“I have high school friends who go to college in San Francisco, so I got a hotel and came up. But it turns out they all have jobs or exams up through today. I was supposed to meet Chip Lupton this morning, but he effing blew me off. He didn’t even text me till I was already waiting for him in, like, a hallway of dead snakes.”
“Dead snakes?”
“Ugh,” Brooke moaned. “I’m at the Academy of Sciences. Effing Lupton said he wanted to go see the herpetology exhibit. I want to get in his pants or I’d never have said yes. Is Immie in San Francisco with you?”
“No.”
“When the eff is Hanukkah? Is she going home for that?”
“It’s now. She wouldn’t go home for it. She went to Mumbai, maybe. I don’t know for sure.”
“Okay. So come down, since you’re in town.”
“To the snakes?”
“Yeah. God, I’m bored. Are you far away?”
“I have—”
“Don’t say you have stuff to do. We’ll keep texting Immie and force her to get back to us. Does she have phone service in Mumbai? We can email her if she doesn’t. Come find me in the herp exhibit,” said Brooke. “You have to make an appointment. I’ll text you the number.”
Jule wanted to seeall the things.She hadn’t been to the Academy of Sciences yet. Plus she wanted to know what Brooke knew about Imogen’s life after the Vineyard. So she jumped in a cab.
The Academy was a natural history museum full of dinosaur bones and taxidermy. “I have a two o’clock appointment,” Jule told the man at the herp desk.
“ID, please.”
Jule showed him the Vassar ID and he let her pass.
“We have more than three hundred thousand specimens from one hundred and sixty-six countries,” he said. “Enjoy your day.”
The collection was housed in a series of rooms. The vibe was half library, half storage facility. On the shelves stood glass bottles filled with preserved animals: snakes, lizards, toads, and many creatures Jule could not identify. They were all carefully labeled.
Jule knew Brooke was waiting for her, but she didn’t text to say she’d arrived. Instead, she walked slowly along the aisles, keeping her feet silent.
She retained the names of most of the things she looked at.Xenopus laevis,African clawed frog.Crotalus cerastes,sidewinder.Crotalus ruber,red diamond rattlesnake. She logged the names of vipers, salamanders, rare frogs, tiny snakes native only to faraway islands.
The vipers were coiled upon themselves, suspended in dingy liquid. Jule touched her hand to their venomous mouths, feeling fear skim through her.
She turned a corner and found Brooke sitting on the floor in one aisle, staring at a robust yellow frog on a low shelf.
“Took you forever,” Brooke said.
“I got into the snakes,” said Jule. “They’re so powerful.”
“They’re not powerful. They’re dead,” said Brooke. “They’re, like, coiled up in bottles and nobody loves them. God, wouldn’t it be depressing if after you died your relatives, like, preserved you in formaldehyde and kept you in a giant jar?”
“They have poison inside them,” said Jule, still talking about the vipers. “Some of them can kill an animal thirty times their size. Don’t you think that would be an amazing feeling, to have a weapon like that inside you?”
“They’re so damn ugly,” said Brooke. “It wouldn’t be worth it. Whatever. I’m sick of herps. Let’s get espresso.”
The snack bar served tiny mugs of deeply bitter coffee and Italian gelato. Brooke told Jule to order vanilla and they poured the espresso over their dishes of ice cream.
“It has a name,” said Brooke, “but I didn’t pay attention when we went to Italy. We had it at this little restaurant on some square. My mother kept trying to tell me the history of the square, and my father was all, ‘Let’s practice your Italiano!’ But my sister and I were bored. We were like that for the whole trip, our eyes rolling up, but then—and this happened nearly every time—the food would come and we would just be all, nom nom nom. Have you been to Italy? It’s a level of pasta you don’t even understand, I promise you. It shouldn’t be legal.” She lifted her bowl and drank the last of the espresso from it. “I’m coming home with you for dinner,” she announced.
They hadn’t talked about Imogen yet, so Jule said all right.
They bought sausage, pasta, and red sauce. Brooke had a bottle of wine in the trunk of her car. At the apartment, Jule shoved the stack of mail upside down in a drawer and hid her wallet while Brooke wandered around.
