Free Matrimony by Joshua Henkin

simply assumed he’d take the Saab up to school. “Squatters’ rights,” he told Mia.
    Now, up on campus, Julian had made clear that Carter and Pilar could drive the car as well, and other friends, too, were allowed to borrow it if they needed to run an errand. Julian was rich but he was generous, and he, Mia, Carter, and Pilar could be seen caravaning to campus—“Here comes the Wainwrightmobile!” Carter would call out—depositing themselves in a parking lot near class.
    Other times Carter would take his motorized scooter (he’d been home over the summer, working in Oakland, and the scooter had been his reward to himself) and Pilar would hop on and he’d drive her to campus.
    Pilar was more cautious than Carter, and she was always telling him to drive carefully, which made him only more headlong. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “I’ve got a hard head.”
    “A dense one!” she yelled into his ear, holding on to him as they zipped along the roads, past Main Street and Union and West University.
    Later, with the four of them reposing in the hot tub, passing around a hollowed-out apple Carter had fashioned into a bong, Pilar said, “A person can get to class without doing wheelies, don’t you think?”
    Julian shrugged beneath the water. “Carter has a reputation to live up to.”
    “That’s right,” Carter said. “Evel Knievel goes to anthropology class.”
    Pilar made a show of being exasperated. She was tall and thin, with eyes the green of a soldier’s uniform and a fine, delicate nose that seemed always to be pointing somewhere. Her features were constantly moving, she had a high-alert face, and she was beautiful, Julian thought; they all did.
    “Eventually, Carter’s going to crash that thing and I’ll end up as some poor college-girl widow. A twenty-one-year-old Jackie O.”
    Carter shook his head. “What’s going to happen is we’ll both be dead and the school will have to mourn us together.”
    “That’s Carter’s dream,” Julian said. “To have the college flag at half-mast and him in heaven spitting down on everyone.”
    Carter said, “It would almost be worth dying just for that.”
    “He does have a death wish,” Pilar said.
    But later, alone with Julian in their bedroom, Mia said Pilar protested too much. Pilar liked having a boyfriend who drove a scooter, even liked the fact that he drove it helmetless and insisted that she ride helmetless, too. “Carter has this theory,” Mia said, “that the safer the world gets the more we need to find new risks. It’s like we have this allotment, and one way or another we’re going to spend it.” She and Julian were reading in bed, idly glancing up from their books. “The thing about Pilar is, you know how she’s always deferring to Carter, giving him the spotlight? Well, secretly she has a plan for him.”
    Julian agreed. Carter had started to dress differently, with fewer holes in his blue jeans, less alligator leather, and now that he’d moved in with Pilar he seemed like a striver, as if suddenly he thought all this could be his.
    “When we go out to dinner,” Mia said, “have you noticed how Pilar watches him hold his fork? She’s always saying things like, ‘Perhaps you’d like to try the mallard.’”
    Pilar had grown up in Washington, D.C., and in Greenwich, Connecticut, where everyone wore white on the tennis court and no one wore it after Labor Day, and she had been to debutante balls even if she hadn’t been a debutante herself. Mia had assumed Pilar would end up in law school—both her parents were attorneys—so when she told Julian that Pilar had a plan for Carter, what she meant, she said now, was that Pilar would get Carter to go to law school, too.
    “I doubt it,” Julian said. “Everyone goes to law school. That alone would make Carter not do it.”
    But soon October became November, and as everyone prepared to return home for Thanksgiving, the senior class was overcome by anxiety. The career