Remy
REMY
From: [email protected]
I’ve read your latest work in progress, and while I admire your ability to jump from genre to genre, fantasy is an oversaturated market and love triangles (especially ones with vampires!) are out.
Have you thought more about sticking to what you do well, what I mentioned in the previous email and at lunch?
Female friendship, dysfunctional families etc.
It doesn’t need to be anything fully realized.
A brief synopsis will do and we can go from there. I look forward to it…
The bell above the door rings and in walks Jenni.
She’s wearing a flower-patterned skater dress, her hair pulled back and placed into two symmetrical space buns with tendrils skillfully framing her face.
She’s placed a peachy blush on her cheeks and nothing else to conceal the dark freckles splashed across them and the bridge of her nose.
When she smiles, her cheeks bloom and her chin dimples.
We both order the sticky toffee pudding ice-cream sundae, and after only fifteen minutes, I learn Jenni is funny, friendly, and has no trouble filling silence.
She offers a lot of herself up, even oversharing at some points, and talks at such an exuberant pace that it seems like she’s been dying to have this (or any?) conversation for a while.
She tells me about her job in retail, her friends who she doesn’t see as often anymore, and the TV shows she’s addicted to.
Her hands are always moving, which makes it easy for me to spot the thin gold band she wears on her middle finger.
It’s only when I talk and she stills, listening intently, that I get the chance to study the ring and confirm it looks exactly like the one I saw on Simone’s finger in the bathroom at Ink@84.
“Your ring…” I say, unsure of how to finish the sentence without mentioning Simone.
“Oh, yeah?” She looks down at the slim gold band. “It’s a purity ring.”
I look up. “A purity ring?” I ask, surprised. “As in, abstaining from sex?”
Jenni nods and then laughs. “Why do you look so shocked?”
“Sorry. I’ve never seen one,” I say. “I didn’t think they were common.”
“Depends on the circles you run in, I guess.”
I hurry to clarify. “To be clear, I understand the no sex before marriage, but the actual ring… I didn’t know that was a thing.”
“Well, it’s just an ordinary gold band. When we made the decision, our mum bought them for us.”
“Us?”
“My sister and I. She had one, too.” Jenni only nods and places her hands on her lap, under the table, and I note her use of the past tense.
Could she be talking about Simone? I’m fighting against asking outright, but then Jenni clocks the uncertainty on my face.
“Our parents didn’t make us do it,” she says, “if that’s what you’re thinking. ”
“Oh, it wasn’t,” I say truthfully. “I just didn’t know you had a sister. She wasn’t at the church?”
“No…” Jenni looks down then says, “She travels a lot, but, yeah, my friends always assumed our parents made us wear them.”
I nod. “Maybe because your dad’s a pastor, so it kind of fits the stereotypical narrative?”
“I guess, but it was our idea. And of course, it made our parents happy. They’re pretty conservative.” Jenni leans forward. “Seriously, they once even voted Conservative.”
“Pre- or post-Brexit?”
“Post.”
“Fuck.” I look down at her ring. “Sorry.”
“Are you apologizing to me or my ring?” She laughs and brushes a hair strand from her face. “You’re fine.”
“The conservative thing makes sense, though.”
Jenni tilts her head. “It does?”
I almost mention Simone because it’s her I’m thinking of, but then I realize it’s actually S and her secrets I’m picturing.
Jenni continues to look at me curiously.
I have to bring up Simone now; it would be weird not to.
The best way to start would be just telling Jenni that I recognize her from Mantl, the Turkish restaurant, but then Jenni answers her own question.
“Oh, you mean it makes sense with the ring? Like I said, it was our choice—it still is my choice. I can’t really explain it.
I don’t abstain from drinking, I hang out with people who chill out on weed, and I don’t dress particularly modestly, but there’s something about sex that’s different for me.
I don’t care what other people do with their bodies, but for me, it just means a lot.
I wear this ring because I’d still feel the same way even if I weren’t religious. ”
Our sundaes arrive; a deep puddle of sticky toffee sauce floods the pit of the glass, topped by two generous scoops of vanilla ice cream, finished with a scattering of toasted chunks of chewy, moist date cake.
Jenni and I both take a bite and widen our eyes in appreciation. This makes us laugh and the conversation reverts back to getting-to-know-you territory. When I get round to telling her what I do for a living, Jenni playfully slaps my arm and says, “You wrote These Four Friends ? I loved that book!”
“Really? Thank you!”
“I’m not just saying that either!” she says. “I really did. I loved the friendship group in it.”
I nod. “So did I.”
I must smile sadly because Jenni purses her lips and again tilts her head inquisitively. “Is it not like that with you in real life?”
I play with my sundae spoon. “It used to be.”
Jenni nods, licking the toffee sauce off hers.
“I can relate…” Jenni lets her sentence wander off.
“Kind of. I have a big friendship group, there’s like seven of us.
We hang out less now, just life moving forward, but when I read These Four Friends , I thought I’d relate to it.
What it actually made me realize is that me and my friends don’t have a connection like your characters do.
Your characters were in love , and I think me and my girls are a bit superficial.
There’s so many of us, so many lives to keep track of, and then each of us have other friends…
We don’t end up getting that deep or sharing a lot.
I didn’t mind that before. I always had someone else to do all that deeper stuff with, someone who knew everything without me having to say it, you know?
But then…” Jenni shakes her head. “Things changed. It is what it is.”
I stare at Jenni. “A best friend?” I finally ask.
“My sister,” she answers, pushing her sundae glass away. “And yes.”
“Is it because she travels so much?”
Jenni frowns then remembers that’s what she told me. “Exactly. Sorry. I don’t really talk about it, so I don’t really know how to phrase things.”
I swallow, trying to keep my voice steady. “I’m guessing… because she travels… you don’t speak often?” I worry it sounds like I’m digging, so I add, “I mean, does she know how much you miss her?”
Jenni shakes her head forcefully, then stops. “I don’t know. But with the way things ended… before she started traveling, I mean… she’d have to be the one to make the effort. She kind of just… left .”
Returning to that day at the restaurant, it looked to me like Simone was reaching out, and it was Jenni who wouldn’t accept the olive branch. It was Jenni who snatched her arm away.
Right?
“These connections,” I begin slowly, unsure of what I’m going to say next. “The ones I have with my friends, the one you had with your sister, they’re… they’re really hard to come by. So much has gone into creating them that it makes it impossible to replicate with someone new.”
“How do you do it?” Jenni asks sincerely.
“I haven’t yet,” I answer truthfully, with a sigh.
“Saying it out loud makes me realize, maybe I never will. You know in romantic scenarios when people have ‘the one that got away’? Even though they might be happy with who they have now, a part of them knows they had the potential for something greater.”
“They settled.”
“Exactly. So maybe if we don’t get those friendships back, we settle for what’s available. We can still have friends who make us laugh or friends we make unforgettable memories with, but we might also have friends who ‘got away.’”
Jenni stares at me and her eyes glisten.
“It’s up to us though,” I continue, gathering steam. “Some relationships can’t be saved, or just shouldn’t be— but there’s always a few that we can and some that we should. Only you know which one it is.”
We fall into silence and there are so many questions I want to ask. But that would be taking things too far in a matter I’ve already inserted myself too deeply into.
“Just something to think about.”
Jenni nods. She scrapes the edges of her glass with her spoon and takes the last bite of toffee sundae. “This was so good.” She thoughtfully chews and then smiles. “She—my sister—would love this place.”
I nod, fighting the urge to say, “I know.”
At home, I return to the last line I wrote about the two sisters: Which begs the question, what went wrong?
I briefly glance at the list of possible answers I’d made after my date with Jenni.
S denounced her religion?
Something to do with a purity ring??
An abortion???
I double-space before starting a new paragraph.
I decide S’s secret is going to be that she terminated a pregnancy conceived out of wedlock.
With two devout Christian parents, that feels big enough.
What’s J’s problem, then? Could their estrangement have something to do with her purity ring?
Did S take a vow alongside J, and was S the only one who made J feel “normal” about her decision?
Maybe the dissolution of that commitment left J more isolated than ever.
Maybe J’s friends, who aren’t really her friends, would warn her of the disadvantages of leaving sex as a surprise until it was too late; friends who would tell her she was unlikely to find someone in this day and age willing to wait; friends who maybe called her a prude to her face and cackled worse behind her back, until S was all J had—and then she left her, too.