Friends and Strangers - J. Courtney Sullivan Page 0,117
the weather was nice. I can even talk him into bowling on a really good day.”
“I think I kind of know how Andrew felt,” she said. “When I was in high school, everyone I knew was the same as me. Just, normal. But now, you wouldn’t believe it. There’s a Saudi princess in one of my art classes. My first year, this girl in my dorm invited a bunch of us home with her to Boston to celebrate her birthday. I grew up like ten minutes from her, but in the suburbs. Her family lives in a penthouse apartment in the city, overlooking the Charles River. An elevator opens right into their living room. Even Isabella. Her parents own three houses! I’ve had to learn how to be comfortable around rich people. The main thing is you’re supposed to act like they’re no different than you are. Even though they don’t act normal. They always want to give you a tour of their house, like it’s a museum.”
George laughed.
“You can pretend you’re the same when you all have rooms in the same dorm and eat the same food and go to the same classes,” she said. “But then you see the way other people live, and—”
“Diego gave a very interesting presentation about first jobs after college at discussion group once,” George said. “His oldest graduated in 1990. There were just no jobs to be had. Same thing happened six years ago, when the economy tanked. The economic climate you graduate into defines so much about your prospects, and yet if you happen to graduate at the wrong time, you end up feeling like a failure because you did everything right, you went to this elite school, and you couldn’t get a job after. The fact is we’re not as in control of our personal destinies as we imagine ourselves to be.”
Sam nodded.
A lot of the people she knew from high school and college were planning on the Peace Corps or Teach For America or law school next year. She wondered now how many of them had a passion for it, and how many just needed a plan.
They were silent through the end of Tom Petty singing “Refugee,” and “Gimme Shelter” by the Rolling Stones.
A song she particularly liked came on next.
“Who sings this again?” she said.
“Chuck Berry.”
“I think Andrew was playing this song when I was over there for dinner recently.”
“Probably. Kid left for college and made off with half my CDs. This here is a playlist of my favorite songs. I’ve decided life’s too short for music that’s just okay.”
“I like that,” she said.
A sign for the airport came into view. George hit the blinker.
Suddenly Sam felt embarrassed, remembering where they were headed.
“Did Andrew and Elisabeth tell you that Clive is—very old?” she said.
She sometimes found it helped to make a situation sound worse than it was so that the truth, which might otherwise be troubling, would instead come as a relief. Like in high school, when she wept to her parents that she had bad news and was ashamed of herself, allowing them to conjure up an unwanted pregnancy or a drug addiction, before telling them she had gotten a B in chemistry.
“Nobody tells me anything,” George said. “How old is very old? My age?”
“Eww, no!” she said.
“Gee, thanks.”
Sam grinned. “That’s not what I meant.”
George expertly navigated his way through the twists and turns of the airport. He didn’t need to slow down or consult the signs to check which airlines landed at which terminal. The cars going in every direction felt to Sam like a video game. But George was unruffled.
He pulled out of a lane of cars stuck at a standstill, crossed to the far right, and sailed into the arrivals area.
“You’re good at this,” Sam said.
“I’ve done it a few thousand times,” he said.
Sam saw Clive before he saw them.
He stood on the curb, a suitcase by his side. He was taller than everyone else around, and his hair was spiked up in that way he wore it when he was going out for the night. He wore jeans and leather sneakers and a red zip-up top that she knew had the Nottingham Forest team logo printed on one sleeve.
“There,” she said, pointing. “That’s him, that’s Clive.”
George pulled up right in front of him.
When Sam got out of the car, a smile spread across Clive’s face.