We Could Be Beautiful Read Online Free

blanket and was feeling a lot better after her episode with the flu, though she still wanted to baby herself, which was why she was swaddled, drinking tea, and which was also why she had conveniently planned this visit to coincide with Dan the masseur’s usual Sunday appointment. Dan loved me, so he usually didn’t mind adding another body to the roster, especially if it was Susan.
    Susan was my closest friend. We had gone to Deerfield together and now basically led parallel lives—same gym, same hairdresser, same magazines in the bathroom. Physically we were total opposites, which was annoying only because it disproved my theory that short people and tall people didn’t mix in meaningful ways, though this theory still held up with everyone in my life besides Susan. I was tall, Susan was short. I had brown hair, Susan had blond hair. Susan was fair-skinned, I was olive-skinned. Our color themes even extended to the tea we were drinking right now. Me: Earl Grey. Susan: chamomile.

    “I think one of my people got me sick,” she said, curling her small legs underneath her blanket/scarf.
    “Who? Henry?”
    “Please, don’t say his name.” She mock-cringed. “Oh, I need to text him. Thanks for reminding me.” She rummaged around her giant salmon-pink purse until she found her phone. I was surprised it wasn’t in her hand already. Susan was a little addicted to the screen.
    By “her people,” Susan (lovingly) meant the people who worked at her shop, Bonsai, an adorable little boutique that sold, obviously, bonsai trees. It turned out Susan had landed on a gold mine with this very niche market that combined artistry and minifauna, and she was killing it. Henry was her manager. He was also twenty-four and wanted to fuck her. He’d made this obvious through the many doting cards he left around the shop for her to find. With his spirited curly hair and the cutoffs he wore in summer, Henry looked like a gardener from a ’90s movie. (“I half expect to find him singing into a hose every time I go in there,” she said once.) But as much as she thought sleeping with Henry would be “wholly entertaining,” he was too young, and he was her employee. Susan had self-respect, or at least she wanted it to appear that way. So her approach was to dismiss the cards entirely—she didn’t mention them to Henry at all. Yes, of course she kept them. She kept them in a box at home, and that was no one’s business.
    Working was a big thing Susan and I had in common. Most of our friends didn’t work, especially the ones from Deerfield. They were too busy raising kids (or paying people to do that) and taking care of the household (or telling their assistants how to do that) and going to Pilates and lunch and dotingly removing their husbands’ coats at night after long moneymaking days at the office.
    Susan and I, both still childless (she didn’t want them) and unmarried (which bothered me more than it bothered her), owned small businesses within a few blocks of each other in the West Village, where we both also lived. Mine was a handmade stationery shop. The goal in starting it was to promote new artists and give them a way to make some extra cash while giving people cool, original, not-Hallmark cards. Susan had actually named the shop for me: Leaf. First we thought Paper, but that was taken, and Leaf—ha—went with the bonsai theme. As in bonsai trees had leaves, most of the time. (Yes, we may have come up with this idea while tipsy on pink champagne one late afternoon at Le Gigot.)

    Although neither of us actually needed to work, we often did. It was nice to have something tangible and straightforward to do during the day. I hated to be such a cliché, but if I had nothing to do, I shopped. Which was bad, but better than drugs. Of course I was grateful to have the luxury to buy whatever I wanted, but I also knew I didn’t fully understand gratitude for material things like other people did. By “other people” I obviously