Free Commencement by J. Courtney Sullivan

wonderful thoughts about the marriage of one of her best friends. She never wanted to be the sort of woman who measured everyone else’s happiness against her own. And of course, in some ways, she could picture Sally married—she was, after all, the only woman in America under sixty who had voluntarily enrolled in a flower-arranging class. In college, she had taken the role of neat freak to levels Bree never knew existed. She laundered her sheets and comforter every Sunday morning, flipping her mattress while they dried. She regularly cleaned the tub with bleach, even though the housekeeper did the same. She occasionally washed her keys in boiling, soapy water. She decorated her room for every holiday: red paper hearts on the windows in February, a tiny Christmas tree with working lights and a shining gold star. And it was more than just that. Sally had lost her mother, and she’d been aching for a family ever since. Unlike the rest of them, Sally wanted to start having kids by the time she was thirty. Overplanner that she was, she had decided long ago that she wanted a few years alone with Jake before her babies came along.
    Bree genuinely liked Jake; they all did, although she and April agreed he wasn’t exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer. They had been e-mailing back and forth with Celia, all three of them trying to decide what to get Sally for a wedding present, when April sent a message saying,
Not to be an asshole, but remember when Sal and Jake were first dating and she went to his place, and she told us he only
owned two books—the Bible and something by John Grisham? Should we be worried about that?
    Bree had responded immediately:
Well that depends on whether you think there’s cause for concern when our best friend is about to marry someone whose favorite author is Dr. Seuss
.
    April shot back:
Maybe we should get them his complete works as a wedding gift? Or a first edition of
Green Eggs and Ham.
    Bree laughed as she read this, but just as she hit REPLY she got an e-mail from Celia, ever the den mother.
    Stop it, you two
, she wrote.
How dumb can he be? He went to Georgetown for Christ’s sake! Jake is a great guy. He’s just … uncomplicated. And Sally loves him, so he’s off-limits for mocking now
.
    April replied:
Uncomplicated? And that’s a good thing?
    Celia wrote back:
For Sally, yes
.
    The correspondence turned to other topics then—Celia’s date the night before, the fact that April had been arrested again and Ronnie had had to bail her out. Then they began to discuss boring wedding details—how they’d wear their hair, whether Sally had a preference about shoes. Without thinking, Bree forwarded the entire exchange on to Sally, and wrote:
See below … your thoughts on shoes?
    As soon as she hit SEND she clapped a hand over her mouth.
    “Shit,” she said. She hoped Sally wouldn’t read farther than the first message. Bree assumed she hadn’t, because two days later, Sally just wrote back:
Sweetpea, sorry for the delayed response. Work has been CRAZY. You guys should wear whatever you want, unless you want to wear Doc Martens. XO
    Celia, who had minored in psych in college and seemed to think that made her an authority on human behavior, said she thought Bree had done it on purpose.
    “Why would I do that?” Bree asked.
    “Maybe because you want her to know how you feel, but you’re afraid to tell her.”
    “Why would I want her to know that I think Jake is stupid?”
    “That’s not what I meant,” Celia said.
    It was true that for some reason Bree couldn’t make it through a conversation with Sally about Jake without snapping at her. Sallyjust acted so smug about it all, so over the top when she described how happy they were together. The extent of Bree’s disappointment shocked her. It felt almost physical, like a broken rib poking through the skin, so that every time her thoughts twisted this way or that, a horrible pain spread through her whole body.
    When she was