“No,” said Forrest. “I need to understand what happened.”
“Look. The rule of you staying in this flat is, don’t ask Jule a million questions about Immie’s private life. Or about Jule’s private life. Then we can get along. All right?”
Forrest sputtered. “The rule of this flat? What are you talking about, the rule of this flat?”
“Every place has rules. What you do when you come into a new place is, you figure them out. Like when you’re a guest, you learn the codes of behavior and adapt. Yes?”
“Maybe that’s what you do.”
“That’s what everyone does. You work out how loud you can talk, how you can sit, what things are okay to say and what’s rude. It’s called being a human in society.”
“Nah.” Forrest crossed his legs in a leisurely fashion. “I’m not that fake. I just do what feels right to me. And you know what? It’s never been a problem, until now.”
“Because you’re you.”
“What does that mean?”
“You’re a guy. You come from money, you’re white, you have really good teeth, you graduated from Yale, the list goes on.”
“So?”
“Other people adapt to you, asshole. You think there’s no adapting going on, but you’re fucking blind, Forrest. It’s all around you, all the time.”
“That’s a point,” he said. “Okay, I’ll grant you that.”
“Thank you.”
“But if you’re thinking through all that lunacy every time you walk into a new situation, then there is something seriously wrong with you, Jule.”
“My friend is dead,” she told him. “That’s what’s wrong with me.”
Immie hadn’t told her secrets to Forrest. She had told them to Jule.
Jule had realized the truth of it early on, even before Immie had told Jule her birth name, and before Brooke Lannon ever turned up at the Vineyard house.
It was the Fourth of July, not long after Jule had first moved in. Immie had found a recipe for pizza dough you made on an outdoor grill. She was messing around with yeast in the kitchen. She had invited friends, summer people she’d met a couple of days earlier at a farmer’s market. They came over and ate. Everything was fine, but they wanted to leave early. “Let’s drive into town for the fireworks,” they said. “We shouldn’t miss them. Hurry up.”
Jule knew Imogen hated the crush of people at crowded events. She couldn’t see over people’s heads. There was always too much noise.
Forrest didn’t seem to care. He just got in the car with the summer people, stopping only to snag a box of cookies from the pantry.
Jule stayed behind. She and Immie left the dishes for the cleaner and changed into swimsuits. Jule pulled the lid off the hot tub, and Immie brought out tall glasses of seltzer with lemon.
They sat in silence for a bit. The evening had turned cool, and steam rose off the water.
“Do you like it here?” Immie asked finally. “In my house? With me?”
Jule did, and she said so. When Immie looked at her expectantly, she added: “Every day there’s time to actually see the sky, and to taste what I’m eating. There’s room to stretch out. No work, no expectations, no adults.”
“We’re the adults,” said Immie, tilting her head back. “I think so, at least. You and me and Forrest, we’re the effing adults, and that’s why it feels so good. Oops!” She had tipped her seltzer into the hot tub by accident. Now she chased around three slowly sinking pieces of sliced lemon until she caught them. “It’s good you like it here,” Immie said as she fished the last slice out, “because there was a part of living with Forrest that was like—being alone. I can’t explain it. Maybe it’s because he’s writing a novel, or because he’s older than I am. But it’s better with you here.”
“How did you meet him?”
“In London I went to a summer program with his cousin, and then one day I was getting coffee at Black Dog and I recognized him from Instagram. We started talking. He was here for a month to work on his book. He didn’t know anybody. That was that, basically.” Immie trailed her fingers across the top of the water. “How about you? You seeing anybody?”
“There were some boyfriends at Stanford,” said Jule. “But they’re still in California.”
“Some boyfriends?”
“Three boyfriends.”
“Three boyfriends is a lot, Jule!”
Jule shrugged. “I couldn’t decide.”
“When I first got to college,” Immie said, “Vivian Abromowitz invited me to the Students of Color Union party. You’ve heard me talk about Vivian, right? Anyway, her mom is Chinese American; her dad’s Korean Jewish. She was set on going to this party because some guy she crushed on would be there. I was a little nervous about being the only white person, but that turned out fine. The awkward part was that everyone was all political and ambitious. Like, talking about protest rallies and philosophy reading lists and this Harlem Renaissance film series. At a party! I was like, when are we dancing? And the answer was never. Were parties like that at Stanford? With no beer and people being all intellectual?”
“Stanford has a Greek system.”
“Okay then, maybe not. Anyway, this tall black guy with dreads, really cute, was like, ‘You went to Greenbriar and you haven’t read James Baldwin? What about Toni Morrison? You should read Ta-Nehisi Coates.’ And I said, ‘Hello? I just got to college. I haven’t read anybody yet!’ Vivian was next to me and she was all, ‘Brooke texted me and there’s another party that has a DJ, and the rugby team is there. Should we jet?’ And I wanted to go to a party where there was dancing. So we left.” Immie ducked her head under the water of the hot tub and came back up again.
“What happened with the condescending guy?”
Immie laughed. “Isaac Tupperman. He’s why I’m telling this story. I went out with him for nearly two months. That’s how come I can remember the names of his favorite writers.”
“He was your boyfriend?”
“Yeah. He’d write me poems and leave them on my bicycle. He’d come over late at night, like at two in the morning, and say he missed me. But the pressure was on, too. He grew up in the Bronx and went to Stuy, and he was—”
“What’s Stuy?”
“Public school for smart kids in New York. He had a lot of ideas about what I should be, what I should study, what I should care about. He wanted to be the amazing older guy who would enlighten me. And I was flattered, and kind of in awe, but then also sometimes really bored.”
“So he was like Forrest.”
“What? No. I was so happy when I met Forrest because he was the opposite of Isaac.” Immie said it decisively, as if it were completely true. “Isaac liked me because I was ignorant and that meant he could teach me, right? That made him feel like a man. And he did know about a lot of things that I never studied or experienced or whatever. But then—and this is the irony—he was totally annoyed by my ignorance. And in the end, after he broke up with me and I was sad and mental, I came to the Vineyard and one day I thought: Eff you, Mr. Isaac. I’m not so very ignorant. I just know stuff about stuff that you dismiss as unimportant and useless. Does that make sense? I mean, I didn’t know Isaac’s stuff. And I do know Isaac’s stuff is important, but all the time I spent with him I felt like I was just so dumb and blank. The fact that I couldn’t understand his life experience very well, combined with how he was a year ahead of me and really into all his academics, the literary magazine, et cetera—that meant that all the time, he got to be the big man and I was looking up at him with wide eyes. And that was what he liked about me. And why he despised me.