Free Rich and Pretty by Rumaan Alam

ensuring our rights to abort our fetuses.
    â€œLauren. Lauren Brooks.”
    â€œOh.” She says it, too, like it’s a word, not a sound; like it’s a greeting. She’s staring. The neurons are firing but nothing is happening, it’s a terrible moment. She went to high school in the city and a college upstate that excels at producing the next generation of publishing and art world talent, so of course, she’s run into old classmates from time to time. She finds it baffling. Melissa Reid had frozen for her at seventeen; to see her, as she had a year or so ago, in her mannish blazer, stabbing away at a phone, looking a little thick around the waist—it was hard to make sense of. It isn’t that Lauren has a bad recall, it’s just that she can only recall what she knows. She had been able to recall the Melissa Reid with the hot older brother, the Melissa Reid whose parents divorcedin such spectacular fashion that she ended up with two cars on her sixteenth birthday, the Melissa Reid who was alleged to have sucked Dylan Berk’s dick in the backseat of a bus en route to a field trip at Fallingwater. Melissa Reid, securities trader—she was someone Lauren never knew.
    â€œGod, how are you?” the girl says, unhelpfully. She has high cheekbones and short hair, like a fashion model from the nineties, like a girlish lesbian, like a little French boy. She leans forward, toward Lauren, doing this thing with her neck that is so unflattering Lauren almost wants to tell her to stop before remembering that she’s trying to figure out who she is; the tips on comportment can come later.
    Lauren can’t tell what’s warranted: handshake, half hug, kiss, sincere embrace. She tugs her tote bag over her shoulder and sort of hides behind it, protectively. “Hey!”
    â€œGod, you look beautiful, look at you!” The girl puts a hand on Lauren’s arm, a gesture that is clue enough—the implication of an intimacy now passed—and as their skins come into contact, Lauren remembers. Maybe it’s hormonal, animal, some secretion by which we can identify others of our species. Jill Hansen. Fraternal twin brother, Riley (fat, pale, much less pretty than Jill), elderly dad, and much-younger mother, from whom Jill had, fortunately, inherited a perfect, perfect nose, and of course, those cheekbones. Jill Hansen. Lauren hasn’t had occasion to imagine Jill Hansen in the past decade and a half, but they were friends, once. Lauren’s default attitude to these old acquaintances encountered on the street is usually disdain, so she’s surprised to discover she still feels warmly toward Jill Hansen.
    â€œJill. Wow!”
    â€œIt’s great to see you.” Jill Hansen’s eyes widen. She’s turned out to be one of those people who look better at thirty-two than at thirteen.
    â€œYou look amazing!” This is what you say, but Jill does.
    â€œI don’t.” A dismissive wave. “But I’ll take it. I need to hear it. I just had our second, I feel like a corpse.”
    â€œYour second!” Lauren’s at the age now where she’s required to affect enthusiasm about other people’s fecundity. She likes babies well enough but feels the false note in her own words.
    â€œYeah, do you have kids?” An excited edge in Jill’s voice: visions of playdates, the kids squirming in front of a movie, the husbands discussing whatever heterosexual men discuss with one another.
    â€œMe? No, no kids.” She has a strange urge to proffer her hand, show there’s no wedding band there. How hetero-normative someone like Jill—an early adopter of veganism, who refused to wear leather shoes and organized a schoolwide letter-writing campaign in support of Mumia Abu-Jamal—would probably find that. “You have two!” Changing the subject.
    â€œLeo, he’s four, and Audie, she’s two months.” She says it