“I like them already,” said Jule.
—
Immie had gotten into Vassar College on the strength of her essay about those characters. She wasn’t much for school besides that, she admitted. She didn’t like it when people told her what to do. When professors assigned her to read the ancient Greeks, she had not done it. When her friend Brooke told her to read Suzanne Collins, she had not done that, either. And when her mother told her to work harder on her studies, Immie had dropped out of school.
Of course the pressure hadn’t been the only reason Immie left Vassar. The situation was desperately complicated. But Patti Sokoloff’s controlling nature was definitely a factor.
“My mother believes in the American dream,” said Imogen. “And she wants me to believe in it, too. Her parents were born in Belarus. They full-on bought the package. You know, that idea that here in the US of A, anyone can reach the top. Doesn’t matter where you start out, one day, you can run the country, get rich, own a mansion. Right?”
This conversation happened a little later in the Martha’s Vineyard summer. Jule and Immie were at Moshup Beach. They had a large cotton blanket spread underneath them.
“It’s a pretty dream,” said Jule, popping a potato chip into her mouth.
“My dad’s family bought it, too,” Immie continued. “His grandparents came from Poland and they lived in these tenements. Then his father did well and owned a delicatessen. My dad was supposed to move even further up, be the first in his family to go to college, so he did exactly that. He became, like, this big lawyer. His parents were so proud. It seemed simple to them: Leave the old country behind and reinvent your life. And if you couldn’t quite live the American dream, then your children would do it for you.”
Jule loved hearing Immie talk. She hadn’t ever met anyone who spoke so freely. Immie’s dialogue was rambling, but it was also relentlessly curious and thoughtful. She didn’t seem to censor herself or craft her sentences. She just talked, in a flow that made her seem alternately questioning and desperate to be heard.
“Land of opportunity,” Jule said now, just to see what direction Immie would go.
“That’s what they believe, but I don’t think it’s really true,” Immie responded. “Like, you can figure out from half an hour of watching the news that there’s more opportunity for white people. And for people who speak English.”
“And for people with your kind of accent.”
“East Coast?” said Immie. “Yeah, I guess. And for non-disabled people. Oh, and men! Men, men, men! Men still walk around like the US of A is a big cake store and all the cake is for them. Don’t you think?”
“I’m not letting them have my cake,” said Jule. “That’s my bloody cake and I’m eating it.”
“Yes. You defend your cake,” said Immie. “And you get chocolate cake with chocolate icing and, like, five layers. But for me, the point is—go ahead and call me stupid, but I don’t want cake. Maybe I’m not even hungry. I’m trying to just be. To exist and enjoy what’s right in front of me. I know that’s a luxury and I’m probably an asshole for even having that luxury, but I also think, I’m trying to appreciate it, people! Let me just be grateful that I’m here on this beach, and not feel like I’m supposed to be striving all the time.”
“I think you’re wrong about the American dream,” said Jule.
“No, I’m not. Why?”
“The American dream is to be an action hero.”
“Seriously?”
“Americans like to fight wars,” said Jule. “We want to change laws or break them. We like vigilantes. We’re crazy about them, right? Superheroes and the Taken movies and whatever. We’re all about heading out west and grabbing land from people who had it before. Slaughtering the so-called bad guys and fighting the system. That’s the American dream.”
“Tell that to my mom,” said Immie. “Say, Hello! Immie wants to grow up to be a vigilante, rather than a captain of industry. See how it goes.”
“I’ll have a talk with her.”
“Good. That’ll fix everything.” Immie chuckled and rolled over on the beach blanket. She took off her sunglasses. “She has ideas about me that don’t fit. Like, when I was a kid, it would have been a huge deal to me to have a couple friends who were also adopted, so I didn’t feel alone or different or whatever, but back then she was all, Immie’s fine, she doesn’t need that, we’re just like other families! Then five hundred years later, in ninth grade, she read a magazine article about adopted kids and decided I had to be friends with this girl Jolie, this girl who’d just started at Greenbriar.”
Jule remembered. The girl from the birthday party and American Ballet Theatre.
“My mom had fantasies about the two of us bonding, and I tried, but that girl seriously did not like me,” Immie continued. “She had blue hair. Very cooler-than-thou. She teased me for my whole thing about stray cats, and for reading Heidi, and she made fun of the music I liked. But my mom kept calling her mom, and her mom kept calling my mom, making plans for the two of us. They imagined this whole adopted-kid connection between us that never existed.” Imogen sighed. “It was just sad. But then she moved to Chicago and my mom let it go.”
“Now you have me,” said Jule.
Immie reached up to touch the back of Jule’s neck. “Now I have you, which makes me significantly less mental.”
“Less mental is good.”
Immie opened the cooler and found two bottles of homemade iced tea. She always packed drinks for the beach. Jule didn’t like the lemon slices floating in it, but she drank some anyway.
“You look pretty with your hair cut short,” Immie said, touching Jule’s neck again.
—
On her winter break from her first year at Vassar, Imogen had rummaged in Gil Sokoloff’s file cabinet, looking for her adoption records. They weren’t hard to find. “I guess I thought reading the file would give me some insight into my identity,” she said. “Like learning names would explain why I was so miserable in college, or make me feel grounded in some way I never had. But no.”
That day, Immie and Jule had driven to Menemsha, a fishing village not far from Immie’s Vineyard house. They had walked out onto a stone pier that stretched into the sea. Gulls wheeled overhead. Water lapped at their feet. They were the same height, and as they sat on the rocks, their legs were tan in front of them, shiny with sunblock.
“Yeah, it was total poop,” said Imogen. “There was no dad listed at all.”
“What was your birth name?”
Immie blushed and pulled her hoodie up over her face for a moment. She had deep dimples and even teeth. Her pixie-cut bleached hair showed her tiny ears, one of which was triple pierced. Her eyebrows were plucked into thin lines.
“I don’t want to say,” she told Jule from inside the fabric. “I’m hiding in my hoodie now.”
“Come on. You started the story.”
“You can’t laugh if I tell you.” Immie lifted the hoodie and looked at Jule. “Forrest laughed and then I got mad. I didn’t forgive him for two days until he brought me lemon cream chocolates.” Forrest was Immie’s boyfriend. He lived with them in the Martha’s Vineyard house.