YOU NEVER GET IT BACK by Cara Blue Adams

A party was being had, and Kate agreed to go. The party would be held in Cambridge, a five-hour bus ride away from southern Vermont, where she was working part-time in a lab and living with her mother this first year out of college to save money and think about what kind of future she might want. It was a New Year’s Eve party. With the arrival of a new millennium came a legitimate, historic-feeling reason to panic or celebrate, depending on one’s inclination; the whole world was gearing up. Her old college roommate Esme called to invite her on December 30, and, because Kate was fighting with her boyfriend, with whom she had planned to spend New Year’s Eve, she said yes, though not without hesitation. But Esme begged; she didn’t want to go alone. She promised Kate that this party would be fun and cheap and attended by Harvard Law School students, including Esme’s ex‑boyfriend, Paul. Kate and Esme could crash at his studio in the densely populated, Harvard-dominated neighborhood behind the law school if a better option failed to present itself.
“Both of us? It won’t be awkward?” Kate asked, and Esme assured Kate that she and Paul had a friendly relationship, and that each regarded the other with platonic affection but had moved on, going so far as to suggest perhaps, just maybe, if this other thing wasn’t working out, Kate might be interested in him. No, no, Kate said, never going to happen, but Esme persisted, saying that Kate would like Paul. He had grown up in a single-parent household in a little town outside Albuquerque, lived in a trailer. Was determined to rise from the lower middle class to the upper middle class.
“Some men in his position would want to be rich,” Esme told her, “but he’s not greedy. He wants a nice life, that’s all.”
Was Esme herself still interested in Paul? Kate couldn’t tell.
She made a noncommittal noise.
“You’re his type, Kate,” Esme continued. “Smart, brunette, with a working-class background. I was too blond for him. He called me Princess. He hated that I grew up in a bedroom with white carpet.”

Kate arrived at South Station from Vermont before Esme’s Amtrak train came in from the posh town in rural northern New Jersey where she had grown up. Esme was spending the winter holidays there with her parents, a VP at a pharmaceutical agency and a real estate agent who were both now semi-retired. Esme considered them her best friends. In her mind they led audacious, iconoclastic lives. “In the eighties, when my father was a lowly bench chemist,” she would say, “my mother out-earned him!” They liked to drink and throw catered parties.
Kate towed her luggage from the bus station through the chill wind of the concrete-walled outdoor walkway to South Station’s main building, which housed the train station. Waiting in the train station’s warm, brightly lit food court, Kate ordered a pepperoni slice from Sbarro and ate the slice with a plastic knife and fork to make it last. An hour to spend here, at least. But she had been the one to suggest she wait. Go along to Cambridge when you arrive, Esme had said. Paul will be happy to see you.
Kate wished she had a cell phone. If the train was delayed, how would she know? She would have to ask the desk agent.
The big clock by the black arrivals board read 2:07 p.m. Esme’s train was due in at 3:05 p.m. She read a back issue of Structure until 2:55 p.m. and went to the platform to stretch her legs.
Outside the sky was already darkening. A light snowfall drifted down from the flat gray vault, the wind picking up the dry flakes on the platform and eddying the snow in small twists like a peel of lemon in a cocktail. The pale light had a muffled quality, as if strained through white gauze. Would the party be fun? She gave it a fifty-fifty chance. A small regret moved through her; she would prefer to be in New York with Michael. But he hadn’t called and what could she have done, gotten the ski resort’s address from his mother and shown up unannounced? No. And anything was better than sitting home on New Year’s Eve, worried and humiliated and preparing to break up with him unless he had a truly dazzling explanation for his behavior.
Two trains arrived on parallel tracks. Passengers disembarked into the cold air, stamping their feet and chafing their hands.
“Roomie!” Esme’s voice called from behind her. Esme liked to call her this, as if to reinforce the source of their unlikely bond. Their junior year at Williams they’d roomed together, matched up by the housing office when Kate’s freshman- and sophomore-year roommate transferred to Yale and Esme transferred in. Before going their separate ways senior year, Kate to a co‑op and Esme to an off-campus apartment, they’d grown unexpectedly close. Kate listened to Esme’s romantic worries and reassured her about her academic papers, which Esme gave to Kate to read, and, after hearing her responses, relentlessly revised into perfection. Esme, in turn, took offense on Kate’s behalf when she felt Kate had been slighted and insisted Kate stand up for herself when a professor failed her on an exam when she was in the infirmary with strep throat. She helped Kate with money, too. She had bought Kate’s second-semester schoolbooks on her parents’ credit card, knowing the books’ expense was a hardship and insisting her parents didn’t mind when Kate tried to refuse what seemed too large a gift. And now, unlikely a pair though they were, they stood greeting each other in South Station on the cusp of a new millennium.
Small and bird-boned, Esme struggled along the wet platform with an oversized Chanel duffle bag. She dropped the bag to embrace Kate. The two women let out a joint shriek of happiness, or a performance of happiness, and Esme said, “Hi, hi, hi, oh, you look great,” as Kate said, “You’re here!”
A businessman in his forties trailed Esme.
“Kate, this is Duncan,” she said triumphantly, pulling away and turning to acknowledge him. “Duncan, my brilliant roommate Kate.”
Esme collected men. She was good at it.
“Nice to meet you,” the man said. To Esme: “Where are you headed? I can give you a hand with that bag.”
The businessman walked them to the Red Line. He left the bag at the turnstiles, hoisting it over to Esme after she passed through the steel arms. “Can you get it? I can carry it to the platform if you’d like,” he said, nodding toward the glass window behind which sat a T official, to indicate he could buy a token.
“No need,” Esme said. “But thank you.”
Kate dragged her own dingy roller bag, taking care not to dirty it further. The pink fabric showed all stain. The wheels were wet from slush. Snow clung to the bag, and as Esme took the man’s card and made a general promise to call if she found a free minute for lunch while she was in town, Kate brushed away the white accumulation with her bare hand, the warmth melting the snow so the fabric grew damp, pink deepening to a dusky rose.
Their first semester as roommates the two had seen each other little. Esme had spent many weekends away in New York City, visiting Paul, who worked for a public policy think tank. He was five years older. Kate had never met him; he and Esme had split up that November because Esme had fallen for a lanky, wealthy member of the lacrosse team – though really, Kate suspected, the problem had been Esme’s jealousy of Paul’s ex‑girlfriend, a model, and Paul’s resistance to Esme’s plans, which involved moving to Princeton and settling down into a life like her parents’ in a community that seemed to demand one strive for more while pretending to think of oneself as a success. Kate was busy with schoolwork, trying to salvage a faltering attempt to double major in physics and chemistry, a choice she was beginning to doubt was a good one, though it had qualified her for several scholarships.
But that spring the two shared an English class. Kate enjoyed the short stories the professor assigned. She tended to sympathize with the women in these stories, and she tired of the boys in the class making comments like “She’s so self-pitying,” about a girl dating a married man, despite the fact that the girl blamed only herself and was self-deprecatingly funny about her regrets, or “I’d be out of there” about a grieving wife mourning a stillborn baby and shaken by a carjacking who began to suffer an extreme fear of break-ins. Or about the bullying, patronizing, passive-aggressive young American man in “Hills Like White Elephants,” a character even Hemingway didn’t much seem to like as he, the young man, pushed his girlfriend, Jig, into having an abortion: “He’s being rational. He just wants a straight answer, but she’s being so emotional about it.” “What does she mean when she says, ‘You never get it back?’” one went on. “She hasn’t even lost anything.” The professor, a new assistant professor about the age of the fictional grieving wife, smiled when the boys made these comments and left it to the girls in the class to take up the cudgel for empathy, for feminism. Esme was unafraid in this regard. Her good looks and intellectual confidence shielded her from the boys’ dismissal or ridicule. She had recently been introduced to critical theory, too, and she liked to talk about homosocial triangles, and since no one knew what she meant, they were cowed into silence. This had interested Kate.
Kate suspected that Esme regarded her, with her scholarship and work-study job in the lab and what Esme might call her disadvantaged background, as a charity case. But despite this Kate felt an affection for her; Esme was smart and could be generous. Kate spent the first few months evading Esme’s questions about her family, choosing not to disclose how much they’d struggled after her father had left, but when her mother called one night, worried about money and in fact sounding suicidal and Esme overheard the conversation and the subsequent call to Kate’s aunt, the plea for intervention, she was tactful and compassionate. The fact that she regarded Kate as exotic held an appealing innocence.
On the T ride to Harvard Square, Esme told Kate about graduate school. She was studying English at Stanford, a decision over which she had agonized; accepted at all the top schools, she’d gone into a tailspin and called Kate crying, barely able to choke out, “Harvard and Yale are both so good but the theorist I most want to work with is Terry Castle.” Kate had been torn between sympathy and distaste. Esme was so afraid, beneath her confidence, of failing. Once at Stanford she asked to be assigned to the medical school dorm so she could meet a doctor. She reported without irony that her mother’s advice was to sit on the medical school steps reading a book. “But the dorms are better,” she’d said, “more casual. More points of contact.” Kate thought Esme should go to business school. Forget teaching; her mind was tuned to strategy. She would perhaps be best-suited to running the free world.
“I talked to my advisor last week and he thinks I should learn Russian and write my dissertation on the Russian novel, well, this one obscure Russian novelist named Goncharov, using Eve Sedgwick as a lens text.”
“Do you want to learn Russian?” Esme had begun as a Henry James scholar; her true fondness was for romantic stories of American girls abroad.
Esme shrugged. “Sure. My advisor says it’s my best chance at being competitive for jobs.”
“What happened to James?”
“He’s overdone.”
Kate knew little about PhDs in the humanities and the academic job market. Still, it struck her as silly to focus on an area in which you weren’t all that interested if you were going to study the topic for five or more years and go on to teach it.
About Esme, Michael had remarked, “She learns things to have information to lord over you in conversation, not because she actually wants to know.” He was an economics major in his senior year at Cornell and planned to work in finance when he graduated; he believed money was power, and that was what he wanted. His view of the world was unduly cynical, Esme frequently remarked to Kate, but too often he was proven right.
“How is UMass?” Esme asked.
Kate worked twenty hours a week in a lab on campus researching DNA. Or, rather, as a technician in support of the post-docs and lead scientist who did the research. Her increased work-study hours and flagging grades had forced her to drop the chemistry major in her senior year, minoring instead, so after graduating with her physics degree she’d sought practical research experience. It was an hour drive, and she shared the car with her mother, so she scheduled herself for the longest days possible. Her job was to help carry out crystallographic analysis by cleaning and prepping equipment, tedious but necessary tasks. She was saving for a deposit on an apartment and applying to full-time jobs in Boston and New York.
“You know – fine. The work is a little rote, but it’s going to be until I get an advanced degree. It’s good to be around these scientists and see how they got where they are and what they like and don’t like about the job.”
“And Michael? What a shit.”
“I know. But maybe he has a good reason.”
“There is no reason good enough.”
Kate knew Esme was right. Things with Michael were complicated, though; he made her laugh, and he was genuine and angry in a way she liked. Why anger drew her she didn’t know. Esme located men she could control; Kate chose men she could not. Perhaps it had to do, she speculated, with Esme’s love of constructing a good story, as opposed to her own curiosity about the results of an experiment.

By the time they arrived at Paul’s building, darkness had fallen. The wind gusted. Kate could swear the temperature had dropped ten degrees in the fifteen minutes between when they emerged from underground at the Harvard Square station and now. A winter storm advisory was in effect, Esme said; they were lucky to have made it to Paul’s before the snow began in earnest. She pressed his buzzer, holding it an extra second as Kate shivered. The wind whipped her hair into her mouth. Her nose ran. They waited. Esme pressed the buzzer a second time and a loud buzz issued forth. The door lock clicked open.
The women climbed a narrow, dim flight of stairs, bags bumping behind them as a man Kate assumed was Paul opened a door five flights above and waited in the doorway.
“Sorry!” he called down. “I don’t have my keys and it’ll lock behind me.”
“That’s fine,” Esme called up, giving a brittle laugh that said it obviously wasn’t. Kate paused on the second-story landing, rearranged her grip on the bag. Esme stopped behind her. “My duffle isn’t too heavy,” Esme called, “but Kate has an actual suitcase. Do you want to find your keys?”
“Of course,” he said. “Hold on a sec.”
Esme set her bag on the landing and waited for Paul. He retrieved his keys and bounded down the stairs and hugged Esme, who failed to give much of a response until he lifted her in the air, at which point she relented and seemed pleased by the flattering attention. After lowering Esme, he shook Kate’s hand. His grasp was warm. Now disarrayed, his longish brown hair fell across his forehead. She took in his undeniable good looks: pleasantly crooked nose that might once have been broken, a mouth that suggested good humor and intelligence. When he smiled at her, she wanted to smile back. “Here,” he said. “I’ll get these,” and he lifted the two bags and carried them up the remaining three flights of stairs in the effortless way that surprised Kate even though she knew to expect it from men. They were stronger. And yet it was hard to look at her bag and see a thing that could be easy to lift. It necessitated looking at a suitcase and seeing in its place a lighter object: a pillow, a microscope, a slide. She envied that ability to act on the world.
Paul wore gray sweatpants and a T‑shirt, and she could see Esme examining this choice critically. Esme liked her men well-dressed. For holidays she gave them clothes she wanted them to wear and then complimented them encouragingly for wearing the sweaters and button-downs, soliciting other people’s approval. “Don’t you think Marcus looks handsome in this shirt?” she would ask friends, or “Doesn’t this lilac make Jake’s eyes look so blue?” and what could one say but yes? The men Esme dated usually seemed to expect this and were happy to humor her; the ones who resisted didn’t last long. Kate and Michael had joked about this, but secretly Kate was a little jealous. She would never want to be like Esme, but Esme did get what she wanted.
The studio was small but neat. Paul put their bags by a faded maroon futon couch. A television opposite the couch provided a focal point; beside it stood a small bookshelf with legal books. Adjacent to the kitchen, a desk was wedged in the dining nook where a kitchen table should go, a green-shaded lamp emitting soft light.
Paul went to get them drinks. “Beer or wine?” he asked the women. “I haven’t been properly domesticated,” he added, nodding to the desk; “I eat on the couch if I eat here, which is rare. But please note I did clean up for you two.”
Esme wandered toward the kitchen, where Paul stood uncorking a bottle of wine, and peeked through the open door to the bedroom. Kate joined her, hanging back a little. The studio was not a true studio; in fact, it was two rooms, though the bedroom was closet-sized. “Clean sheets,” he said. “Look, there’s even a decorative pillow. The futon’s murder. I’ll take it. Or we can all sleep in the bed.”
At this Esme turned to him and said, “Someone’s getting ahead of himself.” Paul laughed an easy, perhaps flirtatious laugh. “Baby doll,” he said, “since you broke my heart I haven’t even allowed myself to dream of you. You ruined me, you know. Gutted me like a fish.”
“Please,” she said.
“She’s a heartbreaker, this one,” he called to Kate.
Emerging from the kitchen area with two glasses of red wine he distributed to the women, he smiled and announced, “I’m going to hop in the shower. The day got away from me. I thought we’d grab a bite to eat before the party. There’s a great cheap place around the corner. You two like Middle Eastern?”
Mollified by the flirtation, Esme said yes. Kate was relieved. Cheap was good. Each week she saved as much of her small paycheck as she could so she might afford a deposit on an apartment when she got a job, but most of the money went to cover her portion of the telephone bill and bus fare to see Michael and to her mother, who insisted Kate didn’t have to pay rent but who appreciated the help. Her disability check only went so far, and after the second month without enough heat, Kate started chipping in, even though her mother protested; they both knew it was the only reasonable option. Esme enjoyed nice restaurants and tended to suggest expensive places. Worries about money she met with “This is the one time we’re here,” or “We work hard. We deserve this,” or “In five years whatever we spend on this meal is going to seem like such a pitifully small amount of money,” which Kate sincerely hoped was true.

She began to feel guilty at dinner. Esme and Paul caught up over falafel and hummus, Paul occasionally asking Kate a question about herself to draw her into the conversation – what had she studied at Williams? And what did she do now? If she was in Boston looking for jobs she could stay with him; he might even have a lead for her on a position at an MIT lab – and she was appreciative but distracted. It had been four days since she had spoken with Michael. Kate normally took a bus to see him on holiday breaks. His parents lived in Westchester. The Greyhound went from Brattleboro to Port Authority, where he would pick her up. Before Christmas, they had planned to meet in New York on New Year’s Eve, watch the ball drop live in Times Square on this historic occasion, but after their Boxing Day fight he went on an impromptu skiing trip with his friends and did not leave a telephone number; three times she’d spoken with his mother and left him messages, all unreturned. Angry as she was, a small part of her held out hope. What if Michael had a good reason for not calling from the ski cabin and he called her house in Vermont to explain himself and to arrange to pick her up in New York, or to offer to drive to Vermont for New Year’s, and he couldn’t get her? Her mother did not like to answer the phone.
“Esme,” she said quietly when Paul was in the restroom, “can I leave Michael your cell number? In case he needs to reach me?”
“Absolutely not,” Esme said. “He needs to sweat.”
Paul, returning, smiled warmly at both women and asked what he’d missed. To Kate’s embarrassment, Esme gave him a rough outline of her romantic situation, emphasizing that Michael was not good enough for Kate, was not fit to buy her dinner let alone date her. “This is inexcusable, right?” she concluded. “She needs to end it. And we need to help her. Do you have any cute friends?”
“Plenty,” Paul said affably.
“And you’re single yourself.”
“Esme,” Kate said sharply, more sharply than she had intended. She’d meant it to sound like a groan, like, please, not more of this, to diffuse the tension, when instead she sounded like a person whose secret interest had been revealed. Paul didn’t appear to notice. He had a way of noticing small things when they might add to a person’s comfort – her silence at the table – and not noticing them when they were embarrassing or awkward, a form of social grace she liked.
“What?” Esme said. “You two have a lot in common.”
“Do we?” Paul asked. He waved to the waitress and ordered baklava.
“You both have single mothers.”
“That isn’t so rare,” Kate said.
“You’re smart, admirable people. You grew up in single-parent households, worked hard, and succeeded.” Esme paused, considering. “Remember when we went camping?” she asked Paul. “And we ran out of water? And the nearest place to get water was three miles away?”
“Sure,” he said.
“And you hiked there and back to get the water.”
“You had a blister. I shouldn’t have let you go on a long hike in new boots.”
Kate could imagine this scenario well. Esme hated the outdoors, though she liked to claim she was woodsy. She would begin a project like this, a hike, a camping trip, and quickly plead illness or injury to curtail it, returning with a glorious story of triumph over adversity. Paul’s voice held no animosity, though, and he looked at Esme in a protective, affectionate way that suggested his flirtation might be a test.
“See?” Esme said. “Kate’s just like that. She’d hike six miles without complaining.”
And Esme wanted to establish his interest and turn him away.
“You have a work ethic,” Kate said. “It’s not the sole territory of us children of single mothers.”
“Sure, I work hard,” Esme agreed. “But you and Paul overcame things.”
The baklava arrived. Paul distributed it among the three. Esme checked her phone, and he winked at Kate, a fast, subtle indication he knew what Esme implied was insulting and ridiculous and that he felt no need to let Esme know this. She felt grateful. Of course he knew; he’d dated Esme. She could relax. She didn’t need to debunk these ideas. Esme would be Esme and that was okay. She and Esme were different and those differences were in some ways unbridgeable. Esme, with her vacations in Europe and her childhood bedroom with the canopy bed and white carpet and private, pink-wallpapered bathroom, Kate, with her summers spent working as a dishwasher at a local restaurant and her futon mattress on the floor of the uninsulated back room in her mother’s small, government-subsidized house.

They stopped at a package store near the Middle Eastern restaurant to buy liquor to bring to the party. Paul paid, as he had paid for dinner – “You’re my guest,” he protested when Kate reached for her wallet; Esme made no such gesture – and, at Esme’s request, they returned to Paul’s apartment so Esme could change. To this suggestion Paul said, “You look great. Kate, you, too,” but Esme said she felt underdressed seeing partygoers in the streets of Cambridge, men in blazers and women braving the snow and cold in cocktail dresses and heels. At Paul’s she put on a sparkly blue shift, against which her white-blond hair glowed, and delicate gold shoes; Kate, having brought nothing so dressy, wore dark jeans and a black top.
Snow fell faster outside. Esme, after insisting she could walk to the party in her stilettos, observed meaningfully two blocks into the walk that the sidewalks were icy, and Paul, with infinite patience, said not a word. He put up a hand and hailed a taxi and opened the door for the women.
As the taxi swerved through narrow Cambridge streets, throwing slush onto the sidewalks from the icy puddles, Esme and Paul laughing and taking sips from a flask Paul had produced from his jacket, Esme clutching Paul’s arm dramatically at turns, Kate borrowed Esme’s phone and called Michael’s parents’ house. His mother answered in Korean, and, hearing Kate’s voice, switched to English. Her voice was warm but hesitant, halting. She attended a Korean church, maintained friendships with Korean women in her neighborhood, and spoke with her husband in Korean at home. He’d been a doctor in Korea and now ran three bodegas in Trenton and East Orange and was fluent in English, but she had no reason to be. This was why she persisted in speaking to Michael in Korean, though he responded in English, neither at home in the other’s first language.
“Michael not here,” she said, and Kate explained that she wanted to leave a new telephone number for when he returned. She was staying at a friend’s apartment in Boston, she told his mother, careful to keep references to this friend gender-neutral.
Their fight had been about how to spend New Year’s Eve. Michael had said they couldn’t go out with his friends to the Korean bottle clubs they frequented in the city because she was white, that even if he could get her into a club, which was unlikely, she would dislike these friends, a clique of wealthy Korean and Korean-American college students she hadn’t met once in the two years she and Michael had dated. These friends were materialistic, he said, obsessed with fashion; the women were dependent upon the men for money and gauged love this way. The female half of one couple did not carry credit cards or cash or any form of currency when traveling; she simply expected her boyfriend to pay. In return he ordered for her: salads, because she was plump. “You’d hate the whole scene,” he told Kate, and he was probably right. Michael wasn’t like this in most respects; he wore ratty old T‑shirts and admired her independence and ambition, but he liked the comfort of being around them. “So you’ll always have two lives,” she’d said, “including one in which I can’t participate?” He had never failed to be honest in her presence, but she wondered how, and whether, he talked about her to these friends. “Yes,” he’d said after a pause. “I guess that’s right.”
“OK, I tell him,” his mother said on the phone now, “bye,” the way these calls usually ended.
“Happy New Year,” she managed to get in. She wished she spoke Korean so she could talk in an open way with this woman, whom she liked a lot, though they communicated mainly in gestures and smiles and in their familiar call-and-response upon seeing each other: You look thin, his mother would say with a mixture of admiration and concern; have you been ill? No, she would say, I haven’t been ill. And his mother would smile and say, Good, good, very thin, very nice.
Hanging up, Kate saw Esme and Paul looking at her expectantly.
“Not home,” she said.
“Good,” Esme said. “You’ve done your duty and you didn’t even have to talk to the miserable bastard. If he calls, break up with him. From here on in you can consider yourself free.”
“Don’t pick up if he calls tonight,” Paul said, reasonably. “It’s hard to break up with someone on New Year’s Eve. It’s too emotional. Have fun at the party and have the conversation in a few days.”
That she was not necessarily planning to break up with Michael she didn’t say. She should end it, she knew. She should. But she missed him. He was funny and honest. Because of his sense of outrage at the world’s unfairness, his alienation, he could voice what she herself couldn’t, could hold others responsible in a way her own sympathies and, yes, her own fear prevented her from doing. She wanted to hear his caustic take on Esme’s behavior toward Paul, his assessment of this party to which they were headed. She wanted him to make her laugh.
The Harvard Law student hosting the party had bought his loft upon starting school, Paul said. His name was Amir and his father owned four hotel chains based in Florida. Amir was twenty-seven years old and regarded law school as good preparation for serving on the board when he turned thirty, which was the family plan. The family plan also involved Amir coming into a good deal of money beyond his generous trust fund once he proved he could conduct himself responsibly, the standard of which was not failing out of Harvard Law.
But the plan for the night had little to do with responsible corporate stewardship. Nothing, in fact. Quite the opposite: irresponsible individual hedonism. And why not enjoy being young and wealthy as the century came to an end, Paul asked? Why not go on enjoying these things as long as possible, in fact? Until the youth and the money ran out?
“We like to encourage Amir to squander his trust fund,” Paul said. “Not that it’s tough to do. He spends money like it’s a hobby. At least when he’s penniless, he’ll have his law degree to fall back on.”
But the money would not run out, Kate felt sure – not for Amir, or people like him. There was too much of it, too much to burn in one life.
The loft was brick-walled and high-ceilinged and spacious, a huge room with large windows that looked out on the dark Charles River. Strands of white lights twinkled, nets strung across the ceiling. A staffed bar had been set up in the back. The bartenders wore gray vests over white shirts, sleeves cuffed. Hip-hop pumped through the professional-grade sound system, bouncing off the brick. The party was more adult than she had expected, not the standard post-collegiate affair with people congregated in the kitchen, drinking from plastic cups, the young men reminiscing about college, the young women overdressed and attempting more elevated conversation.
Paul went to get drinks. He greeted a male classmate on his way to the bar and waved the friend over to them, pointing out the two women. The friend pushed through the crowded room. Esme and Kate stood at the outskirts of the dancers, where groups of people clustered, talking.
The friend wore old-fashioned wire-rimmed glasses. Blinking in a slowed-down fashion that suggested he’d had a few, he peered at Kate and Esme, saying by way of introduction, “So what do you think? Is this the end of late capitalism?” He held a glass of whiskey and rattled the ice cubes, smiling appraisingly.
“Undoubtedly,” Esme said.
“I hope not,” Kate said. “We just got here.”
Paul emerged with the drinks, a Champagne cocktail for Esme and gin and tonics for himself and Kate.
“It’s snowing outside,” the friend said, gesturing to the gin and tonics that Paul and Kate held.
“Always so literal, aren’t you, Rand?” Paul said.
“Order is the backbone of society.”
“Kate wanted one,” Paul said. This was true. She had not realized it was an odd thing to request.
“A contrarian,” Rand said. “I like that in a woman.”
“What happened to order being the backbone of society?” Paul asked.
“I’m worried about ruffians like you,” Rand said with a smile, “not girls like this.”
He was older and had the bloated look of a banker. Too many late nights at the desk, too many dinners with clients.
Esme laughed, making eye contact with Rand, who smiled back. She didn’t like it when Kate was the focus of attention for too long. She liked to direct attention to Kate, like an MC, and quickly reclaim it.
“And you,” Rand said to Esme, “Champagne already? Midnight’s an hour off.”
Paul waved to a group of classmates, ushered them over, introduced everyone: Miriam, Alice, and Jonathan. Hands were shaken, names repeated. Jonathan was tall and fair, with an athletic build, perhaps of Scandinavian origin; he spoke with a trace of an accent. The women were both South Asian. Their eyes were rimmed with dark kohl-like eyeliner, their hair dark, their clothes dark, and they spoke in murmurs. The music grew louder.
Esme’s gaze switched to Jonathan, a runner. “I run too,” she said. They began to discuss the best way to stretch. Kate asked Miriam what she did. Alice drifted off to get a drink. “I’m in school with these jokers,” Miriam said. Her hair was cropped in a pixie cut, like a sixties icon. “But they want to be corporate assholes and I want to do civil rights law.”
“You’ll marry one of us corporate assholes and we’ll bankroll your conscience,” Rand remarked, overhearing.
“I said assholes. I didn’t say unattractive,” Miriam responded. To Kate, she said, “You’re here with Paul?”
“Yes – or, well, we’re staying with him, Esme and I. Esme knows him. I don’t yet, not really.”
“Ah,” Miriam said. “He’s one of the good ones, as you’ll see.”
“I do my best,” Paul said, turning from the conversation he’d been having. “Miriam, Kate is a scientist. She’s going to figure out the secrets of the human genetic code and save us from ourselves. Kate, as you may have heard, Miriam is going into civil rights. You two will redeem us all.”
Esme laughed at this, the rustle a dry leaf scraping across concrete. Kate looked away from Paul’s smile. She was beginning to like him but she did not want to cross Esme. Female friendship was a complicated business.
Before midnight the music dropped. A plasma TV tuned to the ball in Times Square came on and the partygoers gathered and chanted the countdown. Champagne flutes were passed around but didn’t reach their group in time. Paul put his arms around Kate and Esme and pulled them in close – “Three! Two! One!” the crowd cried – and at midnight, he kissed each on the cheek, first Esme and then Kate, the touch of his lips warm and soft. Kate felt so lonely in that moment. What was Michael doing? Who was he kissing? She couldn’t imagine him being unfaithful but no word for four days; surely it was over. It had to be.
They had never not spoken for so long, even after their worst fight, which had taken place six months earlier in New York on a hot July night. Her bus had arrived at Port Authority at two a.m. on a Friday, or, well, a Saturday, and he’d been late to pick her up. The crowd at that hour was rough; she’d gone to the public restroom to find two women fighting and a third apparently passed out in a stall, dirty white sneakers visible beneath the stall door, and had left without using the bathroom. She’d waited for Michael on the street corner for forty-five minutes. Anticipating her displeasure, he was in a bad mood. When the man at the parking lot charged him more than he’d been told he’d have to pay, he argued. “I have cash,” she’d said, and he’d snapped, “That’s not the issue.”
The parking lot attendant was a fiftyish-looking black man. She felt bad for him; he seemed reasonable, weary, as he explained to them that the electronic system would not allow him to charge less and that if the owner found less in the cash register he would be accused of stealing.
Michael paid the amount without speaking. Leaving, he slowed at the speaker and spat on the gray mesh cover. “Motherfucking nigger,” he called, and sped off.
She had been stunned into silence. He interpreted this silence correctly as anger, disgust, disavowal. He had black friends; in the two years they’d dated he had never said anything she could remember interpreting as racist. “I know what you’re thinking; say it,” he said. “Kate, say it.” She couldn’t. What did she need to say, she found herself wondering, to separate herself from those words? She could not speak.
“I’m going to keep driving until you talk,” he said. He drove around the silent, dark suburbs outside the city. The minute she spoke she knew she would become the target of his anger. She could not coax any words from herself. He spoke instead; he said she could not know what it was like to grow up in a household of Koreans who were mocked and shut out by white society, polite though it appeared on the surface, and who feared black people, who worked in black cities and were targets of racially motivated violence. “I know you had it hard,” he said, “but there are some things you will never understand.” This was true. She could not know. She was so tired. The anguish and rage in his voice flickered as a heat inside her died. “Please talk to me,” he’d said, “please.” And when she still did not speak, he pulled over and stopped. “Get out of the car,” he said, and she had, she’d watched him drive away and begun walking, wondering which doorbell she should ring, debating whether it was better to say her car had stalled or to confess the truth.
When he’d come back for her, he’d broken down crying, the only time she’d seen him cry. He apologized. For what he’d said to the man, for leaving her. He promised he would work on himself. He begged her forgiveness, and agreed when she pointed out that hers was hardly the most important forgiveness to ask. This went on for hours and though she had wanted to end it then, had seen the end, she had at last capitulated. And after that things were better between them, as if in the fight a tension had lifted.
Five minutes after midnight Esme’s phone rang. She had set it on a nearby table. Rand answered. “Who?” he yelled. “Wait, I think so. What does she look like?”
It was him. Of course.
Taking the phone she said, “Hello?” in a way she hoped was matter-of‑fact, not elated, not angry.
“Where are you?” he said. He was furious. “Who answered the phone?”
“A friend of a friend,” she said. “We’re at a party.” She felt not victorious but low.
“Where?” he demanded.
“Cambridge, somewhere. We’re staying in Cambridge.”
She found a quiet corner by the loft’s enormous windows, which revealed a glinting snowfall. The veil of snow made the street look dim and mysterious, a face glimpsed across a subway platform before a train arrived. Beyond the trees lay the river’s shadowy, silvered curve.
“Who are you staying with?”
“Where have you been? I’ve been calling for four days.”
“We were at the ski cabin, and there was no landline and no one’s cell phones worked up there. The cold killed the car battery.”
“Why didn’t you invite me?”
“You wouldn’t have been comfortable. Trust me.”
“You couldn’t call from the lodge?”
“I should have called, I know. I’m sorry. I was so focused on getting the car fixed, and I thought it would be done in time to call you this morning to make plans.” This made no sense to her – surely he could have called? And waiting until the day of New Year’s Eve to make plans was absurd – but perhaps it was because she’d been drinking. He sounded so rational.
The crowd jostled closer as more people began to dance. She had been sipping a whiskey and her head felt detached from her body, a balloon she held by a string. Miriam was bending to take off her heels, the kohl around her eyes smudged, a hand on Rand’s arm to steady herself. Kate overheard a man in a blue blazer say to Esme, “Princeton? Those pussies? You’re shitting me.”
Paul slipped by, there and gone. He had two drinks in hand, and he looked at Esme, leaning against Jonathan, the runner, and sipping a fresh cocktail, glanced down at the drinks he was holding, one of which appeared to be for her, and handed one cocktail to another woman. The woman laughed, long crystal earrings swaying, and he touched her lightly on the back, and they disappeared into the crowd.
Esme had told Kate that Paul hoped to buy his mother a house once he finished law school, pay for her to earn a college degree. He had a younger brother, seven, who he also hoped to send to college. Esme had said this with wonder at his nobility, at the nobility of the lower classes, and Kate had both admired his ambitions and cringed at Esme’s knowing tone.
Amir, the host and heir to the hotel fortune, tapped his glass and shouted a long toast, the words of which she could not make out. An uproarious laugh greeted one comment. At the bar, a middle-aged bartender polished a wineglass and listened.
“I don’t want to be here,” she said on the phone.
“I’m coming to get you.”
“What? No. That’s crazy.”
“At least tell me where you’re staying.”
“I don’t even know.”
They negotiated. He insisted he was driving to Boston that night, she said no, it would be rude, and besides the snow was worsening, and finally he promised he wouldn’t if she gave him the address. She found Paul, who wrote it on a cocktail napkin. Reading the address over the phone she knew it was a mistake.
“I love you,” he said before they hung up. He didn’t usually say this on the phone. She did not reply. She believed him, but it was increasingly not enough. “Did you hear me?”
“I did.”
“I’m going to drive up tomorrow. We can go to New York or Vermont, wherever you want to go. Please let me do that. I need to see you. I’m so sorry, baby, I really am.”
She was tired. “Okay,” she said. “I mean, let’s talk about it tomorrow.”
“No talking,” he said. “I’m going to come.”
They hung up. Esme appeared, the fine blond hair at her temples darkened with sweat from dancing. “How are you doing?” she asked, seeing Kate standing alone, and when Kate said, “Good,” Esme squeezed her arm happily in a way that signaled she’d had a lot to drink. Drinking made her more affectionate, relaxed, though no less goal-oriented. Over Kate’s shoulder, Esme watched Paul cross the room. The expression on her face revealed to Kate that she did, in fact, still want him but had decided to repress this feeling indefinitely. “Paul shouldn’t leave you alone like this,” Esme announced. “Where is he? You’re his guest.” “I’m fine,” Kate said. “Really, I’m having fun. I was just talking to Miriam before she went to get a drink.”
“You sure?”
“Yes. How about you? Are you having fun?”
A familiar look of determination appeared on Esme’s face.
“My New Year’s resolution is to date one of Paul’s friends,” Esme cried. She pointed at a brooding guy across the room. “That one. He’s a clerk for the Supreme Court.”
Paul returned, alone. Paul and Kate danced. An hour and a half passed. Esme drank two more Champagne cocktails, grew stumbly. The brooding guy supported her as she held court in the corner, two other men listening to her story. Kate stopped drinking and switched to water.
The night was veering out of control. A man in a red-checked shirt carried a loveseat onto the balcony, where smokers gathered and two women danced with each other sexily, touching enough that a kiss seemed at hand.
Kate lost Paul in the crowd. He’d switched to water, too, though he had never seemed that drunk, and was getting them more seltzer. Esme was in the bathroom, or somewhere.
A slim girl with elegant features and Italian skin danced to the music, her drapey top swaying dangerously. The neck scooped low between her small breasts and the top was cut in a deep arc beneath her arms as well, baring an expanse of skin. She was not wearing a bra. Seeing Kate observing her, she smiled.
“How does your top stay in place?” Kate said over the music.
“I have,” the girl said, followed by a phrase Kate couldn’t understand.
“I’m sorry, what?” Kate said, speaking louder.
“I said I have,” the girl yelled, “double-stick tape on my tits.”

Finding a taxi was impossible. Paul called seven cab companies and they all said it would be two hours or more. They decided to walk. Esme was far gone enough that she did not complain. Paul helped Esme and Kate over the slippery sidewalk, one on each arm. Snow weighed down phone lines and trees, hushing the city. The storm was over, a new millennium here, and the world was blank, mute. At his apartment Esme collapsed on the futon and fell asleep.
“No,” she moaned when Paul went to lift her and carry her to bed.
“You sure?” he said. “You want to sleep here?”
“Sick,” she breathed.
He brought out blankets, helped her off with her shoes and jacket. By the futon he put a bowl into which she could vomit.
Kate’s head felt clear. The final whiskey had worn off. She went to get her pajamas from her suitcase and realized she’d forgotten them. “Need something?” Paul asked as she rooted around, and she confessed she had neglected to pack a nightgown. He lent her clothes to sleep in and changed into sweatpants and a T‑shirt, what he’d worn when the women had arrived. She brushed her teeth first, turned out the light, and climbed into his bed. This was how things were done; they could be adult about it. There was nowhere else to sleep. Besides, the thought of sleeping next to another person was nice; after talking to Michael, she felt lonely, unsure of what to do. Paul joined her. He put an arm around her and whispered, “I wanted to kiss you all night.”
“Esme would never forgive us.”
“She broke up with me,” he said. “We’re friends, that’s all. Besides, you and I have so much in common. Just ask her.”
She laughed. He cupped her face in his hand and smoothed her hair from her cheek. Michael might be driving here now, she thought. On the nightstand she’d placed Esme’s phone for when he called to say he was on his way. “I have a boyfriend,” she said. “Kissing isn’t cheating,” he said. She laughed again. “Where are you from? D.C.? Kissing is absolutely cheating.” Rolling over, she pulled away, and he sighed and lay still. “Sweet dreams,” he said. “Sweet dreams,” she replied. She curled around his childhood toy, a gray stuffed rabbit with a hard pink plastic nose sewn above a black embroidered mouth. Paul’s self-conscious breathing evened, became the soft sound of sleep, the body taking over from the brain. On the nightstand Esme’s phone was silent. Kate fell asleep waiting for it to ring.
He woke her at an hour she could not have guessed – the windowpanes were black, no warm sign of dawn tinging the darkness, so perhaps four or five a.m.? – as she dreamed she was slaloming down a run of deep, fresh powder. His body cradled hers. She felt his hand’s warmth on her stomach, beneath the T‑shirt she had borrowed. At first his hand exerted no pressure. Then, gently, he began to press against her stomach, shift his hand, press again a little lower, circle back, a soft, arousing palpitation. Through his boxers, two sets, really, as she had worn a spare pair to bed with his T‑shirt, she could feel him growing hard.
She moved away. “I have a boyfriend,” she said.
He pulled down her underwear. He took his hand and rubbed against her, feeling that she was wet, and though what he was doing felt good she said, “We can’t.”
“It’s okay,” he told her. Before she could reply he pushed into her, pulling up the T‑shirt she wore and lightly touching her nipples with one hand as he guided himself in with the other. “That’s right,” he said. He began to rub her back to calm her as though she were a child. She struggled a little.
“Really,” she said. “Really we can’t.”
He made a shushing noise. He knows I want to, she thought.
But did she? Her body did. She did not, or was not yet convinced she did, though convincing might have been possible given time. She imagined Michael at a ski lodge in New York with his friends, talking about her dismissively. Or worse, not talking about her at all. Michael, driving here now though she had told him not to come.
A numbness set in. She felt neither panicked nor aroused. She had no decision to make; the decisions were being made for her. These men will both be successful, she thought, and perhaps they both care about me in their way. Surely they think they do. This man, this sweet, gentle man who shared with her a single-mother upbringing and was attending Harvard Law School in order to raise himself and his family up, breathed heavily, grabbing her hip and pulling her closer. “It’s okay,” he murmured again. Then, more to himself than to her: “This is so good.”
She would not tell Esme, she knew, and after this was over she would not bring it up with Paul, would not return his calls if he called, would avoid seeing Esme if it meant seeing him, would never see him again. And when Michael arrived the next day, flushed from the cold January air of the new year and needing to pee from the six-hour drive and angry – furious – she had slept in the bed of another man, she would weep, and she would yell at him, and she would apologize. “I couldn’t reach you,” she’d say. “What was I supposed to think?” She would never admit what had happened, she decided. It would only make him angrier. And if she cast it in more dramatic terms than she was willing to do, explained, emphasized, that she had said no, he would still be angry and she would be a rape victim, and that was not what she wanted to be. Those girls went around perpetually fifteen, weak, cutting themselves or wearing unattractive clothes, on the brink of crying when one didn’t expect it. No thank you. She didn’t want it and what’s more she couldn’t afford it. That was for people who wanted attention from the world, not people who were working to be invisible so they could rise in it, rise above their place in the only way one could: quietly, without eliciting alarm. That was for people who had given up, not for her. She would be better. She would be better than that.

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Cara Blue Adams has published stories in Granta, Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, Mississippi Review, The Sun, and Narrative.