Jule was in the shower before her roommates woke up and started using the hot water. Then she climbed back into her top bunk and unwrapped a chocolate protein bar.
The bunk room was still dark. She opened Our Mutual Friend and read by the light on her phone. It was a thick Victorian novel about an orphan. Charles Dickens wrote it. Her friend Imogen had given it to her.
Imogen Sokoloff was the best friend Jule had ever had. Her favorite books were always about orphans. Immie was an orphan herself, born in Minnesota to a teenage mama who had died when Immie was two. Then she’d been adopted by a couple who lived in a penthouse on New York’s Upper East Side.
Patti and Gil Sokoloff were in their late thirties at the time. They couldn’t have children, and Gil’s legal work had long included volunteer advocacy for kids in the foster care system. He believed in adoption. So, after several years on wait lists for a newborn baby, the Sokoloffs declared themselves open to taking an older child.
They fell in love with this particular two-year-old’s fat arms and freckled nose. They took her in, renamed her Imogen, and left her old name in a file cabinet. She was photographed and tickled. Patti cooked her hot macaroni with butter and cheese. When little Immie was five, the Sokoloffs sent her to the Greenbriar School, a private establishment in Manhattan. There, she wore a uniform of green and white and learned to speak French. On weekends, little Immie played Lego, baked cookies, and went to the American Museum of Natural History, where she loved the reptile skeletons best. She celebrated all the Jewish holidays and, when she grew up, had an unorthodox bat mitzvah ceremony in the woods upstate.
The bat mitzvah became complicated. Patti’s mother and Gil’s parents did not consider Imogen Jewish, because her biological mother had not been. They all pushed for a formal conversion process that would put off the ceremony for a year, but instead Patti left the family synagogue and joined a secular Jewish community that did ceremonies at a mountain retreat.
Thus it was that at age thirteen, Imogen Sokoloff became more conscious of her orphan status than she ever had been before, and began reading the stories that would become a touchstone of her interior life. At first she went back to the orphan books she’d been pushed to read in school. There were a lot of those. “I liked the clothes and puddings and the horse-drawn carriages,” Immie told Jule.
Back in June, the two of them had been living together in a house Immie rented on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. That day, they drove to a farm stand where you could pick your own flowers. “I liked Heidi and God knows what other dreck,” Immie told Jule. She was bent over a dahlia bush with a pair of scissors. “But later, all those books made me puke. The heroines were so effing cheerful all the time. They were paragons of self-sacrificing womanhood. Like, ‘I’m starving to death! Here, eat my only bakery bun!’ ‘I can’t walk, I’m paralyzed, but still I see the bright side of life, happy happy!’ A Little Princess and Pollyanna, let me tell you, they are selling you a pack of ugly lies. Once I realized that, I was pretty much over them.”
Finished with her bouquet, Immie climbed up to sit on the wooden fence. Jule was still picking flowers.
“In high school I read Jane Eyre, Vanity Fair, Great Expectations, et cetera,” Immie went on. “They’re, like, the edgy orphans.”
“The books you gave me,” Jule said, realizing.
“Yeah. Like, in Vanity Fair, Becky Sharp is one big ambition machine. She’ll stop at zero. Jane Eyre has temper tantrums, throws herself on the floor. Pip in Great Expectations is deluded and money hungry. All of them want a better life and go after it, and all of them are morally compromised. That makes them interesting.”
“I like them already,” said Jule.
—
Immie had gotten into Vassar College on the strength of her essay about those characters. She wasn’t much for school besides that, she admitted. She didn’t like it when people told her what to do. When professors assigned her to read the ancient Greeks, she had not done it. When her friend Brooke told her to read Suzanne Collins, she had not done that, either. And when her mother told her to work harder on her studies, Immie had dropped out of school.
Of course the pressure hadn’t been the only reason Immie left Vassar. The situation was desperately complicated. But Patti Sokoloff’s controlling nature was definitely a factor.
“My mother believes in the American dream,” said Imogen. “And she wants me to believe in it, too. Her parents were born in Belarus. They full-on bought the package. You know, that idea that here in the US of A, anyone can reach the top. Doesn’t matter where you start out, one day, you can run the country, get rich, own a mansion. Right?”
This conversation happened a little later in the Martha’s Vineyard summer. Jule and Immie were at Moshup Beach. They had a large cotton blanket spread underneath them.
“It’s a pretty dream,” said Jule, popping a potato chip into her mouth.
“My dad’s family bought it, too,” Immie continued. “His grandparents came from Poland and they lived in these tenements. Then his father did well and owned a delicatessen. My dad was supposed to move even further up, be the first in his family to go to college, so he did exactly that. He became, like, this big lawyer. His parents were so proud. It seemed simple to them: Leave the old country behind and reinvent your life. And if you couldn’t quite live the American dream, then your children would do it for you.”
Jule loved hearing Immie talk. She hadn’t ever met anyone who spoke so freely. Immie’s dialogue was rambling, but it was also relentlessly curious and thoughtful. She didn’t seem to censor herself or craft her sentences. She just talked, in a flow that made her seem alternately questioning and desperate to be heard.
“Land of opportunity,” Jule said now, just to see what direction Immie would go.
“That’s what they believe, but I don’t think it’s really true,” Immie responded. “Like, you can figure out from half an hour of watching the news that there’s more opportunity for white people. And for people who speak English.”
“And for people with your kind of accent.”
“East Coast?” said Immie. “Yeah, I guess. And for non-disabled people. Oh, and men! Men, men, men! Men still walk around like the US of A is a big cake store and all the cake is for them. Don’t you think?”
“I’m not letting them have my cake,” said Jule. “That’s my bloody cake and I’m eating it.”
“Yes. You defend your cake,” said Immie. “And you get chocolate cake with chocolate icing and, like, five layers. But for me, the point is—go ahead and call me stupid, but I don’t want cake. Maybe I’m not even hungry. I’m trying to just be. To exist and enjoy what’s right in front of me. I know that’s a luxury and I’m probably an asshole for even having that luxury, but I also think, I’m trying to appreciate it, people! Let me just be grateful that I’m here on this beach, and not feel like I’m supposed to be striving all the time.”
“I think you’re wrong about the American dream,” said Jule.
“No, I’m not. Why?”
“The American dream is to be an action hero.”
“Seriously?”
“Americans like to fight wars,” said Jule. “We want to change laws or break them. We like vigilantes. We’re crazy about them, right? Superheroes and the Taken movies and whatever. We’re all about heading out west and grabbing land from people who had it before. Slaughtering the so-called bad guys and fighting the system. That’s the American dream.”
“Tell that to my mom,” said Immie. “Say, Hello! Immie wants to grow up to be a vigilante, rather than a captain of industry. See how it goes.”
“I’ll have a talk with her.”
“Good. That’ll fix everything.” Immie chuckled and rolled over on the beach blanket. She took off her sunglasses. “She has ideas about me that don’t fit. Like, when I was a kid, it would have been a huge deal to me to have a couple friends who were also adopted, so I didn’t feel alone or different or whatever, but back then she
was all, Immie’s fine, she doesn’t need that, we’re just like other families! Then five hundred years later, in ninth grade, she read a magazine article about adopted kids and decided I had to be friends with this girl Jolie, this girl who’d just started at Greenbriar.”
Jule remembered. The girl from the birthday party and American Ballet Theatre.
“My mom had fantasies about the two of us bonding, and I tried, but that girl seriously did not like me,” Immie continued. “She had blue hair. Very cooler-than-thou. She teased me for my whole thing about stray cats, and for reading Heidi, and she made fun of the music I liked. But my mom kept calling her mom, and her mom kept calling my mom, making plans for the two of us. They imagined this whole adopted-kid connection between us that never existed.” Imogen sighed. “It was just sad. But then she moved to Chicago and my mom let it go.”
“Now you have me,” said Jule.
Immie reached up to touch the back of Jule’s neck. “Now I have you, which makes me significantly less mental.”
“Less mental is good.”
Immie opened the cooler and found two bottles of homemade iced tea. She always packed drinks for the beach. Jule didn’t like the lemon slices floating in it, but she drank some anyway.
“You look pretty with your hair cut short,” Immie said, touching Jule’s neck again.
—
On her winter break from her first year at Vassar, Imogen had rummaged in Gil Sokoloff’s file cabinet, looking for her adoption records. They weren’t hard to find. “I guess I thought reading the file would give me some insight into my identity,” she said. “Like learning names would explain why I was so miserable in college, or make me feel grounded in some way I never had. But no.”
That day, Immie and Jule had driven to Menemsha, a fishing village not far from Immie’s Vineyard house. They had walked out onto a stone pier that stretched into the sea. Gulls wheeled overhead. Water lapped at their feet. They were the same height, and as they sat on the rocks, their legs were tan in front of them, shiny with sunblock.
“Yeah, it was total poop,” said Imogen. “There was no dad listed at all.”
“What was your birth name?”
Immie blushed and pulled her hoodie up over her face for a moment. She had deep dimples and even teeth. Her pixie-cut bleached hair showed her tiny ears, one of which was triple pierced. Her eyebrows were plucked into thin lines.
“I don’t want to say,” she told Jule from inside the fabric. “I’m hiding in my hoodie now.”
“Come on. You started the story.”
“You can’t laugh if I tell you.” Immie lifted the hoodie and looked at Jule. “Forrest laughed and then I got mad. I didn’t forgive him for two days until he brought me lemon cream chocolates.” Forrest was Immie’s boyfriend. He lived with them in the Martha’s Vineyard house.
“Forrest could learn manners,” said Jule.
“He didn’t think. He just blurted out the laugh. Then he was super sorry afterward.” Immie always defended Forrest after criticizing him.
“Please tell me your birth name,” said Jule. “I will not laugh.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
Immie whispered in Jule’s ear, “Melody, and then Bacon. Melody Bacon.”
“Was there a middle name?” Jule asked.
“Nope.”
Jule did not laugh, or even smile. She put both her arms around Immie’s body. They looked out at the sea. “Do you feel like a Melody?”
“No.” Immie was thoughtful. “But I don’t feel like an Imogen, either.”
They watched a pair of seagulls that had just landed on a rock near them.
“Why did your mother die?” Jule asked eventually. “Was that in the file?”
“I guessed the basic picture before I read it, but yeah. She overdosed on meth.”
Jule took that in. She pictured her friend as a toddler in a wet diaper, crawling across dirty bedclothes while her mother lay beneath them, high and neglectful. Or dead.
“I have two marks on my upper right arm,” said Immie. “I had them when I came to live in New York. As far as I knew, I’d always had them. I never thought to ask, but the nurse at Vassar told me they were burns. Like from a cigarette.”
Jule didn’t know what to say. She wanted to fix things for baby Immie, but Patti and Gil Sokoloff had already done that, long ago.
“My parents are dead, too,” she said, finally. It was the first time she’d spoken it aloud, though Immie already knew she’d been raised by her aunt.
“I figured,” said Immie. “But I also figured you didn’t want to talk about it.”
“I don’t,” said Jule. “Not yet, anyway.” She leaned forward, separating herself from Imogen. “I don’t know what story to tell about it yet. It doesn’t…” Words failed her. She couldn’t ramble like Immie did, to figure herself out. “The story won’t take shape.”
It was true. At that time, Jule had only begun to construct the origin tale she would later rely upon, and she could not, could not tell anything else.
“All good,” said Imogen.
She reached into her backpack and pulled out a thick bar of milk chocolate. She unwrapped it halfway and broke off a piece for Jule and a piece for herself. Jule leaned back against the rock and let the chocolate melt in her mouth and the sun warm her face. Immie shooed the begging seagulls away, scolding them.
Jule felt then that she knew Imogen completely. Everything was understood between them, and it always would be.
Now, in the youth hostel, Jule put down Our Mutual Friend. There was a body in the Thames, early in the story. She didn’t like reading that—the description of a waterlogged dead body. Jule’s days were long now, since news had gotten around that Imogen Sokoloff had killed herself in that selfsame river, weighting her pockets with stones and jumping off the Westminster Bridge, leaving a suicide note in her bread box.
Jule thought about Immie every day. Every hour. She remembered the way Immie covered her face with her hands or her hoodie when she felt vulnerable. The high, bubblegum sound of her voice. Imogen rolled her rings around her fingers. She had those two cigarette burns on her upper arm and a scar on one hand from a hot pan of cream-cheese brownies. She chopped onions fast and hard with an outsize heavy knife, something she had learned to do from a cooking video. She smelled like jasmine and sometimes like coffee with cream and sugar. There was a lemony spray she put on her hair.
Imogen Sokoloff was the type of girl teachers never thought worked to her full potential. The type of girl who blew off studying and yet filled her favorite books with sticky notes. Immie refused to strive for greatness or to work toward other people’s definitions of success. She struggled to wrest herself from men who wanted to dominate her and women who wanted her exclusive attention. She refused, over and over, to give any single person her devotion, preferring instead to make a home for herself that she defined on her own terms, and of which she was master. She had accepted her parents’ money but not their control of her identity, and had taken advantage of her good fortune to reinvent herself, to find a different way of living. It was a particular kind of bravery, one that often got mistaken for selfishness or laziness. She was the type of girl you might think was nothing more than a private-school blonde, but you’d be very wrong if you went no deeper than that.
—
Today, when the hostel woke up and the backpackers began staggering to the bathroom, Jule went out. She spent the day as she often did, on self-improvement. She walked through the halls of the British Museum for a couple of hours, learning the names of paintings and drinking a series of Diet Cokes from small bottles. She stood in a bookshop for an hour and committed a map of Mexico to memory, then learned by heart a chapter of a book called Wealth Management: Eight Core Principles.
She wanted to call Paolo, but she could not.
She wouldn’t answer any calls except the one she was waiting for.
The phone rang as Jule came out of th
e tube near the hostel. It was Patti Sokoloff. Jule saw the cell number and used her general American accent.
Patti was in London, it turned out.
Jule was not expecting that.
Could Jule meet for lunch at the Ivy tomorrow?
Of course. Jule said how surprised she was to hear from Patti. They had spoken a number of times directly after Immie’s death, when Jule had talked to police officers and shipped back items from Immie’s London flat while Patti nursed Gil in New York City, but all those difficult conversations had finished some weeks ago.
Patti normally had a busy, chatty way about her, but today she sounded low and her voice didn’t have its usual animation. “I should tell you,” she said, “that I lost Gil.”
That was a shock. Jule thought of Gil Sokoloff’s swollen gray face and the funny little dogs he doted on. She had liked him very much. She hadn’t known he was dead.
Patti explained that Gil had died two weeks ago of heart failure. All those years of kidney dialysis, and his heart had killed him. Or maybe, Patti said, because of Immie’s suicide, he had not wanted to continue living any longer.
They talked about Gil’s illness for a while, and about how wonderful he was, and about Immie. Patti said what a help Jule had been, handling things in London when the Sokoloffs couldn’t leave New York. “I know it seems strange for me to be traveling,” Patti said, “but after all those years of looking after Gil, I can’t bear to be in the apartment alone. It’s filled with his things, Immie’s things. I was going to…” Her voice trailed off, and when she started talking again it was forced and bright. “Anyway, my friend Rebecca lives in Hampshire and she offered me use of her guest cottage to rest up and heal. She told me I had to come. Some friends are just like that. I hadn’t talked to Rebecca in ages, but the moment she called—after hearing about Immie and Gil—we started up again right away. No small talk. It was all honesty. We went to Greenbriar together. School friends have these memories, these shared histories that bind them together, I think. Look at you and Immie. You picked up again so brilliantly after being apart.”