“You are unhappy, Chloe,” Rob observed, as the screen on his wrist flickered to mirror hers, with a gray line. The empathy returned to his expression, his eyes pooling with a new depth of emotional intelligence. “What can I do to cheer you up?” he asked, and now he was Rob again. It dawned on her that maybe the humanity in him had always been her.Shewas the ghost in the machine.
“I’m fine. We should go get the bus,” she said.
Rob nodded as he picked up their bags. She followed him out of college in a daze. Part of her just wanted to let him comfort her, hold her, tell her it was all going to be okay. This urge reminded her of giving up smoking, the lure of nicotine, calling her back whenever life got hard. But she knew it would be a quick fix, not the one she needed.
Looking around at people walking through Oxford, she felt a nagging dread about the future, about what the world would look like when everyone had a Rob. But then, seeing the glow of a screen lighting up every face, she wondered if they already did.
On the bus, she scanned the seats for John, for Richard, but they weren’t there. Rob sensed her misery but could do nothing to help. Chloe leaned her forehead against the cold glass of the bus window, replaying last night’s conversation with John. Thenshe straightened her spine, held her head high, a new confidence settling over her. He was right about one thing—she had everything going for her, she’d just been looking at her life through the wrong lens.
As the bus pulled away from the curb, Lorna Childs stood up and asked the driver if she could borrow his microphone. Then she moved to the center of the aisle to address everyone.
“What a weekend!” she said, pausing for a few cheers. Chloe looked around the bus at all these happy, smiling faces. “I know everyone probably needs to sleep for a week,” Lorna went on, “but before we leave, I wanted to thank Elaine and the alumni crew for all their hard work, and Gary the coach driver for putting up with us today. As for you guys”—she waved her arm around the bus—“I feel so blessed to call you all my friends. And anyone who doesn’t follow me already on Instagram, it’s @LornaInspires. My DMs are open—”
Before she realized what she was doing, Chloe found herself getting out of her seat, walking down the aisle, and holding out her hand for the microphone.
“I have something I want to say too,” she said.
She must have said it forcefully because Lorna looked mildly terrified, then handed her the mic midsentence.
Chloe clasped it with both hands, planting her feet to steady herself as the floor swayed with the motion of the bus.
“I want to tell you all that I am a liar,” she said, turning to face her peers. “And if this was the Olympic Games of lying, I’d be going home with the gold.”
There were a few nervous laughs as everyone waited for the punch line. “I am a fraud,” she said. Now the laughter stopped. Chloe’s mouth went dry. She dropped a hand to her side, clenched and then flexed it. “When the invitation for thisreunion came through, I didn’t want to come. I thought my life was an embarrassment compared to the rest of yours. I don’t have an impressive job; I spend my days booking medical procedures for my boss, then cold-calling film financiers. It’s not glamorous. It’s not well paid. It’s certainly not the job I dreamed of when we graduated.”
She scanned the rows of faces, her eyes landing on Thea, who was looking back at her with open confusion. “I am single,” Chloe went on. “I live with my parents, and I was ashamed. I thought it was my fault that I’d failed to find a partner, that I wasn’t good enough. Rob is not my boyfriend, he’s someone I asked to come along and support me this weekend, because I couldn’t face coming alone. I didn’t want you to see that the girl you voted most likely to succeed hadn’t succeeded in anything.” She tightened her grip on the mic, reaching out to steady herself as the bus rounded a corner. “But what I’ve realized this weekend is that I got it all wrong. Success isn’t a job title or marital status. It isn’t about money or who brings the most attractive date. It’s about being a decent human, a good friend, and being honest enough to put your hand up and say: I don’t have it all figured out yet.” She raised her hand, then immediately regretted it, because now she had to awkwardly lower it. She cleared her throat, pushed her hair out of her eyes. “That’s all I wanted to say.”
Chloe passed the mic to Lorna and walked back to her seat.
There was a long, stunned silence. Lorna stared at Chloe, eyes glassy, her mouth opening and closing, like a fish gasping for air. Then, from the back of the bus, Mark Patel stood up, flattening the kink in his dark hair with a palm.
“My life isn’t perfect either,” he said, clearing his throat. “I am proud of my career, but it came at the expense of everythingelse. I was in love with someone—a boyfriend who wanted a future with me—but I was always working. He left. And this weekend, seeing so many of you with partners, families, actual lives, it’s made me question whether all the professional success is worth what it cost me.”
The coach fell still. Then Alan Crest stood up, running a hand through his thinning blond hair.
“I’m on probation at work,” he said nervously. “I made a serious error. I sent an all-company email with this photo attached, it was on my hard drive by mistake, I don’t know how it got there…I haven’t slept properly in weeks. I started taking sleeping pills and now I can’t sleep without them.” He glanced toward Mark, then Chloe, offering a small nod of solidarity.
“I didn’t pass the bar exam,” Harriet blurted suddenly, standing with eyes already brimming. “I failed twice and that’s why I gave up on law. It wasn’t because I wanted to stay home and make jam and cheese. I don’t even make the cheese, someone else does, I just take the photos for Instagram.”
One by one, people started popping up like whack-a-moles; everyone had something to confess. Chloe had set off a bus full of honesty dominos. Colin Layton admitted he was drowning in debt after borrowing too much to build a dream house he couldn’t afford. Nisha Anand confessed she regretted having children so young—how she hadn’t even known who she was before she became a mother. Rocco Falconi stood on his seat and, to a ripple of awkward laughter, told everyone he had erectile dysfunction.
Finally, Lorna lifted the microphone back to her mouth. Her glossy smile was gone, her lip wobbled.
“Matteo and I can’t have a baby,” she said. “We’re on our fourth round of IVF. And I…I stopped calling my two bestfriends because I couldn’t bear how easily they both got pregnant.” She looked toward Harriet and gave her a watery smile. Harriet shot to her feet and wrapped her arms around Lorna. “Oh, hon, I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “Why didn’t you say? I thought you just found us boring.”
Lorna started sobbing. “I do find the farm stuff quite boring, I’m sorry, but not the baby stuff, notyou.”
“Everyone needs to sit down and put their seat belts on!” the driver hollered from the front, and everyone shuffled back to their seats. But something had changed. The air felt lighter. Now people were talking,really talking. Conversations sparked in every direction—about failure, fear, regrets. It wasn’t small talk anymore, it was big talk. By the time the bus rolled into Victoria, there were promises to stay in touch that felt like they might be kept.
Four people, including Mark, came to ask for Rob’s number, given he wasn’t really Chloe’s boyfriend. Rob tactfully declined.
Victoria Coach Station was alive with motion and noise. People spilled out of buses dragging wheeled suitcases, jostling to retrieve their luggage from the storage locker beneath the bus. It all felt too busy, after the serene quiet of college. There was a constant hum of engine noise, announcements echoing from inside the station, and the rise and fall of strangers’ conversations. Chloe and Rob said their goodbyes, then she pulled him away, around the corner up Elizabeth Street, escaping the bustle and noise.
When they were alone, Rob turned to her. “That was a brave thing to do,” he said gently. “To share your real feelings, to tell everyone I was Post-its.”
“Post-its?” she asked, confused.
“Romy and Michele.I’m your Post-its, the lie you thought you needed to impress people. Like them, you realized you didn’t need me.”
