Fly Away Home by Jennifer Weiner Page B

to marry her had never even crossed her mind) … and her will had never failed her, not in the classes she took or the races she’d run. It would not fail her now.
    “So do you think you guys will get married?” Lizzie asked. This was in August, right before Diana was starting classes again, and Lizzie had come down to Philadelphia to spend the weekend. Diana and Gary had taken her to their favorite brunch spot, then to the Museum of Art, where Lizzie was visibly bored, and on to the Mütter Museum of medical oddities, where Lizzie had spent hours photographing the collection of syphilitic skulls and taking close-ups of some of the two thousand objects that had been removed from people’s throats.
    “Maybe,” Diana had answered, turning her back to her sister, unhooking her bra, and slipping it through the sleeves of her shirt.
    “And you like him?” Lizzie’s disbelief was as palpable as the scent of sandalwood and pot that clung to her clothes.
    “Yes,” Diana said, twisting her hair into a knot on top of her head. “I do.”
    Lizzie peered into the screen of her digital camera, training the lens on the ceiling, with her blond hair fanning out over the bedspread. “Why?” she asked.
    Diana sighed. “Because he’s a good guy.”
    “He’s boring,” Lizzie said, punctuating her assessment with the shutter’s click.
    “Because he’s not passing out at the table or stealing Grandma’s silver?”
    Lizzie fiddled with the lens, then snapped a picture of the crown molding. “Boring,” she repeated, swinging the camera toward Diana and punctuating her assessment with another click.
    Diana turned her back again. She hated having her picture taken, hated the way she looked so massive and overpowering through Lizzie’s eyes and Lizzie’s lens. She thought of telling her sister that, unlike her, she couldn’t afford to be picky, because she was never going to have a dozen guys to choose from. With hard work at the gym and at the mirror, where there was always something to pluck or wax or exfoliate, Diana rated herself acceptable: a six-and-a-half on the one-to-ten scale. Lizzie, with no work at all, looked like a woodland sprite, a busty little thing meant to wear a toga and a crown of laurel leaves and strum a lyre on a mountaintop. Diana looked, her exchange-student boyfriend had once told her, like the goddess Diana, Diana the huntress, born to sling a bow and a quiver full of arrows over her broad shoulders and go out and kill something for dinner.
    Lizzie set down the camera, rolled onto her side, and swept her hair back over her shoulder. “You know that he spits when he talks.”
    Diana sighed. She knew. You couldn’t spend five minutes with Gary and not know. “He can’t help it,” she said, stepping into her pajama bottoms. “And by the way, you could have been a little more subtle.” At brunch, over banana-and-ricotta-stuffed French toast and a spinach-and-blue-cheese frittata, Gary had asked Lizzie where she’d be applying to college, and Lizzie had lifted her napkin and ostentatiously wiped off her cheeks before answering.
    Her sister snorted. Lizzie was a great snorter. She could get away with it. On Lizzie, it was cute. “Subtle?” she said. “I thought I was going to drown. How can you like him? He’s a …” She lifted the forefinger and thumb of each hand into the shape of an L and a 7, then touched them together, forming a square.
    “He’s nice,” Diana said, feeling her face heat up, hoping that Lizzie’s critique would not extend to Gary’s looks. He did have those gentle brown eyes and good teeth and thick dark hair, and he was tall, but his face was all unpleasant, aggressive angles, and his body was bony and unwelcoming.
    “Bor-ing,” Lizzie repeated, lifting her camera again. “I liked Hal.”
    Diana turned away from the lens. “Hal,” she said tightly, “has moved on.” She got into bed beside her sister, rolled on her side, and shut her eyes.
    Maybe love was