Page 72 of Fundamentals of Being a Good Girl
Leo’s mouth pulls into something deeper than a pout. Genuine hurt. “Don’t use labels to box me out, Bram, I can’t handle it today.”
I turn to Sloane, who lifts a blazer-clad shoulder. “Joey’s players have a football clinic on campus this afternoon, and since it’s a block day and he only had a couple history classes to teach, he could leave school a little early and come do some diaper drills. So I grabbed the baby and some of the diapers we keep on hand to help the nontrad students and thought we’d give it a shot. It was Leo who suggested your office. And then Alessandro was already at Nagel for some speech he’d given the little premed zygotes, so—”
“Wait.” I look around at the so-called friends assembled here. “So thereisa group chat without me?”
The guilty faces grow guiltier.
“I’ve gotten my double-diaper turnaround time down to twenty-three seconds,” Joey volunteers in an unsubtle attempt to divert the conversation. “That’swithwiping, Bram.”*
I’m about to go back to the perfidious group chat when Leo’s phone rings. He glances down at the screen and then says to me, “You’re going to want me to take this,” as he steps out of the office.
“Don’t be sullen about the texts, Bram,” Alessandro says cajolingly as he leans back against my desk and crosses his arms. (Another three-piece suit today. This one definitely Italian, and definitely tailored by someone who knew Alessandro’s capacity for casually breaking hearts left and right, especially while on Italian suit–buying trips.) “We actually started it in undergrad when we thought you and Sara might need a bail network or whatever. And then we only brought Sara in last year when she thought it would be in poor taste to send her and Asher’s boudoir photos to the main group chat.”
“They were great pictures, though,” says Joey.
“It’s my fear that this secret chat is rife with speculation and hearsay, and—” I stop and really look at Sloane. There is white dust all over her blazer and trousers. Sloane is never covered in dust. Sloane has never even seen dust, to my knowledge.
Sloane follows my gaze, looking down at herself, and then her ivory cheeks go a deep pink.
“Darling,” Alessandro starts, “have you misread the instructions on the cocaine again?”
“It’s not... cocaine.” She slaps viciously at her chest and then at her thighs.
“Not that we’d blame you, with the divorce and all,” Alessandro says in a gracious voice.
“It’s not cocaine!”
That’s the moment Maddie steps into my office. She looks up at Sloane on the love seat, still slapping at herself, then down to the floor, where Joey is stacking diapers next to the stuffed ermine and the fake baby. And then to Alessandro and me.
“I didn’t realize you had... this... going on, Dr. Loe,” she says. “I’ll come back another time.”
“Stay,” I say, an unstoppable instinct, really, to beg her to stay, but the naked honesty in my voice is hidden underneath Sloane’s breathless, agitated “Don’t go, I promise this is normal.”
“Normal for us,” mutters Alessandro.
Leo steps back into the office behind Maddie, and now, despite being a decent-sized office for Gerhart, the space is nearly shoulder to shoulder with unwelcome visitors, a weasel, and Maddie. I squeeze my way to my chair and sit, Maddie and Leo shuffle farther into the room, and Sloane is still on the love seat, slapping herself more gently now.
“Why do you have cocaineall over you?” Leo inquires, in tones of the delicately offended rich. “You don’t have a lint roller for that?”
Sloane’s face is red enough now to be medically concerning. “It’s not cocaine,” she growls. “It’schalk.”
If she hopes this will shut down the discussion, she’s sorely mistaken, because the entire room erupts.
“Chalk, like for sidewalks and children?”
“Is Student Health too poor for dry erase markers?”
“Did you travel back to the 1890s? Do you need a slate rag?”
“It’s from a chalkboard,” Sloane says through gritted teeth. “And I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Did the chalkboard give you the cocaine? Is that why?” asks Leo.
I’m just baffled. “Where on earth did you find a chalkboard on this campus?”
“I bet it was one of those folding ones you put out in front of cafés and shops,” Maddie says, clearly trying to be supportive of Sloane. “Was it for a student health fair or something?”
“No, I was just cleaning it, and it was obviously the first time it’s been cleaned in forty years.”
