the blame on her brother Tommy when they fought. “...so really, Winnie, we don’t know the story, and Manda is probably overreacting.”
“You’re probably right,” she said.
During college, Vicky had a horrendous crush on Dakota, who was a freshman to her junior. She’d wanted to marry him “So we can be sisters!” When Dakota deflected her advances, Vicky had moved on to his roommate: Mack.
Winnie held the phone between her shoulder and ear and typed her password into her computer. She was thinking about the joints in the back of her underwear drawer, the ones that Dakota had got for her. She wasn’t usually a weed smoker, but lately, she was so stressed she felt like she was losing her mind.
“Have to go, V, I have a million things to do before tomorrow.”
“Okay, text me the deets.”
“Sure.” Winnie hated when Vicky said “deets.” She also hated that Vicky insisted on calling their gathering Friendsgiving just because Taylor Swift did it.
After she hung up with Vicky, she called Nigel straightaway. When he picked up, it felt like a great fist had grabbed her stomach and squeezed.
“Are you serious, Winnie? We just moved Dakota in. No.”
“Nigel, they planned their trips to visit family around this. We’ve literally had these plans for a year. We can’t just cancel on them!”
“We can, because things happen. They’ll get over it.”
“I can’t believe you’re being so dismissive about this.”
There was a long pause before he spoke again.
“Okay...okay.”
Winnie felt the hands loosen on her stomach a little. “Okay...?”
“Yeah. I don’t want to fight about it. Just okay.”
* * *
Nigel was in a surprisingly good mood on the day of Friendsgiving. She was suspicious; was he holding back his irritation? Winnie had to remind herself that she was being negative with no real basis for that feeling. When she needed supplies from the store he volunteered to go: “What my baby wants, my baby gets!” he called on his way out the door.
His errand gave Winnie time to get herself ready. She shot upstairs to do her makeup and slip into a dress she’d bought online for the occasion. She had always wanted to be the most interesting person in any room. She’d gone to great lengths as a child to stand out; once, at thirteen, she’d chopped off her waist-length hair during one of her parents’ dinner parties, announcing to a room of her father’s coworkers that she was done with blatant sexism. A few years later, during her emo phase, she’d fed right back into that blatant sexism and paid one of her brother’s friends to tattoo the words Sweet Girl on her upper thigh. And late into her teenage years, Winnie had decided that sex wasn’t a big deal at all and freely slept with whomever she felt she had a connection with, all this during her self-professed “hippie stage.” Now that she was a grown-up, Winnie felt like she was still playing a role—a more grounded and responsible one. She recycled voraciously; grew her own organic vegetables that she fed to her perfect child and smart husband; had gay friends, Black friends, West Indian friends, and—more recently—a trans friend. Winnie volunteered, always kept spare dollars in her purse for the homeless, and kept her tight-knit group together by being the peacemaker. When Winnie came downstairs, Nigel had come back, and he was whistling.
“You can make your risotto, right?” Winnie asked. “The one everyone loves?”
“Yep.”
“And pick up a case of wine from the—”
“Got it,” he said.
Nigel did make his risotto. It was on the stove when the first of their guests rang the newly installed “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” doorbell. Don and Malay, who arrived wrapped in scarves and toting a bottle of Bordeaux, were exclaiming about a museum opening like it was the second coming of Christ when Nigel walked into the living room. Despite their being Winnie’s friends from grad school, and that they were horrendously pretentious, they loved Nigel.
Winnie knew her friends, and they weren’t as nice as they pretended to be. Nigel had been taken on as a sort of pet to the group: the kid with the single mom who grew up eating Hungry-Man dinners and went to community college. They fed him pieces of their intellect and humored his lower-middle-class mentality with stories of their own artistic and ostentatious upbringings. Nigel always acted like this was a real treat, but after they were gone, he and Winnie would laugh about all the obnoxious things her friends had said. It became