At five a.m., she stumbled to the bathroom, splashed water on her face, and lined her eyes. Why not? She liked makeup. She had time. She layered concealer and powder, added smoky shadow, then mascara and a nearly black lipstick with a gloss over it.
She rubbed gel into her hair and got dressed. Black jeans, boots again, and a dark T-shirt. Too warm for the Mexican heat, but practical. She packed her suitcase, drank a bottle of water, and stepped out the door.
—
Noa was sitting in the hallway, her back against the wall, holding a steaming cup of coffee between her hands.
Waiting.
END OF APRIL, 2017
LONDON
Seven weeks earlier, at the end of April, Jule woke up in a youth hostel on the outskirts of London. There were eight bunks to a room: thin mattresses, topped with regulation white sheets. Sleeping bags lay on top of those. Backpacks leaned against the walls. There was a faint reek of body odor and patchouli.
She’d slept in her workout clothes. She eased out of bed, laced her shoes, and ran eight miles through the suburb, past pubs and butcher shops that were still shuttered in the early light. On return, she did planks, lunges, push-ups, and squats in the hostel common room.
Jule was in the shower before her roommates woke up and started using the hot water. Then she climbed back into her top bunk and unwrapped a chocolate protein bar.
The bunk room was still dark. She opened Our Mutual Friend and read by the light on her phone. It was a thick Victorian novel about an orphan. Charles Dickens wrote it. Her friend Imogen had given it to her.
Imogen Sokoloff was the best friend Jule had ever had. Her favorite books were always about orphans. Immie was an orphan herself, born in Minnesota to a teenage mama who had died when Immie was two. Then she’d been adopted by a couple who lived in a penthouse on New York’s Upper East Side.
Patti and Gil Sokoloff were in their late thirties at the time. They couldn’t have children, and Gil’s legal work had long included volunteer advocacy for kids in the foster care system. He believed in adoption. So, after several years on wait lists for a newborn baby, the Sokoloffs declared themselves open to taking an older child.
They fell in love with this particular two-year-old’s fat arms and freckled nose. They took her in, renamed her Imogen, and left her old name in a file cabinet. She was photographed and tickled. Patti cooked her hot macaroni with butter and cheese. When little Immie was five, the Sokoloffs sent her to the Greenbriar School, a private establishment in Manhattan. There, she wore a uniform of green and white and learned to speak French. On weekends, little Immie played Lego, baked cookies, and went to the American Museum of Natural History, where she loved the reptile skeletons best. She celebrated all the Jewish holidays and, when she grew up, had an unorthodox bat mitzvah ceremony in the woods upstate.
The bat mitzvah became complicated. Patti’s mother and Gil’s parents did not consider Imogen Jewish, because her biological mother had not been. They all pushed for a formal conversion process that would put off the ceremony for a year, but instead Patti left the family synagogue and joined a secular Jewish community that did ceremonies at a mountain retreat.
Thus it was that at age thirteen, Imogen Sokoloff became more conscious of her orphan status than she ever had been before, and began reading the stories that would become a touchstone of her interior life. At first she went back to the orphan books she’d been pushed to read in school. There were a lot of those. “I liked the clothes and puddings and the horse-drawn carriages,” Immie told Jule.
Back in June, the two of them had been living together in a house Immie rented on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. That day, they drove to a farm stand where you could pick your own flowers. “I liked Heidi and God knows what other dreck,” Immie told Jule. She was bent over a dahlia bush with a pair of scissors. “But later, all those books made me puke. The heroines were so effing cheerful all the time. They were paragons of self-sacrificing womanhood. Like, ‘I’m starving to death! Here, eat my only bakery bun!’ ‘I can’t walk, I’m paralyzed, but still I see the bright side of life, happy happy!’ A Little Princess and Pollyanna, let me tell you, they are selling you a pack of ugly lies. Once I realized that, I was pretty much over them.”
Finished with her bouquet, Immie climbed up to sit on the wooden fence. Jule was still picking flowers.
“In high school I read Jane Eyre, Vanity Fair, Great Expectations, et cetera,” Immie went on. “They’re, like, the edgy orphans.”
“The books you gave me,” Jule said, realizing.
“Yeah. Like, in Vanity Fair, Becky Sharp is one big ambition machine. She’ll stop at zero. Jane Eyre has temper tantrums, throws herself on the floor. Pip in Great Expectations is deluded and money hungry. All of them want a better life and go after it, and all of them are morally compromised. That makes them interesting.”
“I like them already,” said Jule.
—
Immie had gotten into Vassar College on the strength of her essay about those characters. She wasn’t much for school besides that, she admitted. She didn’t like it when people told her what to do. When professors assigned her to read the ancient Greeks, she had not done it. When her friend Brooke told her to read Suzanne Collins, she had not done that, either. And when her mother told her to work harder on her studies, Immie had dropped out of school.
Of course the pressure hadn’t been the only reason Immie left Vassar. The situation was desperately complicated. But Patti Sokoloff’s controlling nature was definitely a factor.
“My mother believes in the American dream,” said Imogen. “And she wants me to believe in it, too. Her parents were born in Belarus. They full-on bought the package. You know, that idea that here in the US of A, anyone can reach the top. Doesn’t matter where you start out, one day, you can run the country, get rich, own a mansion. Right?”
This conversation happened a little later in the Martha’s Vineyard summer. Jule and Immie were at Moshup Beach. They had a large cotton blanket spread underneath them.
“It’s a pretty dream,” said Jule, popping a potato chip into her mouth.
“My dad’s family bought it, too,” Immie continued. “His grandparents came from Poland and they lived in these tenements. Then his father did well and owned a delicatessen. My dad was supposed to move even further up, be the first in his family to go to college, so he did exactly that. He became, like, this big lawyer. His parents were so proud. It seemed simple to them: Leave the old country behind and reinvent your life. And if you couldn’t quite live the American dream, then your children would do it for you.”
Jule loved hearing Immie talk. She hadn’t ever met anyone who spoke so freely. Immie’s dialogue was rambling, but it was also relentlessly curious and thoughtful. She didn’t seem to censor herself or craft her sentences. She just talked, in a flow that made her seem alternately questioning and desperate to be heard.
“Land of opportunity,” Jule said now, just to see what direction Immie would go.
“That’s what they believe, but I don’t think it’s really true,” Immie responded. “Like, you can figure out from half an hour of watching the news that there’s more opportunity for white people. And for people who speak English.”
“And for people with your kind of accent.”
“East Coast?” said Immie. “Yeah, I guess. And for non-disabled people. Oh, and men! Men, men, men! Men still walk around like the US of A is a big cake store and all the cake is for them. Don’t you think?”