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  “Sure. Or even just you and me, if Chloe’s too busy.”

  So maybe they weren’t dating after all.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked. “I was about to order sushi.”

  HUDSON DAY SCHOOL

  Dear Mr. and Mrs. Blake,

  Thank you very much for your interest in Hudson Day School. We truly enjoyed getting to know you and Dillon through the admissions process. Dillon possesses many wonderful qualities, and we are confident that his middle school years will be happy and engaging ones.

  Due to the large number of highly qualified candidates who applied to Hudson this year, we are unable to offer Dillon a place in our sixth-grade class. We know this comes as disappointing news, but Dillon will surely enjoy his learning experiences and find great success wherever he decides to go.

  We wish you and Dillon the very best for the future.

  Sincerely,

  Henry Bigley

  Director of Admissions

  To: Kenneth Blake

  From: Henry Bigley

  Subject: Re: Dillon Blake

  * * *

  Dear Mr. and Mrs. Blake,

  Thank you for your email. While we appreciate your continued interest in Hudson, we cannot accommodate your request. We do have a waiting list, but Dillon did not get a place on it. Therefore, there is no possibility of a space opening up for him.

  Your comments about your interview have been noted. I’m sorry if you were under the impression that Ms. Pearson gave you a “verbal acceptance” during your interview. This was certainly not her intention, as we would not and could not make an informal offer before the official date. We make all decisions as a committee. In addition, as a member of the Independent School Collaborative (ISC), our school follows all of the organization’s rules, which include issuing decisions on an agreed-upon date in February, and not a day sooner.

  While we very much appreciate your wife’s status as a Hudson alumna, we cannot go against the decision of the committee for that reason.

  We wish you and Dillon the very best.

  Sincerely,

  Henry Bigley

  Director of Admissions

  HUDSON DAY SCHOOL

  REPLY CARD

  My son/daughter: Annie Allsworth

  ____ will attend Hudson Day School in the fall. (Contracts due 4/12)

  ____ will attend a revisit day on  3/15  3/18  3/21  3/24 (Please circle one)

  ____ will not attend Hudson Day School. He/She is enrolling at _________________________.

  Please return by March 7th

  To: Tess Allsworth

  From: Kate Pearson

  Subject: Annie’s acceptance to Hudson

  * * *

  Dear Ms. Allsworth,

  Thank you for returning your reply card. Could you please clarify: will Annie be attending a Hudson revisit day? I would be happy to sign her up for any of the four days we offer (3/15, 3/18, 3/21, or 3/24).

  I look forward to hearing from you.

  Sincerely,

  Kate Pearson

  To: Silvia Blake

  From: Henry Bigley

  Subject: Re: Admissions policies at Hudson

  * * *

  Dear Mrs. Blake,

  The way the admissions process works is that we have one round and one round only. There is no “second round.” As I mentioned in my last email, our decisions are made by committee, and we do not change the decision once it has been made. I’m sorry that I cannot honor your request for an “appeal.” I can assure you that Dillon’s file was given thorough and thoughtful consideration. We do not give reasons for rejections, so I ask you to accept the decision as it stands.

  While we appreciate your continued interest in Hudson, we hope that you will understand that we cannot make exceptions to our policies.

  All the best to you and Dillon,

  Henry Bigley

  To: Kenneth Blake

  From: Henry Bigley

  Subject: Re: Appalling treatment

  * * *

  Dear Mr. Blake,

  You are welcome to meet with your lawyer if you choose to do so, but we are an independent school and reserve the right to make decisions as we see fit. I would urge you to look at the procedures detailed on our website. The process is clearly outlined, including materials we require, important deadlines, as well as official dates for decisions. We would never and have never made an offer to a student without a complete file to review. On the day you interviewed, early last October, Dillon’s file was empty.

  I have complete confidence that my colleague Kate Pearson behaved professionally and kept to our procedures. If you took her friendly, welcoming demeanor as an offer of admission, then you were mistaken.

  While I am sorry to hear of your wife’s deteriorating mental health, I dispute your assertion that the actions of our department had anything to do with her condition. We do, however, wish her our best for a speedy recovery.

  As you have threatened legal action, this is the last correspondence you will receive from me or anyone in my department. Any future letters will be forwarded to our legal counsel.

  Henry Bigley

  To: Kate Pearson

  From: Tess Allsworth

  Subject: Annie Allsworth NOT attending Hudson

  * * *

  Dear Ms. Pearson,

  As I indicated on my reply card, Annie will not be attending a revisit day or accepting your offer of admission. We appreciate your interest in having her attend Hudson and understand that this comes as disappointing news; however, we have decided for a number of reasons that it is not the right place for her. She was accepted into every single school to which she applied, and it has been very difficult to make a choice. We have definitely ruled out Hudson as a contender, but thank you anyway.

  Regards,

  Tess Allsworth

  Dear Ms. Pearson,

  Thank you so much for everything. You were my favorite interviewer of everyone I met. I’m writing to tell you that I want to keep my spot on the wait list. Thank you very much. I am keeping my fingers crossed that something will happen, and you will tell me I can come to Hudson.

  Thank you for putting me on the wait list.

  Yours truly,

  Claudia

  March

  George and I moved to a new apartment in Alphabet City, had sex without condoms, and took a romantic trip to Cape Cod, and my friends still didn’t know he existed.

  In early March I got the flu. I was achy and weak, recuperating slowly, and I called Kate to cancel plans we’d made for the following day. She assured me that rescheduling would be easier now because she was close to coming out of what she called “the dark time.” She thanked me again for the gifts, the notes, the candy. I guess I did those things out of guilt, but I like to think it was also nobler than that, that I was trying to be a good friend.

  “It’s after seven,” I told her. I was sitting on the floor of our new place, sipping ginger ale and trying to empty a book box. Carter was lying down next to me, his tail thumping even though he was sound asleep. “I can’t believe you’re still at work. Are you doing okay?”

  “Better than okay. It occurred to me the other day that I’m feeling great,” she said. “I was walking to school, and I suddenly had this thought, ‘I’m a person who has her act together,’ and I don’t know how it happened. I pay my bills. I’m punctual. The people I work with think I’m reliable. If I keep this up, I’m going to be employee-of-the-month material.”

  “They’re lucky to have you.”

  “But I’ve been such a terrible friend; I don’t know anything that’s going on with you. I feel completely out of it. How’s your life? What’s happening with you?”

  “Same old, same old,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “No, not really.” How could I possibly fill her in? “When I see you, I’ll tell you everything,” I said, “starting with George.”

  “Who’s George?”

  “He�
��s a guy I’m dating. We’re kind of serious, actually. Very serious.” I got up to join George on the bed. He had caught the flu from me and still had a fever. He was sitting up with an ice bag on his head, holding our rescue kitten Tutu (as in Desmond) in his lap.

  “George?” she said to me. “I love his name. It’s so earnest.”

  “You have to meet him,” I told her. “It’s impossible that you won’t like him.”

  “And Vicki? How’s she?”

  “Oh, fine,” I said vaguely. “I’m sure she’s fine.”

  “Well, we should make a plan, the three of us. Or just you and me maybe, so we can really get caught up.”

  “And Jonathan?” I asked, making room for Carter, who jumped up on the bed and planted himself right between us.

  “We’ve had dinner together almost every night since we stopped hating on each other in the stairwell. He waits until I get home before he orders takeout.”

  “That’s neighborly,” I said, nudging George and giving him the thumbs-up.

  “You should have seen the look on his face when I told him the librarian is coming back, and I have to move out during the summer,” she said. “It was kind of adorable.”

  “He really likes you, he told me.”

  “We’ll take it slow, see how it goes.”

  I appreciated her caution. We agreed to get together in April, after the last group of accepted students visited Hudson to decide if they wanted to attend. Kate said she was nervous. She had schedules to make, sample classes to organize, and buddies to assign.

  “It might not sound like much, but every student who attends a revisit day is expected to leave wanting to enroll,” she explained, “and I have to set up all four days. If anything goes wrong, it’s on me.”

  “What could go wrong?”

  “A lot, because now the tables are turned. All year these students have been trying to get us to like them and now that we’ve told a select group of them that we do like them, suddenly everything’s flipped the other way around: we need them to like us. So let’s say they don’t, and they choose another school; then we won’t hit our eighty-five percent yield, and Henry will lose his mind, which I’ve never seen him do, and the board of trustees will be really pissed. And if we’re actually under-enrolled for the fall, we’ll have to keep seeing kids through the summer, pretending every time like a spot just happened to open up because some beloved Hudson family was unexpectedly ‘transferred to London.’ I have to make sure that the accepted students have the best, most stimulating, friendliest day a child could possibly have at Hudson. There can’t be any mishaps. What if a visiting kid feels sad and lonely during lunchtime in the cafeteria? Or a couple of Hudson high school students are making out in the stairwell just as my visitors walk by? There could be an accident, like an explosion in the chemistry lab or a child could trip and fall into the ceramics kiln.”

  I stopped her. “I’m sure none of that is going to happen.”

  “Last year the guy who had my job, Nathan, lost a kid.”

  “He what?”

  “He had around twenty-something students revisiting the first day. Somehow, in the middle of all the chaos, there was a mix-up with the buddies, and one kid didn’t know where he was supposed to go, so he wandered around alone and ended up in the high school video production room. It was empty, so he got on one of the computers and played Miniclip games.”

  “For how long?” I asked.

  “A couple of hours. He had a great time, chilling by himself. All the parents arrived to pick up their kids, and Nathan suddenly realized he was missing one. He ran around the middle school floors, checked every bathroom, every classroom, every closet, and came back to the lobby, completely freaking out, which didn’t help the situation. The mom started screaming at everyone, and she tried calling her kid’s cell. When he didn’t pick up, Nathan actually started crying, making a huge scene. You’ve met Albert, right? Our security guy? He assured everyone that the boy hadn’t left the building, but Nathan couldn’t pull it together. Eventually the film teacher found the kid playing Club Penguin and brought him to the lobby. The whole thing was a huge mess. Anyway, I want everything to go smoothly on my watch.”

  She had one more hectic, nerve-racking month before she could finally relax a little.

  “Can I bring you anything?” she asked. “Soup? Saltines?”

  “No, no. I have everything I need,” I told her. “I’m fine.”

  “And Vicki?” she asked again. “What’s going on with her?”

  For half a second I considered telling her the truth, the story of another terrible, messy situation, but found I couldn’t get the words out. Why spoil a nice conversation? Instead I sent her a fruit basket. I felt guilty, plus I knew she didn’t have time to shop.

  Victoria noticed with horror that she had a small pimple on her nose. It was stress, and she didn’t appreciate it. Whipping this boy into shape was proving even harder than she’d anticipated. When Robert was in town, they were together every night, but when he left, he wouldn’t call for days at a time. He was inconsistent. She had a long way to go to get him to do things her way.

  And it was hard dating a man that handsome. Everywhere they went, girls gawked and made eyes at him. Walking into a restaurant, she would see a pretty blond head turn, and then she’d watch him intensely to see if he made eye contact with her. On her way to the ladies’ room one night, she stopped at a table of college-aged girls, leaned in to one in particular, and said, “Back off, bitch.” The girls looked at each other and laughed, and Vicki stormed off to the bathroom in a rage. She couldn’t recall a moment that humiliating. Standing at the sink, she looked in the mirror, asking herself, “Who am I? Who am I?” She arranged her beautiful hair, put on lipstick, and said, “I’m a girl who gets exactly what she wants.”

  And, in fact, it seemed she had him, with all of his flaws. Chloe was right: his judgmental comments were irritating. They weren’t insults exactly, more like little put-downs, about the fit of her pants, the size of her apartment, the seriousness of her job. He was astonishingly self-satisfied and had something to say about everything. But on the plus side, his apartment in Paris was to die for, his skill in bed remarkable, and she didn’t expect him to be perfect. They would have these amazing nights together, and she would forget all about the opinions he flung around. Besides, she often agreed with his opinions, many of which were quite sensible. Flying first-class, for example, is always worth the money, but excellent wine doesn’t have to be expensive. Absolutely true. Robert appreciated good design, whether in clothing, furniture, or hotel lobbies, and respected it as an art form just like she did. And he could be thoughtful in the most remarkable ways, remembering the details of everything she said and then acting on them. She had mentioned offhandedly that she’d bought a cool, sexy IRO dress at Barneys, so Robert surprised her during Fashion Week with an IRO jacket and an invitation to a private party with the French men behind the label, the Bitton brothers themselves.

  He was so ridiculously French, which was somehow an asset and a defect at the same time. The beautiful, heavy accent and the embarrassingly deep V-neck T-shirts, the smoking that she’d thought was social and turned out to be addictive. Wine ditto. Espresso ditto. His obsession with soccer. His attitude about Americans who make a crisis over every little thing when all they need is a nice dinner with friends and an easy solution that is probably staring them right in the face. “What eeez ze problem?” was his usual response to any problem, which felt undermining every time she presented a goddamn problem. But then again, maybe he was right? What was ze fucking problem, after all? She just needed to stop being insecure. Self-loathing didn’t suit her. Although self-admiration didn’t suit him so well, either; she never knew any man could spend as much time as he did primping and studying his face in any reflective surface he could find. One night at a restaurant, he tried to check his profile in a spoon.

  If Chloe knew how much time she spent either arguing with Robert or
stalking him, she’d give her a big I-told-you-so lecture because she wouldn’t understand that it was complicated. She and Robert had grown-up issues. They would iron them out eventually, and once they did, it would all be okay. Victoria expected that one day, Chloe and Kate would be happy for her. The past simply made for a funny story. A slightly awkward but nevertheless hilarious wedding toast. Bygones.

  Neither Chloe nor Angela knew that the miserable breakup Kate endured, the infamous airport dumping, had made Vicki ecstatic. She kept that to herself, of course, and had taxied with Angela out to the airport, letting Chloe take the fall, while she had feigned an outpouring of sadness and concern when she was, in fact, privately elated. It was a triumph, a score for Team Vicki. It was restitution for that night, that graduation dinner, that was supposed to be the moment when she and Robert reconnected, a year after their Parisian fling, when instead, he’d gotten caught up with Kate, with the wrong girl, and Vicki stood there watching while her soul mate flirted with her friend.

  Fucking Kate.

  Victoria—taking her usual peek at Robert’s laptop when he was in the shower—discovered that Robert had contacted Kate. He’d sent an email saying he wanted to see her, talk to her. Victoria wished she’d never suggested that he apologize. It was supposed to be a way of smoothing things over, of allowing them to go public, but now it seemed like he really wanted to connect with her. Recently, on a one-week vacation from his job (that didn’t actually seem to be much of a job, in that he never actually needed to be anywhere), Robert came to New York and talked about Kate more and more, dropping her name, remembering things, telling stories about her. “Quel dommage, that Italian restaurant eeez closed. Kate and I had a marvelous dinner there one night.” “Kate bought me theees book; I always meant to read eeet, and she was right—eeet’s wonderful.” “I hope Kate eeez enjoying her work; eeet was clear to me ze life of a professor was not ze right choice for her.” He lit a cigarette and opened a window, as if that would help.