was in third grade, she had developed insomnia for no apparent reason. She would just lie awake at night, wondering and worrying why she couldn’t sleep. She’d read sometimes, and made her way through the Baby-Sitters Club books, one right after the other. “Don’t worry about sleeping,” Weezy always used to tell her. “Just lay there. Resting is just as good as sleeping.” The problem went away one day, just as quickly as it had appeared, but whenever Claire couldn’t sleep she always thought of Weezy’s advice: “Resting is just as good as sleeping.” (Which was total bullshit, by the way.)
Figuring she was less likely to get sick if she was sitting up, Claire finally got up from her bed and started looking through her dresser drawers. They were all still stuffed full of random things—a couple of the old Baby-Sitters Club books, collages made from magazines, notes from Lainie, a couple of games of MASH, and tons of those fortuneteller things, made by folding paper and filling them with predictions from the future.
It was around sixth grade when she and Lainie became obsessed with telling the future. They played games to find out what their professions would be, used a Magic 8 Ball, a Ouija board, whatever they could find. They never pulled a top off of a Coke can or the stem off an apple without believing that it would tell them the initial of their future husbands. Even now, sometimes, Claire would find herself twisting an apple stem around, silently saying the alphabet, waiting for the letter when it would fall off. It was funny to think of it now, the way they thought these things would just happen to them. You’ll be a Lawyer and Live in a Mansion and marry Michael Kelly! When did they start realizing that there was more to it than that?
Farther down in the drawer, Claire found a couple of mix tapes with titles like Claire’s Driving Songs and Spring Fling Mix. She wondered briefly what high school kids did these days instead of making mix tapes for each other. Did they trade playlists on their iPods? That seemed so boring and sad. They’d have nothing to show for their years in high school.
Claire sorted through all this stuff, and she thought about Fran and his ex-fiancée’s ring. She’d given her own ring back to Doug when things were final, handed it over to him and said, “Here,” like she was giving him a pen that he’d asked for. He didn’t insist that she keep it, and at the time she wasn’t sorry to see it go.
But now, she kind of wished that she’d kept it, just so she could hold the ugly thing between her fingers and know that she hadn’t made the whole thing up, that it had actually happened. She had all this shit in her room, all these pieces of paper with sixth-grade fortunes written on them, all these tapes in their plastic cases that were proof that her life had happened. But for Doug? For Doug she didn’t really have anything. Not even a stupid, dull ring.
CHAPTER 7
Martha resigned from J.Crew the week she got back from the shore. “I am giving my notice,” she announced to the staff that day. “I want you all to know that this is a personal decision and has nothing to do with my relationships with each of you. I have loved our time together, but it’s time to make a change.”
One girl, who had just started the week before, kept looking around at everyone as though they could explain just what was going on. Martha thought somebody should tell her that it was rude to keep swiveling your head around during a speech.
“I’ll miss you all,” Martha continued. “But not as much as I’m going to miss my discount.” She had practiced that line in front of the mirror the night before, and was expecting a big laugh, but there were just a few chuckles. Her speech was wasted on these people. She wrapped it up and sent them back to work.
“I really am going to miss some things,” Martha said to the other manager, Wally. They were going over the schedule, moving things around so that in two weeks, when Martha was gone, they wouldn’t be shorthanded. “I wasn’t just saying that. I’ll miss when the new shipments come in, the excitement of opening the boxes and seeing the new things. It’s like Christmas, sort of.”
“Sweetheart, I say