“You know, it’s depressing when you’re everyone’s second choice,” Sarah continued. “I only had her. Everyone else in our circle was Lauren’s friend. I was there, and I’d known her the longest, but I wasn’t in the inner circle. Never slept over at their houses, or invited them to mine. Lauren was my best friend, and I didn’t really need anyone else, you know?”

He leaned forward, setting down his fork. “I do. I understand completely.” How shocking, that he had this in common with Sarah. He’d never wondered about Sarah’s other friends. He’d had no reason to.

She smiled sadly. “Of course you get it. So anyway, Lauren was too loyal to cut me off, but I wasn’t . . .” She shook her head, started to do another hair swoop, then stopped herself with a half smile at Josh, silently acknowledging her habit. “Whatever. Everything came easily to Lauren. Friends, guys, grades. She was so pretty and fun. Everyone wanted to be around her.”

Josh nodded. “I felt the same way. She could’ve had . . . I don’t know.” Who was that character Lauren had so crushed on? “She could’ve had Jon Snow. But she picked me, and I’m still not sure why.”

Sarah smiled. “Ah, she adored you, Josh. Right from the start.”

“And she always thought of you as her best friend. When we first started dating, she never said your name without the title. ‘My best friend, Sarah. Sarah, my best friend.’”

Sarah wiped her eyes. “That’s nice to hear.” She swirled the remaining wine in her glass, studying the deep golden color. “When she got sick,” she said quietly, “I thought it had to be a joke. Like, if anyone should be the dying friend, it should be me. Like she was too golden to have anything but perfection.”

Josh stifled the urge to wish it had been Sarah. He’d already thought it a number of times, anyway. He felt ashamed of that, of thinking Sarah’s life was worth less. She was someone’s daughter, too. Someday, someone would love her the way he loved Lauren. She’d probably become a mom, and she’d be a really good one. He shouldn’t judge.

“I was going to dump her as a friend,” Sarah said quietly. “In college. She got into RISD . . . I didn’t get into Brown. She lived in the coolest student housing ever; I was at URI in a triple with the girl in the top bunk drunk-puking on me four nights a week. Lauren was here on the Hill, so happy and confident that the world was hers, and I felt completely unremarkable by comparison. It bugged me so much I was thinking about transferring somewhere.”

“Why didn’t you?” he asked.

Sarah shrugged. “I had a good scholarship at URI. In my mind, I was brave enough to go out west, to California or Seattle, but in reality, I was in Kingston, thirty minutes from home. Every time I saw Lauren, she was telling me how fabulous and interesting school was, how cool her professors were . . . she was majoring in clothing design originally. I don’t know if you knew that.”

“I did.”

“Yeah. So she was taking classes like History of the Little Black Dress or whatever, making her own beautiful clothes, while I was slogging through statistics taught by these sleepy adjuncts who never bothered to know my name. I didn’t even know what I wanted to major in.”

“That’s not uncommon,” Josh said. Good job, he could just about hear Lauren say. Good sympathetic listening.

“So. I was sick of her sparkliness. Her perfect life. Her happiness, honestly. I was tired of comparing myself to her and coming up short. Everything about her was cool. Her married sister, her hot brother-in-law, her field of study.” She poured the remaining wine into her glass. Her eyes filled again with tears. “I wanted something crappy to happen to her, because it seemed like nothing ever did. So you were right. I was bitter and petty.”

“Why didn’t you, um, dump her?” he asked, a little fascinated.

“Her father died. And she was completely heartbroken.” Sarah wiped her eyes carefully, so as not to smudge her mascara. “The first bad thing that ever happened to her. Mr. Carlisle . . . he was the best. I still remember her voice when she called me. I knew right then and there something horrible had happened.”

And so Josh learned that Sarah’s own father had left when she was eight, popped out a few new children with his next two wives and had to be ordered into paying child support by the court. Sarah was her mother’s only child, alone to bear the contentiousness of the divorce and the neglect from her father. When Sarah did visit her father in Arizona, she was forced to babysit her younger half brothers and a stepsister, courtesy of her father’s second wife. Sarah had adored that little girl, but once her father divorced Wife Number Two, she never saw her again.

“So her family life . . . that was just one more thing she had that I didn’t. Did you know the Carlisles ate together every night? Every night! My mom worked nights, so I always made my own dinner. Frozen pizza and shit like that.”

Josh made a noncommittal noise. He and his mom had eaten together every night, too, and at least once a week with the Kims. Once in a while, his mom would go out with her friends or attend a lecture, in which case the Kims had him sleep over and treated him like their own son. From the age of eight until fourteen, he’d spent every afternoon at their house, fixing things in the basement with Ben, cooking with and being spoiled by Sumi.

The image of Sarah opening a cardboard box and eating pizza alone was awfully sad.

They ordered dessert, and the evening, which had been dragging earlier, was now quite . . . pleasant. Interesting. There was something to be said for this after all, this . . . interaction. Mining of information.

“Something happened to Lauren after her dad died,” Sarah said. “She grew up, I think.”

Josh nodded. “I thought so, too.” He hesitated, feeling slightly guilty. “The first time I met her, I thought she was a twit.”

“Are you serious?” Sarah exclaimed. “I thought it was love at first sight!”