THIRTEEN

It was eighty-five degrees the next morning, and Cleo had a fun run in Central Park with her local staff and about five hundred people who each raised money for GreenUpNow!, a nonprofit dedicated to refurbishing downtrodden urban areas in the state that sorely lacked both funding and grass. She shook a lot of hands, took a lot of pictures, and tried not to make too many promises unless she was sure she could follow through. This was one way that Cleo stayed in the good graces of voters—she never lied to them, never told them things they wanted to hear just to gain their votes. Almost inevitably when you glossed over difficult truths, it meant that you got their votes but eventually lost their trust, and that was not a viable long-term plan. It was part of the reason she had initially spurned Senator Jackman’s free housing proposal: she’d told her constituents she wouldn’t give away something for free, even while knowing that many of them didn’t understand that by lifting up some members of their community, they lifted up the community as a whole. But still. She had promised, and she kept her word. Until last week, when she realized that part of her job was convincing her constituents that an unpopular proposal was still the right proposal. That’s why they’d elected her. Not just to be a mirror to their own reflections.

She was enjoying a free Clif bar (breakfast) and an orange at the finish line when two young women approached. She figured that they would press her on her broader GreenUpNow! plans—what could she promise them about a hope for a better tomorrow? She was running through her standard lines, but they caught her off guard.

“Hi,” one girl said. Cleo didn’t know if they were even old enough to vote. She thought they looked older than Lucas but maybe not by much. My God, she thought. Is this what Marley Jacobson looks like now? With actual breasts and legs like a gazelle’s and eyes wide enough for Lucas to convince himself that he’s in love? No wonder he was smitten with more than one girl. She had realized, obviously, that her son was smack in the middle of puberty, but seeing young women so close in age to him and seeing them as, well, adults—those were two separate realizations.

“Hi,” the other girl said.

“We’re best friends,” they said together.

“Hi!” Cleo said, pushing her smile as wide as it could go.

“Do you have any advice for us if, like, we want to be successful together, as a team?” the first one said.

“Oh.” Cleo furrowed her brow. “In politics?”

Girl One shook her head, her ponytail swaying behind her. “No.” She looked at the other one. “Well, maybe?”

Her friend said: “We saw your old friend’s article, and, um, we didn’t want to end up like you guys. We’re, like, best friends forever.”

In just a flip of a second, Cleo’s smile fell, and she worried that she might throw up. It had been only a 5k, so she knew it wasn’t from that. The New York air was too humid for May, and her tank top was sticking to her stomach, but it wasn’t that either. She looked from Friend One to Friend Two, their eyes wide, their words said with only openhearted generosity.

“You’re still in high school?” Cleo asked finally. Both girls nodded.

“Sophomores,” they said together. Cleo told herself that Lucas wasn’t even yet a freshman. He couldn’t yet be in this deep with breasts and long legs and beguiling eyes.

Then one added, “We think women can run the world. And you’re doing it. But . . .” She waved a hand, as if that ended her sentence.

“But we don’t want to do it being mean girls,” said the other one.

Cleo swallowed, found she couldn’t find her tongue. Why was it so hot out in May? Was this global warming? Why was she sweating more after the run than while she was actually running? She glanced around for members of her staff, but she’d already told them that once the photo ops were over, they should head home. They were reconvening tomorrow for bagels and lox at a Westchester synagogue, then moving on to muffins and coffee at a nearby church. Mean girl? Really? She’d never once, ever, ever considered herself a mean girl. Yes, obviously, what she had done to MaryAnne was unkind, but that didn’t rise to the level of those horror stories she sometimes heard from other moms on the sidelines of Lucas’s games. Those mean girls did all sorts of untoward things: texting ugly photos of their friends, spreading rumors about their rivals, acting sweet but ultimately pushing the knife into someone’s back just a little deeper. She was ambitious, but she wasn’t ruthless. She was cutthroat, but she’d never stab you in the back.

She found her breath, steadying herself. One of the girls offered her a water.

“Here,” she said. “Are you, um, OK?”

Maybe she had been all those things, though. In the pursuit of more, more, more, maybe she had been exactly the type to slice MaryAnne right through the trapezius, even if she had done it simply to get a leg up, to propel herself out of Seattle and away from her grief and on to something better. Cleo felt a little dizzy and closed her eyes, pointed her face toward the sky until it passed. Jesus. She’d justified her behaviors toward MaryAnne for so many years that she hadn’t considered them objectively: that after her parents died and maybe before that too—with MaryAnne’s leg up from her own parents’ connections and with Cleo’s just a bit more promising work ethic and acumen, she had believed she deserved the success, that she was the worthier one, so she stripped those opportunities from her best friend.

That wasn’t deserving at all.

“What I would tell you,” Cleo said finally, once she righted herself and looked from one set of wide eyes to the other, “is that . . . well, the truth is that I’m not great at friends. Obviously. I wish I had better advice, but being an adult sometimes means that you make choices. And I made mine. And then you live with the consequences, which sometimes work in your favor and sometimes, well, they do not.” She tried to smile, but she worried she just looked nauseated.

“That’s not very reassuring,” the first girl said.

“We’ve been told we can have it all,” the second one echoed. “You’re telling us that we can’t?”

“I’m telling you that sometimes you find yourself at a crossroads, and maybe you guys will be best friends forever, and I hope that you will.” She smiled then, genuinely. She wished that so very much for these girls who had not yet faced what the world would throw at them, how it would ask them to work harder, fight better, climb faster than it would ask of any man. “But what I’m also telling you is that sometimes you have to make choices, and sometimes this means that you’ll choose . . . you.” Cleo thought of Beverly Hills, 90210, which she and MaryAnne had considered appointment television, and that episode where Kelly Taylor chooses herself. She hadn’t meant to quote Kelly Taylor, but maybe she should rewatch (when would she have time to rewatch?) and see if Kelly Taylor wasn’t a bit of a feminist.

“You?” one of the friends asked.

“You,” Cleo answered, pointing a finger at her. Would it have been so hard if Cleo had chosen them? She and MaryAnne together?

“OK,” one girl said. “Well, thanks.”

Cleo didn’t want to leave it on a down note. She hadn’t meant to discourage them. “Would you like to take a photo?”

They each shook their head, turned their back, walked away.

Bowen met her on the corner outside her apartment, just in front of the Korean deli, which had been there since she bought the place and had saved her more than a few times when her pantry and refrigerator were empty and she had a toddler to feed.

She had showered since the fun run and stood in front of her mirror for too long, trying to figure out what to wear. She knew that, especially for women, clothes told your story before you even opened your mouth, and she had a story to tell today. Also, she wanted to look nice for Bowen, even if she pretended that she didn’t, but she wanted to look amazing for Nobells. She might be a buttoned-up senator, but drop-dead gorgeous still felt like its own sort of revenge.