Bennington Girls Are Easy Read Online Free Page B

was okay. Having gotten out from Tish and company alive was enough of a triumph to keep her in an excellent mood for a long time.
    And she was living rent-free in a beautiful four-story brownstone in the Village! With a grand piano, and fluffy white couches, and all of the fabulous French paintings Vicky’s father had spent a lifetime collecting. The windows of Sylvie’s bedroom faced an iconically leafy Greenwich Village street, which was just as it should have been.
    When Cassandra came to visit her at that apartment, the two of them passed hours in that bedroom with the view of the nice, leafy street, talking and talking, stopping only to eat the occasional cupcake from Petunia. That was another good thing: unlike Black Currant, Petunia let their employees get away with some freebies. Sylvie brought home boxfuls of cupcakes, and she and Cassandra could be found, toward the end of their evenings together, moaning at the deliciousness of it all and licking fat curlicues of chocolate buttercream frosting from their fingertips.
    “Do you think you’ll ever move to New York one of these days?” Sylvie asked Cassandra one night, because she wondered how she could bear to go on living in Cambridge.
    “Maybe,” replied Cassandra, who did sometimes envy Sylvie the comparative coolness of her lifestyle. And yet at the same time, because she was still in her early twenties, she believed that her options as to where she might live or what she might do with her life were limitless. Besides, her life in Boston was nothing if not comfortable, and Cassandra was big on having her creature comforts. She also liked having a steady boyfriend, and Sylvie had reported back to her that in New York these were not quite so easy to find because everybody knew that single women outnumbered the men. Then, too, Sylvie said, so many of the men you met there were short: “Manhattan,” she had once fumed to Cassandra over the phone, “is an island of short men!” Cassandra’s Harvard boyfriend was very tall and she liked that. It had been a point of pride when he came to visit her at Bennington. He’s a big one, Alphie the security guard had murmured, with evident approval, on checking him in. It had been a long time since Alphie had seen a male specimen so strapping.
    “If you moved here,” went on Sylvie, “you’d have so many
connections
. You could get a job
like that
.” Doing what, Sylvie didn’t know and Cassandra didn’t ask: another perk of being twenty-two is that you still believe that things will just work out. For you anyway, they’ll work out. “Like, for instance. The other night, there I was doing Zumba at Crunch—”
    “Doing
what
at
where
?”
    “
Zumba
. Zumba
dancing
. At Crunch. Crunch is the gym I go to. Gala and I go to the one on Lafayette,” she added, with that peculiar desperation of people who are new to New York to show that they can get street names and addresses right. Cassandra failed to deduce, as quickly as Sylvie would have wanted her to, that Lafayette meant SoHo.
    “Oh,” Cassandra said, suddenly feeling left out. It wasn’t that she wanted to go to the gym. Cassandra didn’t exercise, and had avoided gyms ever since the day at Bennington when Pansy Chapin had convinced her to work out with her and she had fallen and bruised her knees when trying to get off the treadmill; Pansy never invited her to go again. No, it was just the thought of Sylvie and Gala going somewhere together without her that rankled.
    “Yeah, and guess who I ran into? Gala wasn’t there that night, she was off cheating on Tess with some guy.”
    “Oh, God. Oh, no. Please tell me it wasn’t the guy with the peanut brittle recipe.”
    “No, no, he’s ancient history. Peanut Brittle! That’s what Gala and I decided to call him: Peanut Brittle. Sometimes when we meet a new guy, we say: He seems kind of Peanut Brittle. Peanut Brittle! It’s the new crunchy granola.”
    “Hmm.”
    “But what I wanted to tell you