Rich and Pretty by Rumaan Alam

totem pole—too old for that “Associate”—and that the same weariness, coming from her, feels sometimes like bitterness.
    She works at keeping that bitterness at bay. She never wanted this particular turn in her career, so she can’t begrudge not having climbed higher. It would be dishonest. She’s still planning, still plotting, still keeping her options open, though to what end she’s not entirely sure, not yet anyway. She has options but she also has insurance, and the occasional Balenciaga bag.
    â€œThis is good, but this isn’t a meal.” Karen is quite expert with her chopsticks. A new restaurant, an all-dumpling menu, and she’s not wrong: The food is fine but unsatisfying.
    Lauren knows it’s small of her but she doesn’t like going to a restaurant alone. She supposes this is a measure of her failure as a human being, a certain kind of human being, an evolved human being. How can you claim comfort with yourself if you can’t sit and read The New Yorker while dunking something into a tiny plastic cup of inky soy sauce? You can’t. Maybe she can’t. But don’t we all have those memories of hesitating, plastic tray in hands, while scanning the cafeteria for a friendly face, and aren’t friendly faces hard to come by when you’re eleven? She’s always needed a friend. At eleven, at the new school, she was panicked. Who wouldn’t be? The teachers didn’t make her stand up in frontof the class and say something about herself, nothing like that, teachers don’t actually do that, do they? But eleven is old enough to understand a lot more than some might think, and Lauren understood, eyeing the queue of taxis and town cars that morning, that things were going to be different.
    Her mother had held her hand, then it was her mother who let go of it, her mother who understood she needed to not risk coloring her classmates’ perceptions of her daughter. There were other parents in evidence, fathers and mothers who similarly sensed that they should play it cool for the good of their child’s social capital. But there were unattended children as well: They’d gone to this school for six years together, this was not a first day, merely a return. Lauren took her place among them: They lined up, as they’d been taught to for half their lives, and disappeared inside the school’s actually-ivied walls and Lauren said nothing, not even to the chubby girl who pointed out they had the same model backpack. She would need to make friends, but she would need to be discriminating. She saw the desperation on that girl’s face and was not going to let it pull her into its orbit.
    It is not clear to either Lauren or Sarah why they spoke. They can’t recall who approached whom. But they met, almost right away; on that, there’s consensus. Sarah nice enough, but still as fierce as her compatriots; no one is more fierce than an eleven-year-old girl. Even Lauren, eager, nervous, was defended—her need guarded, and because it was hidden, it was vanquished by lunchtime. They were friends by noon. That first moment, conversation, exchange lost to time, but twenty-one years later here they are still.
    Sarah introduced her—introduced her! Explained who was who and everything, though certainly there couldn’t have beenhands shaken?—to the other girls she deemed worth knowing. At her old school, Lauren had known the other kids her whole life. You learned who people were quickly, learned them alphabetically. Three weeks later, she was going to Sarah’s house after school. By fall break, she was with her at their house in Connecticut—a whole other house, meant only for the weekends and days off, something she’d never considered. Her mother had made her send a thank-you card, and she’d been mortified when she went back to Sarah’s house and the thank-you card in question was pinned to the corkboard by