Friends and Strangers - J. Courtney Sullivan Page 0,25

Sam opened the fridge to get Gil’s bottle, there were leftovers from Sunday dinner wrapped in cellophane—roast chicken stuffed with lemons, red potato wedges sprinkled with dill. She envied Elisabeth then most of all.

Before she left for college, her mother bought her something called Dinner For One. It was a box containing four pieces of matching blue china—a dinner plate, a bread plate, a bowl, a cup. In years past, Sam had put the set to use, but now it sat at the back of the closet. Something about it depressed her.

From what she had seen, most people’s twenties were much closer to Dinner For One than they were to Sunday Roast Chicken. Roommates seemed so odd, the more she thought of it. Strangers with whom the only thing you had in common was that none of you could afford to live alone. Sam wanted to skip all that and be settled.

Clive talked about moving to the country. A little house with a room upstairs where she could paint. Children, not right away, but someday. It sounded both wonderful and terrifying.

When Sam saw a used pregnancy test in the dorm bathroom, she thought of how nobody here was hoping for a positive result. She wished she had reached that place in life, when the reaction could be what they showed in the commercials: a happy couple jumping up and down.

“Wear my black halter dress!” Isabella shouted at someone, pulling Sam’s attention back to the party. “Keep it! I’m serious! It would look amazing on you.”

Isabella was already drunk. Giving her stuff away was a telltale sign. In a week or two, she would search both their closets, asking if Sam had seen her black halter anywhere.

A bunch of them had pooled their money for pizza. Sam went to the stack of boxes on her desk, removed two slices of cheese, and put them on a paper plate. She brought it to her roommate.

“Eat,” she said.

Isabella took one bite, then another, and then put the plate on the floor.

“Thank you, Mom,” she said. “Do you promise to look after me forever?”

“Yes,” Sam said.

“Even when you and Clive are married and raising five kids in England and I’m the mistress of some corporate tycoon in Dubai?”

“Even then,” Sam said.

They smiled, because, she thought, they both sort of liked the sound of it.

Isabella took Sam’s face in her hands. “I love you so much it hurts.”

Sam swore she could feel the grease working its way off Isabella’s fingertips and straight into her pores.

“Love you too,” she said.

* * *

—

By ten, Isabella was fully sobbing.

A normal occurrence after so many drinks, but it irked Sam. This was supposed to be her night to freak out, to be on the receiving end of the pep talk. She needed to leave for the airport soon.

They went into their room and closed the door.

“What’s up?” Sam said.

Isabella looked like she was trying to remember.

“I miss Darryl,” she said, finally.

“Darryl?”

“Darren.”

“The guy you dated senior year of high school?”

“We started dating at the end of junior year, Sam. He was the only boy who ever accepted me as I was.”

Isabella must have seen something on Sam’s face. She added, “I’m serious.”

“I believe you,” Sam said. “Though the story would be more compelling if you’d remembered his name.”

Isabella pursed her lips, deciding whether or not to protest. Then she flung her head back and laughed.

She had cheated on Darren her first Saturday at college. She called him immediately to confess. They broke up by the time orientation ended. As far as Sam knew, they hadn’t spoken since.

“I’m gonna call him,” Isabella said, taking her phone from her pocket.

“Let’s wait on that,” Sam said.

“Fine, then I’ll call Toby.”

A guy she’d met on her junior year abroad, who broke it off with her right before they left and got back together with his ex, raising the question of whether they’d ever broken up in the first place.

One of the drawbacks of a single-sex education was that the pool of men one had, even to think about, was unbearably small. They kept males around and alive in their imaginations far longer than any normal woman would. It was like prison or war in that way.

Before Clive, Sam’s only college relationship was with Julian, a sweet but odd guy who worked in the campus library.

He was an aspiring poet working toward a degree in literature at State, where, he took pains to explain, he had chosen to go only because he got