Read Online The Ramblers by Aidan Donnelley Rowley - Free Book Online Page B

special softness for Bitsy, who drove Smith to New Haven the night that Clio’s mother died, but Clio’s neverfelt totally comfortable in the family’s presence. She knows that in their eyes she’ll always be Smith’s quirky college roommate, Smith’s pity project. Smith checks her watch, seems anxious.
    â€œHot date?” Clio says.
    â€œSoooo . . . ,” Smith says coyly. “I invited Tate to join us.”
    â€œTate?”
    â€œTate Pennington? From the game yesterday? Jesus, Clio, do you remember anything from last night?”
    â€œOh! Tate! Of course,” Clio says. This was one of the first things Smith mentioned when she arrived at the hotel’s opening party. That she’d run into her old friend Tate at the Yale-Harvard tailgate that morning; that they laughed about being the only “pathetic singletons” there.
    â€œI hope you’re not upset that I invited him. Thought we three could go abuse Thatcher’s tab at the Boathouse?”
    â€œYeah. Sure,” Clio says, but the truth is that she is slightly annoyed. She was craving time alone with her friend, eager for Smith’s take on Patrick’s appearance, for some timely optimistic gloss. They’ve met like this almost every week for years now, and it’s become a ritual of sorts, a bookend to each week, their Sunday date. Typically, they sit here for a while and then walk through the Ramble and find their spot in the grass by the Gill.
    â€œI guess Tate built some kind of photography app with another guy from our class and they sold it about a year ago,” Smith says breathlessly. “He just got separated . . . from a girl in our class. Olivia Farnsworth, long dark hair, Silliman, field hockey team? Remember her?”
    Clio shakes her head no as Smith pops up and waves. “There he is!” she says.
    He’s still tall and thin and fair, endearingly disheveled. Though she never got to know him well, her memories of him are sharp and enduring, in contrast to the rest of the red brick and ivy blur. Smith likes to point out that Clio never made much of an effort to get to know most of their classmates. Throughout college Clio cultivated an air of aloofness. She wore the same plain uniform every day—faded jeans and asweater—and threw her hair back in a ponytail. She worked hard to seem like she didn’t care, but underneath it all was a simple, gnawing sense of inferiority, that everyone else fit in and she didn’t. During the week, she kept to herself, diligently attending class and studying hard, working various jobs to help with tuition, spending time with Smith and making phone calls to Jack. On weekends, while Smith flitted around from party to party, ever the well-bred social butterfly, Clio hid in the hushed stacks at Sterling Memorial Library or went home to run errands for her overwhelmed parents, stocking the fridge with her mother’s favorite yogurt, her father’s Heineken and Canadian bacon, running to the pharmacy to refill a prescription. They’ll figure it out without you, Smith said insistently. But Clio wasn’t so sure.
    She has come to realize over the years how foolish this façade was, that everyone else was no doubt just as lost and insecure and confused as she was. But Tate made an impact and she remembers him fondly. He was a bit of an oddball like she was, effeminate or maybe just artsy, an outsider who had never been to Nantucket or Paris, who didn’t smoke pot at prep school or know how to handle a lacrosse stick. He carried a Polaroid camera everywhere, even to his shifts at the campus laundry, where he and Clio worked together freshman year, at first quietly side by side, but soon dipping into cathartic conversations about their new privileged peers, kids who didn’t have to work to subsidize their tuition like they did, kids who went out for expensive sushi dinners instead of eating in the dining hall, kids