Friends and Strangers - J. Courtney Sullivan Page 0,27

year,” Sam closed her notebook. She understood that there was no way she was going.

Her parents had told her to go to a state school, like they did. By the time she was a senior, they would have three kids in college. If Sam wanted more, she would have to pay for it. For reasons she could not articulate then or even now, she wanted more.

Ultimately, her brother and sister stayed closer to home and went to their parents’ alma mater. Brendan wasn’t sure what he wanted to do yet. Molly wanted to be a teacher. Set against their ambitions, Sam worried that hers seemed indulgent.

She got a small scholarship and a work-study position. She took the rest out in loans, in her name.

“I’m worried you’re too young to understand what this means,” her father said as he watched her sign the forms. “I’m sorry. I wish we could have done better by you, Sam.”

“You’ve done great by me,” she said, and it was true. She hated making him feel otherwise.

Only after she got to college did she realize that she should have considered not just the cost of affording the school, but the cost of living among the kind of people who could easily afford it. Her friends might decide on a whim to go out for sushi if they didn’t like what was on offer in the dining hall. Sam wouldn’t join them. She knew from experience that Lexi and Isabella would order one of everything, and while she might get miso soup, the cheapest item on the menu, inevitably, when the bill came, someone would say, “Why don’t we just split it?”

The summer after sophomore year felt like any other summer. Sam slept in her childhood bedroom with its ballet-slipper wallpaper. She babysat on the weekends. On weekdays, she temped. Her longest gig was at an ad agency called Fleischer Boone. Her main job was to answer the phone and say “Fleischer Boone” in a professional-sounding voice.

Maybe a quarter of the time, it was her twelve-year-old sister, Caitlin, prank-calling her. “Fleischer Boone,” Caitlin would yell in an exaggerated southern drawl, before hanging up and doing it again. “Fleischer Boone! Our chicken is finger-lickin’!”

Any spare moments that summer were spent with Maddie, Sam’s best friend from high school, who was pre-med at Clemson. They walked the streets of their hometown free of the angst they’d felt before going to college. They were detached, observant. Visitors from a foreign land.

In July, Maddie saw an ad in the Globe for cater-waiters, offering twenty dollars an hour. They went to the training together. It was run by identical twin sisters in their fifties, who wore matching outfits. They taught the class how to serve in four styles—normal, fan, butler, and silver service—as well as the correct way to hold and pour champagne.

At home, Sam’s father teased her as she set the dinner table. “Not like that, Sam. We’re doing fan service tonight.”

In August, Sam’s college friends left for their study-abroad programs. She kept up with what they were doing through the photos they shared on social media—pictures of stunning architecture and plates of food and selfies taken with new friends. But it didn’t hit her that they were gone until she got back to campus. More to the point, that she was alone.

There were girls in the dorm and acquaintances from her classes whom she liked well enough to say hi to, or go to the movies with sometimes. But the college only meant what it did to her because of her friends.

Sam roomed with a girl who had skipped going abroad to play varsity soccer. She hardly ever saw her. The girl left for practice each morning before Sam was awake and ate in the one dining hall that stayed open late for athletes. Sam missed Isabella so much that sometimes she sat in that empty room and pretended she was about to walk through the door.

“The solitude will give you more time to paint,” her mother said, and it was true.

Sam spent long hours in the studio. She sometimes went on a Saturday night, when she knew she’d have the place to herself. But she would have traded that for Isabella any day.

Sam babysat a lot that year. She worked twice as many shifts in the dining hall as she had her first two years. She prepped meals, power-washed dirty dishes, took buckets of composted slop down to the gardens behind the stables that housed the horses