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“All right, well, we won’t whistle at your dad.” Lainey threw Jill a pointed look over her knees. Jill continued, “Or just I’ll whistle at your dad.”
“Stop, please, I can’t laugh right now. I have no idea what I do from here.”
“I just told you, remember? The whistling? Do you not like that plan? I thought it was good.”
“With my life. I had a plan. Go to medical school to be a doctor, turn Josh into a trophy husband, have two and a half kids, retire when I’m fifty, and spend the rest of my life drinking sweet tea on the porch. It was the perfect plan. Now I don’t even know if I want to go to medical school.” Prior to saying the words, Lainey hadn't even realized she'd been feeling that, but having said them, she knew it was true.
“You don’t have to go.”
“I just want to help people.”
“There are other ways to help people.”
“Like what?” Lainey released her knees and dropped her feet to the ground. She turned to face Jill and clasped both her shoulders, shaking her a little. “Tell me what I want to do with my life. Maybe I should be a vet. Vets help people, and it’d require way less school.”
“You’re not even a vegetarian. You don’t even have pets. Have you ever had a pet?”
“No,” Lainey conceded, dropping her hands from Jill’s shoulders and into her own lap.
“So, probably not that then. You’ll figure it out. Everyone does.”
“Do they?” Lainey asked Jill quietly, to no answer. Jill was a lot like her mother in that she didn’t fill silence with pointless words. If she didn’t have an answer, she wouldn’t manufacture one. Lainey, on the other hand, would jabber on until she’d backed herself into a corner. Her dad always told her she’d make a good doctor, that good doctors keep making guesses until they arrived at a solution. Sometimes that felt true, and other times she thought Jill’s approach would make a better doctor, someone who just sat with you in the sadness if they couldn’t do anything for you. She sighed deeply and rested against her roommate, inhaling the smell of orange zest that lived on her from her unfettered baking. They sat together for a moment in silence, and Lainey thought about how strange it was to be silent with someone and know that they had an internal dialogue unique from hers. She wondered what Jill thought about in those silent moments. As far as she could tell, Jill was one of the most content people she’d ever known. She had hobbies, and she was always busy. She dated around, but she never seemed to have a steady boyfriend or girlfriend. She went to work eight to five every Monday through Friday, and when she came home, she never talked about it. When she clocked out, the day was just over. No studying for finals, no life or death on the table. So then what, Lainey wondered, did Jill worry about when the air was still and no one was talking?
“I need to finish making the brownies.” So that was what.
“Okay. Thanks for making them. I need to get ready for dinner with my parents anyway.”
Jill gently pushed Lainey away from her and extracted her limbs from her to stand up. “Good. It’s good to be around family when you feel like this.”
Lainey wasn’t so sure of that. She loved her family, but she knew her father wasn’t going to take her post-graduation instability well. To top it off, she knew they’d invited Bradley Arnault, a best friend to both of them that they met their freshman year of college. Even though she’d known him her whole life, there still wasn’t closeness between them beyond knowing what kind of tea he liked—green with peppermint—and what kind of alcohol he drank—scotch. It would be just another person to perform for while she wrestled her unsteadiness. Lainey sat quietly on the couch, listening to the tinkling of a utensil against ceramic and staring at the manicure she had gotten for the photos at graduation. She knew they would take a photo when she shook the dean’s hand, and she’d wanted it to look like a worthy hand. Josh had told her when she came home from the nail salon that he wasn’t going to propose to her, so she shouldn’t have bothered. It had made her angry at the time, but then she had realized it had made complete sense for him to say something like that because in the eight years they’d been together, Lainey had managed to give him the idea that she lived with him in mind. He was right, but only because she was living with everyone in mind.
“Hey,” Jill said quietly, pulling Lainey out of thought. She looked up to see her standing in the middle of the kitchen, cradling the bowl in the crick of her elbow like a newborn.
“Yes?”
“You really thought you could make Josh into a trophy husband?” Jill laughed good naturedly as she whisked. Lainey rolled her eyes and curled up into a ball on the couch. But she knew she had a good point.
More like a participation ribbon husband, she thought, even as she heard her own thoughts echoed from Jill’s mouth: “What kind of trophy—most improved?”
Chapter three
Laineysatatdinnerwith her parents and Mr. Arnault. He was an impressive man, a biomedical engineer who’d managed to become a billionaire with innovative technology that allowed consumers to monitor the activity of their heart 24/7 with a small heart monitor and an app. It seemed like such an inconsequential thing, but the revolution of it was that usually patients that needed their heart monitored got a $300 EKG put on them for a week that they couldn’t remove themselves even to shower with, and if after the end of the week, they hadn’t had any unusual heart activity, that was pretty much the end of that. His idea of ongoing data retrieval as it came to health had set him up for life, and he was basically free to do as he pleased.
Next to him and her parents, who were equally impressive in their own right, Lainey felt like a participation ribbon daughter herself. She struggled with habitual insecurity, always second guessing whether or not she had done things that made her worthy of calling herself a Crane. Though she knew her parents would be ecstatic that she and Josh were no longer together, she still felt a mewling inside her heart, a damaged child crying under a blanket inside her ribcage where no one could hear. She watched in silence as her mom and dad joked around with Mr. Arnault. The crunching of her roasted carrots filled her ears like a soundtrack to their laughter. Whenever he came over, the two of them drank more than they usually did. She didn’t know if it stemmed from a desire to impress him or if they were just enjoying themselves. They were not usually hyper concerned with image, but sometimes she liked to imagine that they, too, had tiny children living in their ribs that only stopped crying if someone was proud of them. It made her feel closer to them, less alien.
“So, Lainey, what do you think you plan to do with that Vanderbilt degree? Congratulations again.” Mr. Arnault’s voice graveled with an authority that begged to be answered. Lainey swallowed too big a piece of carrot in order to respond more quickly, and it wedged in her throat. Holding up a finger, she wheezed until it dislodged and went down uncomfortably. “Are you all right?” he asked. She grimaced and took a sip of water, breathing deeply and reminding herself to just be a normal person. Which she had a feeling normal people did not have to remind themselves of.
“Yes, excuse me. You know, I’m not sure.”
“You’re not sure?” her father repeated from across the table. Lainey twisted her neck, touching her ear to her shoulder.
“No,” she replied, though it was a tinny “no” that lacked even a shred of confidence. Suddenly, she felt itchy all over. She resisted the urge to scratch right there at the dinner table, opting instead to fidget inside her own skin, wiggling her shoulders and her knees and her head, moving her hair in front of her ears then back behind her ears.
“You don’t want to be a doctor anymore? Like your old man?” Her dad was trying to keep it light, but she could tell that that possibility gnawed at him. Mr. Arnault clapped her dad on the shoulder with his big paw and flashed her a grin that showed off his impossibly straight, white teeth. When he smiled, his jawline was somehow even harder, a lovely chisled face offset by two dimples.
“Good choice, Lainey. Being a doctor is overrated. Your dad’s putting on a brave face now, but it’s a lot of school and a lot of debt.” His words were comforting, and she met his eyes with hers, noticing for the first time that they were a disarming shade of mossy green, like the Verzasca River in Switzerland. She’d gone on vacation there once and had visited the valley with her family. She had climbed the angular rocks, cutting the bottoms of her feet on the pointed edges. They’d been so sharp that she hadn’t noticed until she clambered to the beach later to eat crackers and fruit and her mom had seen her blood in the sand.
“Now, Brad, that may all be true, but it is far from overrated. I’ve built a nice life for my family and a legacy I’ll be remembered by. Besides, Lainey Bug, you come from a lineage of doctors,” her father pleaded, though his voice didn’t betray that he was begging. It sounded cool and relaxed. She was familiar with the tone. He was the sort that knew that hysterics didn’t get anything out of anyone. Better to disarm them with a collected persona. He popped a bite of steak into his mouth and chewed carefully, looking at her as though she were an insect he’d found, something he’d have to search the name of later.
