Rich and Pretty Read Free Page B

she does seems somehow girlish. Sarah drops onto the bed. She’s wearing a navy dress, a little conservative, something that blouses and gathers at the waist in a way that implies the early stages of pregnancy or one’s fifth decade. It’s not a great color for her, but she’s always drawn to strong, declarative shades—blue, black, red—that don’t flatter her skin. She’s somehow not mindful of how she looks in them. Lauren has always been a little jealous of Sarah’s obliviousness to certain things.
    There are two beds, matching headboards, matching upholstered benches at their feet. The bench at the foot of the left bed, that’s where Lauren dropped her overnight bag, nights she came to stay. The bench at the foot of the right bed, that’s where Sarah discarded sweaters and shirts, the ones she’d rejected that morning, with the labels Lauren loved, Benetton this, Gap that, Ralph Lauren this, Donna Karan that, the last less hand-me-down thana pilfered-from courtesy of Lulu, cashmere as perfect as a baby’s skin. The housekeeper would come up in the afternoons, put everything away.
    â€œFuck me, it’s like a museum in here.” Lauren sits on the edge of the bed, her bed. She seems to swear more under this roof, shades of her adolescent self.
    Sarah laughs. “A museum to the excellence that is me.” She’s got a pipe in her hand, glass, emblazoned with colorful daisies. “Exhibit A.”
    â€œExhibit A is trials, not museums.”
    â€œDo you want to get stoned or not?”
    â€œWhere did you even find that thing?” Lauren recognizes it, vaguely, studies it with revulsion but also fondness, like a hideous sweater that once made you feel beautiful.
    â€œThe jewelry box, in the little drawer, next to earrings you shoplifted from Bloomingdale’s, I think?”
    Lauren knows just which earrings Sarah is referring to. “You had pot hidden in here, too?”
    Sarah hands her the glass pipe and a tiny, lime-green lighter. She shakes her head. “That, believe it or not, is from the personal collection of Mr. Henry ‘Huck’ Thomas.”
    Lauren is holding her breath, feeling the smoke build in her lungs and then it’s in her nose, as if by magic, and her mouth. She opens it, and it escapes—mere wisps. She’d imagined more. “You’re fucking kidding me,” she says with a cough.
    â€œI’m fucking not, my dear.” Sarah has taken off her shoes, folds her feet up under her body so she’s in a sitting position but still looks very attentive. “Arthritis. Doctor’s orders.”
    â€œOh?” Lauren is coughing more. It’s been a long time since she got high.
    â€œToo much hand shaking maybe?” Sarah smiles. “Poor Papa. A decade plus on I’m still dipping into his stash.”
    â€œKents, that was his brand, right?” Lauren remembers: Sarah, in the other room, distracting him with some nonsense about their school day while Lauren searched the blazer, hung on the back of a dining chair, helped herself to two or three. She passes the pipe and the lighter back to Sarah.
    â€œYou were good, Lolo. Nerves of steel. Unafraid of shopgirls at Bloomingdale’s, unintimidated by the man of this house.”
    â€œThey say everyone is good at something,” Lauren says. She wants to take her shoes off, but also doesn’t want to. She doesn’t want to get too comfortable in this room. The poster of the Van Gogh at MoMA, the jumble of madras belts on a peg on the back of the door; it’s too familiar and too foreign, a country she visited once, but doesn’t want to go back to. She’s outgrown this.
    The little flame flickers out of the lighter, rising higher as Sarah inhales in one, two, three gulps. She sets the glass pipe onto the piece of glass that Lulu had cut to protect the antique nightstand from rings from the diet soda the girls