of the time when they were together, they talked about Doug and Liz, telling stories and trading information with a sense of urgency, like the faster they could get it all out of their heads, the sooner they’d be back to normal. They talked about them when they were still in bed together, often when they were still naked. Claire wondered what Doug and Liz were doing at that moment, and she thought that it would have been nice if they could have been together, doing the same thing.
They were a good balance; Fran was angrier than she was, and Claire suspected he was a little more heartbroken too. Claire was mostly confused and embarrassed, and Fran was neither of these things, so it seemed to work out well. Claire never minded when Fran talked about Liz, even when she didn’t have clothes on. She understood what was happening here, that they were trying to get rid of their memories, trying to figure out new bodies to forget the old ones.
Claire waited to come to her senses, waited for her grown-up self to show up and tell her to cut it out, to tell her that Fran Angelo was not who she should be spending time with. But every time he called, she happily went over there, ran down the steps to the basement as quickly as she could, to get to Fran Angelo and his dryer-sheet–scented room.
CLAIRE HAD BEEN DREADING THIS weekend for a long time. All of her high school friends were getting together, “for a reunion,” they kept saying, like they didn’t all see each other a few times a year at least.
Their friend Jackie was the one that demanded this reunion happen. “I miss you girls,” she kept saying. “Come to my house and I’ll send the kids to my mom’s and we’ll have a GNI.”
“A GNI?” Claire asked.
“Girls’ Night In,” Lainie said.
“It sounds like an STD,” Claire said.
They suspected Jackie just wanted to show off her new house, but for some reason they all still agreed to go to Red Bank, New Jersey, for the weekend. Claire, Lainie, and their friend Paula drove from Philly, and their friends Katherine, Clancy, and Erin came from New York.
Paula was recently engaged, and on the drive down there, every time she talked about the wedding, she turned to Claire and said, “Sorry.”
“I’m fine,” Claire said. “Really, you can talk about your wedding.” She was already planning to drink as much wine as she could.
“I can’t believe we’re going to Jackie’s,” Claire said. “We could have at least gone somewhere fun. Why did we agree to go there again?”
Lainie just shrugged. They’d all been friends with Jackie in junior high, mostly because they were scared of her. Jackie was the queen of three-way calling, orchestrating one girl to stay silent, while she encouraged another unsuspecting girl to rip the listener to shreds, and then she’d announce the secret guest like she was a talk show host. She was like an evil preteen Oprah.
In seventh grade, Jackie left fake notes in Claire’s locker, signed from Luke, the boy in the class that they all loved. It still made Claire’s face burn to remember the excitement she felt when she found those notes, how she hoped they were real, as if any seventh-grade boy would ever declare his love for a girl on a piece of notebook paper and stuff it in her locker.
Jackie confronted Claire at a sleepover, announcing to everyone that the notes were fake. “You believed it, though,” she said to Claire. “I saw your face and I know you believed it.”
“I did not,” Claire said. It still remained one of the worst nights of her life, as she found out that every one of her friends had known that Jackie was leaving the notes, including Lainie, who cried later and apologized.
“I wanted to tell you,” she said. “But she told me that she’d get me if I did.”
To distract Jackie from Luke and the fake notes, Claire suggested that they TP Molly Morrisey’s house. “You know,” she told Jackie, “she said you were the fifteenth-prettiest girl in our class. The only one lower than you was Lacey. And she said it was because she thought you were fat.”
Claire was still ashamed that she’d thrown Molly under the bus like that. But looking back, she realized it was normal to crack under a regime of terror. She was just trying to survive.
In high school, Jackie had gone through