The Smart One (22 page)

“Who knows? Probably not,” Claire said.

But Fran called her the next day, as she thought he would, and they saw each other that night. And then the next night and the one after that.

“It’s fun,” she said to Lainie, as if that explained it all.

The truth was that most of the time when they were together, they talked about Doug and Liz, telling stories and trading information with a sense of urgency, like the faster they could get it all out of their heads, the sooner they’d be back to normal. They talked about them when they were still in bed together, often when they were still naked. Claire wondered what Doug and Liz were doing at that moment, and she thought that it would have been nice if they could have been together, doing the same thing.

They were a good balance; Fran was angrier than she was, and Claire suspected he was a little more heartbroken too. Claire was mostly confused and embarrassed, and Fran was neither of these things, so it seemed to work out well. Claire never minded when Fran talked about Liz, even when she didn’t have clothes on. She understood what was happening here, that they were trying to get rid of their memories, trying to figure out new bodies to forget the old ones.

Claire waited to come to her senses, waited for her grown-up self to show up and tell her to cut it out, to tell her that Fran Angelo was not
who she should be spending time with. But every time he called, she happily went over there, ran down the steps to the basement as quickly as she could, to get to Fran Angelo and his dryer-sheet–scented room.

CLAIRE HAD BEEN DREADING THIS
weekend for a long time. All of her high school friends were getting together, “for a reunion,” they kept saying, like they didn’t all see each other a few times a year at least.

Their friend Jackie was the one that demanded this reunion happen. “I miss you girls,” she kept saying. “Come to my house and I’ll send the kids to my mom’s and we’ll have a GNI.”

“A GNI?” Claire asked.

“Girls’ Night In,” Lainie said.

“It sounds like an STD,” Claire said.

They suspected Jackie just wanted to show off her new house, but for some reason they all still agreed to go to Red Bank, New Jersey, for the weekend. Claire, Lainie, and their friend Paula drove from Philly, and their friends Katherine, Clancy, and Erin came from New York.

Paula was recently engaged, and on the drive down there, every time she talked about the wedding, she turned to Claire and said, “Sorry.”

“I’m fine,” Claire said. “Really, you can talk about your wedding.” She was already planning to drink as much wine as she could.

“I can’t believe we’re going to Jackie’s,” Claire said. “We could have at least gone somewhere fun. Why did we agree to go there again?”

Lainie just shrugged. They’d all been friends with Jackie in junior high, mostly because they were scared of her. Jackie was the queen of three-way calling, orchestrating one girl to stay silent, while she encouraged another unsuspecting girl to rip the listener to shreds, and then she’d announce the secret guest like she was a talk show host. She was like an evil preteen Oprah.

In seventh grade, Jackie left fake notes in Claire’s locker, signed from Luke, the boy in the class that they all loved. It still made Claire’s face burn to remember the excitement she felt when she found those notes, how she hoped they were real, as if any seventh-grade boy would ever declare his love for a girl on a piece of notebook paper and stuff it in her locker.

Jackie confronted Claire at a sleepover, announcing to everyone that the notes were fake. “You believed it, though,” she said to Claire. “I saw your face and I know you believed it.”

“I did not,” Claire said. It still remained one of the worst nights of her life, as she found out that every one of her friends had known that Jackie was leaving the notes, including Lainie, who cried later and apologized.

“I wanted to tell you,” she said. “But she told me that she’d get me if I did.”

To distract Jackie from Luke and the fake notes, Claire suggested that they TP Molly Morrisey’s house. “You know,” she told Jackie, “she said you were the fifteenth-prettiest girl in our class. The only one lower than you was Lacey. And she said it was because she thought you were fat.”

Claire was still ashamed that she’d thrown Molly under the bus like that. But looking back, she realized it was normal to crack under a regime of terror. She was just trying to survive.

In high school, Jackie had gone through a klepto phase. She had piles of bras and underwear in her room with the tags still on them that she’d stolen from Victoria’s Secret. “It’s so easy,” she told them. “You just bring a bunch of stuff to try on in the dressing room, and then you wear it out underneath your clothes.”

Sometimes if she grabbed the wrong size or was simply feeling generous, she’d dole the stuff out to the girls. Claire never wanted to take any of it, since it felt like stealing once removed, but Lainie didn’t seem to have a problem with it. “What?” she’d always say. “It’s not like
we
stole it.”

The fact that they’d lived with Jackie as their evil ruler for all of junior high was hard to believe. Harder to believe was that they stayed friends with her throughout high school, where her power was diminished a little bit when it became clear (as Molly Morrisey so accurately pointed out) that she wasn’t very pretty; but whatever power she lost, she made up for by always being the one to take beer to parties in her backpack, to be unafraid to talk to boys. She was not to be trusted.

Jackie had married a boy from high school, Mike Albert, who was
a roundish guy with glasses and a fuzzy stare. He’d been friends with all the cool kids, even if he was a little on the periphery of the group, and Claire figured that this was very important to Jackie, that she had probably bullied him into dating and then marrying her.

As they pulled into the driveway at Jackie’s house, Claire said, “I can’t believe we agreed to this.”

“Of course you can,” Lainie said. She turned off the car and the three of them sat there for a moment. “Come on, we’ll get drunk and it won’t be so bad.”

“I CAN’T BELIEVE THAT I HAVE
two under two,” Jackie said. It was probably the twentieth time she’d said it, but who was keeping track? She sounded so pleased with herself that she almost couldn’t stay seated.

“I’m so glad we’re doing this,” Jackie said. “And I’m so glad you guys get to see my house. Don’t you love it?”

The girls just nodded and looked around. Clancy was eight months pregnant and was sitting so far back on the couch that it looked like she’d never be able to sit up again. Claire didn’t envy her, having to stay sober this weekend. Clancy and her husband had just moved to Long Island. “It’s really boring,” she answered, when they asked her how it was. “I mean, I know we had to do it. We were running out of space and we would have had to put the baby in a drawer or something, but still. You can’t order any takeout past like eight thirty, and it’s just really boring.”

Erin and her boyfriend, James, had just bought a new place in Brooklyn. She showed them all pictures of the huge new loft, and when she left the room, Jackie leaned forward. “What does James do?” she asked. “I mean, I know it’s just an apartment, but still it’s really nice.” Jackie was easily threatened. “I mean, I’d sooner die than live in Brooklyn. There’s a lot of immigrants there, you know. And gangs. It’s really dangerous.” Claire was almost positive that Jackie had never been to Brooklyn.

Jackie poured them all some more of the deep yellow Chardonnay from the huge bottle, unaware that they were all looking at each other.
They’d begun to notice in the past few years that Jackie was definitely racist. At first, they’d thought she was just a little clueless, maybe had some bad timing or judgment with her jokes. But her comments kept getting harsher and way more embarrassing. “Don’t be a Jew,” she’d say, when someone tried to itemize a restaurant bill.

“Even my grandmother wouldn’t say that,” Claire whispered.

“Bets would totally say that,” Lainie whispered back.

“Okay, fine, but she’s like a hundred years old.”

They all took large gulps of the wine, which was tangy and bordered on unpleasant, but thankfully seemed to go down easier the more you drank. When Jackie went into the kitchen to get another bottle, Katherine picked up the empty one and said, “I think my great-aunt Janice drinks this. And she’s, like, the world’s cheapest person.”

The weekend went slowly. The next day, as they walked around the neighborhood and down a bike path, Jackie made an announcement. “We’ve decided to teach Emma to sign,” she said, like they’d all been waiting for this news about her daughter. “We’ve all read the reports about its possibly delaying language. But Mike and I just really believe that it’s positive, you know. We really think it will help her.”

No one said anything, but Jackie didn’t seem to notice. She was so sure that everyone was dying to know the details of her life that it probably never occurred to her that she could possibly be boring them.

Later that night, they ordered pizza and drank more wine. Erin suggested going out for dinner, but that idea was quickly shot down by Jackie. “It’s so cozy in the house,” she’d said. “Let’s just stay here.”

They drank more wine that night than they had the night before. Katherine told them all how she had broken up with her latest boyfriend, Jed, a computer programmer of some sort that looked like he really wanted to be a hipster, but was just a little off.

“What happened?” Claire asked.

Katherine shrugged. “I read his e-mails and found out that he’d been posting online ads for meeting men,” she said. Lainie choked on her wine and started coughing. Erin leaned over and patted her on the back. “It happens sometimes, you know?”

Jackie nodded knowingly. “That’s why you should always read your boyfriend’s e-mails,” she said.

“Seriously?” Clancy asked. “That’s seriously what you just took from that story?”

Katherine sighed and drank her wine. She’d cut her hair short and dyed it blond. She looked tired, like she’d given up fighting. Even when she’d climbed out of Clancy’s car the day before, it had seemed like she didn’t want to be there but didn’t have the energy to resist.

“So,” Jackie said, turning to Claire. “I heard you and Fran Angelo have a little thing going on.”

Claire turned to Lainie, who shook her head just a little, meaning that she hadn’t said anything. “Who told you that?” Claire asked.

“I have my sources,” Jackie said.

“It’s nothing,” Claire said. “Really.”

Jackie let it drop, and Claire was relieved. But on the ride home, she was angry. “What are we doing still hanging out with her?” she’d yelled at Lainie and Paula in the car. “She’s disgusting. I’m done. I’m serious, I’m ashamed of myself that I even spent this much time with her. What does that say about us? What is wrong with us?”

Paula and Lainie had muttered in agreement, which made Claire even angrier. She was silent the rest of the way home, arms crossed, hating herself for not cutting off all contact with Jackie when they were twelve. What was wrong with her? Why was she still putting herself in situations where she was around this person? Jackie was nothing but bad energy. She was pure evil. And how on earth had she ended up married and living in a house with two kids? How had she tricked people into not seeing that she was horrible?

It seemed to Claire that Jackie was a symbol for everything that had ever gone wrong in her life since junior high. She couldn’t stand up for herself then and it had probably just spiraled from there.

FRAN WAS SITTING ON THE COUCH
in the basement playing video games when Claire walked in. “How was your weekend?” he asked. He didn’t look away from the TV, or pause the game.

“It was fine,” she said. “Sort of boring. We just stayed at Jackie’s house mostly.”

“Oh yeah? Did you see Mike?”

“No. Jackie made him leave for the weekend.”

“Jackie was always sort of a beast,” he said. “I don’t know what he was thinking.” Claire felt better.

At least sitting in the basement with Fran, she didn’t feel like the messed-up one. Even around Katherine and her boyfriend that dabbled in men, Claire felt like she was the one that was a disaster. It was only here, on the red-plaid couch, that she felt like things weren’t totally falling apart. She sat and watched Fran play his game.

“Remember what video games looked like when we were little?” Claire asked. “The people were basically just little geometric shapes. You could barely see them. These look like real people.”

“I know,” Fran said. “It’s awesome.” He stood up and put his arms straight up in the air when the game was over, and Claire assumed that meant he’d won. “Want to watch a movie?” he asked her.

“Sure.” Claire sat with her arm resting against the back of the couch, her feet right at Fran’s thigh. She let him pick the movie. It was some story about gangsters or a fighter or something. It was mindless. She watched it without talking, just nodding whenever Fran said something.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

Fran picked up her foot in his hand and held it on his lap. He started running his fingers over her toes, pausing to hold each one for a second, before moving on to the next one.

“What are you doing?” Claire asked.

“I’m looking for the one that ate roast beef,” he said. He held on to her middle toe and squeezed it. “He’s my favorite.”

Claire leaned her head back and laughed, a big loud laugh that surprised her. She held her stomach and laughed until it hurt. Her whole body shook, and she laughed harder than she had in as long as she could remember.

“There we go,” Fran said. He patted her leg. “There we go.”

CHAPTER
10

Cleo never even went to the bathroom when Max was in the apartment. That was her first thought when the nurse told her. Of course, if she just had to pee that was one thing. But to really “do her business,” as her mother would say, she waited until he left and then she’d run in there. A couple of times, when she really couldn’t hold it, she’d pretend to take a shower, letting the hot water run (which she knew was wasteful), and just pray that he couldn’t hear or smell anything on the other side of the door.