Fake Plastic Love Read online

  Don’t misunderstand me—many people at Dartmouth could give a hoot about the world of finance. My best friend Annabelle Bailey—Belle is what we always called her—was one of them, and it was on that score and many others that we made such an unlikely duo. I would eventually figure out that we weren’t so unlikely, after all—that the purest forms of admiration and envy don’t require an incubation period, blooming instantly and soon coloring everything.

  Belle and I first met during our freshman year when she—with characteristic absent-mindedness—picked up my coffee at the counter of the off-campus café, Rosey Jekes, instead of waiting for her own. Despite all of our glaring differences, our coffee orders were identical—double-shot black Americanos—and she had taken mine. I trailed her in the coffeehouse for all of three steps, and then lost my nerve. I could wait another thirty seconds for my caffeine injection. And besides, there was something about her bow-clad flats and giraffe’s neck and ballerina’s walk that was too unsuspecting and delicate to startle. The effect endeared her to strangers like me without our ever realizing it. But in reality Belle was far from unaware: she had a sixth sense about her—an extra set of vigilant cat eyes fixed onto the back of her head—and she knew all at once that I was there and that I had watched her mistake.

  “This is your coffee,” she stated, turning around and looking straight at me. Glancing down to the cup in her hands, I saw two opposing arcs decorating the plastic lid in brilliant red—she had already taken a sip and left behind her signature stamp. “It’s how Great Love and Friendship begin in the movies, isn’t it?” She laughed, shooting sparks of delight around her. Her neck craned toward me. I would soon learn this was Belle’s physical reaction when she properly focused on another person or thing—a trace or two away from silly and undeniably florid. I assumed a puzzled look that she must have mistaken for amusement, adding, “Lovely, then—the next one will be on me!” before flying out the door and zipping off on her red bicycle, with each pedal fertilizing a blooming path along an otherwise ordinary campus walkway. And so she had declared us friends—invented a romantic beginning, planted seeds of meaning into something I would have quickly forgotten as one of life’s everyday and inevitable accidents.

  Of course I had seen Belle around campus and knew who she was before that first encounter. She’d been a gleaming light in our class—her blond head and hundred-watt smile and apple-red accessories brightening the moods of even the most hungover or chauvinistic fratty types on walks across campus between classes. She could usually be spotted cycling by, laughing or waving atop her cherry-colored, basket-clad bicycle, an old-fashioned Pashley she had imported from England. She was the lifestyle reporter for The Dartmouth, churning out stylized and sentimental stories about the history of Valentine’s Day proposals on campus or accounts of swoony old Winter Carnival traditions—the crowning of the Queen of the Snows (“Not only beauty but the spirit of New Hampshire snows and Hanover winters will grace her personality and costume”), sleigh riders munching maple-syrup-topped snow cones, and ski jumpers swooping off an eighty-five-foot-tall trestle to hold fast-fleeting court high above the frosted country club golf course. She saved and pressed the brightest autumn leaves to use as bookmarks. She requested songs to play on Baker Library’s bells that she’d dedicate to people with anonymous note cards left in their Hinman postboxes. If it had been politically correct enough for Dartmouth to have a twenty-first-century Queen of the Snows—or if Belle had been granted her great wish of being born in an earlier, dreamier era—without a shadow of a doubt she would have been it.

  Though she could have chosen anyone, after our Americano mix-up she decided to shine her light on me. I couldn’t help but be flattered. I played varsity squash, dressed in navies and neutrals and duck boots, and was as far a cry as you could find from your prototypical Winter Carnival Queen. But still, something about me must have caught her fascination. Belle did some amount of research to find out my name and within a few days, monogrammed letterpress cards, beautifully penned in her tilted cursive, started appearing in my mailbox. Each one listed an instruction that stacked together could have been published as a guidebook called something like Mischief in Madras: Charmed Life in the Ivy League.

  I.O.U. one double-shot Americano! How about we make it a triple and then race canoes on the Connecticut?? Last one across the river and back is a rotten egg!

  Apple picking at Windy Hill Orchard this Saturday! The apple cider donuts are so naughty but I’ve been feeling a bit devilish lately …

  Ice-skating on Occom Pond after class today—bundle up in College colors and I’ll bring the hot cocoa (spiked, of course—shhhhh!).

  We found a simple kind of balance together: I helped bring her down to Earth, if only momentarily, and she brought me out of my shell, offering much-needed diversification of my spare time outside my varsity squash schedule. Neither of us joined sororities so we were both GDIs—God Damn Independents—a more surprising label for a bombshell like Belle Bailey. I never rushed but she had, receiving bids from all the most coveted houses. But none of them had done enough to win her over. Even back then Belle insisted on fashioning her own mold instead of folding her willowy frame into someone else’s. In no time we had thrown out the label GDI and started calling ourselves The Lost Girls, our very own (unrecognized) two-person secret society. All Greek meetings were held every Wednesday when the clock struck an ominous ten, which meant those nights became ours. The campus would darken and empty as undergrads scurried into the close, beer-reeking holds of their fraternities and sororities and, for a few special hours, we were handed the keys to a mystical village. On one of those Wednesdays another one of Belle’s note cards handed me my marching orders:

  M.,

  They call Jupiter’s proximity to the moon tonight a “conjunction”—I say they’re facing each other ready to set off on a celestial foxtrot. It’s happening tonight! Meet at the Shattuck Observatory at 10 p.m.—sharp!

  B.B.

  I never asked how she secured the keys to the observatory so we could meet after hours, but it was the first of many trips we would take there on Wednesday nights, when campus police had their hands full trolling the sordid and shadowy length of Fraternity Row. The first time we tiptoed through the door, I could see she was pulled toward the 130-year-old refractor telescope magnetically.

  “He’s out there, you know,” she whispered, hovering near the telescope with her voice slowed to a snail’s pace by the sweet drag of dreaminess.

  “Wait, didn’t you want to look for the preposition? Or was it the conjunction?” I squinted as I thumbed through The Cosmic Perspective, an introductory astronomy book Belle had borrowed from Baker Library to assist us in our stargazing.

  “No, no. For God’s sake.” She sighed, impatiently, as though hauling us across campus to peer into the heavens in search of an intergalactic ballroom dance had been my ill-conceived idea in the first place. “I mean, the boy who will change everything one day—for you, and for me.”

  “I certainly hope it’s not the same boy! Because that would end very poorly for one of us,” I said with a snort. We had no idea that at that moment, hundreds of miles away in a rural stretch of upstate New York, there actually was a young man—the same young man—who would alter so much for both of us.

  “Don’t,” she censured me with deadpan seriousness. She reached through the dim to take the library book with one hand and grasp my arm with the other. “It’s not a thing to snort at, M. Snort at anything else in this world but not at that. It’s the most important thing there is.”

  Belle was a very smart girl who would never apologize for dreaming the most formulaic dreams about moonlight and storybook endings and so-long-as-we-both-shall-live. And sometimes the universe responds to what a person sends out into its silent, starry vastness. Eager suitors lined up around her on campus—from slow-witted, supercute hockey players to sharp-tongued, owl-eyed, Jack-O-Lantern writers. But none fit the bill perfectly enough to be anoin
ted as her Chosen One. Belle was her most emphatic on one point. She would wait as long as she needed to find True Love. While on some fundamental level I hoped—and expected—he would materialize someday, during my teenage years I’d never idled away hours pining for the boy who would one day change everything for me. I’d never had a confidante or coconspirator—no hairbrush lip-syncing or crank calling crushes or heart-fluttering first kiss recaps. After the sweaty herd of adolescence had stampeded by, I would always wonder if, by skipping those most blushing moments of shared girlhood, I had ever been fully and completely young. My friendship with Belle gave me another crack, if only vicariously, at some of the things I’d missed. I suspect that was a great comfort to my mother who had been so profoundly disappointed to realize that I, her only child, lacked that essential girlishness—that, as I got older, I continued to sport several earmarks of a tomboy. Makeup always seemed too costume-like, and the thought of nail polish chipping imperfectly was almost as unbearable to me as the sound of nails scraping their way across a chalkboard. I was happier gripping a squash racquet than a ballet barre. At school, I was proudest being anointed yearbook editor instead of Homecoming Queen. I found steadiness, dedication, thoroughness, and honesty to be the most attractive qualities and pursued them in everything I did in the classroom and on court. This no doubt resulted in a healthy amount of eye-rolling from other girls my age, but I didn’t notice. I wanted to be good and do good things—I didn’t pay attention to much else. At fifteen I went to one school dance and was never asked to dance. I left the building long before the grand “Stairway to Heaven” finale. The thought of what was happening through the double doors in the seedy smokiness of the parking lot behind the gym frightened me to no end—maybe the boys could sense it. So I never went back to another dance. I learned that secret Valentines and sentimentally scrawled journals and soulfully recorded CD mixes were not for me. And so, while Belle Bailey became a woman for whom two-plus carats were a life certainty, I grew up into a woman who’d insist she preferred her signet ring to a diamond.

  * * *

  Every life has an essential inflection point—a sharp angle that jolts each of us off in some direction, altering our course and marking the Before and After. Belle’s came earlier and was sharper and more course altering than most. In the last stretch of our junior year on a blue-skied and blossoming May day, her parents died in one of the decade’s most notorious plane crashes when flying back from their holiday in Burgundy. An in-flight fire and pilot error were to blame. I had studied abroad in London that term, then went traveling—hiking in Iceland, sleeping in a volcano hut and out of phone contact for a full three days when it happened. I would always feel a fresh scraping of guilt for being so unaware, so far away from Belle when she got the news. Her tragedy—losing her parents so young in such a spectacular way—granted her the right to be evasive about her past. It was deeply melancholic territory and no one would disrespect her by posing the questions shallow souls were most desperate to ask her: What did your dad do? Where did you summer? Wait, my dear girl, are you still able to summer? What’s the state of your trust fund? How much did you actually inherit? It handed her a special allure. The intrigue and pity of others intermingled to form a lovely film around her—a second skin that distanced her. So, from that point on, no one could ever say with certainty whether Belle was a beer fortune heiress or just another pretty Golightly girl dusting off her nonexistent social status on trips to the powder room.

  Belle spent the first summer after the crash with an aunt back home in Rhode Island and I wasn’t certain she would return to campus to finish her senior year. But she did return—much thinner and brushed with a watercolored sadness that only managed to make her look more beautiful. We had planned to share a small off-campus house for our final year, but Belle regretfully told me she needed to back out of the lease, retreating into her own palatial two-bedroom apartment reigning high above the quiet bustle of Main Street. Her trademark fire had dialed down to an ember—she stopped making Baker bell song dedications, and to my knowledge she never visited the Shattuck Observatory again. She gave up her job as lifestyle reporter for The Dartmouth. She started walking, leaving her red Pashley leaning at a lonely angle, chained up on the sidewalk in front of her building. Our entire class started scrubbing and polishing itself in preparation for the first round of corporate recruiting that hovered like a black boom on the brink of swinging over to complete a hazardous sailing tack. Our entire class except Belle, that is. She never spoke of it, but I could see plain as day that her interest in the future dissolved along with the last traces of her parents’ downed fuselage. And so did her insistence on finding True Love. In both respects, she decided to look the other way.

  One electric October morning with hints of fire in the air, I checked my campus postbox as a desperate break from editing and reediting my CV for the first résumé drop lurking only a few days away. A single envelope occupied the darkness of the box, slanting sadly against its left wall. Even before I pulled it into the daylight, I knew it was a letterpress card from Belle—the first I’d received since the crash. Without a single exclamation point or asterisk or all-capped word, she was summoning me on one of our old adventures:

  M.,

  Lost Girls Summit on Gilman Island. Meet me tomorrow at the Ledyard dock at 5:30 p.m. Bring your sleeping bag. I’ll bring the canoe and the jam and bread.

  B.B.

  I traced my fingers along the string of blue loops spelling out Lost Girls and shivered.

  And so the next evening we canoed through the early ripples of twilight away from campus and down the Connecticut River, deeper and deeper into haunted Indian territory toward Gilman Island, the Lost Girls’ very own New Hampshire Neverland, that when viewed from above in its full autumn flush would have resembled the teardrop flame of a candle floating mystically atop the water. When we arrived, Belle sat cross-legged at water’s edge, holding a piece of bread smothered in jam and marveling up as the sky darkened and a deep-blue, star-specked carpet unfurled above her.

  “Let’s never leave,” she said, decisively. “I think I’d prefer to stay right here.”

  “Gilman Island?” I laughed. “I don’t buy it for a second. You can make it through a night with no electricity and plumbing, but I think Block Island is more your speed, Belle.”

  “No, I think I’d rather not leave this place,” she insisted, ignoring me and keeping large eyes trained upward as she took a giant bite of her bread and jam.

  But we have to leave—none of us have a choice, I thought to myself, feeling the full, sad weight of her desperation to escape the rawness and reality that awaited her once she’d be forced into the wider world beyond campus. On our holy undergraduate lawns, she was safe—we were all safe; she could wrap herself in the College’s history and its verdure and pretend that tragedy hadn’t actually struck her. But what would she do once that wrapping was gone, once she was left exposed without that arcadian shield?

  When night fell with crisp and inky permanence over the island, Belle wouldn’t retreat into the log cabin to sleep and insisted on spreading her sleeping bag out along the shore.

  “Come inside, Belle”—I almost said you’ll catch your death out here but caught myself—“you’ll catch an awful cold out here.” I had officially started editing the things I said to her and it would take a good number of years for me to speak my mind to her again, honest and unchecked.

  “No, thank you,” she refused, politely, pulling a red wool hat over her ears and stretching wide within her sleeping bag. “I want to wake up with a frosty nose. Don’t you just love waking up with a frosty nose? It’s one of my favorite things in the world.”

  When we paddled back to campus the next morning, Belle had in fact caught something. She couldn’t stop sneezing, issuing an unending string of soft and dainty “a-choos!” But something else had shifted, too, like a weather vane rotating a few ominous degrees east.

  Within a week of our summit on Gi
lman Island Belle took up with a brash and bulky fraternity president named Chase Breckenridge—an Anglo-American turbo-douche she secretly canoodled with after a number of frat parties over the years and the guy least likely to qualify as the one who would change everything for her. Belle never introduced us properly, which confused and irritated me in equal measure. But I managed to meet him on my own later that October when a big gang of us—at long last turned twenty-one—took over a townie pub off-campus, downing Long Island Iced Teas that could have doubled as lemon-laced rocket fuel. Belle had agreed to meet me at the bar but never turned up; I had assumed Chase was the reason but since our return from Gilman Island she had started disappearing, breaking or rearranging plans or arriving an hour or two late, without explanation or apology. It was becoming increasingly difficult to track her movements. By myself in the mayhem, I was tossed into a crowd of classmates who were semistrangers and urged into a game of darts with an especially rowdy lot that included Chase. It came down to the two of us and I ended up beating him. Though he looked more and more outraged as it was happening, at some point he resigned himself to the defeat, rocking back on his heels and staring at me with wide and amused eyes, as though he were observing a newly evolved species flashing its feathers just to please him.

  “And that, my friend, means you owe me another one of these,” I said to him, smugly, waving my empty glass in his direction once I had won. We sidled up to the bar and he fixed his big, off-kilter grin on me as he commandeered my victory tea.