Rich and Pretty by Rumaan Alam

Author:Rumaan Alam
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-04-28T04:00:00+00:00

The French toast tastes different. Not as good. Even the little slice of papaya is less appetizing, seems to be grinning at her, menacingly. Lauren pushes the plate away after a couple of bites, where only yesterday she devoured the whole thing, and even briefly considered ordering something else, a side of potatoes, fried to crispness, a plate of bacon, pink and slimy.

There are hours until they leave, and she’s already packed, leaving aside the clothes she plans to wear on the plane, after one final shower, because suddenly the sand, omnipresent as sand tends to be, is starting to drive her mad. Her hair, which gets luxuriously wavy and full from the salt water, suddenly feels dirty, oily, a hindrance. She’ll miss this, she is sure, a few weeks from now, or even upon arrival: waiting in that taxi line at JFK, her breath visible in the evening chill. She’ll miss this when the sky grows dark at an hour when Britons could conceivably be taking tea.

Meredith settles in across from her. She’s dressed for the beach: a too-big white T-shirt she’s knotted at her midriff, a skirt fashioned from a long scarf. Her hair is pulled up into a high, girlish ponytail. She yawns, then smiles. It is early. “Good morning!”

Lauren’s never been good at remembering to say good morning. It seems like something people should just assume. She sips her coffee. It’s not as strong as she wants it to be. “Morning.”

“It’s thirty-six degrees in New York right now. Thirty-six!” Meredith looks at her joyously.

“Yeah.” There is no other obvious answer.

“I tell you what, I could stay here for another week, two, three, whatever.” Meredith unfolds the menu, which is comically oversized, though much of it is just white space. She must have it memorized at this point, they’ve had breakfast here every morning. “What about you, Lauren?”

“It’ll be hard to go back to reality,” Lauren says, though she doesn’t mean it and misses her reality, her mornings alone: opening her eyes seconds before the alarm clock rings, dressing while watching the newscaster on the local channel who does that segment where he highlights interesting stories in the day’s local newspapers.

“We have been spoiled,” Meredith says. “All these amenities.” She pauses. “Sometimes I think I should run away, you know? Start over. Like seriously.”

“Everyone thinks that sometimes. Or all the time. I don’t know.” Lauren studies the dining room even though she knows he’s not working.

Meredith waves over the waitress, asks for a cappuccino and a mixed-berry muffin. “I just don’t even know what I have to go back to, to be honest,” Meredith says. An audible sigh.

Meredith is so deeply within her own agony she doesn’t even have it in her to properly tease/needle/blackmail Lauren about what she’s witnessed.

Lauren pokes at the flesh of the papaya with her fork and feels ill. “It’s that time of year,” she says gamely.

Meredith looks puzzled. “What time of year?”

“Oh, the holidays, you know.” Lauren gestures helplessly. “That time of year.

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