the basement of his parents’ house. It looked just as she’d imagined it would. There were two old red-plaid couches that were scratchy when you sat on them, a banged-up coffee table, wall-to-wall brown carpeting, and a queen-sized bed in the corner. There was a small bathroom down there with a stand-up shower, a tiny refrigerator (the kind that kids keep in their dorm room), and a flimsy-looking desk with the oldest computer Claire had ever seen on it. In an adjoining room were the washer and dryer, and every so often, a whiff of dryer-sheet–smelling air would come drifting out, which was always surprising and pleasant.
“Here it is,” Fran said when she walked down there. “My new place.”
“It’s nice,” Claire said. She knew that since she was living in her parents’ house at the moment, she didn’t have a lot of room to judge, but it seemed worse that Fran was in the basement. Like it was more permanent or something.
Claire’s friend Natalie had a brother who had lived in the basement for as long as she could remember. He was eight years older than they were, and by the time they were in high school, he was a permanent fixture in the basement of the Martin house. He smoked pot down there, and he and his parents seemed to have an agreement—as long as he sprayed air freshener and pretended that he wasn’t smoking, his parents would pretend that they didn’t notice the smell of weed drifting up to the kitchen.
When they were freshmen in high school, they were all in love with Dan Martin. They’d giggle when he came upstairs and talked to them, kept their makeup on when they slept over, just in case he was around. As they got older, they sometimes went down to the basement with him to hang out, and by the end of high school, they sometimes drank beers down there or even smoked a joint.
But by the time they graduated from college, Dan no longer seemed cute or even a little bit appealing. He was thirty then, and even though he was thin everywhere else, he had a gut that hung over his pants. They never went down to the basement to see him anymore, and when he came upstairs they didn’t giggle. He transformed into Natalie’s creepy older brother, who was sort of a perv, and everyone seemed to forget that they used to worship him. Even Natalie started rolling her eyes at him, calling him a loser, blaming her parents for letting him live there. “What a waste of life,” she used to say. “What a complete waste of a person.”
Claire sincerely hoped that Fran would not live in the basement forever, but as she looked around she heard Weezy saying, “It’s a trend, an epidemic.”
Fran told Claire that he’d let Liz keep their apartment, which was a loft on the edge of a trendy new neighborhood. “I didn’t want to stay there anyway,” he said. “She picked out all the furniture and decorated it. I didn’t want that place. It was full of fake posters and dream catchers.”
He got them both beers and they sat on the couch with the TV on, but they didn’t watch anything. Instead, he told her about Liz, who was a waitress and an artist who made jewelry that she sold at street fairs and some small boutiques.
“She thinks she’s going to make it,” Fran said. “She stays up half the night baking beads in a kiln that’s in the middle of the fucking apartment, thinking that she’s really going to make it.” He took a sip of beer and sniffed. “I mean, her stuff’s good, don’t get me wrong. But how many people actually make it big designing jewelry, you know?”
“Probably not a lot,” Claire said.
“Yeah, exactly. I used to tell her I wanted the kiln out of there, and she’d freak, like me saying that I didn’t want a huge fire pit in the middle of our apartment was single-handedly killing her career. Like, because I didn’t want to live in a fire death trap, I wasn’t supporting her.”
Claire laughed, and he smiled at her. He got them each another beer, and they set the empty ones right on the coffee table in front of them.
“Doug used to sleep with his BlackBerry. And I don’t mean he had it by the side of the bed. He had it in the bed, right next to him, sometimes on the pillow like