Like A Charm

NOT QUITE U. by Laura Lippman

The newspaper had a story the other day about sisters who discovered each other at Princeton, or maybe it was Rutgers. It was definitely a school in New Jersey, I remember that much. Literally separated at birth in Mexico or some place like that, they had been placed for adoption with two different families - one Jewish and obviously rich, the other Catholic and without so much money, so I guess their daughter was on scholarship, like me. Like I? As I am, yes that's it. She was on scholarship, as I am. Or, as I was, at the time of the story I'm telling.

I was a sophomore at what I'll call Not Quite U., a place that was no one's first choice, except for the pre-meds. Not Quite wasn't a safety school exactly. In fact, some of the students who didn't want to be there had failed to get into places with lesser reputations. Sure, we had the usual mix of would-be Ivy types, but also people who hadn't made the cut at, say, Washington University or Bucknell. Not Quite U. was a consolation prize, a future line on your resume, a drag in the present tense. Whenever some magazine did a round-up of the Top Ten party schools, Not Quite could be found in the correlating list of places where no one had any fun.

That was fine with me. I wasn't in college to have fun. I was pretty pleased with myself, getting into Not Quite with a good financial aid package, although it did feel like crashing a party where no one wanted to be. Even with the scholarship, I had to work two jobs to make ends meet. But I didn't mind either. It meant I spent less time in my dorm, listening to everyone whine about how miserable they were.

My first job was a work-study gig, decorous and dull. I worked at one of the information desks in the Great Glass Library, which afforded me plenty of time to study, but it paid only a dollar above minimum wage. So I fudged my age and my ID, took a second job in a working-class bar not far from campus. Most girls would have gone the glamour route at one of the downtown bars, figuring it would pay better. But a woman who sips a single $12 cocktail tends to be a lot stingier than a guy drinking six one-dollar draughts. Most people don't get that, but coming up where I did, I know there's no one more generous than a poor man on payday. I made $100 in tips on Friday-night shifts, and while the men were flirty, they were more respectful than the ones you meet in nicer places, the guys who seem to think a handful of ass goes with the drink, another little bowl of snacks.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. This was two years ago, and I had been working at Long John's for six months and liking it almost too much. The whole point of going to Not Quite U., after all, was to do better than my parents had done. When I was in junior high, my father had run a small bar near the racetrack. Run it right into the ground, my mother would chime in here. My mother always said that if you wanted to know where to put your money, watch what my father did and run in the other direction. To which my dad said, 'True enough, given that I've sunk most of my money into you, and it's the worst bargain I ever made.'

This was drunk talk, late at night. My parents weren't generally mean, just disappointed. In life, in each other, in themselves. And they weren't alcoholics, they just needed a vice they could afford and a six-pack of Carling Black Label cost $3.69. Me, I don't much care for alcohol. I'll nurse a drink to keep a guy company, but I can't understand why anyone wants to dull the edges that way. I like to keep my mind sharp. Mind sharp, body hard. Did I mention I was on the track team in college? Which wasn't a prestige thing at N.Q.U., which had love in its heart only for lacrosse, but still helped to get me in. I ran the mile, which I think requires the most discipline. Anyone can turn it on for a sprint, you're finished before your brain and body have had the chance to register the effort, while the marathon is a dull, plodding affair. The mile requires speed and strategy. And discipline. Even on the days I worked until two a.m., I was up at six for my morning run, back out in the afternoon to practise with the team. All the while, I maintained a B+ average, and I would have made straight As if it weren't for all the general requirements outside my major, econ.

Everything began in late February of my sophomore year. Long John's was slow because a freak snowstorm had blown in, keeping most of the regulars at home. It was almost nine p.m. and there were only a few hardcore regulars along the bar when the door opened and four students fell in, giggling and stamping their feet. I disliked them on sight. They were so taken with themselves, so self-adoring that it had never occurred to them that anyone could find them less than fascinating. They kept collapsing in hilarity at their own jokes and I knew that taking their orders would be pure torture. I let them arrange themselves in a booth – more hysterical laughter as they shrugged out of their coats and scarves and hats - before I approached.

'I don't suppose I could get a gin rickey here,' one girl said, and the others laughed as if this were the funniest thing they had ever heard. Pretty and haughty, she was the apparent leader, the one they deferred to. Excuse me – the one to whom they all deferred. That's it. The one to whom they all deferred.

'The bartender here can do pretty much anything but I should tell you we don't have a lot of premium brands in stock.'

'I like Boodles,' she said, prompting another round of laughter. 'It's a British gin,' she added helpfully, in case I couldn't put it together for myself.

'We have Beefeaters and Gordon's.'

'Not even Bombay?'

'Beefeaters and Gordon's,' I repeated.

She ran her fingers through her hair and I heard the bracelet before I saw it, and the sound it made was like another laugh at my expense. As an econ major, I didn't have to take too many English classes, but I knew about Daisy Buchanan and the silvery tinkle in her voice. That's what the bracelet sounded like to me, a woman's voice, full of money. The girl who wore it had long dark hair, falling loose to her shoulders, and a heart-shaped face. Staring at her was like looking into a mirror, only my hair has a lighter cast, and my cheekbones aren't as pronounced.

They eventually settled for beers and asked if the kitchen was open. They had apparently been lurching from place to place in the neighbourhood, trying to find someone who was open, which is how they ended up at Long John's. They all asked for cheeseburgers, except for bracelet girl, who wanted a chef salad. I brought them their draughts and prayed that they would drink slowly, so I could ignore them as much as possible.

'Hey, you and Maya look alike,' said one of the boys, the better looking of the two. He was a short guy, thin yet muscular, with dirty blond hair curling under the rim of his ski cap.

The girl who wasn't Maya stifled a laugh, as if he had said something forbidden, but the other boy nodded. 'Yeah, the resemblance is uncanny.'

'What is this, another remake of "The Parent Trap",' asked Maya. She began fiddling with her bracelet, unhooking the clasp, sliding it from her arm, sliding it back on. 'Am I the proper one from Boston, or the tomboy from California?'

'They walk alike, they talk alike,' the ugly boy sang.

'That was Patty Duke,' the other girl corrected him. 'What's your name? Where are you from? Maybe you're distant relations and you don't even know it.'

'I'm Kate,' I said, using the shorter version of my real name. My parents had named me Caitlin. It was the year everyone was naming their daughter Caitlin. Only my mother, being my mother, had spelled it Katelyn. I had shortened it to Kate when I was in high school and the crisp, sharp sound fitted me much better. Hard and sharp, like me. 'And I'm from around here, more or less.'

'Well I'm from New York,' Maya said. 'And I have to say, I really don't see it. I mean, we have dark hair and green eyes. So what? Do you see it?'

Her look at pretty boy said: You better not.

'No,' I said. 'Our bone structure is completely different.'

And I almost ran to the kitchen, heart pounding. It's not easy to give bad service to your only table of the night, but I managed it that evening, hiding in the kitchen as much as possible. They stiffed me on the tip, but they probably would have anyway. Besides, the last thing I wanted was for them to come back, bring other students interested in slumming for a night. If Maya wanted to disavow me, then I was just as anxious to deny her. Although, by all accounts – judging from her clothes, her averred preference for Boodles, and especially that bracelet dangling from her wrist – she had done just fine, better than me. Better than I.

The next week, I checked the freshmen face book from her year in an idle moment at the library. She had gone to a private school in New York City. The last name didn't mean anything to me, but maybe she used her mother's name. She was majoring in art history, with a minor in dance, a sure tip-off to how wealthy her family must be. No one who was worried about getting a job ever majored in art history.

I should have left it there, and I think I would have, but one of the boys from the bar came into the library one afternoon while I was working. 'Hey, it's you,' he said. 'Maya's twin. Kay.'

'Kate. I think I remember you, too.' He was the sort-of cute one.

'I'm Clay, by the way. Why are you working at that bar if you've got a gig here?'

I shrugged, hoping it seemed devil-may-care, I do it for the experience, my good man. Not everyone at Not Quite is rich, but even the average kids seem kind of sheltered. I had heard a few stories that made me realize that not everyone's life was glossy perfection - the loss of a parent, a sibling's drug problem. But I hadn't heard anyone yet confess to being on intimate terms with the 911 dispatcher, or knowing the code for a domestic. Hey, nothing's ever a complete loss. The Fraternal Order of Police gave me $500 towards my tuition.

'I still think you and Maya look alike,' he said. 'If I didn't know better, I'd say you were long-lost sisters.'

'Maybe we are,' I said, trying to keep my tone light. 'Was her father the mailman?'

'See, that's the funny thing. Maya doesn't know her real dad. I think it was some scandal. Luckily, her mom met this great guy and remarried while Maya was still really young. But no one ever talks about it. I've known her since junior high.'

'Are you her boyfriend?'

'More of a friend,' he said swiftly, as if sensing an opportunity. But I'm not sure the opportunity was there, not when I asked. Two hours later, I was letting him screw me in his dorm room. His roommate came in not long after we finished, while I was putting on my socks, and said, 'Hey, Maya.'

'Hey,' I said, my voice sweet and tinkly, not at all my own, and Clay didn't bother to correct his roommate's notion of what happened. And if I had been trying to make trouble, wouldn't I have made sure the roommate, ugly boy, knew I wasn't Maya?

It wasn't a big deal, by the way. My generation, whatever our problems, we're level-headed about sex. It feels good, and dorm life provides a lot of opportunities. I've been with guys and I've been with girls, and it's more about warmth than anything else, like puppies in a pet shop window, piled together in a heap. Plus, N.Q.U. is in this boring Rust Belt city where there isn't a lot to do. (Are you getting it yet? First choice of pre-meds, the Great Glass Library, big on lacrosse, Rust Belt city, a college with a two-word name? Look, I'd name it outright, but they have some scary lawyers, men who are very keen that the school's name not be connected with me in any form.) Anyway, it wasn't a big deal, sleeping with Maya's maybe, maybe-not boyfriend. It wasn't some Bette Davis movie where she plays twins, or even that stupid flick where the girl puts the spike heel through the guy's eye after a little mistaken identity action. Sex at N.Q.U. was about as meaningful as going out for a latte with somebody, only it didn't cost $3. Condoms were free, thanks to the student health clinic.

But sex with Clay was one degree of separation from Maya, and it made me feel as if I had, I don't know, permission to remove that one degree, to talk to Maya one-on-one, figure out if I was right about what I suspected. We didn't have any classes together, her being a year ahead and a dilettante art history major, but it was a small enough campus to cross someone's path, if you really put your mind to it.

I put my mind to it.

'Hey,' I said, coming across her as she left a rehearsal one night. It was early spring now, just a month after we first met, warmer but by no means balmy. Still, all Maya wore was a pair of sweats over her skimpy leotard. I've got a nice body, too, a body very much like Maya's - long legged, small-boned - but I don't walk around in my track shorts, showing everyone my ass.

'Yeah?' she asked, not looking up. She was bent over her wrist, fastening the charm bracelet. I guess she couldn't wear it when she danced, loud as it was.

'We met at Long John's that one time? Remember? Those crazy guys thought we looked alike.'

'Oh, sure.' Sizing me up now, still trying to decide if the comparison was an insult.

'I like your bracelet,' I said, then hated myself for sounding as if I were sucking up. 'I mean, they're very fashionable right now, aren't they? Charm bracelets.'

'Are they? This was a gift from my father, so I wear it all the time. It's an odd story – he found it in a cab.'

'Was he the driver?'

'No.' She laughed as if the idea of a cab-driving father were something quaint. But my dad had driven a cab once upon a time, although I had never heard of him doing it in New York. Then again, my dad's life had a lot of gaps, even the parts I knew about were filled with gaps. 'He just found it in the back seat. Normally, he would have handed it over to the driver, but the guy looked kind of shady. So my dad called the cab company and told them what he had found, and they said they would turn it over to him if no one claimed it. No one ever did, so he kept it, and gave it to me on my sixteenth birthday.'

It sounded like the sort of story my dad would tell, except it had a happy ending. I put a deposit down on the most beautiful bike, baby, but the guy sold it from under my nose. I went to the toy store, baby, but they didn't have the doll you wanted. I meant to have something for your birthday, honey, but I got held up at work and all the stores were closed. Until I was ten, I believed it all. That was when I found out about the two things that kept us so broke - Daddy's poker habit and Daddy's other family.

'I'm going for coffee. You want to come?' Again, I could have kicked myself for sounding so needy. But Maya said yes. I don't know why. Maybe she wanted a cup of coffee. Maybe she liked me, in spite of herself. Maybe she wanted to know more about this strange girl with her face. We went to a place just off campus, Grounds for Life. That was the year when all the coffee places around Not Quite U. had grounds in the name. Grounds for Life, Urban Grounds, Common Grounds. Only the last one made sense to me.

'Hey, maybe some day someone will open up a Grounds Zero,' I said as we fixed our coffees, just to be saying something. I noticed we took our coffees the same, with skim and two Equals.

Maya wrinkled her nose. All my life, I had been seeing that phrase in books, but I didn't really get it until that moment. She looked like a cat, a cat that had smelled something bad. I wondered if I would look like that if I made the same face.

'I'm sorry, my dad is a stockbroker, we knew like a dozen people who were killed that day.'

'Your stepdad, right?'

She didn't like that word. She played with the clasp on her bracelet, easing it on and off her wrist, just as she had that first night in Long John's. 'Who told you that?'

I shrugged, determined not to mention Clay. See, I didn't have any intention of hurting her. If I wanted to blow up her life, I could have done it right there, introduced Clay into the mix and let her draw her own conclusions. 'I don't know. I probably just confused you with someone else. You know how it is on this campus, you hear bits and pieces of people's lives, all out of context. It gets jumbled up.'

'Well, he is my stepdad, technically. But I think of him as my father. I never knew my biological father.' She hit that word hard, as if it were something distasteful. 'He ran out on the family when I was less than a year old.'

'You never knew him?'

'I don't want to know him. Creep.'

'Still, he paid child support, right?'

'I'm sure I don't know. It couldn't have been much, he was a real loser. It was my mother's lucky day when he left. She met my dad, Frank, six months later and they were married before I was three years old. I grew up on Park Avenue.'

The last detail bugged me. Why would she tell me that she grew up on Park Avenue if she didn't know it would get under my skin. We had moved nine or ten times, but not one of our former addresses was Park Avenue. I had lived on streets with names like Meushaw and Hinton, places as ugly as they sounded, in stripped-down apartments that were still more than we could afford. We usually left owing a month or two of rent, although once my dad played the hand out too far and they put our stuff on the street. Whatever happened, the excuse for everything we didn't have was that my father had another family before he met my mom and his ex-wife took him for every penny he had, even though she didn't need it. My mom tried to make it sound more proper than it was, but I did the math and I figured out that the last child of his first marriage and the first child of his second marriage – me, me, me - had been born within a few months of each other. Four to be exact. My birthday was October, which meant I was always the youngest in my class.

'I took a sociology and statistics class last semester and they say the average household sees its income drop after divorce. Guess your family bucked that trend.'

'Thanks to my father, yes. If my mother hadn't met him, life would have been pretty hand-to-mouth for us.'

'Your stepfather,' I said because precision in language is important to me.

'Right,' Maya said.

'I have both parents, and life is really hand-to-mouth for me.'

I was trying to make a joke, or at least be a little self-deprecating, but Maya didn't laugh. She suddenly glanced at the big neon clock over the counter and said she had to go. She left in such a hurry that she didn't notice her charm bracelet was still on the table. Maybe that was because it had sort of scooted under a napkin, so she didn't see it as she gathered up her stuff. Or maybe she thought it was in her tote. At any rate, she left it behind and she was long gone before I realized it was there. So I did what anyone would do. I picked it up, planning to give it to her later.

Of course I examined it first. It was surprisingly heavy and some of the charms were almost lethally sharp. A person would have lots of little nicks and cuts on her wrists, wearing a bracelet like that day-in and day-out. You couldn't dance in it, or work on a computer, or - if Maya had a life more like mine - wait tables with it on. You wouldn't want to wear it with a fine dress, because it would end up catching a thread here or there, creating runs. And you couldn't make love with it. You'd put someone's eye out, as my mom might say, although not about sex.

I fingered the charms. There was a heart-shaped locket with a catch and I tried to prise it open, certain my father's photo was inside. I know, I know, Maya said it was her stepfather who had found it in the cab, but I didn't believe that. She was so keen to write our father out of her life that she had revised the story in her head.

The charm I couldn't help noticing were the ballet slippers, two tiny gold cylinders with ribbons so fine you couldn't imagine one not getting broken over the years, with a jewel sparkling at one toe. It could have been cubic zirconium, but how would I be able to tell? The most precious stone I ever saw was the green glass in my high school ring. But I was sure it was a diamond glistening on those toe shoes.

I had wanted to take dancing lessons, wanted it more than anything. I was graceful, I had the right build for it, long and lean. But even the half-assed amateurs who teach ballet and tap and jazz at ten bucks a pop still expect to be paid, up front and in full. Twice, I got into a class, only to have to drop out when my dad stopped paying. I can still see myself at eight, bare-legged because the leotard and the shoes were a big enough stretch - no money left over for the pink tights - being told that I can't come to class again until my mommy or daddy calls Madame Elena. After the second time I was barred from class - barred from the bar - I just didn't go back. I began running. To run, all you need is a pair of shoes and an open road.

I tucked the bracelet in my jacket pocket, thinking I would give it to Maya the next time I saw her. It was the natural thing to do, right? She was gone, I couldn't run after her, and I didn't know exactly where she lived. I couldn't see giving it to the manager at Grounds for Life, he looked pretty skeevy. But what with one thing and another, I didn't see her for a while. Midterms came and then spring hit the area hard, with a wave of almost summer-like days. Even the mopey types at Not Quite U. knew what to do with good weather. The grassy hill in front of the Great Glass Library was filled with sunbathing girls and Frisbee-tossing boys. They told us not to tan, Not Quite put on a big information push about skin cancer, just like with STDs and eating disorders, but we know, OK? We knew and we made our choices.

Anyway, I was sitting on the lawn with my sociology text when Clay approached me. He seemed kind of nervous, but guys often act weird after they've had sex with you. Why is that? I haven't been with that many guys, but I haven't found one yet who wasn't nervous after screwing you. Maybe it's because I don't get hooked on them, don't follow them around. The only thing guys dislike more than a clingy girl is a non-clingy girl.

'Hey,' he said. 'Kate.' He looked around, as if he were proud of knowing my name and wanted to see if anyone appreciated the great effort he had made, dredging it up.

'Hey,' I said, refusing to give him a name at all.

'Um, you know Maya? My girlfriend?' So she was his girlfriend now, I hope she appreciated her promotion. 'She said you two had coffee a while back.'

I figured he was feeling me out, trying to find out if I had told her anything.

'Yeah, for all of ten minutes. We didn't really get into deep.' See, I was being nice, letting him off the hook. I didn't sleep with him to make trouble for anyone, especially myself.

'Well, she thinks maybe she left her bracelet there, and she wonders if you took it.'

Took it. Not picked it up, or remember if she was wearing it that night, or anything like that. He went straight to took it.

'Bracelet? I don't know anything about a bracelet.'

'Oh.' He was standing over me, his shadow blocking the sun, so I was beginning to catch a chill. It was that time of the year when there is a huge difference between sun and shadow, when you can lie in a bikini if you are out in the open, but would freeze in a lane of trees if you aren't carrying a sweater. 'She was pretty sure she wore it that night.'

'I just don't remember it. I guess I didn't notice it.'

'She said you talked about it, that you asked her about it.'

Shit, I had. But so what? 'Maybe I did, I just don't remember.'

'The thing is, she's always taking it on and off. It's like a nervous habit with her.'

'Sorry.'

It wasn't just that Maya had all but accused me of being a thief. It was the fact that she did it secondhand, sent her boyfriend to claim it for her, as if she were some lady fair and he was a knight trying to win her devotion.

'Well, if you see it around-' Clay said, looking more nervous than ever. He was scared to go back to Maya empty-handed, he was that whipped.

'What does it look like?' I asked. I wish I hadn't. The lie was too perfect in its nonchalance, and Clay caught it. He ambled away, with a careless backward glance at my body, as if congratulating himself for knowing what it looked like without a bathing suit.

A week passed, then another, and no one came to talk to me about the bracelet again. I can't say I completely forgot about it - I kept the bracelet in my top drawer, next to my underwear, so I saw it every morning - but it wasn't uppermost in my mind. If I thought about the bracelet at all, it was to wonder how I could get it back to Maya anonymously. No plan seemed right.

And then I came back to my room one night and found Maya standing there with the Resident Adviser, demanding to be let in. The R. A. thought it was bogus, I could tell he did. He took me aside and asked me to let her look through my room as a favour, so she would back off. Apparently her stepfather had been making calls to various people and he was a big giver and an alum, so they had to indulge him. Yet the R.A. was so sympathetic and kind that I began to think the bracelet wasn't in my room, that it was all a horrible misunderstanding. But once the door was unlocked, Maya went straight for it, as if the bracelet had a homing device.

'How did that get there?' I asked. And the thing is, I meant it. I really couldn't remember.

'Because you stole it. And you're just lucky that all I care about is getting it back, because my father said this bracelet is so valuable that I could bring felony theft charges against whoever had it.'

My father. Two simple words, people say them all the time. But it was a lie, in Maya's mouth, and the lie made me furious.

'Your stepfather. Because I know who your father was, and he happens to be my father too. And while you were living on Park Avenue and going to private school, he was either broke from paying your child support or moving us around so they couldn't find him to pay the child support. Five hundred dollars a month was nothing to you, but it was a lot to us, as much as we paid for rent in some places.'

'Don't be ridiculous,' Maya said. 'We're practically the same age and my father didn't leave until I was two. How could we have the same father?'

'Pretty much in the same way we ended up having the same boyfriend.' I turned to the R.A., the lie now fully formed. 'She planted this here because she's jealous of me for having sex with her boyfriend, Clay. She's setting me up.'

I looked to the R.A., then Maya. She was clearly shocked, and she sagged into him, whimpering a little. The R.A., so recently my ally, looked at me as if I were pure evil. So I did the only thing that made sense to me at that moment: I grabbed the bracelet back from Maya and began to run, just run, with no plan or thought. I was too busy doing the math in my head. The child support cheques my father made out every month had been for $500. But $500 a month was $6,000 a year and almost $100,000 over sixteen years. The money my father spent on Maya, who didn't need a dime, could have covered my tuition at Not Quite U. And she was going to begrudge me a bracelet, found by our father, in his cab? The way I see it, she had gotten to have the bracelet and now it was my turn. I ran, the bracelet in my hand, and remember I was fast, a miler.

But Maya chased me and she had stamina from dancing, if not speed. She chased me down the steps of our dorm and on to the street. She chased me up the main drag, the one that separated the housing units from the campus, and into a neighbourhood of grand old houses. The fruit trees had lost their blooms and the tulips were beginning to lose their petals, but the azaleas were coming in and the trees were past the budding stage. Funny, the things you notice at such a moment, but I was breathing hard and those green spring smells went deep into my lungs. It occurred to me that Maya's family could afford a house as nice as the ones we ran past, possibly nicer, given how much more stuff cost in New York. I wondered if she had a car and a horse, if all the charms on the bracelet digging into my palm represented the abundance that Maya took for granted.

She was not close to catching me and I knew the gap between us would only increase the longer we ran. But I also knew I'd have to go back eventually, face the R. A. and whatever consequences Not Quite U. had in store for me. They probably wouldn't let me have student housing next year, which was fine with me. I already planned to move off campus. But I didn't want to let go of the bracelet, not yet, so I ran and Maya continued to run after me. I wonder now why she didn't scream for someone to stop me, but I was still in my practice clothes and people were used to seeing young women jog down these streets around the university. I reached a busy intersection and crossed the street just as the light changed. I gather that Maya tried to put on a burst of speed, thought she could cross on the diagonal and pick up some ground. At any rate, I heard the screechy sound of failing brakes and then a scream, just one.

Maya was hit by a car, an ordinary car. Campus rumour blew it into a bus, but it wasn't that dramatic. I'm tempted to say it was a cab because that would give the story a nice shape, and maybe over the years I'll allow myself that one little tweak. But it was just a car, and a fairly small one. Luckily for Maya, the woman saw her and braked, so she wasn't going that fast when she hit her. Unluckily for Maya, her left knee absorbed most of the impact.

Plenty of people gathered round her, there was no reason for me to go back, nothing I could do. I slowed to a walk, turned the first corner I came to and sank on to a bench, as if waiting for a bus. The bench said 'The Greatest City in America ', a claim so pathetically untrue that I wanted to laugh. This was the kind of place, the kind of people I came from, all brag, no do. I had tried everything I could to set myself apart. I wasn't going to be like my father, too busy dreaming to ever get it right. I certainly wasn't going to be like my mother, who had settled for being the dreamer's wife. But for all I had done, I would never be my sister, fate's favourite up until five minutes ago, one of life's natural-born winners. True, she's never going to dance again, but that will probably be for the best, too. She'll marry some rich guy, sit on the board of the New York City Ballet and spend the rest of her life alluding to the dance career she might have had if she hadn't been hit by a car.

The bracelet had left dozens of tiny red marks, like a cat's tooth prints, inside my right palm. I let it dangle from my index finger, watching the play of light on the diamond on the ballet shoes. I wondered if Maya's stepfather had really found it in a cab, or if that was simply a story he had invented, a cover for something more disreputable - a card game, a pay-off for a bad debt. No, that's what my father would do. What was the logic of a world in which someone like Maya got a bracelet and a new father, while I had to make do with the cheap, pathetic bastard I'd known since birth? My dad was capable of a lot, but the bottom line was that he wasn't organized enough to run back and forth between two families, not even for a few months. Maya was not my sister, which meant that I couldn't show up at Park Avenue or wherever she lived, and demand that her stepfather save me as he had saved her. I couldn't even justify keeping the bracelet he had given her, but I didn't see why she should have it back. I tossed it under the bench in the greatest city in the world a few blocks from the greatest university where no one wanted to be and went back to the dorm.

When I told them I had lost the bracelet, they asked me to leave school. My folks said a twenty-year-old who wasn't in school had to support herself, and I didn't bother to point out that I had been supporting myself even while in school. So here I am two years later in the airport bar, wearing a black polyester skirt that gives me a permanent visible panty line and dusting peanut skins from the seat. I am taking classes at the community college, but I still have a few years to go before my degree, and then I'm going to look at MBA programmes. What do you think, Wharton or Kellogg?

I hope business picks up again soon. It's not just that fewer people are flying, but that people aren't as anxious to get blotto before a flight anymore. Everyone thinks they're going to be wrestling a terrorist to the ground somewhere over Pittsburgh. They almost seem to wish for it. But my mother said this is a good place to meet men and I guess she should know. She met my father this way, back in the day when they called this airport Friendship.

So – are you married? Do you have a family? I don't mind. I know how to keep things casual.