“Finish your breakfast,” Lauren says. “We’ll sneak away for ten minutes and then you can brush your teeth and Danielle can work her magic.”
At some point when they were in the tenth grade, Lulu had become concerned with property values. Huck was on the short list to lead the minority party’s government in exile, a foundation situated in a handsome Washington, D.C., town house. Lulu made lists: National Cathedral School versus Madeira, where she discovered Brooke Astor herself had been a student, Bethesda versus Georgetown, selling the house versus renting the house. The agent had been dismayed to see that the occupants hadn’t fully taken advantage of one of the house’s frontiers: the roof. Lulu was sensible about these things, and the roof deck was built, completed not long after Huck had withdrawn his name from contention for the directorship of the foundation. Anyway, President Gore never came to pass, so it would have been an unexciting time to be at that foundation. In politics, in Huck’s politics, it’s better to be an enemy than a friend. They forgot all about the roof deck.
At least, Huck and Lulu did. By tenth grade, new privileges had accrued: Huck and Lulu decamping to Connecticut Friday morning, allowing Sarah to join them by train, Saturday morning, or skip the thing altogether. Lauren remembers Lulu, looking askance even behind her dark glasses, once, poolside at the Connecticut house, where the distinguished guest couldn’t take his eyes off the dollops of Lauren’s breasts, new enough then that she marveled at it; her nipples grew firmer just from the good professor’s gaze landing on them. The country was for relaxation, and it had to have been more relaxing without Sarah and Lauren in tow.
Lauren hasn’t been up to the roof deck in years. The last time: another party, a celebration of their graduation from college, or Sarah’s graduation, anyway. Lauren had come by, a formality. At that point, their relationship had entered some never discussed cooling-off period. Anyway, they were going to be roommates in the city; they were going to live together, which changed altogether Lauren’s relationship to the house on East Thirty-Sixth Street. Beautiful as it was, much as she loved it, that house was about Sunday dinners and little kid sleepovers and that first time sucking Ryan Harmon’s dick in the upstairs bathroom while Sarah and Amy and Tyler and Jake and Sasha and Rachel sat one floor above, under the Manhattan sky, smoking Camels and dropping the butts into empty Rolling Rock bottles where they died with a quick little hiss. That was childhood, and it was over.
“I haven’t been up here in ages.” Lauren surveys the view, the only thing you can do from that vantage. In the context of the city, of course, the house does not seem that high, but there, on the roof, you feel like a giant, a minor god. “It’s so nice today.”
Sarah sighs, relieved. “Cross your fingers. I should have waited until May.”
Lauren nods at Sarah’s midriff. “You dodged a bullet there,” she says.
There are four wooden chairs gathered around a round table, and they sit.
“I feel like we’re at a spa or something.” Lauren digs into her bag, removes the package of cigarettes and a small blue plastic lighter. “You know? All this primping, us in our gym clothes or something.”
“I thought you quit,” Sarah says.
Lauren lights a cigarette, exhales. “I’m not really smoking,” she says.
“Optical illusion.”
“I just thought, you know, for old time’s sake.” Lauren shrugs.
“We got our emphysema started right here on this rooftop,” Sarah says.
“Shit beer, cigarettes, Friday nights,” Lauren says.
“Ryan,” says Sarah. “Ryan something.”
“Tim Alhadef,” says Lauren. A beautiful half-Arab, half-Swedish guy on the soccer team with whom Sarah had been obsessed for a full year. He had curly hair and thick eyebrows and wore shorts even when it was cold outside.
“Tim Alhadef,” says Sarah, wistful. “God, he was fucking gorgeous.”
“Those legs,” Lauren says.
“Give me some of that,” says Sarah.
Lauren hands her the lit cigarette. “Whatever happened between the two of you anyway?” She knows there was something—a kiss, more than, a makeout in a corner while the rest of them were drinking and talking, but she can’t recall the specifics, and anyway, Sarah was always coy about that kind of thing. She could talk about sex in the theoretical, but not as it related back to her.
“Fuck,” Sarah says, exhaling the smoke. “That is good. Take this away. I’m going to kill the baby.”
“Our grandmothers smoked during pregnancy,” Lauren says.
“We kissed, once, Tim and me,” she says. “It was friendly, then more, and then nothing. A slip of the tongue. That’s it.”
“He was gorgeous, wasn’t he? Whatever happened to him?”