Friends and Strangers

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  Finally, Sam had said, “We have to get it together. Trust me. I can do this. My mother’s a nurse.”

  Isabella was selling her eggs to a couple who had advertised in the student paper. They wanted a donor with brown hair and blue eyes, and a grade point average of 3.7 or higher. Isabella had all three, though if they had requested transcripts, they might have noticed that most of her classes were taken in the film department.

  She would never meet the couple. The transaction was handled through an agency. Isabella had to provide pictures from various stages of her life.

  Sam heard her on the phone.

  “Mommy, can you email me some photos from when I was a baby? It’s for a class project thingy.”

  Sam didn’t understand why she was doing it. Isabella was wealthier than anyone she’d ever met.

  “I’m not rich, my parents are,” Isabella often said, which made no sense.

  Sam suggested a campus job if she wanted to earn extra money.

  Isabella seemed aghast. “It would take me a year to make what I’m making in less than a month. Besides, this isn’t only about the money. I’m doing it to give back. To share something I have, that someone else needs. Like giving blood. But a much bigger sacrifice, obviously.”

  Isabella told anyone who would listen how selfless she was being.

  The two of them were randomly assigned to be roommates their first year. Early on, they couldn’t stand each other. But by the time they were deciding who to live with sophomore year, they stayed together by choice. Sam had once thought of her as just an annoying drama queen, but now Isabella was her annoying drama queen.

  Perhaps she was donating her eggs for the same reason she did most things. Whenever possible, Isabella needed to be engaged in something exciting, extreme, that superseded the rhythm of her ordinary life. Sam never pointed this out. Their friendship was built on a foundation of mutual acceptance. They supported each other’s decisions, no matter how stupid. So Sam didn’t say that if all went according to plan, a baby would exist who was one-half Isabella’s.

  Isabella, in turn, didn’t question Sam’s relationship with Clive. Other friends made it clear that they thought it was odd. Either by asking too many questions, or by never mentioning Clive at all.

  Isabella was voluntarily spending the next four nights across the hall in Lexi and Ramona’s room. Ramona hardly ever slept at home. Her girlfriend had a single in the vegan house on Reed Street, so Ramona’s bed was always free. Still, Isabella was making a sacrifice.

  Sam had been counting down to those nights alone with Clive, but now that he was almost here, she thought she’d miss Isabella a little. It was like with Gil. When she was babysitting, Sam only ever wanted to get him down for a nap so she could do schoolwork or watch TV. But as soon as he was asleep, she had the urge to wake him, craving his company.

  * * *

  —

  At eight-fifteen, Isabella stood in the crowded hall, scooping sangria from the recycling bin into red plastic cups, using a coffee mug that said WHAT WOULD BEYONCÉ DO? as a ladle.

  She rocked back and forth to the music, eyelids at half-mast. She took a swig of sangria straight from the mug whenever she thought no one was looking.

  Sam watched her as she sipped a beer. She kept checking the time, as if she might somehow forget Clive’s arrival.

  Even just last year, hearing the music coming from such a party, she had wished to be included. But now, it seemed kind of pointless. It was the same thing they had done last Friday, and the Friday before that. At ten-thirty, they would go as a group to the actual party downstairs, never as much fun as the hours spent preparing for it. Tomorrow, they would wake up late, hungover or still slightly drunk, and stumble down to the dining hall for bagels.

  After Sam’s summer in London, it no longer seemed normal to live in a hall of near-identical rooms, distinguished one from the other only by curtains or a floral bedspread someone’s mother had chosen. It felt absurd to be told what she would eat, and when.

  Sam could waste an hour wandering around Beekman Market downtown, picking up tiny soaps and silver tubes of overpriced hand cream, mentally decorating a house she didn’t have but could picture herself living in with Clive. She never bought anything. Those soaps would look ridiculous in a plastic shower caddy. The hand cream would get used by every person who entered her room, making Sam stressed at the thought of the cost.

  The home she imagined was the one in which she had spent the last few weeks nannying. Elisabeth’s house. The rooms, light filled and beautifully furnished, had an air of calm that seemed to spring from Elisabeth herself.

  Sam had decided not to work in the dining hall this year as she had in years past. In part, because weekend shifts would impede her ability to see Clive. And if she was honest, she wanted to experience college without washing her friends’ dinner plates for once.

  She had planned to work two full days a week off campus, but Elisabeth needed three. Sam rearranged her schedule. Now her Tuesdays and Wednesdays were booked with classes from 8:00 a.m. until 6:00, but it was worth it. She had never worked for someone like Elisabeth before. Some days she would pour them both a cup of coffee before she left for work and sit and chat for fifteen minutes, like she wasn’t paying Sam to watch her child. Elisabeth wanted to know all about Sam’s art and her travels and her plans.

  While she was there, Sam often pretended the house was hers, and the baby too. She went to the bookcase in Elisabeth’s upstairs hall that held copies of each of her books in hardcover, plus several foreign-language editions, and imagined what it would feel like to have accomplished something like that. Sam thought it must be a relief, among other things.

  She loved to wash her hands in Elisabeth’s downstairs powder room, with the soft white towels and the wallpaper covered in oversize green leaves. The hand soap was peony scented. Sam felt like a slightly better version of herself each time she used it.

  She asked Elisabeth where she’d gotten it.

  Elisabeth shrugged and said she couldn’t remember.

  “The drugstore, I think,” she said.

  That was her—effortless, uncultivated.

  Elisabeth was pretty without having to try. She hardly ever wore makeup. She was a wisp of a woman with a boy’s slender build, the body Sam had wanted all her life. Of the two of them, Sam looked more likely to have given birth in the last five months. She wished she could be this kind of woman for a day, an hour. The type who didn’t have to roll her jeans up over her belly when she sat, or suffer the indignity of bouncing boobs if ever she went for a jog.

  Sam had spotted Elisabeth in the wild once, when she and Isabella were downtown. Isabella saw Sam looking and asked, “Who’s that?”

  “My boss,” Sam had said.

  “Are you gonna say hi?”

  “No.”

  “She’s cute,” Isabella said.

  “Please don’t hit on my boss.”

  “How old is she? Like Clive’s age?”

  “No,” Sam said. “I don’t know. Older than that, I assume. She’s married with a kid.”

  “When my mother was Clive’s age, she had an eight-year-old,” Isabella said.

  “Don’t tell me that,” Sam said.

  Elisabeth’s friends sent extravagant gifts. She received a box of truffles from a chocolate shop in Manhattan as a thank-you for introducing a writer she knew to her agent. Once, her best friend sent flowers, cut short and arranged in a glass vase, because Elisabeth was having a bad day. None of it seemed to matter much to her. When a giant box from Williams Sonoma arrived, Elisabeth didn’t open it for a week.

  Even her ice cubes were the nicest Sam had ever seen. They were exceptionally cube-like, instead of those cloudy half circles that popped out of normal people’s refrigerator doors.

  On Monday mornings when Sam opened the fridge to g
et Gil’s bottle, there were leftovers from Sunday dinner wrapped in cellophane—roast chicken stuffed with lemons, red potato wedges sprinkled with dill. She envied Elisabeth then most of all.

  Before she left for college, her mother bought her something called Dinner For One. It was a box containing four pieces of matching blue china—a dinner plate, a bread plate, a bowl, a cup. In years past, Sam had put the set to use, but now it sat at the back of the closet. Something about it depressed her.

  From what she had seen, most people’s twenties were much closer to Dinner For One than they were to Sunday Roast Chicken. Roommates seemed so odd, the more she thought of it. Strangers with whom the only thing you had in common was that none of you could afford to live alone. Sam wanted to skip all that and be settled.

  Clive talked about moving to the country. A little house with a room upstairs where she could paint. Children, not right away, but someday. It sounded both wonderful and terrifying.

  When Sam saw a used pregnancy test in the dorm bathroom, she thought of how nobody here was hoping for a positive result. She wished she had reached that place in life, when the reaction could be what they showed in the commercials: a happy couple jumping up and down.

  “Wear my black halter dress!” Isabella shouted at someone, pulling Sam’s attention back to the party. “Keep it! I’m serious! It would look amazing on you.”

  Isabella was already drunk. Giving her stuff away was a telltale sign. In a week or two, she would search both their closets, asking if Sam had seen her black halter anywhere.

  A bunch of them had pooled their money for pizza. Sam went to the stack of boxes on her desk, removed two slices of cheese, and put them on a paper plate. She brought it to her roommate.

  “Eat,” she said.

  Isabella took one bite, then another, and then put the plate on the floor.

  “Thank you, Mom,” she said. “Do you promise to look after me forever?”

  “Yes,” Sam said.

  “Even when you and Clive are married and raising five kids in England and I’m the mistress of some corporate tycoon in Dubai?”

  “Even then,” Sam said.

  They smiled, because, she thought, they both sort of liked the sound of it.

  Isabella took Sam’s face in her hands. “I love you so much it hurts.”

  Sam swore she could feel the grease working its way off Isabella’s fingertips and straight into her pores.

  “Love you too,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  By ten, Isabella was fully sobbing.

  A normal occurrence after so many drinks, but it irked Sam. This was supposed to be her night to freak out, to be on the receiving end of the pep talk. She needed to leave for the airport soon.

  They went into their room and closed the door.

  “What’s up?” Sam said.

  Isabella looked like she was trying to remember.

  “I miss Darryl,” she said, finally.

  “Darryl?”

  “Darren.”

  “The guy you dated senior year of high school?”

  “We started dating at the end of junior year, Sam. He was the only boy who ever accepted me as I was.”

  Isabella must have seen something on Sam’s face. She added, “I’m serious.”

  “I believe you,” Sam said. “Though the story would be more compelling if you’d remembered his name.”

  Isabella pursed her lips, deciding whether or not to protest. Then she flung her head back and laughed.

  She had cheated on Darren her first Saturday at college. She called him immediately to confess. They broke up by the time orientation ended. As far as Sam knew, they hadn’t spoken since.

  “I’m gonna call him,” Isabella said, taking her phone from her pocket.

  “Let’s wait on that,” Sam said.

  “Fine, then I’ll call Toby.”

  A guy she’d met on her junior year abroad, who broke it off with her right before they left and got back together with his ex, raising the question of whether they’d ever broken up in the first place.

  One of the drawbacks of a single-sex education was that the pool of men one had, even to think about, was unbearably small. They kept males around and alive in their imaginations far longer than any normal woman would. It was like prison or war in that way.

  Before Clive, Sam’s only college relationship was with Julian, a sweet but odd guy who worked in the campus library.

  He was an aspiring poet working toward a degree in literature at State, where, he took pains to explain, he had chosen to go only because he got a free ride. In addition to his library job, Julian had three internships—one with a translator in New York City, remotely. One at an indie publishing house in town, and one at the three-college literary journal, Ambit.

  He told her he ran a writers’ group; that she ought to come sometime.

  “When do you sleep?” Sam asked.

  He laughed, but she was genuinely curious.

  Sam liked chatting with him in the library. But she was caught off guard when he asked for her number.

  “Aww, he likes you,” Isabella said at the time.

  “I’m not attracted to him,” Sam said. “His hair looks like a Brillo pad. He has a wandering eye.”

  “He’s allowed to check out other women,” Isabella said. “You’re not even interested in him, what do you care?”

  “No, his eye literally wanders. Like, drifts to the side.”

  “Oh.”

  It turned out Isabella was right. Julian did like her. Sam tried to like him back. They kissed a handful of times. His tongue felt slimy and too large for his mouth. Sam told Isabella that it reminded her of a clam trying to escape its shell. From then on, Isabella referred to Julian as the Mollusk, which amused Sam and made her feel bad at the same time.

  They went to dinner, to the movies. He was the kind of guy she should like, and yet. He wrote her a poem for their one-month anniversary. Sam found it revolting. It was too much. When Julian asked what she thought of the poem, she told him it reminded her of T. S. Eliot. She could tell right away he was disappointed. She supposed he wanted only to sound like himself.

  Sam told Julian she needed to focus on her studies. For a while, he texted her whenever he got drunk and pleaded with her to reconsider. Sam never responded.

  Ever since, when she saw him in the library, she hid. She had previously studied on the main floor, which was flooded with sunlight. But after their time together, she worked in the basement, because she knew he never went down there.

  Isabella flopped onto her bed.

  She insisted she wanted to get back to the party and make out with Rosie Simmons, a senior who resembled a young Leonardo DiCaprio.

  “Later,” Sam said.

  “Disco nap!” Isabella said.

  “Good idea. Take off your shoes, at least,” Sam said.

  She pulled the trash can close, in case.

  Isabella fumbled with the button on her jeans.

  “You look like a fourteen-year-old boy trying to get a girl’s pants off for the first time,” Sam said. “Except they’re your own pants.”

  Isabella moaned.

  “I’m too tired,” she said. “Can you do it, please?”

  “You’re annoying,” Sam said, but she complied, pulling the jeans down from the ankles. “I need a crowbar for this. Pajama pants?”

  Isabella shook her head. A minute later, she lay passed out in her tank top and underwear, looking like an American Apparel ad. Sam took the blanket she kept folded at the end of her own bed and draped it over Isabella’s bottom half, not as much for warmth as to avoid the possibility of Clive seeing her impossibly narrow thighs on the off chance she hadn’t woken up by the time they returned.

  Sam looked in the mirror. Her stomach flip
ped.

  “More lipstick!” Isabella demanded, without opening her eyes.

  5

  THE VAN SOUNDED LIKE A rocket ship about to launch.

  Sam clutched the steering wheel. She imagined breaking down on the side of the road in her short sundress, which was inappropriate for both the hour and the season. She had worn it because it was Clive’s favorite.

  Her heart pounded as she drove along the dark highway. She pictured him, hurtling through the air overhead, about to touch down in America for the first time. Six months ago, she hadn’t known he existed, and now he was her person.

  At some point sophomore year, Sam’s friends started talking about where they planned to spend their junior year abroad, as if it was a foregone conclusion. Sam had never considered the possibility. Lexi applied to a program in Brazil. Ramona wanted to be in Nepal. Shannon’s fellowship included an all-expenses-paid year in Paris.

  “Come with me, Sam. Your financial aid will transfer, I think,” said Isabella, who had already decided on London and didn’t need one cent of financial aid.

  Sam got excited, looking at the websites of schools in Scotland, Ireland, France. She went to a question-and-answer session at the International Studies Office and took notes. When the woman running it said, “Expect to spend ten to fifteen thousand on top of your usual school costs for the year,” Sam closed her notebook. She understood that there was no way she was going.

  Her parents had told her to go to a state school, like they did. By the time she was a senior, they would have three kids in college. If Sam wanted more, she would have to pay for it. For reasons she could not articulate then or even now, she wanted more.

  Ultimately, her brother and sister stayed closer to home and went to their parents’ alma mater. Brendan wasn’t sure what he wanted to do yet. Molly wanted to be a teacher. Set against their ambitions, Sam worried that hers seemed indulgent.

  She got a small scholarship and a work-study position. She took the rest out in loans, in her name.

  “I’m worried you’re too young to understand what this means,” her father said as he watched her sign the forms. “I’m sorry. I wish we could have done better by you, Sam.”