“You’ve bought a sofa,” Sarah says.
“I don’t feel vaguely sad,” Lauren says.
“Good.” Sarah pauses. “You probably think this whole thing is stupid.”
“What whole thing?”
“This.” Sarah gestures at the room around them. There’s a skill-less painting on the wall to the left of the bed: a sailboat. “Tropical weekend getaway with the girls. Hen party, that’s what they call it in England. Hen party. Hen pecked. There’s something sexist there, isn’t there, women as fowl?”
“I thought maybe there was some implied double entendre there,” Lauren says. “The opposite of cock, you know. But I don’t hate this. The tropics! What is there to hate? I’ll take this over Thanksgiving. Why did I never consider this before, actually? Destination Thanksgiving. It’s sort of genius.”
“But I bet your family misses you.”
“Maybe.” Lauren doesn’t like to discuss her family with Sarah. Lauren knows and understands the nuances of the Thomas familial life. She knows the private language they speak at home. Sarah does not know the Brooks family way of life—even Lauren feels she no longer knows the Brooks family way of life. She prefers it this way.
Sarah is staring at the ceiling. In profile, Lauren can see a trace of Lulu in her. Something about the way she holds her head, like she’s posing for a photograph, but it comes to her naturally. At her chin, though, she turns back into her father, masculine, decisive, no longer Lulu, without whatever you call that quality that isn’t quite beauty but is something approaching it.
“My mom wanted to come this weekend,” Sarah says.
“No.” Lauren shakes her head.
“She did.”
Lauren laughs. “Of course she did.”
“A girls’ weekend, she just kept saying that, over and over again, finally I was like—Mom, you’re not one of the girls,” says Sarah. “I felt bad, but can you imagine if she’d tagged along?”
Lauren can, actually.
“Well, I’m glad you’re not hating this. I’m half hating it,” says Sarah. “But this is fun, just lying here like this, away from Meredith’s travails.”
“Maybe we just need to sleep? Like even though we’re not tired. Tomorrow is another day and all that jazz? We’ll get pedicures and order shrimp cocktail and eat lunch on the beach and do whatever.”
“Read a book? That’s what I feel like doing, reading a book. I feel like reading a book and thinking about nothing.”
“Or talking about nothing.” Lauren drains her glass. “That’s what you want. To sit with our feet buried in the sand because it’s cool and the sun is hot, and you want to talk but not about anything. About the weather. About what there is to talk about. About things you saw on the street. About whatever you heard on NPR.”
“That is what I want.” Sarah nods. “How did you know?”
“That’s what everyone wants,” Lauren says.
Chapter 12
Knowing it all is a condition of being twelve. So it was something (strange, noteworthy, unfamiliar, odd) that at twelve, Lauren realized that she didn’t actually know Sarah, didn’t understand her. She had thought otherwise for some time; they’d been acquainted for a whole year, after all, a long damn stretch no matter how old you are. Sarah was not quite pretty but was quite popular, by whatever alchemy determined popularity. At twelve, popularity is as powerful a force as you can imagine, and it conferred on Sarah something like authority, the province of grown-ups. Sarah spoke; people listened.
Lauren had nothing, at twelve. Her chest as flat as those of the boys who made a big show of stripping out of their shirts during their basketball games—what, it was hot! Her hair, unremarkable; makeup, forbidden—hell, pierced ears were forbidden. Plus she didn’t know any of these kids, didn’t understand the things they talked about: the Hamptons, their big sisters’ drug dealers, their mothers’ plastic surgery, their fathers’ indictment or promotion or book deal. One of her classmates came to school daily with a bodyguard; this was never remarked upon, which drove her insane. Who were these people?