We Could Be Beautiful Read Online Free Page A

meant poorer people, which also happened to be most people. I knew I was lucky because people told me I was lucky. I knew it to the extent that I could know it. But I actually resented my good fortune sometimes—I may have had distorted, oversimplified notions that romanticized a hunter-gatherer, stranded-on-a-desert-island-in-a-good-way(?)-type life—and this, the resenting, proved that I didn’t get it at all, because, as Susan pointed out, “Only trust-fund babies have the audacity to resent money.” She was allowed to say this because she was a trust-fund baby, too.
    I watched her beady little blue eyes scan the screen. Susan was pretty in sort of a pinched way. She had small features: a button nose and the itty-bitty mouth of a pocket-sized fairy. As a child she had been adorable. Now she was what people usually called “cute.” She hated that—no one called tall people “cute.” But, she argued, she did get more leg room where tall people didn’t, though this would have been more advantageous if she flew coach, which would never happen.
    She chuckled to herself, said, “Wow.”
    “What?”
    “Nothing.”
    In a way Susan and I were still the skinny, naive girls we’d been at Deerfield. When she said “Nothing” now, I saw her saying “Nothing” at age fourteen, when she’d had a crush on Tommy Charles and didn’t want to talk about it.

    “Um.” She looked up. She had forgotten what she was going to say. And then she remembered. “Oh, should we get sandwiches?”
    “I don’t know. Do you want a sandwich?”
    “I wouldn’t be asking you if I didn’t want one.”
    “Okay, but let’s order in.”
    “Oh yeah, I’m not walking anywhere.”
    So I called the sandwich place and ordered our sandwiches. I got a veggie hummus wrap and a Coke for Dan, like a real Coca-Cola, which no adult except Dan actually drank, and which was hilariously not in sync with his holistic approach to life at all.
    I took a sip of my tea and noticed how the leaves on the tree outside my window were so much bigger and greener than they had been the week before. I thought, You can be in the same rut for so long, and then, seemingly out of nowhere, everything changes and you remember what the point is. The point, of course, is love. To love someone, to be loved by someone: that is the point.
    Even in my best relationships, I wasn’t sure I had ever been truly in love. This bothered me. A lot. I thought about it all the time. I was sure it was part of the incompleteness I had always felt. None of the people I’d been with seemed to be the missing piece. They were always the wrong shape, sometimes very obviously and other times in a more irritatingly mysterious way. I told myself I was not stupid to think that with William it would be different, though of course I knew I had said this many times before.
    I didn’t know why I was waiting to tell Susan about him. Usually it would have been the first thing out of my mouth. Maybe I didn’t want to jinx it. Or I didn’t want to find out that she hated him, because if she did, her opinion would be hard to cast aside. I had to tell her, though, and if I waited too much longer she’d accuse me of withholding. “Do you know William Stockton?”
    Susan looked up immediately. “Stockton, Stockton,” she said quickly. She was a person who talked very fast unless she was sad. When she was sad, she talked very slow. “I know Maureen Stockton, I know Callan or Cameron Stock ard . William. William. Will-yam. Does he do Dick or Will or anything?”
    “I don’t know.”

    “Not helpful.”
    I drank more tea, even though I knew it would be cold now, which it was.
    “Who is he?”
    I gave it to Susan in bullet points. Those resonated with her. “Met him at the gala, we had coffee yesterday, he just moved back from Europe, he knows my family, he knew them before I was born. Very good-looking, has a dog, literally just moved back.”
    “Huh.” Susan stretched her feet out onto the