“I’m not letting them have my cake,” said Jule. “That’s my bloody cake and I’m eating it.”
“Yes. You defend your cake,” said Immie. “And you get chocolate cake with chocolate icing and, like, five layers. But for me, the point is—go ahead and call me stupid, but I don’t want cake. Maybe I’m not even hungry. I’m trying to just be. To exist and enjoy what’s right in front of me. I know that’s a luxury and I’m probably an asshole for even having that luxury, but I also think, I’m trying to appreciate it, people! Let me just be grateful that I’m here on this beach, and not feel like I’m supposed to be striving all the time.”
“I think you’re wrong about the American dream,” said Jule.
“No, I’m not. Why?”
“The American dream is to be an action hero.”
“Seriously?”
“Americans like to fight wars,” said Jule. “We want to change laws or break them. We like vigilantes. We’re crazy about them, right? Superheroes and the Taken movies and whatever. We’re all about heading out west and grabbing land from people who had it before. Slaughtering the so-called bad guys and fighting the system. That’s the American dream.”
“Tell that to my mom,” said Immie. “Say, Hello! Immie wants to grow up to be a vigilante, rather than a captain of industry. See how it goes.”
“I’ll have a talk with her.”
“Good. That’ll fix everything.” Immie chuckled and rolled over on the beach blanket. She took off her sunglasses. “She has ideas about me that don’t fit. Like, when I was a kid, it would have been a huge deal to me to have a couple friends who were also adopted, so I didn’t feel alone or different or whatever, but back then she was all, Immie’s fine, she doesn’t need that, we’re just like other families! Then five hundred years later, in ninth grade, she read a magazine article about adopted kids and decided I had to be friends with this girl Jolie, this girl who’d just started at Greenbriar.”
Jule remembered. The girl from the birthday party and American Ballet Theatre.
“My mom had fantasies about the two of us bonding, and I tried, but that girl seriously did not like me,” Immie continued. “She had blue hair. Very cooler-than-thou. She teased me for my whole thing about stray cats, and for reading Heidi, and she made fun of the music I liked. But my mom kept calling her mom, and her mom kept calling my mom, making plans for the two of us. They imagined this whole adopted-kid connection between us that never existed.” Imogen sighed. “It was just sad. But then she moved to Chicago and my mom let it go.”
“Now you have me,” said Jule.
Immie reached up to touch the back of Jule’s neck. “Now I have you, which makes me significantly less mental.”
“Less mental is good.”
Immie opened the cooler and found two bottles of homemade iced tea. She always packed drinks for the beach. Jule didn’t like the lemon slices floating in it, but she drank some anyway.
“You look pretty with your hair cut short,” Immie said, touching Jule’s neck again.
—
On her winter break from her first year at Vassar, Imogen had rummaged in Gil Sokoloff’s file cabinet, looking for her adoption records. They weren’t hard to find. “I guess I thought reading the file would give me some insight into my identity,” she said. “Like learning names would explain why I was so miserable in college, or make me feel grounded in some way I never had. But no.”
That day, Immie and Jule had driven to Menemsha, a fishing village not far from Immie’s Vineyard house. They had walked out onto a stone pier that stretched into the sea. Gulls wheeled overhead. Water lapped at their feet. They were the same height, and as they sat on the rocks, their legs were tan in front of them, shiny with sunblock.
“Yeah, it was total poop,” said Imogen. “There was no dad listed at all.”
“What was your birth name?”
Immie blushed and pulled her hoodie up over her face for a moment. She had deep dimples and even teeth. Her pixie-cut bleached hair showed her tiny ears, one of which was triple pierced. Her eyebrows were plucked into thin lines.
“I don’t want to say,” she told Jule from inside the fabric. “I’m hiding in my hoodie now.”
“Come on. You started the story.”
“You can’t laugh if I tell you.” Immie lifted the hoodie and looked at Jule. “Forrest laughed and then I got mad. I didn’t forgive him for two days until he brought me lemon cream chocolates.” Forrest was Immie’s boyfriend. He lived with them in the Martha’s Vineyard house.
“Forrest could learn manners,” said Jule.
“He didn’t think. He just blurted out the laugh. Then he was super sorry afterward.” Immie always defended Forrest after criticizing him.
“Please tell me your birth name,” said Jule. “I will not laugh.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
Immie whispered in Jule’s ear, “Melody, and then Bacon. Melody Bacon.”
“Was there a middle name?” Jule asked.
“Nope.”
Jule did not laugh, or even smile. She put both her arms around Immie’s body. They looked out at the sea. “Do you feel like a Melody?”
“No.” Immie was thoughtful. “But I don’t feel like an Imogen, either.”
They watched a pair of seagulls that had just landed on a rock near them.
“Why did your mother die?” Jule asked eventually. “Was that in the file?”
“I guessed the basic picture before I read it, but yeah. She overdosed on meth.”
Jule took that in. She pictured her friend as a toddler in a wet diaper, crawling across dirty bedclothes while her mother lay beneath them, high and neglectful. Or dead.
“I have two marks on my upper right arm,” said Immie. “I had them when I came to live in New York. As far as I knew, I’d always had them. I never thought to ask, but the nurse at Vassar told me they were burns. Like from a cigarette.”
Jule didn’t know what to say. She wanted to fix things for baby Immie, but Patti and Gil Sokoloff had already done that, long ago.
“My parents are dead, too,” she said, finally. It was the first time she’d spoken it aloud, though Immie already knew she’d been raised by her aunt.
“I figured,” said Immie. “But I also figured you didn’t want to talk about it.”
“I don’t,” said Jule. “Not yet, anyway.” She leaned forward, separating herself from Imogen. “I don’t know what story to tell about it yet. It doesn’t…” Words failed her. She couldn’t ramble like Immie did, to figure herself out. “The story won’t take shape.”
It was true. At that time, Jule had only begun to construct the origin tale she would later rely upon, and she could not, could not tell anything else.
“All good,” said Imogen.
She reached into her backpack and pulled out a thick bar of milk chocolate. She unwrapped it halfway and broke off a piece for Jule and a piece for herself. Jule leaned back against the rock and let the chocolate melt in her mouth and the sun warm her face. Immie shooed the begging seagulls away, scolding them.
Jule felt then that she knew Imogen completely. Everything was understood between them, and it always would be.
Now, in the youth hostel, Jule put down Our Mutual Friend. There was a body in the Thames, early in the story. She didn’t like reading that—the description of a waterlogged dead body. Jule’s days were long now, since news had gotten around that Imogen Sokoloff had killed herself in that selfsame river, weighting her pockets with stones and jumping off the Westminster Bridge, leaving a suicide note in her bread box.