The Smart One (11 page)

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 fucked 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.

CHAPTER
5

The house at the shore looked like it belonged in a fairy tale. When Claire was little, she used to call it the Gingerbread House, because it was tan and pink with sculpted posts, and rising turrets that looked like the perfect place for hiding a princess. She’d been there every year since she was a baby. Even the year she was in college, when she had her own shore house with friends in Ocean City, she still stayed at the Gingerbread House for the last two weeks of August.

She’d pretended to be annoyed that summer, pretended that her parents were making her stay with them, but really she was grateful. She’d been sharing a room with Lainie, which meant that she was also sharing a room with Brian. The room smelled like mildewy towels and had two twin beds with thin mattresses that dipped in the middle. Every night, Claire had to get upstairs before Lainie and Brian, put on her Discman, face the wall, and pray for sleep so that she could ignore whatever happened when they came in. The alternative was to sleep on the couch downstairs, which always felt wet and smelled worse than the bedroom—a mix of feet and old cheese.

There was sand all over the house, dirty dishes everywhere, and every morning Claire woke up sunburned and hungover. She was filled with relief when it was time to go to the Gingerbread House. She packed up her clothes quickly, saying, “This sucks, I can’t believe I’m missing the end of the summer here. Yeah, my parents are so annoying.”

Claire loved the Gingerbread House, loved waking up to the sound of waves and the smell of sand. It was part of the reason she’d finally agreed to go this year. Well, that and also because she didn’t have enough money in her account to pay September’s rent.

She’d taken the train to Philly on Saturday, and her parents and Martha had picked her up at the station and they’d all headed right for the shore. Everyone was in a great mood. Her dad was whistling, her mom was almost bouncing up and down in her seat, and Martha wasn’t discussing any recent tragedies. Claire started to feel calm for the first time in months. This was exactly what she needed. She had three new books to read, and the thought of lying on the beach and resting in the sun sounded like the most wonderful thing in the world. And then when the time was right, she’d tell her parents that she was broke. And moving home.

But that would all come later. She could wait until the end of the week to fill them in. Actually, it was preferable, since she could just leave right after. In the meantime, she’d enjoy her vacation, go for a walk on the beach or the boardwalk. Eat saltwater taffy. Just relax.

When they were younger, all of the cousins stayed in the same room. Cathy, Martha, Claire, Drew, and Max were all tucked away in bunk beds and sleeping bags. One summer, Martha forgot to put sunscreen on her feet and they burned, badly. She’d insisted that the fan in the room had to stay pointing right at her feet to cool them down, instead of circulating the room like it normally did. They’d all disagreed, of course. But as soon as Martha thought they were all asleep, she’d pull the lever on the fan to make it stop, and one of the other kids would realize it and yell, “Martha!” But they were all laughing, not really annoyed, just thrilled with their own little game they’d created.