Fake Plastic Love: A Novel

By Kimberley Tait

“Prepare yourself for a daring, unsparing takedown of millennial Manhattan, trick by glossy trick.” —Beatriz Williams

We are a bifurcated generation, the Romantics versus the Realists: those who prefer transistor radios to Bose sound systems, scuffed ocean liner trunks to gleaming Rimowa hard shells, fountain pens to BlackBerry keyboards, restored old roadsters to eco-friendly hybrids, the unsmudgeable guarantee of old illusions to present-life ones, tinny and certain to disappoint.

When M. meets Belle at Dartmouth, they become the unlikeliest best friends. Belle is an unapologetic Romantic famous on campus for her bright red accessories and hundred-watt smile, while M. is a tomboyish Realist who insists she’ll always prefer her signet ring to any diamond. Despite their differences, they are drawn together, and after graduation they both move to New York with all the unfounded confidence of twenty-two. M. secures a job at the city’s most prestigious investment bank, and Belle turns her nostalgic aesthetic into one of the first lifestyle blogs, which quickly goes viral. Their future is spread before them, a glittering tableau of vintage cocktails, password-guarded parties, and high-octane ambition. But as they are pulled deeper into their new lives, and into the charming orbit of their Gatsby-esque new friend, Jeremy, style and substance—and dreams and reality—increasingly blur. In this fake plastic world, what do success and love and happiness even look like?

Dazzling, whimsical, and full of yearning, Fake Plastic Love is the transporting story of bright young things tested by the unsentimental realities of post-graduate life. Tipping its hat to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kimberley Tait’s gorgeous, incisive debut is a portrait of millennial Manhattan—equal parts nostalgia and modernity—that explores the timeless question: You will be a grand total of what you spend your time doing, so what do you want to add up to?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: May 9, 2017
• ISBN: 9781250093882

Kimberley Tait

Kimberley Tait was born and raised in Toronto, Canada, and moved to the U.S. to attend Dartmouth College, where she wrote an Honors Thesis on life as a staged performance in the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Kimberley earned an MBA from Columbia Business School and has worked at investment banks in New York and London, continuing to work with financial services and investment firms as a writer and marketing strategist. A Canadian, American, and Swiss citizen, Kimberley lives in London with her husband. Fake Plastic Love is her debut novel.

Book preview

IN THE BRIDAL SUITE

I hear bars of a Glenn Miller big band serenade float dreamily along the corridor, swooping up then down under the mahogany door into my suite, suggesting brightly motioning, monogrammed cigarette holders and ever-widening green eyes and fizzing champagne cocktails. Somewhere in another room, on another floor, a medley of clarinets and muted trumpets and the light trill of fingers along the upper keys of an old Steinway Grand tell the richer, warmer tale of an era long gone and irreplaceable. Inside the suite, someone has lined up bottles of bubbly dutifully along a sideboard to my left. A precocious few are already open and ready to transport a group of invisible imbibers, a boisterous wedding party that doesn’t actually exist. I steal a glance at the bottles, counting a total of six. Who exactly is supposed to down them? The makeup artist pressed in front of me grumbles as I’ve ignored her instructions to keep my lids closed. I can’t close them yet, because now I’ve caught sight of an alien object, white and ethereal, levitating somewhere to my right. I turn my head and blink to realize it’s my dress—of course, my wedding dress!—hanging inches away in perfectly pressed silk shantung, its waist adorned by a geometric bow that will be, now that I think about it, the first bow I’ve worn since I was pigtailed at age six. Another exasperated sigh from the makeup artist and I straighten my head and close my lids obediently, but wriggle my nose in discomfort. I’m not used to being lacquered like this.

This is the happiest day of your life! my mother cries, bursting into the suite. She is propelled by another piano trill and a gust of frankly-I-told-you-so triumph. Fluttering momentarily near the champagne bottles, she frowns. (I can hear her internal monologue now: This would have been the right number of bottles if you had chosen to have a conventional wedding party, dear—emphasis pressed firmly on the word conventional.) Thankfully, she shakes off the gloomy thought and happily splashes a pair of coupes full with the bubbly stuff. She pours a particularly generous coupe for herself and, as shafts of light stream in through the sheer curtains from the shifting skies above Vanderbilt Avenue, the pink sets fire, transforming into a dazzling scepter for my mother to wave in front of herself. She stops her waving momentarily to extend a more modest coupe in my direction. As I accept it, I see one pink bubble abandon ship, bouncing out of the glass in a rebellious arc—through the window and across the street to catch the 12:37 from Grand Central Terminal heading north for a properly merry lawn party in Greenwich, Connecticut, where she can mingle with some gentlemanly mint juleps. I am happy for the little pink bubble and for her impulse and her abandon—qualities I have had a deficit of in my life but am working on making up for now.

"Come on, darling, have a splash of pink! You are looking far too serious for your wedding day."

Despite my too serious looks—a criticism I have been plagued with most of my life—I really am thrilled. Just a passing thought of my groom unleashes a net of butterflies to fly in a dizzying race of figure eights around my stomach. But as the bride I’m all too aware that I will be the focal point of one hundred pairs of blinking eyes turning in unison to face me at the door of the church in a matter of sixty minutes. This is fantastically foreign territory. I’ve really only ever been comfortable being on display with racquet in hand, shoelaces double-knotted, charging around a squash court. I would have voted for a no-fuss trip down to City Hall followed by an intimate dinner here at The Vanderbilt Club, but the mere suggestion of something that informal would have crushed my mother. She believes a wedding day is one of the crowning moments of a woman’s life and that shining in an appropriate way, in an appropriate dress and setting, will determine the course of all that follows. Women who don’t take their wedding day seriously might as well flush everything down the toilet. To my surprise, maybe only to keep feathers unruffled, my groom sided with my mother, meaning they beat me squarely, two against one. In less than an hour now we’ll be married farther uptown at St. James’ Church followed by a reception in The Vanderbilt’s grand ballroom.

The artist exhales wearily at the champagne disruption and disappears into another room in search of some missing beauty product—or a miracle pill that will make it easier for her to deal with the two of us. My mother now has her back to me, cradling a telephone with both hands as she calls down to the front desk with some urgent, eleventh-hour request. Now is my chance. When the makeup artist planted me in this armchair, I tucked a postcard into the crevice alongside the cushion, out of my mother’s sight where I knew it would be plucked away or soaked through by another sloshing pink coupe. I extract it and turn it over in my hands, bringing it within a few inches of my nose to scrutinize every last pixel and letter loop. Its front features a fleet of crayon-colored hot air balloons—dozens of bygone and beautiful flying machines, perfectly scattered and floating up into an apricot dawn. The word TURKEY is typed cleanly along the bottom edge of the card. On the back, a message is scrawled in romantic cursive, the letters tilted right at an encouraging angle:

Dear M.,

Greetings from Cappadocia where I’ve decided to hang my hat for a little while. I have a good gig running balloon trips for sightseers, floating them over the ancient caves and fairy chimneys, all millions of years old. You know I’ve always had a soft spot for tour guiding. They call this magical place the Love Valley. Would you be surprised to hear I feel a strange connection with it? Only three months until your Big Day, M., and I am sorrier than I can say that I can’t be there. But I’ll be thinking of you from up in the sky and I’ll be smiling, knowing that after so many years you finally agree with me: life, and everything in it, is a Great Love Story and nothing more.

Flying on—but always your faithful friend,

Jeremy

I’m hoping if I look at the postcard long enough, the balloons or the handwriting will rearrange themselves into a clue or a distress cry or an assurance—something that will tell me how everything turned out for my friend Jeremy Kirby. Something that will tell me if he needs my help. But I can’t find a hint of anything. And so my thoughts cluster and cloud into a sooty specter that hovers a few feet above me, sprinkling coarse black particles on top of my happy day—and my happiness.

Nostalgic melodies continue to echo down the hall and under the door, drifting from Glenn Miller onto Cole Porter: … Do you love me, as I love you? And suddenly my spine straightens an inch as I remember what I’m listening to. Someone is testing a gramophone one floor up in The Vanderbilt’s grand ballroom—a green-horned music machine that was motored down years ago from a grandfather’s cabin in the Adirondacks, then dusted off and repaired and later anointed to play the swoon of our first dance. Are you my life-to-be, my dream come true? With each gust of the gramophone, its romantic tune turns longing and ghostly as it winds through these Club hallways. My mother has vanished next door to change into her wedding day outfit, fumbling with a brooch and issuing incomprehensible noises.

I’m still looking down at Jeremy’s postcard, flat and tantalizing in my hands. It’s the last card he sent me and is so evocative of him that it seems to be glowing, soft and golden and half-haunted. We can torment ourselves asking what became of a person we love—where they are, who they are with, whether they have found or created a happy ending. I’ve been tormenting myself in that way ever since Jeremy’s postcards came to a halt three months ago. Ever since an article appeared in my FT Weekend just last week, planting an ominous clue about what might have happened to him. I’ve been doing my best to turn all of that speculation and gloom into something more positive—something more productive. I’m trying to channel and carry forward the best of what Jeremy gave me before he left.

When his postcards stopped, I started casting him as the leading man in recurring dreams I now have almost nightly. In each one he wears different costumes, he inhabits different continents, he dwells in different times—but he always assumes the role of protagonist, of champion, of savior. The night before my wedding was no exception and my dream is still with me, tingeing the bridal suite air around me a smoky and sorrowful blue. It was dawn. I was flying a hang glider of all things and slalomed through the air a thousand feet above the ancient rock of Cappadocia, still and slumbering in the earliest moments of day. The world swept out below me—great smears of violets and reds and yellows and darks. I was chasing a lone hot air balloon that drifted fifty feet ahead of me, journeying along in a Turkish breeze that I knew was heading south in the direction of Syria. The balloon was an indigo blue peppered with a hopeful constellation of silver stars. It carried a single man, whose silhouette stretched out optimistically over the wicker basket’s edge, searching the horizon with a pair of binoculars.

Jeremy! I called to the figure from my glider but felt my cry swarmed and swallowed up by the altitude as soon as it escaped my mouth. How would I reach him? How could I get through to him? "Is this the right way? Are we going the right way? Jeremy!" Against all likelihood he heard me—there was some movement in the basket as he scrambled to the other side and peered down at me, his binoculars dangling jauntily around his neck.

Yes! Jeremy answered, his voice a bright flurry of confetti tossed in my direction. Don’t worry about a thing! I’ve mapped out a route to the moon and I’m going up there to find her! I don’t know how long it will take me but I promise I’m going to find her. I’ll pick her up and bring her right back!

I know you will! I yelled, believing him with every fiber of my being. The right corner of my mouth trembled, and I couldn’t tell if it was the start of a smile or the precursing pull of tears. Jeremy Kirby had never been a superhero. If he had been one, he would have looked more like a Peter Parker than a Clark Kent. Either way, when he came into your life and his brown eyes locked on yours so earnestly, you knew that it wasn’t what he would do but how hard he would try to do it that made him so extraordinary. It’s what you were born to do! It’s what she’s really wanted—it’s what she’s been waiting for all along! He smiled at me from above, an aura of fondness and friendship illuminating him, and lifted one palm toward me—part wave, part salute. I desperately wanted to reciprocate his gesture but was frozen, knowing that if I let go of my glider and raised my hand, I’d plummet a thousand feet down and break apart on the rocks below. Keeping his palm in the air, he reached up with his other hand and turned a knob that sent a long and lean flame firing upward into his balloon, lifting him up and whisking him off on a fresh current away from me—a wash of silver stars bound straight for the moon.

Have a sip, dear, my mother implores, startling me out of my dreamscape. She has returned from the other room, sparkling and dressed and disturbingly staccato in her movements, and without warning plucks the postcard from my hand and extends a winking pink coupe toward me in its place.

Mom, I need that, I say to her with surprising sharpness, reaching ahead to reclaim my card. The offered coupe tips precariously to the right then left then right again. Sensing danger, a new, wayward flock of pink bubbles confers and flees out the window and across the street to catch the next train north.

Darling, this is hardly the time for personal correspondence. You can write as many postcards as you’d like on your honeymoon. My brow is furrowed and I lean forward to take another swing at the card as she places it out of arm’s reach on the sideboard next to the remaining champagne bottles. You know, if you had bridesmaids, they could have handled all of these trivial sorts of things for you today.

To her great dismay I have no bridesmaids. I agreed to a bigger wedding, but I still insisted on doing a few things my way, which means there is no wedding party. My mother would have undoubtedly cast Belle Bailey as maid of honor, that much I know, and in my heart I feel the soft indentation of regret that I couldn’t do it—that I had to shut her out. Of course I had to field a legion of questions from my mother about my decision—why Belle wouldn’t be my wedding day right-hand woman, why she will not be with us as even a guest today. We’ve grown too far apart was all I could say as bewilderment gripped my mother’s face. A wedding exposes everything, but it explains very little.

Later in the church, partly out of habit, partly for old times’ sake, I know I’ll still look into the congregation for hints of Belle’s incandescence, for her signature splash of red—the plume of a fascinator, the forward tip of a hat brim, the bright stain of doll-like lips. More than anything, I will be looking for Jeremy’s hallmarks—the sheen of his beeswaxed head, the poetic bloom of the buttonhole in his lapel. I will not see any of that. Belle will not be there. Jeremy is God only knows where—a half a world or a constellation away. I know it’s an idiot’s game to try and predict or control other people. But we can always control ourselves. So I close my eyes and take a deep breath and focus inward, trying to remember my promise: today will be one day, after all of these years, that will finally be about me.

COLLEGE

I know it isn’t standard form to be distracted by a man who isn’t your fiancé an hour before getting married—but I have a good reason that’s worth explaining. I’ve always made a point of doing things at my own pace, in my own time. For example, it took me until age thirty to finally assuage my mother’s greatest, soul-rattling fear that I would never marry. She planted her first urgent seed on the topic at O’Hare Airport, seeing me off on my Boston-bound flight to start my freshman year at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. I’m not sure what a mother is supposed to say to a daughter when she leaves home to begin undergraduate life. Mine yanked me back just as I was stepping into the airport security line, grasping both of my shoulders and rushing out one pressing instruction:

Listen to me, button. Whatever you do, find yourself a nice young man before you graduate. One who’s going into banking. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?

I struggled in the opposite direction while extending my ID to the security attendant. But he only looked on bemusedly as my mother pulled me back toward her, staring at me with large and alarming eyes:

Just make sure he has a good head for numbers!

She tapped an index finger against her temple, indicating the young man’s brain in which all of the numbers would dwell and divide and masterfully square root. That gesture lessened her grip on me, and I wrested myself away successfully, spinning off into the security area in a blur of waving hands and neatly packed carry-on bags.

Though it was an unusual way to say good-bye, I knew what she was getting at. Marrying a numbers man had provided stability and reliability in her life, which she valued far more than any kind of personal ambition. My father was ten years her senior and had come of age as a bond man in a presynthetic world—when, I imagined, it was a yawn-inducing, quintessentially steady business of thirty-year yields and even-keeled coupon payments. The eventual ubiquity of opaque and daringly named financial products like naked swaps would have prompted some embarrassed throat clearing from my father, confirming it was time for him to hang up his beloved braces and pinstripes. But his decades of faithfulness to his bank means that in retirement he still provides my mother with a comfortable life in the white-picket-fenced commuter suburb north of Chicago where I grew up. Our family dwelled in that rare and contented state of not wanting even more than we had, so all of this—my father being a numbers man—meant my mother and I never devoted serious thought or worry to the notion of money.

Though I had briefly considered applying to colleges closer to home—Northwestern or the University of Chicago—the pull of the Ivy League was too lush and storied to resist, so I was heading east for my higher education. This pleased my mother to no end. She had always claimed young northeastern men held more promise than midwestern ones, storing it up in the folds of their ever-present pocket squares and tucking it into the shining penny slots of their oxblood Bass Weejuns. Or perhaps she believed they liked numbers more there—for in the east there were more bankers. Dartmouth would be just the place. The new millennium saw it develop an exaggerated reputation as a feeder for the finance industry or, as one attention-seeking alumnus inaccurately described, a vocational school for investment bankers. When the dark-caped banks swooped down onto campus during senior fall to hatchet their pick of the brightest undergraduate minds, small clusters of cable-knit-sweatered protestors gathered on patchy corners of the campus Green. A nucleus of picketers rooted itself near the entrance to the Hanover Inn, where corporate recruiting interviews took place in the uncomfortable intimacy of suites with four-poster beds overlooking Baker Library. They voiced their disenchantment using homemade cardboard signs in all-cap letters that rewrote the College’s romantically charged motto VOX CLAMANTIS IN DESERTO as a question: A VOICE CRYING OUT FOR A BANKING OFFER?

Don’t misunderstand me—many people at Dartmouth could give a hoot about the world of finance. My best friend Annabelle Bailey—Belle is what we always called her—was one of them, and it was on that score and many others that we made such an unlikely duo. I would eventually figure out that we weren’t so unlikely, after all—that the purest forms of admiration and envy don’t require an incubation period, blooming instantly and soon coloring everything.

Belle and I first met during our freshman year when she—with characteristic absent-mindedness—picked up my coffee at the counter of the off-campus café, Rosey Jekes, instead of waiting for her own. Despite all of our glaring differences, our coffee orders were identical—double-shot black Americanos—and she had taken mine. I trailed her in the coffeehouse for all of three steps, and then lost my nerve. I could wait another thirty seconds for my caffeine injection. And besides, there was something about her bow-clad flats and giraffe’s neck and ballerina’s walk that was too unsuspecting and delicate to startle. The effect endeared her to strangers like me without our ever realizing it. But in reality Belle was far from unaware: she had a sixth sense about her—an extra set of vigilant cat eyes fixed onto the back of her head—and she knew all at once that I was there and that I had watched her mistake.

This is your coffee, she stated, turning around and looking straight at me. Glancing down to the cup in her hands, I saw two opposing arcs decorating the plastic lid in brilliant red—she had already taken a sip and left behind her signature stamp. It’s how Great Love and Friendship begin in the movies, isn’t it? She laughed, shooting sparks of delight around her. Her neck craned toward me. I would soon learn this was Belle’s physical reaction when she properly focused on another person or thing—a trace or two away from silly and undeniably florid. I assumed a puzzled look that she must have mistaken for amusement, adding, Lovely, then—the next one will be on me! before flying out the door and zipping off on her red bicycle, with each pedal fertilizing a blooming path along an otherwise ordinary campus walkway. And so she had declared us friends—invented a romantic beginning, planted seeds of meaning into something I would have quickly forgotten as one of life’s everyday and inevitable accidents.

Of course I had seen Belle around campus and knew who she was before that first encounter. She’d been a gleaming light in our class—her blond head and hundred-watt smile and apple-red accessories brightening the moods of even the most hungover or chauvinistic fratty types on walks across campus between classes. She could usually be spotted cycling by, laughing or waving atop her cherry-colored, basket-clad bicycle, an old-fashioned Pashley she had imported from England. She was the lifestyle reporter for The Dartmouth, churning out stylized and sentimental stories about the history of Valentine’s Day proposals on campus or accounts of swoony old Winter Carnival traditions—the crowning of the Queen of the Snows (Not only beauty but the spirit of New Hampshire snows and Hanover winters will grace her personality and costume), sleigh riders munching maple-syrup-topped snow cones, and ski jumpers swooping off an eighty-five-foot-tall trestle to hold fast-fleeting court high above the frosted country club golf course. She saved and pressed the brightest autumn leaves to use as bookmarks. She requested songs to play on Baker Library’s bells that she’d dedicate to people with anonymous note cards left in their Hinman postboxes. If it had been politically correct enough for Dartmouth to have a twenty-first-century Queen of the Snows—or if Belle had been granted her great wish of being born in an earlier, dreamier era—without a shadow of a doubt she would have been it.

Though she could have chosen anyone, after our Americano mix-up she decided to shine her light on me. I couldn’t help but be flattered. I played varsity squash, dressed in navies and neutrals and duck boots, and was as far a cry as you could find from your prototypical Winter Carnival Queen. But still, something about me must have caught her fascination. Belle did some amount of research to find out my name and within a few days, monogrammed letterpress cards, beautifully penned in her tilted cursive, started appearing in my mailbox. Each one listed an instruction that stacked together could have been published as a guidebook called something like Mischief in Madras: Charmed Life in the Ivy League.

I.O.U. one double-shot Americano! How about we make it a triple and then race canoes on the Connecticut?? Last one across the river and back is a rotten egg!

Apple picking at Windy Hill Orchard this Saturday! The apple cider donuts are so naughty but I’ve been feeling a bit devilish lately …

Ice-skating on Occom Pond after class today—bundle up in College colors and I’ll bring the hot cocoa (spiked, of course—shhhhh!).

We found a simple kind of balance together: I helped bring her down to Earth, if only momentarily, and she brought me out of my shell, offering much-needed diversification of my spare time outside my varsity squash schedule. Neither of us joined sororities so we were both GDIs—God Damn Independents—a more surprising label for a bombshell like Belle Bailey. I never rushed but she had, receiving bids from all the most coveted houses. But none of them had done enough to win her over. Even back then Belle insisted on fashioning her own mold instead of folding her willowy frame into someone else’s. In no time we had thrown out the label GDI and started calling ourselves The Lost Girls, our very own (unrecognized) two-person secret society. All Greek meetings were held every Wednesday when the clock struck an ominous ten, which meant those nights became ours. The campus would darken and empty as undergrads scurried into the close, beer-reeking holds of their fraternities and sororities and, for a few special hours, we were handed the keys to a mystical village. On one of those Wednesdays another one of Belle’s note cards handed me my marching orders:

M.,

They call Jupiter’s proximity to the moon tonight a conjunction—I say they’re facing each other ready to set off on a celestial foxtrot. It’s happening tonight! Meet at the Shattuck Observatory at 10 p.m.—sharp!

B.B.

I never asked how she secured the keys to the observatory so we could meet after hours, but it was the first of many trips we would take there on Wednesday nights, when campus police had their hands full trolling the sordid and shadowy length of Fraternity Row. The first time we tiptoed through the door, I could see she was pulled toward the 130-year-old refractor telescope magnetically.

He’s out there, you know, she whispered, hovering near the telescope with her voice slowed to a snail’s pace by the sweet drag of dreaminess.

Wait, didn’t you want to look for the preposition? Or was it the conjunction? I squinted as I thumbed through The Cosmic Perspective, an introductory astronomy book Belle had borrowed from Baker Library to assist us in our stargazing.

No, no. For God’s sake. She sighed, impatiently, as though hauling us across campus to peer into the heavens in search of an intergalactic ballroom dance had been my ill-conceived idea in the first place. I mean, the boy who will change everything one day—for you, and for me.

I certainly hope it’s not the same boy! Because that would end very poorly for one of us, I said with a snort. We had no idea that at that moment, hundreds of miles away in a rural stretch of upstate New York, there actually was a young man—the same young man—who would alter so much for both of us.

Don’t, she censured me with deadpan seriousness. She reached through the dim to take the library book with one hand and grasp my arm with the other. It’s not a thing to snort at, M. Snort at anything else in this world but not at that. It’s the most important thing there is.

Belle was a very smart girl who would never apologize for dreaming the most formulaic dreams about moonlight and storybook endings and so-long-as-we-both-shall-live. And sometimes the universe responds to what a person sends out into its silent, starry vastness. Eager suitors lined up around her on campus—from slow-witted, supercute hockey players to sharp-tongued, owl-eyed, Jack-O-Lantern writers. But none fit the bill perfectly enough to be anointed as her Chosen One. Belle was her most emphatic on one point. She would wait as long as she needed to find True Love. While on some fundamental level I hoped—and expected—he would materialize someday, during my teenage years I’d never idled away hours pining for the boy who would one day change everything for me. I’d never had a confidante or coconspirator—no hairbrush lip-syncing or crank calling crushes or heart-fluttering first kiss recaps. After the sweaty herd of adolescence had stampeded by, I would always wonder if, by skipping those most blushing moments of shared girlhood, I had ever been fully and completely young. My friendship with Belle gave me another crack, if only vicariously, at some of the things I’d missed. I suspect that was a great comfort to my mother who had been so profoundly disappointed to realize that I, her only child, lacked that essential girlishness—that, as I got older, I continued to sport several earmarks of a tomboy. Makeup always seemed too costume-like, and the thought of nail polish chipping imperfectly was almost as unbearable to me as the sound of nails scraping their way across a chalkboard. I was happier gripping a squash racquet than a ballet barre. At school, I was proudest being anointed yearbook editor instead of Homecoming Queen. I found steadiness, dedication, thoroughness, and honesty to be the most attractive qualities and pursued them in everything I did in the classroom and on court. This no doubt resulted in a healthy amount of eye-rolling from other girls my age, but I didn’t notice. I wanted to be good and do good things—I didn’t pay attention to much else. At fifteen I went to one school dance and was never asked to dance. I left the building long before the grand Stairway to Heaven finale. The thought of what was happening through the double doors in the seedy smokiness of the parking lot behind the gym frightened me to no end—maybe the boys could sense it. So I never went back to another dance. I learned that secret Valentines and sentimentally scrawled journals and soulfully recorded CD mixes were not for me. And so, while Belle Bailey became a woman for whom two-plus carats were a life certainty, I grew up into a woman who’d insist she preferred her signet ring to a diamond.

*   *   *

Every life has an essential inflection point—a sharp angle that jolts each of us off in some direction, altering our course and marking the Before and After. Belle’s came earlier and was sharper and more course altering than most. In the last stretch of our junior year on a blue-skied and blossoming May day, her parents died in one of the decade’s most notorious plane crashes when flying back from their holiday in Burgundy. An in-flight fire and pilot error were to blame. I had studied abroad in London that term, then went traveling—hiking in Iceland, sleeping in a volcano hut and out of phone contact for a full three days when it happened. I would always feel a fresh scraping of guilt for being so unaware, so far away from Belle when she got the news. Her tragedy—losing her parents so young in such a spectacular way—granted her the right to be evasive about her past. It was deeply melancholic territory and no one would disrespect her by posing the questions shallow souls were most desperate to ask her: What did your dad do? Where did you summer? Wait, my dear girl, are you still able to summer? What’s the state of your trust fund? How much did you actually inherit? It handed her a special allure. The intrigue and pity of others intermingled to form a lovely film around her—a second skin that distanced her. So, from that point on, no one could ever say with certainty whether Belle was a beer fortune heiress or just another pretty Golightly girl dusting off her nonexistent social status on trips to the powder room.

Belle spent the first summer after the crash with an aunt back home in Rhode Island and I wasn’t certain she would return to campus to finish her senior year. But she did return—much thinner and brushed with a watercolored sadness that only managed to make her look more beautiful. We had planned to share a small off-campus house for our final year, but Belle regretfully told me she needed to back out of the lease, retreating into her own palatial two-bedroom apartment reigning high above the quiet bustle of Main Street. Her trademark fire had dialed down to an ember—she stopped making Baker bell song dedications, and to my knowledge she never visited the Shattuck Observatory again. She gave up her job as lifestyle reporter for The Dartmouth. She started walking, leaving her red Pashley leaning at a lonely angle, chained up on the sidewalk in front of her building. Our entire class started scrubbing and polishing itself in preparation for the first round of corporate recruiting that hovered like a black boom on the brink of swinging over to complete a hazardous sailing tack. Our entire class except Belle, that is. She never spoke of it, but I could see plain as day that her interest in the future dissolved along with the last traces of her parents’ downed fuselage. And so did her insistence on finding True Love. In both respects, she decided to look the other way.

One electric October morning with hints of fire in the air, I checked my campus postbox as a desperate break from editing and reediting my CV for the first résumé drop lurking only a few days away. A single envelope occupied the darkness of the box, slanting sadly against its left wall. Even before I pulled it into the daylight, I knew it was a letterpress card from Belle—the first I’d received since the crash. Without a single exclamation point or asterisk or all-capped word, she was summoning me on one of our old adventures:

M.,

Lost Girls Summit on Gilman Island. Meet me tomorrow at the Ledyard dock at 5:30 p.m. Bring your sleeping bag. I’ll bring the canoe and the jam and bread.

B.B.

I traced my fingers along the string of blue loops spelling out Lost Girls and shivered.

And so the next evening we canoed through the early ripples of twilight away from campus and down the Connecticut River, deeper and deeper into haunted Indian territory toward Gilman Island, the Lost Girls’ very own New Hampshire Neverland, that when viewed from above in its full autumn flush would have resembled the teardrop flame of a candle floating mystically atop the water. When we arrived, Belle sat cross-legged at water’s edge, holding a piece of bread smothered in jam and marveling up as the sky darkened and a deep-blue, star-specked carpet unfurled above her.

Let’s never leave, she said, decisively. I think I’d prefer to stay right here.

Gilman Island? I laughed. I don’t buy it for a second. You can make it through a night with no electricity and plumbing, but I think Block Island is more your speed, Belle.

"No, I think I’d rather not leave this place," she insisted, ignoring me and keeping large eyes trained upward as she took a giant bite of her bread and jam.

But we have to leave—none of us have a choice, I thought to myself, feeling the full, sad weight of her desperation to escape the rawness and reality that awaited her once she’d be forced into the wider world beyond campus. On our holy undergraduate lawns, she was safe—we were all safe; she could wrap herself in the College’s history and its verdure and pretend that tragedy hadn’t actually struck her. But what would she do once that wrapping was gone, once she was left exposed without that arcadian shield?

When night fell with crisp and inky permanence over the island, Belle wouldn’t retreat into the log cabin to sleep and insisted on spreading her sleeping bag out along the shore.

Come inside, Belle—I almost said you’ll catch your death out here but caught myself—you’ll catch an awful cold out here. I had officially started editing the things I said to her and it would take a good number of years for me to speak my mind to her again, honest and unchecked.

No, thank you, she refused, politely, pulling a red wool hat over her ears and stretching wide within her sleeping bag. I want to wake up with a frosty nose. Don’t you just love waking up with a frosty nose? It’s one of my favorite things in the world.

When we paddled back to campus the next morning, Belle had in fact caught something. She couldn’t stop sneezing, issuing an unending string of soft and dainty a-choos! But something else had shifted, too, like a weather vane rotating a few ominous degrees east.

Within a week of our summit on Gilman Island Belle took up with a brash and bulky fraternity president named Chase Breckenridge—an Anglo-American turbo-douche she secretly canoodled with after a number of frat parties over the years and the guy least likely to qualify as the one who would change everything for her. Belle never introduced us properly, which confused and irritated me in equal measure. But I managed to meet him on my own later that October when a big gang of us—at long last turned twenty-one—took over a townie pub off-campus, downing Long Island Iced Teas that could have doubled as lemon-laced rocket fuel. Belle had agreed to meet me at the bar but never turned up; I had assumed Chase was the reason but since our return from Gilman Island she had started disappearing, breaking or rearranging plans or arriving an hour or two late, without explanation or apology. It was becoming increasingly difficult to track her movements. By myself in the mayhem, I was tossed into a crowd of classmates who were semistrangers and urged into a game of darts with an especially rowdy lot that included Chase. It came down to the two of us and I ended up beating him. Though he looked more and more outraged as it was happening, at some point he resigned himself to the defeat, rocking back on his heels and staring at me with wide and amused eyes, as though he were observing a newly evolved species flashing its feathers just to please

Reviews for Fake Plastic Love

[tenamouse67 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I won this ARC in a giveaway - you know how Stephen King uses tons of words to describe one item or to set up a simple scene?... this author does that, too... A bit of an effort to get through but worth it for the finish! It was a very interesting story of choices, decisions, working, living life, and NEW YORK!