Fundamentals of Being a Good Girl (Academic Affairs #1)

Prologue

The Dry Bean

He’s not bad-looking, if you don’t mind people who look like they play Minor League Baseball,” Sloane says after a minute.

“He looks like a ferret.” An amendment: “A ferret who’s gone to rehab.” This comes from Leo Saint James, Sloane’s cousin.

Leo isn’t wrong. The man in question walks by, rodently, and the table collectively shakes its head.

“Okay, so not Jeremy Allen White’s embarrassing uncle for your first postdivorce smash,” Joey says, “but I’m not giving up hope! You deserve an epic love affair! You’re beautiful and smart and nice . . .”

Joey is starting to tear up now; he always gets a little maudlin when he drinks.

But really! Sloane Saint James was married to a controlling douchebag for ten years; tonight is her first night of official, legal freedom, and Joey just wants her to be happy.

Have a good time like they did in the old days, when they’d crowd into this same bar for cheap shots and loud music and end up on the floor of Sloane’s apartment in a tangle of blankets and friendship.

That’s the real problem with being in your mid-thirties.

At some point, you stopped making new memories and settled for hanging on to the ones you already have.

You stopped doing stupid shit like drinking shots called the Wisconsin Lunchbox and started upgrading from liability-only car insurance instead.

And that’s mostly a good change—Joey does like the other stuff that comes with being in his thirties, like having a funny wife and three little girls who cover him in glittery eyeshadow before they have tea parties—but why can’t they all make new memories once in a while too?

Why can’t Sloane make a bad decision with a rat-faced man tonight?

What’s stopping Joey from ordering a Duck Fart followed by a Chuck Norris followed by a French Pension Protest?

Why can’t they have one of the Andromeda Club’s patented Best Nights Ever, even though they now have a few gray hairs and some mortgage payments between them?*

“I want to have a Best Night Ever,” Joey says abruptly to Bram, who’s just come to the table with a round of drinks clutched easily in his large hands.

Bram calmly—Bram does everything calmly—sets a beer in front of Joey, a glass of neat scotch in front of Leo, and the usual extra-extra-dry martini in front of Sloane.

For himself, Bram has a reddish ale that looks like something a hobbit would drink, which is on track for the only professor at the table tonight.

The man lives a life of rumpled button-downs, dusty books, and boring the pants off people about moss.

Finally, Bram says, “I’d settle for a Medium Night Ever at this point,” and then sits down and runs a hand over his face.

The table stares at him. From Bram Loe, the goodest guy—the guy for whom the term unruffled was invented—this small act of stress is basically the same as flipping over a table and making snow angels in the broken glass.

“You okay, champ?” Joey asks.

Bram takes a drink, his hand nearly dwarfing the glass. (He might live like a hobbit, but Bram himself is well over six feet of muscle, stubble, and hard-earned suntan.) “You know,” says Bram after a minute, “it was a rather frustrating day, now that you ask.”

Joey looks up to see the Saint James cousins exchanging gray-eyed glances.

The cousins—aside from being obscenely wealthy—also share the same pale skin, platinum hair, and silver eyes.

(The main difference between the two of them is that Sloane is nice and Leo is a Berluti briefcase full of scalpels.)

Sloane’s impeccably manicured fingernails tap against her martini glass. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Joey expects Bram to refuse—not because Bram doesn’t trust them, but because there’s never been anything in the history of ever that Bram hasn’t been able to handle.

Knocking up his high school sweetheart at eighteen?

Marrying said sweetheart and refurbishing a crumbling Queen Anne house?

Surprise twins? Tenure? Divorce? Bram has always taken everything in stride, like those broad, sweater-covered shoulders of his can carry any conceivable load.

But Bram surprises him again by taking a long gulp of his drink. “The twins fed Sara’s dog chocolate ice cream,” he says after he swallows. And then, as if upon reflection, he polishes off another quarter glass of ale.

“And why is Sara’s dog at your house?” Leo asks in a drawl. “Surely the most salient benefit of a divorce is never having to lay eyes on that beast again.”

“Right, why is the dog at my house,” repeats Bram with a teacherly nod, as if a student has asked exactly the correct question.

“Sara’s glacier research grant went through at the last minute, but we had almost no notice and no time to make plans for .

. . well, for literally anything. And there weren’t any dog boarders or pet sitters that could take Hester Prynne for as long as Sara needed. ”

Joey loves Sara—she’s a part of the group too, and she and Bram parted ways as friends—but Leo has a point. For anyone else, an ex’s post-split giant dog goes squarely in the not your problem category the minute you light the Freshly Signed Divorce Papers candle.

But not for Bram Loe, their goodest guy.

“Anyway, I have to get this research proposal in by the end of the week, and I thought I could take the twins out for ice cream, bribe my oldest to keep an eye on them, and sneakily work on my laptop while everyone was distracted with treats.” Bram stares at the bubbles racing to the surface of his drink.

“But Fern was on her phone and then the twins thought Hester Prynne looked hungry and then suddenly I was dealing with a puking dog and a four-hundred-dollar vet visit.”

“So is the fiend dead or not?” asks Leo.

Bram gives him a mild look. He never rises to any of Leo’s bait, something not even Sloane can manage. “Hester is fine. No thanks to the brat who stole the last parking space on Tombaugh. I had to park on Andromeda and carry the dog all the way to Dr. Sackrider’s office.”

The table shares a moment of sympathy for Bram. Andromeda to Tombaugh Avenue is a bitch of a walk, even without a puking, hundred-pound dog.

“Anyway, it’s all okay, except the dog has to stay overnight at the vet, the twins are traumatized, Fern is giving me the silent treatment because she has to babysit tonight, none of my work is done, and I still don’t know how I’m going to manage being a single dad for the next eight weeks.

” Bram scrubs his hands through his dark hair and sighs.

“You need an au pair,” Sloane advises in the tone of someone who grew up thinking au pairs were standard issue. Leo is nodding lazily next to her.

“I’ve already put in an emergency request at a local agency,” Bram says tiredly. “At least for help in the afternoons. Otherwise, it’ll all be down to Fern, and she’s already got enough going on after that shithead boy dumped her.”

Bram says shithead boy with the same neutral composure that he uses for everything, but Joey doesn’t miss the subtle twitch of Bram’s hand around his glass when he brings up his daughter’s ex-boyfriend.

(None of them have forgotten that an undergrad Bram once explained in great and drunken detail how he would hide a body without getting caught.

It involved carnivorous plants and a trip to the fine arts department’s pottery kiln.)

“I know what you need,” declares Joey, “and it’s not an au pair. You need to get laid, my brother. Just like Sloane.”

“But not like me?” Leo inquires.

“Leo, you were in flagrante delicto when I called you this morning to ask about Aunt Cassandra’s birthday dinner,” Sloane remarks dryly. “I don’t think you need any encouragement in the sex department.”

“Trust me on this, guys.” Joey spreads his hands wide, ready for his TED Talk moment. Maybe he’s not a professor like Bram or a fancy, galas-for-good-causes person like Sloane, but he is an expert in the long-term health benefits of great sex. “Riley and I have sex all the time—”

“Yes, we know,” Sloane says.

“—and my blood pressure is great, my cholesterol is great, my bench press is better than it’s ever been—”

“I don’t know if that can be ascribed to biblically knowing your wife,” observes Leo.

“—and I just really think you need to get out there with those gonads, and leave nothing on the gonad field!”

“Thank you, Coach,” says Sloane.

Bram hasn’t been listening at all. “I can’t believe she stole that parking spot from me,” he mutters.

“Who?” Leo asks.

“The brat.” It’s the most irritated Joey’s ever heard Bram.

“I was there with my blinker on, waiting to turn in while Hester Prynne was throwing up all over my car, and then she just shamelessly took my spot. And when I rolled down the window and told her I’d been waiting for it before she got there, she flipped me off! ”

For someone who deals with undergrads, a teenage daughter, and twin first-graders on a daily basis, Bram sounds uniquely peeved by this act of finger-based rudeness.

Joey shakes his head and finishes his beer. Bram really needs to cut loose—they all do. And Joey knows just the answer.

Leaving the others to deal with Bram’s bad mood, Joey goes up to the counter and flags down the bartender on duty, who is also the owner (and also the reluctant short-order cook).

Robbie has owned The Dry Bean since long before Joey and the others discovered its hallowed halls as fake-ID-bearing college students, and Joey genuinely doesn’t know if the man is in his fifties or in his eighties—the only evidence of the accumulated years is in Robbie’s long, wispy eyebrows, which make him look like a great horned owl with rosacea.

“You got any shots that will make a table of thirtysomethings act like they’re twenty-one?” Joey asks.

Robbie thinks for a moment, then taps the chalkboard sign hanging behind him.

SHOT OF THE WEEK: ACADEMIC AFFAIRS