In this effortlessness, she reminded me of the older girls at camp who had fascinated me when I was eight, nine, ten. Those girls were visions. Part mothers, part sisters, heroines, idols. They were sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. Some were thin, some muscular, some chubby. Their features had come into fullness and it seemed like they could never be dulled and they were all equally beautiful. But I can see that’s only true in retrospect. At the time, we younger girls absorbed—as if by osmosis, nobody ever said a word—the workings of an intricate caste system. We understood there was a hierarchy even if we couldn’t have said what it was or how, exactly, you came to occupy your place. At the top, the girls could be quiet or loud, careful or bold, academic achievers or average-grade getters, from wealthy Westchester or one of the less affluent towns outside Boston, attending camp with the assistance of a scholarship fund Esther and Joe had established. There were no specific criteria you could point to. But we all knew where each of the older girls stood. They had their favorites, too. Younger girls to whom they were especially kind or attentive, the shining girls in whom they saw themselves, and occasionally the girls they thought were less fortunate, whom they could pity with their charitable hearts.
At the end of each season a themed banquet was held. Under the Sea, On Safari. The bunk of older girls who put it together each year would dress accordingly. The rest of us would wear our best outfits and, for about a half an hour before the dinner started, the girls who’d come to camp with disposable or compact cameras took pictures of each other. An exercise in exclusion, in documenting who was part of your group and who didn’t make it into the frame.
When I was ten, the banquet theme was Outer Space, and my friend Wendy and I got dressed early and went to the bunk of older girls who were putting the finishing touches on their costumes. They loved Wendy, with her freckles, her sweetness, and her athletic ability. They told her how cute she looked, while one of them braided her hair. I sat quietly on the bed next to her, wearing a pink shirt Wendy had let me borrow. It had a perforated mesh pocket, above which was stitched the name of a popular French label. I wore my own denim skirt, brand: unknown, provenance: discount store.
An older girl who had dressed as an alien—in a plastic headband with springs stuck into glitter-coated Styrofoam spheres—noticed me and said, “Hey, sweetie.” A loaded term of endearment; I thrilled to it even as I intuited she didn’t know my name. “Is that top yours?”
The question wasn’t a question. She knew, somehow, that it wasn’t mine and wanted me to know that. I smiled strangely and shook my head, wanting nothing more than to dash out of there and back to my bunk to change, but I had nothing to change into. “Well, you look nice,” she said. I had never before been complimented in a way that seemed designed to make me ashamed, with no real understanding of what I was being shamed for or what it was I sat there feeling ashamed of.
I’d turned onto my stomach, resting my head on my folded arms, my hair falling over my face, and Stella, sitting on her towel now, lifted a piece of it, like a curtain—you there?—and I looked up at her through my hair, which was still as dark as it had always been, only stray grays here and there. I shifted so all I saw was Stella against the trees and sky.
“Who cuts your hair?” I asked her.
“Alice, most recently. She was really good at it. I’ve been doing it myself but it doesn’t turn out as well.”
For a while I had wanted the story of how she and Alice met, and now Stella decided to tell me. She’d been living in Boston. Somerville, to be exact. Working at a music venue and a different coffee place. The music venue tended to attract college kids, and one night, at a show, Alice arrived and she kept looking at Stella and sometimes Stella would make eye contact in return.
Alice had darkly made-up eyes. She wore a deep green slip dress and a fuzzy purple jacket when everyone else was in black jeans and T-shirts. Stella supposed Alice thought herself intimidating, and Stella wasn’t particularly interested in intimidation. But after the show, Alice came over and said she had to talk to her because the two of them were the only ones there with amazing hair. It meant something, didn’t she think? Stella wasn’t sure but she supposed it wasn’t nothing.
Alice came from New York. Brooklyn Heights. In her junior year at Harvard, after taking a couple of semesters off. Studying comparative literature. Stella liked that these facts, as Alice presented them to her, weren’t accompanied by the kind of embarrassment that rich girls so often expressed when they spoke to her—as if her presence, her existence, shamed them. Alice didn’t pretend she was poor or that she was unaware of what wealth did for her. Alice was accustomed to having choices, and in this way, she chose Stella.
It didn’t bother Stella at first. Alice’s glamour and bossiness weren’t alien to Stella. They were, in fact, like a more fully realized and externalized version of qualities Stella knew she, Stella, inwardly possessed. Or maybe, just maybe, Stella would occasionally think in the months to come, she was the more fully realized and externalized of the two and Alice was only playing that role.
“I don’t know what I’m trying to say,” said Stella. “But do you know what I mean?”
I propped myself up on my elbows and stared down at my towel, gold and moss green, from a set left in Esther and Joe’s linen closet. I think she may have meant that Alice’s glamour and bossiness was based on habit and insecurity, while her own ability to meet and to match that glamour and bossiness, when she so wished, derived from self-respect. And Stella had entranced Alice in this way, perhaps—through her aura of self-respect.
“Alice thought I was interesting.”
“You are interesting.”
“No, but interesting like a specimen. Like something to study,” Stella said. “At first I thought that was our thing. Like we were our own kind of project. We weren’t just, like, a couple. We were creating something that gave us purpose. Only, she could keep going with it in her mind, keep spinning it out, like our attraction was a philosophical game or something for her, and I didn’t care enough about that game, not in the way she did.”
“Maybe you cared about something else more.”
“A lot of the time I could already see myself as someone she would look back on years from now. So maybe I wasn’t totally in it either. We were going to come here together for the summer. I’d told her about this place.”
“You were going to summer here.”
Stella gave me a smile like I’d seen children give: guilty, amused, expecting to be rewarded for their mischief.
“Yeah, we were going to be the kind of people who summer somewhere. As a joke, but we’d actually go, so, not a joke. But she got this fellowship and decided to stay at school.”
Stella reached for her backpack, pulling out her phone to show me a photo of Alice. Her long, thick hair pulled back in an undone braid, like a nineteenth-century woman on the wall of the Musée d’Orsay. All entitled, voluptuous composure and insolence.
I asked Stella if she and Alice were still in contact.
“I don’t know. Not really. But she’s still in my phone, you know? People think I don’t give a fuck about things. Something about my face, I guess. Or maybe I don’t give a fuck about what they need me to give a fuck about. But my point is, I generally do give a fuck about things. And I think that was a problem for Alice. That I gave a fuck about things she didn’t. I’m sure she’s deleted me. I’m long gone from her world.”
“I doubt that.”
“Well, you haven’t met Alice. But yeah, I get that maybe it’s easier, for me, to think that she can be so absolute about it being over.”
“What did you give a fuck about that she didn’t?”
“I