxed and sent to Goodwill.

It was problematic to be a “low-level hoarder” (as Elizabeth called her) while living in New York. Their apartment at Seventy-ninth and Riverside was nice—spacious even, by most standards—but it was still an apartment in New York. Sometimes Elizabeth would reach her breaking point, and lay down the law, sounding more like a mother than she usually did. “You need to get rid of this stuff,” she’d say, looking in Cleo’s closet. “What is all this junk?” She’d hold up a stuffed elephant by its ear, and toss it on the floor, like it was going to be the first thing they threw out.

“No,” Cleo would say. She’d rescue the elephant. “I’ll clean it out, just don’t touch anything, please don’t touch a thing.”

It was the same thing she’d made her mom promise when she went off to college. “My room is off limits,” she said. “You aren’t allowed to throw out one thing—not one thing—while I’m gone.” She made Elizabeth swear up and down a million times before she was satisfied. And still she sometimes worried that Elizabeth would get the urge to clean and would throw out all of her memories—her stuffed animals and dolls, her favorite books, her journals—would bag them up in big black garbage bags, until there was nothing left of her.

ELIZABETH WAS IMPATIENT WHEN CLEO moved into the dorm. Most of the other mothers were making the beds, dusting, or folding clothes. Elizabeth sat on the desk chair and watched Cleo do all of these things, looking at her BlackBerry or her watch every few minutes. Elizabeth hadn’t offered to help, but even if she had, Cleo would have declined. Cleo wanted to put everything together herself. She knew that if her mom helped, she’d rush through it, and she didn’t want her underwear thrown in a messy pile in a drawer. She and Elizabeth didn’t have the kind of relationship where she trusted Elizabeth to fold her underwear.

Every so often, parents or other kids moving into their rooms on the hall popped their heads in to say hi. Elizabeth, who was wearing jeans that looked crisp and pressed, flats, and a button-down, barely smiled at these people. “Hello,” she’d say quickly, nodding her head at their response as if agreeing with them, Yes, it is a pleasure to meet me, isn’t it?

Cleo was used to the way her mom didn’t quite fit into social situations. It wasn’t that she didn’t know what to do or say to come across as normal and friendly—she just didn’t care. “Be your own person,” she always said to Cleo. As if there were a choice to be someone else.

Once in sixth grade, when Cleo was crying because Susan Cantor cut her out of the lunch table, told her she couldn’t sit there anymore, Elizabeth had said, “Why do you care about those girls? If they don’t want to be your friend, why do you want to be theirs?”

Whenever Cleo went out of her way to be nice to people, writing letters to her grandmother, being polite to her friends’ parents or to her teachers, Elizabeth would sometimes comment later, “Good God, Cleo, you can’t get everyone in the world to like you. Why try?” Elizabeth was used to being disliked—Cleo suspected she even enjoyed it—and she couldn’t imagine why her daughter wasn’t the same. “You’re such a people pleaser,” she’d said on more than one occasion, in the same way people said, “You’re such a liar,” or “You’re such a cokehead.”

Cleo’s roommate, a small Asian girl named Grace, had already moved her things in and gone off to try to meet up with the dance troupe she wanted to join. “I’m passionate about dancing,” she’d said when they met. Cleo had nodded and tried to think of a fact she could share. “I was on the school paper,” she’d finally said. Grace had nodded like this was satisfactory.

“I’m almost done, Mom,” Cleo told Elizabeth. She was done with her bed and was on to unpacking her clothes into the drawers. Just then she turned and saw a man at the door to the room, “Knock, knock,” he said. Cleo screamed, and he smiled apologetically.

“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to sneak up on you! I just came to offer my services.” He held up a hammer and a box of tools. “My wife and daughter suggested I see if anyone on the hall needed help hanging things up. I suspect they just wanted me out of the room.” He winked at Elizabeth, and she gave him a small smile. Cleo laughed loudly to make up for her mom.

“That would be amazing,” she said. “I wanted to put this shelf up, but I’m actually not sure how to do it.”

“That should be no sweat. I’m Jack Collaruso, by the way. My daughter, Monica, is moving in down the hall.” He stopped to shake Elizabeth’s hand and then Cleo’s, and then he turned to the wall and began making marks with a pencil. “Monica’s our oldest, so my wife’s not handling this so well.”

Elizabeth made a sound then, a sort of agreement grunt that made it clear she wasn’t very interested in Monica or her mother’s emotional turmoil. For twenty minutes, the conversation continued like this. Jack would say something, trying to include Elizabeth in the Club of Parents Dropping Their Children Off at College, and Elizabeth would give a borderline rude reaction, while Cleo went out of her way trying to be charming and polite to make up for it. By the time the shelf was hung, Cleo was sweating.

As Jack was finishing putting up the shelf, a dark-haired mother and daughter poked their heads in. “There you are,” the woman said. “We thought we’d lost you.”

“You told me to go be helpful,” Jack said. The two smiled at each other and Cleo got the feeling of watching a play or a sitcom about a couple taking their daughter to college.

“This is my wife, Mary Ann, and my daughter, Monica,” Jack said. He put his arm around Monica’s shoulders and smiled. Monica looked at the floor, and Cleo wanted to tell her that she had no reason to be embarrassed for her parents when Elizabeth, who was clearly the most embarrassing parent, was sitting right there.

“I was going to run down and get a cup of coffee somewhere. All this unpacking and crying has made me tired,” Mary Ann said.

“Mom.” Monica rolled her eyes, but smiled.

“Why don’t you come with us?” Mary Ann was smiling and looking at Elizabeth, who looked at Cleo and then stood up.

“Coffee sounds good,” Elizabeth said. Cleo let out a breath and Elizabeth gave her a look that said, You need to relax.

“That’s great. It will give these two a chance to get to know each other.” Mary Ann squeezed Monica’s arm and smiled.

After their parents left, Cleo and Monica looked at each other for a few seconds. Cleo wondered if they were just going to stay like that forever, just silently staring until their parents got back, and then Monica said, “So, where are you from?”

“New York. What about you?”

“Boston. Well, just outside. Lynnfield.”

Cleo nodded. “I’ve heard of it,” she said, although she hadn’t.

“Hey,” Monica said. She was staring at Cleo’s bed, where the gray ears of a formerly pink bunny were sticking out from behind a pillow. It was Cleo’s baby blanket—a bunny head attached to a blanket, which used to be pink but was now faded. Monica walked over to the bed, and Cleo tried to think of something to say. Should she deny it was hers? Say that Elizabeth brought it? Or would that make it worse? Cleo had had the blanket for as long as she could remember. It was a thing that you gave babies—they were called snugglies or something like that. Cleo always called hers Bunny Nubby, and when she was younger, she had liked to hold it in her right hand and press it against her face while she sucked her thumb. She’d thought about leaving Bunny Nubby behind, but when she imagined sleeping in a strange room, she knew she wanted him there. When Elizabeth had seen her pull it out earlier that day, she’d made a face and said, “Oh Cleo, really?” And so Cleo had hidden it behind the pillow so no one else could see it and so Elizabeth wouldn’t make any more comments.

And now Monica was walking right over to it, leaning over and plucking Bunny Nubby out from behind the pillow, dropping it on the bed and then running out of the room. Cleo stood there. She felt dizzy. What was Monica going to do? Announce to the hall that she had a baby blanket with her? Wasn’t this sort of behavior supposed to be done with? Wasn’t this the kind of thing that girls in junior high did to each other? Bunny Nubby was lying crumpled on the bed, and Cleo was just about to go and rescue him, put him in her drawer or somewhere safe, when Monica came running back in the room, breathing hard and holding her own matching bunny blanket.

“Look,” she said. She sounded delighted and held her blanket next to Bunny Nubby. “Twins!”

FROM THAT POINT ON, Cleo and Monica were always together. Most people they met assumed the two had known each other before they’d gotten to Bucknell, that they’d gone to high school together or had been friends for a long time. Their names were almost always said together, Monica and Cleo, like they were some sort of celebrity couple. Cleo loved this. She’d had friends before, but never a best friend. She was always the girl that was the addition to the group, the peripheral friend that was nice to have there but wasn’t missed if she wasn’t; and while she was fond of her high school friends, she didn’t miss them all that much.

Monica’s roommate, a girl named Sumi Minderschmidt, had never shown up. A week into the semester, Monica found out that Sumi had decided to go to Villanova instead. “Poor Sumes,” Monica said. “Confused until the very end.”

They loved Sumi’s name, and would often say things to each other like, “You know who loves Lucky Charms? Sumi Minderschmidt,” or “Who do you think you are? A Minderschmidt?”

Cleo was in heaven. She and Monica had inside jokes that could make them double over with laughter, make everyone else look at them with jealousy. They were a pair, a team. And so, a few days after they found out that Sumi wouldn’t be joining them, Monica blurted out, “You should just move in here.” She said it quickly, like she was professing her love for Cleo and was afraid she was going to be rebuffed.

“Okay!” Cleo said. She was delighted. She’d been thinking the same thing, but hadn’t wanted to be the one to bring it up. It was Monica’s room, and she thought maybe she would want it all to herself, but Cleo was so sick of Grace and her spandex dance outfits, and the way she slept with an eye mask and a noise machine set to “Babbling Brook” that made Cleo have to pee. If Cleo ever left the room while Grace was sleeping, she’d hear about it the next day. “You woke me up,” Grace would say. “We can’t have that happen. I just really need my rest for dancing.”

And so the girls got permission from the RA, a senior named Colleen, who was never there much anyway, and moved all of Cleo’s things into Monica’s room. They were perfect together as roommates. They ate pretzels dipped in peanut butter and talked seriously about which famous person they would choose to be their boyfriend. “It can’t just be about looks,” Monica would always say. “It has to be about their personality, too.”

Monica’s Boston accent was surprising and harsh, and at first Cleo found herself reaching out her hand and placing it on Monica’s arm, as if that could somehow soften the edge of her words. But soon she got used to it, the way that she could hear Monica talking loudly down the hall, the way her voice was sort of like a chicken squawk. Cleo found that she started to like the way it sounded, and she sometimes used the word wicked herself, when the situation called for it.

They made up dance routines in their room, after drinking vodka mixed with orange guava juice that they carried back from the dining hall in huge cups. They accompanied each other to parties of upper-classmen, where they were always welcome. Cleo found that their prettiness was somehow multiplied when they were together, that people seemed to notice them more and gave them more attention. She thought maybe it was because when they stood next to each other, Monica’s hair looked darker and hers looked blonder and the difference was striking. But that was just a theory.

They shared each other’s clothes and Cleo always put eye makeup on Monica, after suggesting nicely that sometimes she was just a tad too heavy on the shadow. It was everything Cleo could have hoped for college, and so midway through freshman year, when Monica suggested they move off campus, Cleo was all for it.

“My cousin is a senior and living in one of the best off-campus houses. If we don’t take it now, some junior will get it and keep it for two years. We have to do it. It would be a crime not to.”

“But are we even allowed?” Cleo asked. She hadn’t heard any other freshman talking about moving off campus.

“Well, legally it’s allowed,” Monica said. She bit her bottom lip. “I mean, they don’t really like sophomores to move off, but they make special exceptions sometimes, and my dad thinks he can help.”

Monica never said specifically, but Cleo got the feeling that her dad, who was a Bucknell alum, donated a lot of money to the school—money that had helped Monica get accepted, and also get into the best freshman dorm, and into any classes that were filled.

They decided to ask two girls from their hall, Laura and Mary, to move in with them. The four of them sometimes went to eat dinner together, or pre-gamed in one of their rooms, and it seemed like the logical choice. All four girls got permission from their parents and then from the housing board to move off campus. For the rest of freshman year, the four of them talked endlessly about how amazing their house was going to be and the parties they could have. Sometimes, in the dining hall, Cleo would say to Monica, “I can’t wait to have our own kitchen next year,” just to remind whomever was around them that they were special, that they were moving off campus.

In New York that summer, Cleo felt like she was just counting the days until she could get back to Lewisburg. It seemed now that Bucknell was her real life, and New York and Elizabeth were just a holding place to wait until she could get back there. Cleo went to visit Monica in June, and stayed in her big sprawling house in Lynnfield, slept in the spare twin bed in her room, and went with her to a party at a high school friend’s parentless house.

While they sat outside that night, drinking Keystone Lights by the pool, the two girls talked about their sophomore year, told all the other kids there about their new house and the parties they were going to have. She and Monica sat at the edge of the pool, their feet in the water, and they laughed at everything.

“I’ve missed you so much,” Monica said. “You’re just so much more important to me than my high school friends.”

Cleo loved everything about Monica. She loved where she grew up, how she was meticulous about putting her clothes away as soon as she changed, the way she drew little animals on the corners of her notebooks. She had a best friend and everything just fit. Cleo was filled with happy; everything was right in the world.

SOPHOMORE YEAR STARTED PERFECTLY. The girls moved in at the end of August, tripping over each other as they unpacked and ran from room to room. They hung up posters and bulletin boards, bought throw pillows and pots from Target, stocked up on macaroni and cheese and big plastic bins of pretzels. They were as happy as four little clams.

For the first few months, things went amazingly well—swimmingly, as her mom would say. Then two things happened, although Cleo couldn’t say which had happened first, or if one thing caused the other, or if they just happened at the exact same time. The first thing was that Monica became severely anorexic. She started running for hours each morning, first at the gym on campus and then, when spring came, outside. After her run, she’d do sit-ups in the common room. As they all stumbled out of their bedrooms to make it to class in the morning, they’d find Monica flying up and down as she worked her abs, her arms crossed in front of her chest in an X, counting her progress in an angry, loud voice. “One, two, three, four,” she would huff. When she got to “twenty-five,” she’d stop for a few seconds, lying on the floor and staring at the ceiling, and then she’d start all over again.

“She’s like a soldier,” Laura whispered one morning. It was an accurate description and it made Cleo nervous.

This seemed to come out of nowhere. Monica was anything but fat, and while both of the girls drank Diet Coke and frequently looked in the mirror and said, “I’m a cow,” or “Look at my giant ass,” it didn’t mean anything. It was just what girls did. Cleo hadn’t seen any behavior that would have led her to believe that Monica was going to be one of them: an Eating Disorder Girl. At Cleo’s high school, there was one in every group of friends—a thin, chilled girl with bags under her eyes who was eventually taken out of school to go to a rehab clinic and returned eating measured foods and seeing the school counselor once a week. She couldn’t understand how she’d missed this in her best friend.

Monica kept a notebook to write down every piece of food that she ate. Once, Cleo looked over her shoulder as she wrote down, “Baby carrots, lettuce (NO dressing!), gum, water.”

“It doesn’t seem like you’re eating enough,” Cleo offered.

Monica slammed the notebook shut. “I’m being healthy,” she said. “Not like the rest of you, eating candy and french fries all day.”

She stomped off to her room, where she spent most of her time with the door closed listening to music. She was always tired and cold, sometimes coming out to nap on the couch in the common room, because the sun came through the windows, and she could curl up there like a cat trying to warm itself.

When the rest of them ate, Monica watched them closely. “Is that a waffle?” she’d ask, sniffing the air. She’d sit and stare as Cleo put syrup on her Eggo, suggesting that she add butter, or maybe more syrup. Then she’d fill a glass of water and drink it while she watched Cleo eat, with an almost erotic look on her face. It was really freaky.

Cleo noticed one day that Monica’s arms were covered with peach fuzz, and she knew she had to call her parents. They came right away and took Monica out of school for the last month of sophomore year, keeping her home all summer and the first semester of junior year. They left everything in her room, paid her rent, and told the girls she could return when she was better. Sometimes Cleo would open the door and look in Monica’s room, which was just as she’d left it—the bed was made, there were books stacked on the desk, a box of Kleenex on her nightstand—except there was a fine layer of dust over everything, so that it made Cleo feel like time had stopped. She would stand there and stare at it, until it made her feel too lonely, and then she’d shut the door and go to her own room.

Once Monica was gone, Cleo wished she wasn’t staying in Lewisburg for the summer. The house felt empty, and even though Monica had been in her own calorie-counting world for most of the year, Cleo missed her greatly. But the arrangements were made, and it was too late to back out of the summer job working in the Visitors Center. And so she stayed.

The second thing that happened that year was that Laura and Mary turned into complete and total bitches. The house had always been a little divided, like they were on two teams—Monica and Cleo on one and Laura and Mary on the other—but they still all got along pretty well. And then once Monica got sick and left, the other girls seemed to blame Cleo in some way. They were annoyed at her all the time, made passive-aggressive comments about her jacket’s being left on the couch, or the amount of noise that she made. Post-it notes were left on milk cartons and said things like, This is Mary’s Milk. Unless you’re Mary, then hands OFF.

Cleo had used Mary’s milk on her cereal exactly once, and then she found the note there the next day. She honestly couldn’t figure out how Mary could have known, until she looked at the side of the plastic carton and saw little black lines to mark the level of the milk. She placed the carton back in the refrigerator carefully, and closed the door softly, as if someone was going to jump out and catch her.

It became clear that it had been a mistake to move in with these girls so soon. Everyone else in their class had waited an extra year to make their permanent living choices, giving them time to weed out the crazies, to form real friendships, and now they all had their own living pods that were full and had no room for Cleo.

IN JUNE, RIGHT AFTER SOPHOMORE YEAR ENDED, Cleo went to a party with a girl she knew from her Foundations of Accounting class. It was at that party, standing by the keg in a dirty kitchen with a sticky floor, that she met Max. They were both holding red plastic cups, and waiting in line to get them filled. This was a story that pleased Cleo. It seemed like such a perfect way to meet a boy in college, the way he’d started talking to her in line, then pumped the keg and taken her cup to fill it first, tilting it perfectly to make sure there was no foam on top.

She liked him immediately, mostly because he was taller than she was. Cleo was five nine, and it was surprising how many boys she towered over, especially when she wore heels. But Max was well over six feet tall, and her head just cleared his shoulder. The two of them hung out the whole night at the party, and once when she went to the bathroom and they were separated for more than ten minutes, he came up behind her and put his arm around her shoulders. “There you are,” he said. “I was afraid I lost you.”

At the end of the night, Max said, “I really liked talking to you.” He said this like it was something that boys in college said all the time, when Cleo knew from experience that it certainly was not.

Max was so easy—and not in a bad way. He was so sure of himself, so honest, so happy. After that first night, he was always around and Cleo was thrilled to have someone to hang out with, someone to distract her from her haunted house of eating disorders and milk Post-its. He always wanted to actually do things. Unlike most of the boys at Bucknell, who sat around in sweatpants and played video games, Max suggested real activities, like playing tennis or going to see a movie.

By August, they were a serious couple, by the college definition. When Max’s parents came up to visit one weekend, he asked Cleo to come to dinner with them, and so she put on a sundress and waited for them outside of her house, feeling more nervous than she ever had before.

They ate dinner at a steakhouse, and Max’s mom encouraged Max to get the biggest steak, made sure that all the leftovers were wrapped up for him, and asked about ten times what he was making himself for dinner these days.

Max’s mom fascinated Cleo. Weezy was doting. Cleo had never used that word much before, but it was the only word to explain Weezy’s relationship with Max. When she walked into his apartment, she almost immediately began to clean it, stocking the kitchen with groceries she’d bought, dusting shelves and changing sheets.

During her first visit to the Coffey house, she and Max were sitting on the couch when Max mentioned in an offhand way that he was hungry. “Do you want a snack?” Weezy asked. She got up and went to the kitchen, began returning with options, holding up bags of chips and cold cuts, like she was one of those ladies on a game show, presenting the contestants with their prizes.

It was no wonder Max was such a happy person. Sitting there, watching Weezy fall all over him, she got it. His whole life, people had been doing things for him, telling him how cute and funny he was—and he was all of those things, but still. Cleo couldn’t remember the last time her mom had made her a snack. She might have been around five years old, and the only reason her mom got involved was because the granola bars were on a shelf that was too high for her to reach. After that, the granola bars were put on a lower shelf so that Cleo could help herself to one whenever she wanted.

The first time that Cleo met the whole Coffey family, she was overwhelmed, to say the least. They were loud and could be crass. They hugged often, sometimes for no reason at all. With no warning, they’d just reach over and pull the person standing next to them into an embrace. They touched each other’s hair and squeezed shoulders when they passed by. More than once, Cleo jumped when a hand surprised her.

“You have a family of touchers,” she told Max. Then she tried to take it back and explain what she meant, because it sounded like she was accusing them of something. But Max just laughed. It was nearly impossible to upset him.

WHEN MONICA RETURNED, HALFWAY THROUGH junior year, Cleo was ecstatic. She couldn’t wait to introduce her to Max, to talk to her every night, to have a friend in the house again. But Monica wasn’t interested in any of it. She spent most of her time shut away in her room. She seemed mad at everyone, like they’d all betrayed her. Cleo apologized for calling her parents, but it didn’t make a difference. Monica just shrugged like she couldn’t care less. When Cleo talked to her—about school or Max or parties—she’d just look back at her, visibly bored. It was as if they’d never known each other before.

Cleo didn’t know how to make it better. For a few days, she’d give Monica space, and then she’d decide that it would be better to spend more time together, so she’d force her way into Monica’s room, sit with her and do homework. But nothing seemed to work. Monica was different and no matter what Cleo did, it wasn’t getting better. It was lonelier than when she’d been gone.

Max lived on the top floor of a house in Lewisburg that was converted to a two-bedroom apartment. At the end of junior year, his roommate, Charlie, was asked by the college not to return the following year (a polite way to kick someone out), and Max asked Cleo to move in with him.

“Come on,” he said. “It’s perfect. I don’t want to get some random to move in, and you’re here all the time anyway.”

That was true, but Cleo wasn’t sure. “I’m not sure my mom would like that.”

“My mom wouldn’t like it either,” Max said. “We just won’t tell them.”

Cleo was, first of all, just a little offended at the thought that Max’s mother wouldn’t like their living together, even though she’d just said the same thing about her own mom. Still. It was different.

“Just think about it,” Max said.

And so she did. She thought about what it would be like to give up her house and move in with Max. How she could use his milk whenever she wanted, how he would never yell at her if it was her turn to buy the toilet paper. It was tempting. Very tempting.

But it was a crazy idea. Couples in college didn’t live together. They’d barely been dating a year, and what were they going to do? Live together for the rest of their lives?

“You’re overthinking it,” Max told her.

But Cleo didn’t think she was. She tried to picture herself living there, tried to imagine what it would feel like to wake up with Max every morning, to have all of her clothes there in a real dresser instead of the Tupperware box that she kept them in now. But then she thought about what would happen if they broke up, how she’d probably end up sleeping in the other bedroom since it would be impossible to move midyear.

That was enough to make Cleo decide to stay in her own house. Also, she felt disloyal leaving Monica, even if she barely spoke to her anymore. It was just one more year, and really she could do anything for a year. Maybe things would change and senior year at the house would end up being fun. Maybe Monica would go back to her old self. Anything could happen.

A few days later, Laura came out of her bedroom holding a cardboard wheel and looking full of purpose. Laura, a sturdy girl from Iowa, had gained all the weight that Monica had lost over the years, and was now bordering on being truly fat. People always used to say that Laura “had a really pretty face,” but Cleo didn’t think they even said that anymore.

“What is that?” Cleo asked. She was sitting cross-legged on the couch, eating a bowl of Life cereal and flipping through a gossip magazine.

“It’s a chore wheel,” Laura said. “Well, more than a chore wheel, really. See, there’s a part here that also reminds us whose turn it is to buy toilet paper and toothpaste and dishwasher soap. So it’s fair.”

Fairness was something that Laura talked about often. When Cleo first started dating Max, Laura mentioned that she thought they should have a rule for how many times a boyfriend could sleep over in one week. “It’s not fair to the rest of us if there’s a stranger here all the time.”

“He’s not a stranger,” Cleo said. “He’s my boyfriend.”

“Still,” Laura said. “We have to be fair.”

And that was why Cleo ended up spending all of her time at Max’s, keeping clean underwear and pajamas in the Tupperware box that he had in his closet.

Now Laura stood in front of Cleo, clutching her cardboard wheel, and called Mary and Monica out of their rooms to show them her creation.

“See?” She pointed to the wheel. “For one week, it will be someone’s responsibility to clean the bathroom, and someone else will be responsible for the kitchen and so on. Then we’ll switch.”

“Fine,” Monica said. “Fine with me.” She sat on one of the futons in the room, hugging her knees to her chest and looking bored. She was pretty agreeable these days. “The bathroom’s disgusting anyway.”

Cleo tried to catch her eye, to look at her so that she could see that Monica really thought this was stupid too. She wanted them to roll their eyes at each other and then go into one of their rooms and laugh about how crazy and annoying Laura was being. But Monica kept her eyes down, picking imaginary fuzz and stray hairs off of her leggings.

“Wait,” Mary said. “What if, like, let’s just say it’s my week to clean the kitchen and then Cleo leaves her cereal bowl in the sink. Do I have to clean that?”

“I don’t leave my bowl in the sink,” Cleo said.

“Okay, sure,” Mary said. She snorted and shook her head.

“I don’t. I don’t leave my dishes in the sink.”

“Okay, guys,” Laura said. “I mean, the fair thing is for the kitchen person to just be there for the big stuff, like emptying the dishwasher and just making sure it’s clean. We’re all still responsible for our own mess.”

“Are we?” Mary asked. She looked at Cleo.

Cleo was still staring at Monica, willing her to look up and defend Cleo, or at least acknowledge that the girls were ganging up on her. But Monica only looked up to say, “So are we done?”

Cleo stood up and put her cereal bowl on the coffee table. Her hands were shaking and she knew she was about to cry. “Actually, I think a chore wheel sounds like a great idea,” she said. “Fantastic, actually.”

“Really?” Mary said.

“Yes, really. I’d also like to say that I won’t be living here next year. I’m moving out.”

“What?” Laura asked. “You’re just telling us now? What if we can’t find a new person? This is so unfair.”

“Everything’s unfair,” Cleo said. She knew she wasn’t making sense and she didn’t care.

When she told Max, he screamed, “Yes!” He hugged her around the waist and her feet came up off the ground. “This is going to be great,” he said. “You’ll see.”

THEY MOVED ALL OF CLEO’S STUFF into the apartment right away, and spent the summer working and going to barbecues. Cleo had gotten a marketing internship, working for the Little League World Series in Williamsport. Elizabeth had advised her to take an internship in New York, but Cleo remained firm.

“You don’t even want to go into marketing,” Elizabeth said. “And you don’t even like sports.”

“I like sports,” Cleo said. “And maybe I will want to go into marketing.”

“This is a mistake, Cleo. When you’re up against another candidate that did an internship at a well-known firm in New York, and then they look at you and see you wasted away your time as a ball girl in some stupid town, do you really think you’ll win?”

Cleo was determined to show Elizabeth that she was wrong. Also, she didn’t want to be away from Max, so an internship in New York was out of the question. She didn’t give Elizabeth too much information about her job. She wasn’t a ball girl, but she was mostly just typing out schedules and directions to send to the parents of the players, and getting coffee for people in the office. She was pretty sure there was no marketing involved whatsoever.

At the apartment, Cleo pretended they were married. They played house, making dinner (usually just pasta and jarred sauce) and drinking wine, like they were adults. She knew that her old roommates were wrong when they told her she was making a mistake. “This will end in disaster,” Mary had said as she packed up.

Cleo had become friends with some of Max’s friends, but it felt like they were on loan, like they never really made the switch to being hers. She had really started to like his friend Ally, had started to think that maybe she would be the one that Cleo clicked with, until she heard her say at a party, “Cleo’s totally nice. She’s supersweet. She’s just, you know, sort of a loner.”

A loner? Cleo had been waiting for the bathroom when she heard this, and Ally was around the corner, out of sight, talking to someone else. She wanted to ask Ally what she meant by that, but she didn’t. Instead, she stood there praying that she could get into the bathroom before Ally saw her.

Later that night, she’d told Max what she’d heard. “Do you think I’m a loner?”

“No.” Max laughed.

“It’s not funny. Why would Ally say that? I thought she liked me.”

“She does like you,” Max said. “Don’t let it bother you.”

“I can’t help it.”

“Look, Ally can’t be alone for five minutes without going crazy. You know that. She can’t eat alone, she can’t walk to class alone, and she certainly can’t study alone. She’s probably just jealous of you.”

“It didn’t sound like she was jealous.”

“Well, then she’s intrigued. You do your own thing, that’s all. You don’t need a clan of girls around you at all times.”

“I guess,” Cleo said. But it wasn’t that she didn’t need it, she’d just never had it. She’d learned to live without.

Cleo felt like she’d failed in some very real way, to be almost a senior in college and not have one single girlfriend to show for it. It was her mom’s fault, probably. Elizabeth didn’t have any friends, not really. She had work people that she went out to dinner with sometimes, or to the Hamptons with, but not real friends that she relaxed and spent time with. And now Cleo was all f*cked up because of it. She’d never seen an example of how to have friends and now maybe she never would. She could go on a talk show about it.

One night she and Max were watching TV, and she said, “You’re my best friend, you know.”

Max smiled. “Why do you sound so sad about it?”

“Don’t you think it’s weird? That you’re my best friend? My only friend, really? That I don’t have any girlfriends?”

Max thought for a minute. “No. I think you got in with a bad crowd early on.”

“A bad crowd?”

“Yes, a bad crowd. Any house with a milk tracer and a chore wheel is a bad crowd. In my book, at least.”

“I guess so.”

Max came closer to her and pulled her head down to his chest. “You’re my best friend, too,” he said.

“You’re such a liar.”

“I’m not. I’m not lying at all.”

“What about Mickey?”

Max wrinkled his nose. “He’s fun, but you smell way better.” He lifted up her shirt and started kissing her stomach. “Way better.”

IN THE MIDDLE OF AUGUST, they packed their bags and headed to the shore for a weeklong vacation with the Coffeys. They’d agreed to keep their living arrangement a secret from their families, and Cleo was terrified that she was going to blurt it out during the trip. Max told her she was being paranoid, but she knew better.

Around the Coffeys, she became a strange version of who she was. She tried to be chatty, but her voice came out higher than it usually was. She tried to be casual, but she felt uncomfortable everywhere. It was exhausting.

Cleo was almost certain that Aunt Maureen was bordering on a drinking problem, although when she suggested this once, Max laughed. “She just likes to have a good time,” he said.

On the drive to the house, Cleo asked how Claire was doing. She was nervous about seeing her after the whole engagement disaster.

“She’s good,” Max said.

“Well, she can’t be good. She just called off her wedding.”

Max had shrugged. “I mean, it sucks, but I think she’s handling it fine.”

“It’s just so sad. I feel so bad for her,” Cleo said.

“Well, don’t ask her about it.”

“You don’t think I should say anything?”

“No,” Max said. “You know Claire. She doesn’t like to dwell on things.”

“Yeah, but I’ll feel weird not mentioning it.”

“Trust me, she doesn’t want to talk about it.”

So now there were two things that Cleo wasn’t supposed to talk about. She took a deep breath and looked out the window.

“Are you okay?” Max asked.

“I’m just nervous, I guess,” she said.

Max reached over and took her hand. “It’ll be fun,” he said. “I promise.”

Cleo felt very grown-up just then, driving with her boyfriend to join his family on vacation, discussing the things that they weren’t to discuss with the rest of the family. And the two of them drove almost the whole way like that, holding hands, sometimes linking their fingers, sometimes just resting against each other. It thrilled Cleo a little bit to be doing this, traveling in a car, with her live-in boyfriend, driving through the night with their secrets between them.