8. Sloane #2
The spoon goes back down on the counter with a small, precise click.
“He did not.”
“He did.”
“He texted you the words I didn’t actually do anything wrong after you walked in on him—” she gestures, a sharp circular motion that encompasses the entire situation without naming it “—with her.”
“He framed it as a disagreement by saying we never established exclusivity. Therefore…”
“Therefore nothing. Therefore he’s a worm.
” Margo pulls two plates down from the open shelf with more force than plates require.
“And not even an interesting worm. A boring, predictable, bad-at-football worm, which is the part that genuinely offends me, Sloane. If you’re going to be a cheater you could at least be good at the sport you’re allegedly prioritizing over your relationship. Three and eight. Three and eight.”
I feel something in my chest unclench by a degree. This is the thing about Margo when she’s angry on your behalf — it’s so uncomplicated, so completely on your side, that it does a thing for you that careful sympathy never could. She’s not handling me. She’s just furious, cleanly, in my direction.
“And Vivienne,” she continues, plating chicken.
“Vivienne Park. Of course it’s Vivienne.
Those two deserve each other. I mean that.
I hope they’re very happy performing relentless superiority at each other for the rest of their lives.
” She glances up. “You know she’s going for the same Yale thing as you. ”
“I’m aware.”
“She submitted three weeks early so she could tell people she submitted three weeks early.”
“I’m aware of that too.”
“You’re going to wipe the floor with her.
” Margo says it without drama, like a weather report.
“You’re a better actor and a better person and you don’t smell like a department store.
Here.” She hands me a plate, and it’s genuinely beautiful — golden chicken, vegetables glazed and crackling at the edges, the quinoa with the lemon and the herbs she knows I like.
Margo cooks the way she does everything, with full commitment and a flair that should be annoying and somehow isn’t.
“Sofa. Now. We’re not eating standing up like animals. ”
We settle on the sofa, and the leather makes its familiar complaint, and Margo pulls the throw blanket with the geometric pattern over her knees and balances her plate like a person who has eaten approximately nine hundred meals in exactly this position.
The TV is paused, mid-frame, on a woman in a very specific shade of blue and white.
“You’re watching the cheerleader show again,” I say.
“I’m watching the cheerleader show again.” She’s already cueing it up. “Season two. Don’t judge me, it’s research, I’m a professional.”
“You’re a college cheerleader.”
“It’s aspirational research.” She points the remote at the screen. “These women are elite athletes and the world treats them like decoration and I find it both infuriating and deeply soothing, and you’re going to watch it with me, and you’re going to like it.”
I slip my boots off — the ones that are a half size too big, that I keep meaning to replace and never do — and pull my feet up under me, cross-legged, my plate warm in my lap.
The chicken is, predictably, excellent. The first bite does the thing food does when you didn’t realize how hungry you were until it arrived, and I feel the day recede another inch.
Margo doesn’t press play.
I look over. She’s biting her lip — the way she bites her lip when she’s holding something, which Margo is constitutionally bad at doing for long.
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing.”
“Margo.”
“It’s not nothing, it’s a thing, but I don’t want to be weird about it.”
“You’re being weird about it right now by not saying it.”
She sets her fork down. “Okay. I heard about the party. About Evan grabbing your arm.” Her eyes flick to my arm, where there is, in fact, a faint bruise coming up that I have been very deliberately wearing long sleeves to avoid discussing. “And I heard that Beau Sorensen stepped in.”
And there it is.
I should have known. There’s no such thing as a private scene at a Whitmore party — the place runs on information the way the power grid runs on coal, and a thing like that, the captain stepping in for a girl nobody could place, would have made the rounds before I’d finished walking home.
Margo is plugged directly into the source.
She probably knew before I’d taken my boots off the first time.
The thing is, now that she’s said his name, I realize I have an opportunity I didn’t plan for.
Because I’ve been carrying the proposal around all afternoon like a stone in my pocket, turning it over, and there is exactly one person in my life I can lay it in front of and trust to look at it clearly.
June would worry. Wren would have an opinion delivered in four words and no follow-up.
But Margo — Margo will take it apart with me, piece by piece, with full investment and zero judgment, and she’ll do it while we eat lemon-herb chicken, which is the only conditions under which I want to think about any of this.
“There’s more,” I say.
Margo goes very still, in the way of a person who can tell the good part is coming. “More?”
“He found me today. Beau. Outside Hartwell, after class. With a coffee.”
“He what?”
“He had a proposal.”
Margo makes a sound that is not quite a word, and all but scrambles off the couch.
“Not that kind.” I point my fork at her before she can launch. “Sit back down. It’s not that kind.”
“I’m sitting. I’m extremely sitting. What kind, then?”
So I tell her.
I tell her the whole thing — the chai that turned out to be my exact order because Margaret apparently catalogues my coffee the way she catalogues first editions, the walk down Main, the part where I blurted out that I wasn’t sleeping with him and he laughed and said if he wanted to sleep with me I’d know, which makes Margo cackle so hard she nearly upends her plate.
I tell her about Bella, and Evan, and the architecture of the thing — his problem and mine, shaped the same, a solution that runs in both directions.
I tell her the words fake dating and watch them land.
Margo sets her plate on the coffee table. This is serious. Margo does not abandon a plate of her own cooking for anything trivial.
“Okay,” she says. “Okay. Walk me through it. Pros and cons. We’re doing this properly.”
“There’s nothing to do properly. It’s a bad idea.”
“It’s not obviously a bad idea, which is different, and which is why we’re doing pros and cons.
” She tucks her feet up and turns to face me fully, the show forgotten, glasses pushed up her nose.
“Pro. Evan. You said it yourself — he’s running on the assumption that you’ve got no one and you’ll fold.
What happens to that assumption if you’re visibly, publicly attached to the captain of the hockey team? ”
“It evaporates,” I admit. “He can’t tell himself the story anymore.
And he’s not someone who likes losing in public, so he’d have to back off, because pushing would mean pushing in front of Beau, in front of everyone, and that costs him more than I’m worth to him.
” I hear myself and amend it. “More than the version of me he’s decided he wants back is worth to him.
Which isn’t actually me. It’s the not-losing. ”
“Right. So that’s a big pro. Arguably the biggest.” She holds up a second finger.
“Pro two. It gets people off your back generally. You’d be — and I say this with love — visible in a way you have never once chosen to be.
Nobody questions a girl who’s dating Beau Sorensen.
You’d have cover. For Yale season, for the audition stretch, for all of it — no drama, no Evan, no speculation, just a boring, settled, everyone-stop-looking-at-me relationship. ”
“A fake one.”
“A functionally real-looking fake one.” She waves a hand. “The function is what matters. Con.”
“Con,” I say. “Everyone will be looking at me more, not less. You’re describing it like a privacy screen.
It’s a spotlight. The second I’m seen with him, every person on this campus has an opinion, and most of those opinions are going to be some version of what is he doing with her, and I do not have the —” I stop, because I can feel the sentence getting away from me, getting longer than it needs to be, which means I’m closer to something true than I want to be.
I start over, shorter. “I don’t want to be a question people are asking. ”
Margo’s face softens. She heard the long sentence too. She knows what my long sentences mean.
“Okay,” she says, gently. “That’s real. That’s a real con. But can I push on it?”
“You’re going to anyway.”
“The people who’d be asking what’s he doing with her are not people whose opinion you have ever once cared about.
You don’t care what Bella thinks. You don’t care what the puck bunnies think.
You spent two years not knowing Beau Sorensen existed in any way that mattered to you, and you were fine.
” She tilts her head. “Who, specifically, are you afraid is going to ask the question?”
I don’t answer right away.
The honest answer is me. The honest answer is that the question what’s he doing with her is one I’ve already asked, on the sidewalk, in the exact moment he said fake dating — I looked at him and looked at myself and did the math in front of him, out loud, told him no one would buy it because he has a type and I’m not it.
The fear isn’t that other people will ask.
It’s that they’ll ask and they’ll be right.
But I’m not saying that to Margo with chicken in my lap. Some things are true and still don’t need to be said out loud at seven on a Tuesday.
“Next con,” I say instead.
Margo lets me have it. She files the dodge — I watch her file it — and moves on. “Sex,” she says.
I choke on a mouthful of quinoa. “What?”