VIKING
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Copyright © 2019 by Elizabeth Ames Staudt
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Ames, Elizabeth, 1981– author.
Title: The other’s gold / Elizabeth Ames.
Description: New York: Viking, [2019] |
Identifiers: LCCN 2019001133 (print) | LCCN 2019005427 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984878595 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984878496 (hardcover)
Classification: LCC PS3601.M477 (ebook) | LCC PS3601.M477 O86 2019 (print) | DDC 811/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019001133
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover design by Jaya Miceli
Version_1
For Jenny
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Part I: The AccidentChapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part II: The AccusationChapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Part III: The KissChapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Part IV: The BiteChapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Acknowledgments
About the Author
A circle’s round, it has no end
That’s how long I want to be your friend
Make new friends, but keep the old
One is silver and the other’s gold
—GIRL SCOUT SONG
What do you do with the mad that you feel,
When you feel so mad you could bite?
When the whole wild world seems oh, so wrong
And nothing you do seems very right?
What do you do?
—FRED M. ROGERS
Prologue
Each of the four noticed the window seat first when she walked into their common room. Alice balanced her knee on the ledge, did a calf stretch. Ji Sun ran her fingers along the edges of a tasseled throw pillow, thought briefly of the pasties she’d seen in the back pages of the free weekly newspaper. Margaret sat straightaway, crossed her legs at the ankles as if posed for a portrait, and gazed out the window while her older sister unpacked her boxes. Lainey stacked the cushions off to one side and did a secret spin on the bare bench, perched high above the courtyard. Framed in the window, backed by leaves blinking in the breeze, she celebrated the small spell of freedom after her parents left but before her suitemates returned to the room.
How they became friends was no great mystery, but how they remained so, braiding their lives together beyond their shared college quarters, transcended the usual alchemy of optimism and obligation that kept friendships intact, kept people from fading into other categories: old friend, college friend, just someone I once knew. None of the four would ever be just anything to the others, and the window seat was practice, then, for benches upon which they’d later huddle: in the antechamber of the dean’s office; in hospital waiting rooms; in the parking lot outside the psych ward, gathering the courage to face their friend.
First, they were all second daughters, a fact they’d found so moving and improbable when they discovered it that first day in their suite together that they were certain the housing office had used this piece of information to place them, some kind of complicated, mystical algorithm that also accounted for their rainbow of hair colors: Lainey’s dyed cherry, Alice’s blond, Ji Sun’s black, and Margaret’s brown. That they could all be bright enough to have gained admission to Quincy-Hawthorn College and not think first of their last names—an R, an S, two Ts—did not make them laugh until later, and then only to offset the disappointment that they had been brought together in a manner so base and clerical.
There was also the window seat—the luck and unlikelihood of having one in a freshman common room—with its picture windows overlooking the courtyard, burgundy cushions threadbare but still sumptuous with a kind of worn wealth that fit, better than the rest of the room, with its modular beds and box dressers, their imaginings of what college would be like. They didn’t know they’d gotten the window seat suite thanks entirely to Ji Sun’s family’s contributions, but the seat kept them in the same suite for the full four years, and kept them in their room more than they might’ve been if, like other freshmen, they’d had to go searching for a space like theirs. They came back from holiday breaks with little embroidered pillows and hanging plants, stained-glass discs and dream catchers, made the seat the center of their place, their friendship, their lives. When they remembered their time in college, they saw the seasons from the window seat. They watched leaves and snow and rain and cherry blossoms fall from behind the black cutaways of one another’s silhouettes. The memories faded or were replaced by photographs of the four piled together on the center bench of the bay windows, oblivious to the light streaming in from behind, eclipsing their distinct forms and making them one shape with four heads. The person charged with taking the photograph would become distracted by the four girls and their faces, the easy way they tossed their limbs around each other, how their hair fell on one another’s shoulders, how their cheeks touched and shone. The four bunched together like one giggling living organism, blurred by their vitality, frenetic with the desires and powers of youth. But in the photographs they were stone, backlit and blurred further together by th
e darkness, expressions inscrutable, made monument.
Others sat beside them in some pictures: boyfriends and girlfriends, strangers at parties, future husbands, the professor, their parents and siblings.
Their worst acts sat beside them, too, though only Alice had committed hers before they arrived. Ji Sun would do hers the following year, when they were sophomores, and Margaret would wait until after graduation. Lainey was last, wouldn’t do her worst until they began having babies.
Were they waiting then, huddled together on that bench? Could they sense their gravest mistakes beside them, or know only that they would need to stay within reach of one another as they tested, in turn, how far they could wander from their shared shore before they risked being swept out to sea? Not waving but drowning, they read in a poem in a sophomore seminar, and though only Ji Sun memorized it, all could understand the risks, saw in one another the potential for loose footing, misjudged depth, rocks in pockets. They stayed bound together to witness, yes, and to reassure the others they were more than their worst choices, to measure their own cruelties and mistakes against the others’, same as they would do with their joys and triumphs. But what kept them together more than any of this was the hope that they might map this fine distinction in one another, between waving and drowning, between merely being out to sea some and being swept away, swallowed.
PART I
The Accident
FRESHMAN YEAR,
2002–2003
Chapter 1
After their room, the four spent the most time together in the dining hall, so called as though anyone could mistake its vaulted ceilings, tree-length tables, and brassy chandeliers for anything so pedestrian as a cafeteria. Margaret managed, though. Despite being the one most dazzled by the space, she couldn’t call it anything other than the cafeteria. When they entered the hall for their first dinner together, she stopped, the flow of new freshmen tripped up first over the obstruction caused by the four, and then by the scattered double takes at Margaret, whose face and body her own suitemates were also still stealing glances at, wondering why they hadn’t been warned. Margaret had cheekbones that sliced each one of them open in turn: Ji Sun by their architecture; Alice by how smooth and bright they were, scar-free; and Lainey by the desire to touch them, compare their structure to her own, which she’d always considered the best thing about her face.
“Wow, we get to eat in here.” Margaret looked around, oblivious to, or unmoved by, the people who turned to look at her—her long, gauzy white skirt and her heart-shaped face made her look like some kind of moon child princess bride, like she trailed glitter, didn’t belong on this planet, let alone in a dining hall, even one with chandeliers.
“Didn’t you see it when you visited?” Alice asked, ushering Margaret by the arm toward the tray stand.
“Oh, I didn’t visit,” Margaret said, choosing a fork as though it might play a song. “I just got in off the waitlist.”
“Oh,” Lainey said, and nodded, tried to think of how best to react. She couldn’t imagine admitting this. She’d been wait-listed at Trinity College and even after being offered acceptance, the sting had manifested as lingering resentment toward all things even nominally Irish.
“Wow,” Margaret said again when they’d finished piling their trays and stood, looking for a place to sit. “Just . . . wow!” She held her tray with one arm and used the other to gesture around the room, as though her suitemates couldn’t see it. Her attitude was infectious. Ji Sun, the least impressed by institutional spaces, especially American ones that prided themselves on their “heritage,” did feel now like the room was polished gold, sun dust from the fading day washing the students in honeyed light, glinty little sparks bouncing off the lowest glass facets in the light fixtures.
“Yeah, hey, wow,” Ji Sun said, teasing but warm. They settled at a round six-top that they could tell in their bones would be their table, even as they shared it on this first night with two other freshmen, both of whom seemed more in awe of this foursome, somehow already solidified, than of their surroundings.
They traded the usual questions with the two other girls, Where are you from? Which is your residence hall? but none of the four bothered to listen to or remember the other girls’ answers, especially after, when Lainey answered upstate New York, they asked again with new emphasis, No, but, where are you from from, like where are you originally from? Lainey rolled her eyes, a signal to her roommates to let Lainey decide when or whether to answer this question, which Alice and Ji Sun might have guessed, but Margaret wouldn’t have known. The four had some basic background about one another, and now wanted urgently to know more vital information. Did they have boyfriends? Girlfriends? Had they ever? Had they had sex? Who was smartest? Who would be best loved by the others among them? Who would lead the way?
Four was good in this regard, they could see it already, better than three because there was less stasis. Three meant one could always think of herself as the nucleus, the reason, but four were enough to make a bridge, to link arms all sorts of ways, to have no center.
After dinner, they stopped outside the closed door to their room, the new whiteboard hung there, pristine when they’d left, now covered in frenzied letters that filled the space: I ALREADY LOVE YOU. MARRY ME.* All of them looked at Margaret, who smiled and shook her head in a gentle way that suggested she both accepted and rejected that she was the proposal’s intended recipient.
She inched closer to read the small footnote scrawled at the bottom of the board aloud, “hook up w me at least? Oh, please.” She groaned and smiled and pushed open the door to their room, leaving the other three to consider that maybe the message hadn’t been meant for just Margaret, and anyway, who cared about marriage when they’d just arrived at college?
Inside, a scarf Margaret had thrown over one of the lamps gave the room a maroon glow, and though they were tempted to varying degrees to retreat to their bedrooms and make phone calls or arrange the photos they brought (some chosen because they wanted to see the faces therein every day; some brought along out of obligation; and the largest set selected because they liked how they looked in the pictures, either their face, or the way they were surrounded by smiling friends: loved). But none of this felt as urgent as they’d expected it would, and instead they found places on the window seat, Ji Sun cross-legged and upright, Alice stretched out on her stomach, Lainey with her chin resting on her tucked knees, and Margaret seated as though on a porch swing, tapping the brass vent along the baseboards with her heels.
The note made it easier to talk about sex and romance right away, earlier than they thought they would. But together on their bench, they shared the sense that their fears and desires couldn’t tumble out of them fast enough, and they soon discovered that Alice was the only one who’d had real sex, good sex, the definition of which—they came to a provisional agreement—included penetration (a detail that embarrassed Lainey once she started her first gender studies course later that term) and an orgasm. Margaret admitted that though she’d had sex with two people, she’d never had an orgasm except in sleep.
Alice looked blankly at Margaret. “But what’s the point?”
“I don’t know.” Margaret blushed. “It’s still fun!”
“I guess,” said Alice, not pretending to look convinced.
“You don’t have to have sex to have an orgasm, Alice,” said Lainey, who would give Margaret her first vibrator for Christmas the following year. Her defense of Margaret reified the sense that they were all seeking Margaret’s approval, something Margaret could see and was accustomed to, and which she went out of her way to give to people, so they could relax and fall into a friendship that would be, like any, dictated by jostling for position within the group, but not with her as its prize. Margaret had already touched each of them in turn, squeezed a surprised Ji Sun when they left the dining hall; clasped Alice’s hands when Alice offered to take Margaret sailing;
and lightly rubbed Lainey’s back after she’d mentioned falling out with her high school best friend.
“Obviously I know that,” Alice said, and made a jerk-off motion with her hand, part dismissal, part instruction.
They all laughed at this, and inched closer together on the bench, settled in. Ji Sun leaned back against the window, Lainey loosed her knees, and Margaret swung her legs over Alice’s back. They were dizzy with how bound together they felt already, how much of themselves they’d already given over to the others.
Alice and Ji Sun had both gone to boarding school, Alice near here, in New Hampshire, for high school, and Ji Sun in Switzerland starting when she was twelve. The way they told it, boarding school all but required you to have sex to graduate, though more of Ji Sun’s own exploits had transpired back in Seoul, where she’d grown up and her parents still lived, or in the Philippines, tossed off tantalizingly as where she “typically summered.” A few nights later, after a party where they’d all gotten drunk off beer foam and foul tequila (save Alice, who’d smoked a joint she’d somehow procured before the rest of them even knew how to use the library, and who helped guide the other three as they stumbled back to their room, the inaugural act of an unspoken rule that one of them would always stay sober enough to help protect the others), Ji Sun would, in the hours as the sun came up and their buzz wore off, tell the group about the time her then boyfriend had gone down on her in the backseat of a limousine. After they recovered from the surprise of learning that she just went around in limos sometimes, not only for prom, and in fact found them tacky, the details she shared—the heat outside; the mirrored partition where she could watch him work; and the way they’d almost been caught, someone knocking on the window while her dress was only a suggestion, straps down at her ribs and skirt up over her hips—stuck in their minds and lived there like a scene from a movie they’d memorized, or a memory that they couldn’t be sure wasn’t their own, even if they hadn’t yet been eaten out, or set foot inside a limousine. They embroidered their friend’s story further, so in some memories she wore a metallic dress, the color and movement of mercury, silk pool slunk around her midsection. One of them turned the partition purple, a kind of gas-in-a-puddle rainbow color that cast everything in the car in a plummy, bronze light. On the way to her own rehearsal dinner, in a stretch limo that embarrassed her (on some level thanks to Ji Sun’s dismissal), Margaret let her fiancé go down on her, an act less like the realization of a fantasy and more like the satisfaction of some foretold prophesy, further confirmation that the four were as enmeshed as they believed themselves to be, for better or for worse, married already, in a way, to one another.
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