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  “Yes, Mom,” Orla said.

  “Because you remember the year Aunt Diane gave us all those strange gifts? Your dad got the turkey fryer?”

  “I liked that,” Jerry said tonelessly.

  “And you got those black pearl earrings,” Gayle said severely to Orla, “but they weren’t real pearls.”

  “I don’t have a shopping addiction, Mom.” Orla began the strenuous mental exercise of trying to come up with a restaurant that was inexpensive, close enough to walk to, and stocked with normal bread baskets, not focaccia or olive loaf or anything that might make her mother say, derisively, “Ooh la la.”

  “Because it’s in our blood. That’s all I’m saying.” Gayle sniffed.

  * * *

  Ten minutes later: “Ooh la la,” Gayle said as the waitress set down the bread basket.

  Orla sighed. “But it’s just rolls.”

  Gayle pointed at the dish next to the basket, which, instead of wrapped pats of butter, held a pool of oil and herbs for dipping.

  “How’s the job?” Jerry said to Orla. “Working on anything interesting?” Jerry had no idea what Orla wrote about, and they both preferred it that way. He could keep telling his coworkers that Orla was “a culture writer” if he didn’t see things like “How to Copy This Socialite Goddess’s Distressed Booty Jean Shorts in Just 13 Steps.”

  Gayle, who liked to share Orla’s posts on Facebook, flapped her napkin at him. “Jerry, that’s girl stuff,” she said, like Orla’s job was a box of tampons. “She doesn’t want to talk about that with you.” Gayle pinched a piece of bread between her thumb and forefinger. “Anyway,” she said. “Guess who I saw the other day? Catherine. And Danny.”

  Orla’s heart tripped. She made a show of chewing for a moment, then, when she trusted her voice to come out right, said: “And how are they?”

  “To be honest with you,” Gayle said, “they seemed extremely unhappy.”

  Orla could feel the blotches starting up her chest. She prayed Gayle wouldn’t notice. She could never be sure, then or now, how much her mother knew about then. Or now. “What do you mean?” she said. “How could you tell?”

  Before Gayle could answer, Jerry knocked his fork off the table with his elbow and looked at Gayle helplessly. Instead of signaling for the waiter, Gayle got up, approached the wait station, and retrieved a new set of silverware. “Well,” she said, unwrapping the utensils for Jerry, “they made quite a scene at Chick-fil-A. Maybe it’d be nothing in these parts.” She looked pointedly at two men holding hands across the corner table. “They were fighting, and she...”

  “She what?” Orla jumped in, forgetting to act like she didn’t care.

  “She was screaming,” Gayle said. “At the top of her lungs.”

  “Catherine was screaming?” Orla pictured Catherine, with her slicked-back soccer-girl braid, always pulling at Orla’s arm as soon as they got to a party, whimpering Let’s go, I know the cops are gonna come.

  “Evidently,” Gayle said, “she wanted Danny to pray with her over their meals. And he wouldn’t.”

  Jerry swallowed and laughed to himself without looking up.

  Orla had noticed a religious tinge to Catherine’s online presence, the last time she browsed. This was the term Orla clung to—browse had a light touch, a whiff of the happenstance—as she bored through everything she could find on Danny, sucking her ice cream spoon in the light of her laptop. She recalled an Instagram photo of a sunset, shot from Danny and Catherine’s backyard, just a few miles from her parents’ house, and the photo’s caption: When something beautiful happens and you just can’t help but thank Him. #nofilter.

  Gayle watched Orla carefully as she said: “When he got her calmed down, she said, ‘This is why I can’t be with you anymore.’”

  Orla’s fingers itched. She needed to get rid of them, get back to the apartment, get online. Since she and Floss began working together, she had been spending fewer nights looking up Danny. But it didn’t really matter how much time she spent clicking around his life, how many times she entered his name into a search box or how many days she managed not to. She was always waiting, still.

  Jerry shook the empty little cylinder and called out, “Salt?” The waitress came over to refill it and got trapped in Gayle’s signature rant on allergies (she did not have any; she just wanted to establish that she thought people invented them these days. People needed to toughen up about peanuts and gluten, that was all). The waitress looked to Orla for aid, but Orla was glad for the distraction. She let the letters on the menu blur in front of her and thought about Danny, the last time she ever spoke to him.

  * * *

  They were at a party, the night before high school graduation. The party was at the home of a kid named Ian, whose parents were never there. Neither, usually, were Orla and Catherine. Gayle and Jerry never had to police Orla’s whereabouts; her best friend was frightened of everything. But they were graduating, Orla insisted to Catherine, and they wouldn’t want to look back and remember that they had spent the last night of high school making Cheez Whiz nachos and rewatching Austin Powers. “We’ll bring Danny,” Orla added, feeling bold. “Danny won’t let anything happen.” Finally, Catherine gave in.

  Danny drove them. Catherine slid into the front seat, and he leaned over to kiss her on the cheek. He made sure her seat belt was clicked in right. Orla watched from her place in the back—behind Catherine, where she could see him.

  It was simple: Orla had always loved him. She had loved him since the first day of ninth grade, when she and Catherine, allies from middle school, sat next to each other in English. Danny sat in a desk on the other side of the room. His arms were pale and muscled, folded across a wordless gray T-shirt on a day everyone else had picked their clothes like their lives depended on them. When he twisted around to look, at the teacher’s urging, at a how-to chart on bibliographies, his dark blue eyes locked on Orla’s pale brown ones, and that was what she would always remember: the way he was willing to stare, when so many boys nearly wet themselves from eye contact. Orla looked at him, and he looked back at her, and she wished the teacher would never shut up about how to cite sources.

  Afterward, Catherine turned to Orla in the hallway, red as an angry infant, and said, “Did you see him?”

  And Orla said, “I know.”

  They were talking quietly, because he was behind them, all of them shuffling toward next period, struggling to hold the map of the school in their heads. Catherine turned quickly, as if she needed to do it before she lost her courage. Her braid grazed Orla’s face, a quick, bristling lash. “Hi,” Catherine said to Danny. “Do you know which way Upper B is?” Danny glanced once at Orla, then nodded and started speaking to Catherine. Simple again: Danny and Catherine started dating that weekend, and never stopped.

  Orla could have raged or cried or sabotaged them, but she was strangely content to orbit them instead. For four years, she joined Danny and Catherine for movies and camping trips and felt only shallow pangs when they went into one tent, and she went into the other. She dated plenty of his friends, was always happy to take on another for the pleasure of Danny leaning against her locker, grinning, his hand on her shoulder as he joked, “Be nice to this one.” They spent high school in the same carpeted basements and starry parking lots, under the arms of different people. And as Danny and Catherine synced up their applications to state schools, Orla never tried a thing, never made an advance, never confessed. She was already writing him into the story of her life later on. She had it all planned: she was going to be a New Yorker, an author with chic glasses and a grip on what to do with her disorderly hair. At seventeen, she went to bed dreaming not of going to prom with Danny, but of him knocking on the door of her brownstone. She bundled him together with success and self-confidence—things from the future—and her ability to wait for them made her feel brave and pure and wise, like a monk. Catherine often told
the story of how she and Danny met. “He stared at me all through freshman English on the first day of school,” she would say, turning to her best friend for backup. “Ask Orla. She was there.” Orla would nod and murmur, “It’s true. I was there.” But the truth, the smooth and immutable fact that propelled her through each day, was that Danny’s gaze had been on her first.

  At Ian’s pre-graduation party, Catherine gulped Mad Dog too fast from a jelly jar with Lion King characters on it. Danny and Orla put her to sleep in the only untrashed room of the house, atop Ian’s parents’ plain navy quilt. Danny sandwiched Catherine between pillows, propping her on her side in case she threw up. When they got back downstairs, the other kids had all passed out or gone home, abandoning the strobe light that sat blinking on a card table. Orla was starving. Danny suggested they go back into town, to Wawa, for hoagies.

  When they left the store, bags swinging, Orla thought they would head right back to watch Catherine, but Danny felt like a drive. Orla, sitting in the front seat for once, touched the gearshift and said, “I wish I could drive stick.” She wished no such thing; she couldn’t have cared less. But she was always on the lookout for ways to seem interesting.

  Without taking his eyes off the road, Danny had covered her hand with his and left it there as he guided the car through its powers. Orla hadn’t said a thing, hadn’t moved, hadn’t breathed. He was driving too fast, she thought, drifting too close to the yellow line, getting careless on hairpin curves. She had never felt safer in her life.

  When they got back, they sat on Ian’s porch, eating and talking. Orla had given Danny a book a few weeks earlier, a whiny teenage manifesto she took as gospel at the time. “I loved it,” he said. “I tried to get Catherine to read it, but I don’t think she got it.” He looked out past the porch rail as if there were a great vista in front of them, though the house across from Ian’s was only thirty feet out. A string of Christmas lights, half-burned-out, still drooped from its eaves. “It’ll be our thing,” Danny said.

  Inside, they found Catherine sleeping deeply. Danny felt for her breath with his hand, then crawled into bed beside her. Orla collapsed on the floor, and Danny pulled the pillow from beneath his neck and tossed it down. “Are you gonna remember us, Orla?” he said quietly.

  Orla’s heart pounded in her throat as she wondered, briefly, if she had done it all wrong, being brave and pure and wise, if she should withdraw from her fancy mountainside college, or beg him to come along. Like the seventeen-year-old girl she was, she believed him full of potential that was invisible to everyone but her.

  “Who’s us?” she said finally.

  Danny was half-asleep when he answered. “All of us,” he said. “You know, you’re gonna be somewhere else, you’ll be this writer, and...” He paused, gave a long moan of a yawn. “I’ll be like, ‘I know her.’”

  The next morning, after the principal and class president were finished, Orla had to give a speech. She had served as class vice president after running unopposed, at Gayle’s insistence, for the sake of her college applications. Onstage with her speech, a single-spaced printout of metaphors that didn’t quite land, Orla spoke slowly, hoping Danny and Catherine might show up by the end. But their seats were still empty when she finished.

  A few hours after graduation, the phone rang at Orla’s house. It was Catherine. Though both girls had cell phones by then, they still called each other’s homes, a habit both formal and intimate, proud proof of their long friendship. Catherine was shaky with guilt. She had been sick from drinking all morning, she said. Then she had gone to the car wash with Danny, to wait with him while he had his car detailed. She had vomited, on the way home from Ian’s, all over the passenger seat.

  “Was I awful?” Catherine said. “At the party?”

  “Not awful,” Orla said. She drew the word out carefully, as if Catherine had really embarrassed herself and Orla was sparing her the truth.

  “I feel terrible I missed your speech.” Catherine’s voice was gaspy in the receiver, the way it got when she was headed for a cry. “Are we okay?”

  “Sure,” Orla said. Nothing else. She listened to Catherine’s trembling sighs on the other end, the sound of her waiting for Orla to comfort her. But all she could think of was Catherine puking in Danny’s car, on the seat that had been hers in the middle of the night. She tucked the receiver under her chin and stayed stingily silent.

  When Orla hung up, she saw Gayle in her bedroom doorway, holding the lidded plastic tub that would live under Orla’s bed at Lehigh. “You have so much going for you, Orla,” Gayle said. “Let Catherine have what Catherine has.”

  Summer drifted past, and Orla made excuses not to see Catherine. They said shallow precollege goodbyes over the phone. Orla hadn’t lied, when Catherine asked; they were okay. She wasn’t angry. She just didn’t see the point of staying close. Her feelings for Danny had been validated—I’ll be like, I know her. He wanted to see how she was going to turn out. No matter where the story went from here, Orla thought, Catherine was destined to be a footnote.

  College became the place she started watching him, because college was the place she started being alone. For no reason Orla could see, the girls on her freshman-year dorm floor looked around her as if by agreement. Her roommate mumbled something about a sleeping problem and transferred elsewhere in October, just weeks after she and Orla had agreed, with the rusty manners of two girls who have always had their own rooms, where to put the posters and the minifridge. After the roommate’s furniture was removed, Orla vowed each day to plant her feet in front of one of her hallmates and say, “I have a single now, you know, if you guys want to drink in my room tonight.” But—perhaps because they mostly saw each other while wearing only towels—she never found the bravery.

  By the time fall break began, the borders of cliques were bonded and set. Orla could hear groups of friends moving outside the door she no longer kept propped hopefully open, as her orientation counselor had advised. She heard them going to breakfast late without her, going to dinner early without her, going to parties loudly without her. Her aloneness was so random, so total and unprovoked, that she almost thought someone from the school would come along to smooth it out, the way they might a housing mix-up, or a schedule snafu. Just before winter break, she tried to join a sorority, walking into an information session to find two hundred girls in the nearly same black pointed boots, ink-blue jeans, and tartan scarves. Only one other girl in the room was not wearing some version of this look: a girl from India whom Orla recognized from her discrete math class. An eager blonde who had been talking to the Indian girl, enunciating loudly, turned to Orla when she sat down. She assessed Orla’s Lehigh hoodie and sky blue denim, the plastic claw in her hair. “And what country are you from?” the blonde said loudly.

  By spring, Orla was leaning into isolation. She sold her meal plan on the student exchange website and took to eating buffalo wings in her room. She worked her way through Sex and the City on DVD. She wrote: short stories, song lyrics, never-ending screenplays. And, as more and more ways to do it were invented, she kept up with Danny. She would write for four minutes, then refresh Danny’s Myspace. She would falter on a passage, then toggle over to stare at his screen name on her Instant Messenger buddy list, watching the letters go from black to gray when he found something better to do.

  The semesters turned into the next ones, and nothing changed. Once, Orla saw the Indian girl from the sorority meeting in the student union. She walked toward the girl, an opener gathering itself in her mind—Remember that night, how crazy was that, like was there a Burberry memo we missed? But as she got closer, a harried redhead ran up and punched the arm of the Indian girl. They found a table and unzipped their jackets. Orla saw that the Indian girl had on the right scarf, the right jeans and boots. And a crew-necked sweatshirt with Greek letters, denoting Alpha Phi.

  When she went home on breaks, Orla would sometimes glance up at
the ring of her parents’ landline. But, after a school year’s worth of silence, Catherine had started to text her. She would send Orla canned messages on holidays—happy this or that, and hi to your parents—and each girl would ask how the other had been. What could really be said that way? Twice, Orla snuffed out an exchange by saying, with a smiley, “Nothing new to report!” Facebook had not yet reached Catherine’s lower-tier state school, but Orla didn’t need it; she could picture how well her friend had moved on. She imagined Catherine’s soccer teammates with tight stomachs and clean faces, fussing over Danny the first time he came to visit. She imagined them teasing Catherine about being a lightweight, and putting her gently to bed when she proved them right. There was only one thing she really wondered about her old friend: how long she and Danny would be together.

  She got the answer she wanted a few weeks after college graduation. Orla moved straight back to Mifflin, to make good on a deal she had struck with her parents: she would live at home and work locally for one year, to save money before moving to New York. She had secured a job covering town council meetings for the newspaper that fell on Mifflin’s doorsteps.

  One night, a week before she was due to start at the paper, Orla ran into Catherine while picking up takeout at TGI Fridays. (Jerry was fond of saying that the chain’s Jack Daniel’s chicken was the best dinner on earth, that “you”—who “you” was had never quite been defined—“can keep your Michelin-star joints.”) When their eyes met, Orla was holding her father’s credit card, and Catherine was holding a drink with a flashing scrotum plunged into the ice.

  “It’s my bachelorette party!” she crowed, grabbing Orla’s elbow to anchor herself. “Danny and I are getting married next month.” Her eyes widened and she dug her fingers into Orla’s arm. “Stay!” she pleaded. “Hang out.” Orla phoned home, hoping for an out, but Gayle joyfully insisted that Orla forget about bringing home the food and enjoy herself.