The Group Trip by Audrey Ingram

Author:Audrey Ingram
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: CROOKED LANE BOOKS

♦ 11 ♦

Six Years Ago

THE SUMMER AFTER GRADUATION should have been heartbreaking. Most friends scatter, rudely dropped into adulthood while clinging to memories of hazy college bliss.

But that wasn’t the case for Chloe. Somehow, miraculously, she managed to convince everyone to stay together.

Luke had a job on Wall Street. And Marianne got a job at Teach for America in the Bronx. Even though Chloe’s brother tried to convince her to come back to California, she wasn’t ready. She didn’t want to glom on to his life, weekends spent discussing grocery runs and toddler birthdays. She also wasn’t ready for the constant tidal wave of grief that seemed to consume her whenever she went back to her parents’ home.

It was easy for Chloe to get a job at a gallery. Then Sloane got hired at an interior design firm on the Upper East Side, and Alden was coding something, which he could do from anywhere. When Wyatt got an offer as an editorial assistant at a publishing house, it felt like all the pieces fell into place.

“So we’re going to do it? We’re all moving to New York? Together?” Chloe had squealed that spring, bouncing up and down. Wyatt didn’t really want to take the job, he told them. He wanted to write. But helping other writers seemed good enough. For a year at least. So in response to Chloe’s gleeful dance, they all wrapped her in a hug and made plans for the big move to NYC.

Finding an apartment that they could afford and could fit six people was next to impossible. But by May, they’d found something doable in Murray Hill. They put up temporary walls creating rooms that Sloane called prison cells. More often, they’d all gather on the couch in the living space. It was the only room with a real window that admitted outside light. Every other room either looked out onto a brick wall or was windowless. Sloane’s prison cell description wasn’t actually much of an exaggeration.

They filled the apartment with thrift store finds and questionable Craigslist purchases. Sloane insisted that they all buy new mattresses, after reading one too many articles about bedbug infestations. None of them protested this mandate because buying a used, stained mattress was a threshold none of them wanted to willingly cross.

There was no design sense to the apartment, Sloane’s constant complaint. It was functional and, for Chloe, full of comfort. The knitted blanket Marianne brought from home that they all fought over for movie night. The piles of Wyatt’s books that they turned into makeshift side tables. The cabinet full of mugs with corporate logos that Luke seemed to have in endless supply. And the antique trunk that Sloane found at the flea market to store the ridiculous number of cords and cables that Alden said were absolute requirements. Maybe the comfort of the apartment had more to do with the fact that it was filled with people Chloe loved rather than any material thing.

By late August, they had a rhythm to their days.

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