Bittersweet Read Online Free

said with a pout, “because if we don’t get that little hovel shipshape in less than a week, I won’t inherit it. And then you’ll go home and I’ll have to live under the same roof as my mother.”
    Her mouth was set to snarl at whatever I said next, so instead ofvoicing all the questions flooding my mind—“You mean I might still have to go home? You mean you, of all people, have to clean your own house?”—I looked across the tracks to a tangle of chickadees leapfrogging from one branch to the next, and sucked in the fresh northern air.
    An invitation marks the beginning of something, but it’s more of a gesture than an actual beginning. It’s as if a door swings open and sits there gaping, right in front of you, but you don’t get to walk through it yet. I know this now, but back then, I thought that everything had begun, and, by everything, I mean the friendship that quickly burned hot between me and Ev, catching fire the night she told me of Jackson’s death and blazing through the spring, as Ev taught me how to dance, who to talk to, and what to wear, while I tutored her in chemistry and convinced her that, if she’d only apply herself, she’d stop getting Ds. “She’s the brainiac,” she’d started to brag warmly, and I liked the statement mostly because it meant she saw us as a pair, strolling across the quad arm in arm, drinking vodka tonics at off-campus parties, blowing off her druggie friends for a Bogart movie marathon. From the vantage point of June, I could see my belonging sprouting from that day in February, when Ev had uttered those three dulcet words: “You should come.”
    Over the course of the spring, in each note scribbled on the back of a discarded dry-cleaning receipt, in each secretive call to my dorm room, my mother had intimated I should be wary of life’s newfound generosity. As usual, I’d found her warnings (as I did nearly everything that flowed from her) Depressing, Insulting, and Predictable—in her way, she assumed Ev was just using me (“For what?” I asked her incredulously. “What on earth could someone like Ev possibly use me for?”). But I also assumed, once my father reluctantly agreed to the summer’s arrangement, that she would lay off, if only because, by mid-May, Ev had peeled her Winloch photographoff the wall, I’d put the bulk of my belongings into a wooden crate in the dorm’s fifth-floor attic, and my summer plans—as far as I saw them—were set in stone.
    So the particular call that rang through Ev’s Upper East Side apartment, the one that came the June night before Ev and I were to get on that northbound train, was surprising. Ev and I were chop-sticking Thai out of take-out containers, sprawled across the antique four-poster bed in her bedroom, where I’d been sleeping for two blissful weeks, the insulated windowpanes and mauve curtains blocking out any inconvenient sound blasting up from Seventy-Third Street (a blessed contrast to Aunt Jeanne’s wretched spinster cave, where I’d spent the last two weeks of May, counting down the days to Manhattan). My suitcase lay splayed at my feet. The Oriental rug was scattered with sturdy bags: Prada, Burberry, Chanel. We’d already put in our half-hour jog on side-by-side treadmills in her mother’s suite and were discussing which movie we’d watch in the screening room. Tonight, especially, we were worn out from rushing to the Met before it closed so Ev could show me her family’s donations, as she’d promised her father she would. I’d stood in front of two swarthily paired Gauguins, and all I could think to say was “But I thought you had three brothers.”
    Ev had laughed and wagged her finger. “You’re right, but the third’s an asshole who auctioned his off and donated the proceeds to Amnesty International. Mum and Daddy nearly threw him off the roof deck.” Said roof deck lay atop the building’s eighth floor, which was taken up entirely by the Winslows’