Friends and Strangers - J. Courtney Sullivan Page 0,168

old times’ sake. But then Isabella finagled the use of her father’s friend’s condo at a nearby ski resort. It was an hour from campus, but it had a hot tub and a deck and a fireplace in every bedroom.

* * *

—

The reunion began on Friday afternoon. They met up on Wednesday evening to have some time alone beforehand. They drank wine and watched the sun set and agreed that life would be so much better if they lived closer. They talked until three in the morning.

On Thursday, they hiked and went to lunch, talking all the while. It seemed impossible that they could ever run out of things to say. At some point, Sam wondered why her jaw hurt, and then realized it was from laughing. She wished she had understood during their school days that she would never experience friendship in such a concentrated form again, except in small doses, like this.

When Isabella got depressed after the birth of her first son, they instituted the Bat Signal—a way of letting each other know that an urgent response was required. If one of them truly needed the other, she’d be there. But for the most part, their friendship was guilt-free. Voice mails sometimes went unanswered. A birthday present might arrive two months late, or not at all. There were no hurt feelings on either side.

The plan for Friday was to get to the college early, hours before the festivities began. To remember the place on their own terms. But that morning, when Sam walked into the kitchen, Isabella didn’t even look up from her phone. She was typing furiously.

“Fucking fuckheads,” she murmured.

“Work drama?” Sam said.

“Yes. Ugh. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

Sam said she’d take her own car to campus. They could meet up later.

On the drive, she listened to the radio, left the window down, and breathed in the air. Ten miles outside town, she started to feel nervous. She wished she had waited for Isabella after all.

Sam made a mental list of her achievements, as if she could build a wall out of them and hide behind it—she weighed fifteen pounds less than the day she graduated. She knew how to dress now, in clothes that flattered her figure, rather than shapeless things meant to hide it. She had a two-hundred-dollar haircut and had recently been profiled in the Alumnae Quarterly for her work in the art world. So why did she feel so insecure?

She parked in front of Foss-Lanford Hall. The dorm looked exactly as it always had, the name embossed in stone above the entrance.

Once, lying poolside on one of their trips, Isabella asked, “Who was Foss Lanford?”

“Was it a person?” Sam said. “I thought it was two people.”

Isabella shrugged, and moved on to another topic.

Back at work a few days later, Sam went online for answers.

Eleanor Foss, class of ’47, had married George Lanford in 1950. Together, they made a fortune designing popular board games, none of which existed anymore. When Eleanor died, George gave enough money to the college that they named a building in her honor, albeit a dorm at the far end of campus. Sam felt bad for not knowing sooner, for passing under her name every day for years without so much as wondering. The appeal of having your name carved in stone, she would imagine, was that you would never be forgotten. But that assumed curiosity, care, on the part of those who came after.

She got out of the car now and noted the second-to-last window on the third floor, which had once been hers and Isabella’s. From out here, it looked like all the others.

In the dining hall on the first floor, bodies moved around.

Sam couldn’t make out the faces.

Maybe this was why she’d been reluctant to return, the sensation that still showed up every once in a while when she thought of what had happened. Not only what she’d done, but how she’d been. All the things she didn’t understand until later, made worse by the fact that she believed, at the time, that she understood perfectly.

There was shame in knowing how easy it had been to walk away from the mess she made. A childish mistake on her part that would make every day that much harder for the women in the dining hall, women she claimed to love.

Sam never spoke to them again after graduation. She left this place with promises to keep in touch with so many people, never imagining that she’d stop knowing them