Our friend Ellen dates ugly boys,” Lauren used to say. She said it all through college. She said it to warn attractive boys who were interested in Ellen. “You’re not her type,” she’d try to explain. “It’s weird, I know, but you’re far too good-looking for her.” Most of the time, these boys didn’t listen. They’d just nod and keep staring at Ellen, thinking about how they were going to approach her, as Lauren insisted in the background, “Our friend Ellen dates ugly boys.”
All of Ellen’s friends accepted this. They weren’t surprised when she introduced them to boys with receding hairlines and mild cases of rosacea. They didn’t laugh when she picked out the one guy in the bar with braces and said, “Look at him!” When she got breathy and excited about someone new, they all mentally prepared themselves to meet a guy with a creepy carnival mustache and a mean case of dandruff. Even in first grade, when the only acceptable boys to like were Jon Armstrong and Chris Angelo, Ellen announced that she liked scabby Matthew Handler. It was just who she was. Ellen dated ugly boys.
It was surprising, mostly because Ellen was pretty—and not just your average, well-groomed and well-dressed kind of pretty. She was the kind of pretty that people noticed, the kind of pretty that made people watch her walk by. She had long eyelashes and skin that didn’t seem to have any pores. There was a glow about her, something that always drew boys to her side. If she’d been anyone else, Lauren might have been too jealous to be her friend. But it never mattered, because Ellen would look at all of her admirers gathered round, and point to Mr. Fatty and say, “I choose you.” Lauren got to keep the rest of them.
Some friends are gossips and some are sloppy drunks. If you like them well enough, you ignore this trait and continue to be their friend. And that’s what they did with Ellen—they tolerated her taste in men.
Once, in college, Ellen kissed a guy who lived down the hall from them. They called him the Wildebeest because he was portly with wild curly hair and he snorted when he laughed. He was the guy who got drunk at parties, stripped naked, and did the worm on the floor in a pool of keg beer. They all knew him. They all liked him well enough. And they were all shocked when Ellen announced that she’d kissed him the night before when he’d walked her to her door.
“Hold on,” Isabella said. “Please back up. You made out with the Wildebeest?”
Ellen shrugged. “I didn’t plan it,” she said. “He offered to walk me home and he’s so funny.”
“Of course he’s funny,” Lauren said. “He’s a Wildebeest. Wildebeests are supposed to be funny. But Wildebeests are not for making out with.”
Ellen was unashamed. She just smiled and shrugged and went back to her room. All the girls stared at each other and shook their heads. “Making out with a Wildebeest,” they whispered to one another. “What will be next?”
For the most part, Ellen’s boys were harmless. That’s not to say that they all had sparkling personalities or quick wit to make up for their appearance. No, some of them were truly blessed with nothing. But still, the girls never really objected to Ellen’s choices. “Different strokes for different folks,” their friend Mary always said whenever Ellen brought home another one. And they all laughed and let her be. “What harm could it do?” they asked each other. And so they let Ellen have her ugly little fun.
But then she met Louis. And Louis was awful.
Louis weighed about ninety pounds, had soft, wispy blond hair, and wore the same pair of rust-colored corduroys their entire junior year. He was pretentious and socially awkward and Ellen was crazy about him. Louis sat in their apartment and chain-smoked cigarettes while he ignored all of them. Once, when Lauren asked Ellen for an opinion on which shirt she should wear out that night, Louis weighed in. “It can be dangerous to care too much about clothes. It makes you shallow,” he said. Then he reached into his pants pocket, took out a paperback copy of Why I Am So Wise by Nietzsche, and started reading.
“I hate that guy,” Lauren said later that night. “He’s such a dick.”
“Relax,” Isabella said. “It won’t last. They never do.”
The first time Louis dumped Ellen, they silently cheered. But a week later, the couple was back together, and Louis showed up again in their apartment, smoking cigarettes and making comments about how silly girls were in general. Louis broke up with Ellen over and over again, and she kept going back to him. None of them understood it.
“He looks like Ichabod Crane,” Lauren said once. “I mean, what I think Ichabod Crane would look like if he wore the same pants for a year, you know?”
“I just don’t understand when he has time to wash those pants,” Mary said. “He wears them every day. That’s just so gross.” They all agreed.
After graduation, Louis broke up with Ellen again. He told her that he couldn’t be tied down, that he was going to travel through Europe alone and needed his freedom. “Please let this one stick,” they said to one another. Sure, Ellen was devastated now, but she’d meet someone else, someone who would make her happier. They were sure of that. It was all for the best.
They all spent a year after graduation living with their parents in their respective suburbs, saving money and looking for jobs. It was miserable, sleeping in twin beds in their childhood rooms, sending out millions of résumés, and trying not to get annoyed when their parents said things like “What time will you be home?” and “No drinks upstairs.”
Lauren, Ellen, and their friend Shannon all moved to Chicago that summer. Ellen had gotten a job offer in Boston but had turned it down, claiming that she had always wanted to live in Chicago. “It’s such a fun city,” she said. “The lake is so great.” Lauren and Shannon rolled their eyes at each other. They knew she was lying about the lake. Louis was from Chicago and Ellen was just hoping he’d come back there soon. It was sad, really. Even a little pathetic, they thought.
But they didn’t really care that much. One year after graduating, they were finally on their own. They rented an apartment on Armitage with two and a half bedrooms, one tiny bathroom, no air-conditioning, and a giant deck. It was almost like college, except they had to get up and go to work every morning.
It was so hot that summer that no one could stay inside. They tried (for the sake of being grown-ups) not to go out every night. They sat on the deck in ponytails and shorts, reading magazines and painting their nails, trying to imagine a breeze from Lake Michigan. Eventually, someone would suggest having a beer or a glass of wine. They’d sit awhile, and someone would suggest going to the bar below them, just for one drink, just to sit in air-conditioning for a while. And before they knew it, it was two in the morning and they were listening to Karen, the crazy bartender with missing teeth at Shoes Pub, tell them about Craig, the asshole who broke her heart.
Lauren blamed the weather for a lot of what happened that summer. It drove them out of their apartment, to bars and street fairs and concerts. It made them restless and irritable while they waited for something to start. They all knew they ought to feel different in their new lives, but they felt the same and it put them on edge. Hot and impatient, they fidgeted in the heat, grumbling and asking each other, “What next? What next?”
Ellen was at a loss without Louis. She hadn’t so much as flirted with an ugly boy since he’d left for Europe. He sent her postcards from Paris and Florence that said things like Be yourself or be nothing and Live humbly but live true.
Lauren and Shannon snatched these cards from the pile to read them before Ellen did. It was one of their greatest sources of entertainment.
“Live humbly?” Shannon said. “Uh, yeah. I’m pretty sure his parents are paying for his humble trip around Europe.”
They always put the cards back in the mail so that Ellen could take them to her room and read them over and over again. They knew she was pining over him in there.
“We’ve got to get her over this,” Lauren said. So they dragged her to bars and scouted for unattractive men. A few times she even met some homely boys, let them buy her a drink, and talked to them for a while. But when the girls got close, they heard what Ellen was saying to these guys. “He really broke my heart,” she’d say. “I just really miss him.”
“What can we do?” they asked each other. They shook their heads in disappointment. Why couldn’t she just let it go?
They all got tickets to a concert at the old steel factory down the street, to see a young, handsome singer who wrote tortured love songs and whined about the troubles of being twenty-five. Their friend Isabella was visiting from New York, and she came over before the concert to drink beers on the porch, but all she did was wander around and say, “This place is huge. Your apartment is huge.”
“Yeah, we like it,” Lauren said.
“No,” Isabella said. “You have no idea. You should see my apartment in New York. It’s teeny. And expensive. This place is a mansion.”
“Then move here,” Lauren told her. “Move to Chicago!” Isabella just smiled and continued to look around in wonder.
Lauren and Shannon were in a fight that started when Shannon called Lauren a slob. “Isabella, don’t you think it’s disgusting when someone leaves Q-tips on the sink?” Shannon asked. Isabella shook her head and kept quiet.
“You’re the one who sits in that bathroom for an hour and plucks your hairy eyebrows,” Lauren said. “If anyone’s a pig, it’s you.”
Isabella just smiled and looked happy that she didn’t have to weigh in. Now Lauren and Shannon were sitting on the porch, sighing and scoffing to let everyone know that they weren’t speaking to each other.
Ellen was in the kitchen pouring wine when Isabella asked her, “So, have you seen Louis since he’s been back?”
It was like a movie: Ellen spilled her wine, Isabella jumped, and Lauren and Shannon forgot they were ignoring each other and looked at each other with wide eyes.
“Yeah.” Isabella made a face. “Sorry, Ellen. I thought you knew.”
Ellen shook her head and swallowed some wine. “No,” she said. “I didn’t know.”
“Sorry,” Isabella said again. “I just assumed he would have called you. I saw Phil last weekend and told him I was coming here for the weekend and he mentioned it. He just got back a couple weeks ago. I’m sure he was going to call you.”
They all looked at Ellen, who was now calmly drinking her wine. Lauren could tell that she wasn’t upset. Surprised, yes. But not upset. They’d known Ellen long enough to be able to read her mood by the way she held herself, and right then, she was as straight as a pole, alert, and excited.
“Fuck,” Shannon said softly.
“Yeah,” Lauren answered. “I know.”
They went to the concert, where Lauren and Shannon made up, then got in a fight again when Shannon forgot to watch the Porta-Potty Lauren was in, and let a man open the door, which had a broken lock. “Everyone in line saw me with my pants down,” Lauren screamed.
“So what’s new?” Shannon asked.
They went to a bar called Life’s Too Short near the old Cabrini-Green buildings. The whole area was under construction and the streets were lined with half-built condos and shells of townhouses. Because nothing was around it, the bar paid no attention to the city’s rules about shutting down by four a.m. The bartenders let everyone stay in the bar’s outdoor area. Nothing good ever came of this, but they kept going back.
They sat in a corner of the patio where they could see everyone that walked in. They were fascinated with watching Margaret Applebee, a girl they knew from college. She’d always been kind of fat, but had dropped about forty pounds that year and was, according to Shannon, “whoring it up all over town.” She was talking to their friend Mitch McCormick, pressing herself against his arm, and they were all waiting for him to tell her to go away.
“Who does she think she is?” Shannon asked. “Like Mitch would ever be interested in her. It’s so embarrassing.”
“She’s persistent, though,” Lauren said. “You gotta give her that.”
“I don’t even recognize her,” Isabella said. “She lost forty pounds? She’s a whole different person.”
None of them saw Louis walk in. They were all so focused on the Margaret Applebee fiasco that they didn’t notice him until he was standing at their table saying, “Hey, Ellen.” Ellen tried to smile and then immediately burst into tears.
“She’s really drunk,” Lauren said to Louis.
He took her by the arm and led her away from them. Now they watched the two of them, heads bent together, talking quietly to each other.
“Oh shit,” Shannon said. “Margaret Applebee is gone. We missed it. Where’s Mitch?”
Ellen came back over to the table, crying harder now. She couldn’t really talk, but they could guess what had happened.
“He’s a jackass,” Lauren said.
“He’s not worth it.” Isabella rubbed Ellen’s back.
“You should just forget him,” Lauren said.
“I think Mitch went home with Margaret Applebee,” Shannon said.
Ellen was up and out before any of them the next morning, and she came back to the apartment with Bloody Mary ingredients, a large block of cheddar cheese, and a log of summer sausage.
“I’m sorry, you guys,” she said. “For how I freaked out last night.”
“No worries,” Shannon said. She’d already made herself a Bloody Mary and was now cutting off hunks of cheese and sausage to shove in her mouth. Isabella lay on the couch, listening to the conversation. She was too hungover to move, but made a noise and motioned for some cheese and sausage. Lauren cut some off and brought it over to her.
“I called Louis this morning to apologize to him too,” Ellen told them.
“Why?” Shannon asked.
“Because I want to be friends,” Ellen said. “I at least want to be friends with him.”
“Do you think that will work?” Lauren asked.
“I think it’s my only choice,” she said. They were quiet for a few moments.
“There’s something weird about summer sausage,” Shannon said.
“There’s a lot of things weird about summer sausage,” Ellen said.
“It should be disgusting,” Lauren said. “I mean, you leave it wrapped up and unrefrigerated forever, but when you open it, it’s still delicious. It’s one of the great world wonders.”
“I think it’s curing my headache,” Isabella said. She tried to sit up and then lay right back down. “Never mind,” she said.
“I think you guys might still be a little drunk,” Ellen said.
Later, they all agreed that she was a disaster waiting to happen.
Lauren met Tripp at a bar in Bucktown that had maps all over the walls and pool tables in the corner. He wasn’t much, but she kept seeing him. For her birthday, he gave her gift certificates to the bar downstairs and a dirty romance novel that you buy at a grocery store. “I know you like to read,” he told her. The card read Dear Lorin, Happy Birthday. Sincerely Tripp.
“Do you think he knows he spelled your name wrong?” Ellen asked.
“He didn’t even put an exclamation point after ‘Happy Birthday,’ ” Shannon said. She frowned at the card. “So serious. Happy Birthday—period.”
“I’m just calling because I’m bored,” Lauren explained to her friends when she dialed his number.
“You must be,” they answered.
Chicago was small that summer. No matter where they went, they ran into people they knew: Tripp, Louis, and even Margaret Applebee were always around. If they didn’t see them at Shoes or Kincade’s, then they saw them at Big John’s or Marquee Lounge. And if they didn’t see them at any of those places, they always found them at Life’s Too Short.
Every once in a while, Ellen would announce that she wanted to meet someone. She’d talk to the first boy who offered to buy her a drink. They would smile, encouraging her from across the bar. Then Louis would show up and Ellen would stop talking to the boy and come back to them. “Ignore him,” they’d tell her, and she would nod. About thirty minutes later, she’d decide to just say hello to Louis. “I have to be civil,” she would say. She would cry a little and tell him that it was hard to just be friends with him. Some nights he would enjoy the attention, pulling her aside and talking closely to her. Other nights he would get angry and tell her that he couldn’t deal with her, then storm out of the bar. Almost always, she’d cry back at the apartment, while they drank beer and ate late-night macaroni and cheese.
“You can find someone else,” Shannon would tell her as she chewed the bright orange noodles.
“This whole thing is getting really predictable,” Lauren would say.
They could have changed their patterns, Lauren thought later. They could have tried to go someplace new so that they wouldn’t see the same people over and over again. It just never really occurred to them at the time.
Their new favorite thing to do on Sundays was to sit on the back porch, drink Bloody Marys, eat summer sausage, and talk about the weekend. Shannon was mildly obsessed with Margaret Applebee, and wanted to talk about her all the time.
“Just because she’s not fat anymore, she’s a huge slut? I mean, come on,” Shannon said.
“Maybe she wants a boyfriend,” Ellen suggested. “I don’t think she’s ever really had a boyfriend before.” She didn’t like it when they talked about Margaret Applebee.
“Well, she certainly doesn’t have a boyfriend now,” Lauren said. “She probably just has herpes.”
“Oh, Lauren.” Ellen looked at her like a disappointed mother and shook her head a little. “What’s going on with Tripp?” she asked, to change the subject.
Lauren shrugged. “Not much. We see each other when we see each other.”
Tripp and Lauren sometimes went days without speaking. She kept thinking they would either decide to start really dating or stop seeing each other altogether. But things just kept going like they had been. Most of the time, she saw no reason to change this. Once, she saw him go home with another girl from Life’s Too Short and it felt like someone slapped her. It was over, she decided. But then a week or so later, she saw him and made no mention of it. She would ignore it, she decided. After all, it’s not like they were exclusive or anything. He was just a good way to pass the time until something better came along.
At the end of July, their friend Sallie called to tell them that she was engaged and getting married in a month. And also, one more thing: She was pregnant. They weren’t sure what to say, so they told her congratulations. They couldn’t believe it. Sallie and Max had dated in college, where Max was known for doing keg stands until he vomited and Sallie sometimes forgot she had a boyfriend and kissed other boys at the party. They were getting married? They were having a baby?
“I think it’s exciting,” Ellen said.
“You think it’s exciting that their lives are over?” Lauren asked her. She was appalled.
“But you know them,” Ellen said. “They’re in love.”
Lauren snorted. “They’ll be divorced in five years,” she said.
“I hate to say it,” Shannon said, “but I kind of agree.”
Lauren learned something important at Sallie and Max’s wedding: You never want to be the first one of your friends to get married. If you are, just resign yourself to the fact that your wedding will be a shit show. Most people are still single, open bars are a novelty, and no matter how elegant the wedding was planned to be, it will wind up looking like a scene out of Girls Gone Wild.
They almost didn’t make it to the actual ceremony, because Lauren was throwing up all morning. “Please wait for me, you guys,” she kept saying before she ran back to the bathroom. “I’ll be ready in just a minute.”
They had five friends in town for the wedding, camped out all over the apartment on couches and air mattresses. When their guests had arrived the night before, they’d done their best to be good hostesses and show them a fun night, but had ended up staying out way too late. It was all they could do to shower and put on clean dresses.
“Is this going to be a long mass?” their friend Mary asked. She had gotten ready and then lain down on the couch to take a nap in her dress.
“You’re going to get wrinkled,” Ellen told her.
“I really don’t care,” Mary said. She kept her eyes closed.
Ellen was the only one who seemed to be excited about the wedding. She hadn’t stayed out too late the night before, and she was ready on time, looking fresh and ironed. She sat on the edge of one of the couches with her ankles crossed and watched as the rest of them scrambled to get ready.
The wedding was a mess. Everyone stampeded the bar and ordered tequila shots until the bride’s father demanded that the bartenders stop serving them. Their friend Isabella was one of the bridesmaids, and she informed them that the bride’s mother had been crying all morning. “She kept saying, ‘I can’t believe this is how it’s happening,’ ” Isabella said. “It was awful.”
Their friend Joe threw up on the dance floor and it had to be cleared and cleaned before anyone could continue dancing. One of the bridesmaids was found passed out in the bridal suite and had to be sent home. People made out in corners, girls fell down and ripped their dresses, and finally the band stopped playing and everyone was kicked out and decided to go to Life’s Too Short. Shannon kept slurring, “Their lives are ruined, you know. Their lives are ruined.”
Louis was at the wedding and they all knew this meant Ellen would cry. Louis and Ellen danced together at the reception and then sat alone at a table in the bar. They were sure that Louis would stand up at any moment and storm out, but every time they looked over, Ellen and Louis were laughing and he was touching her knee.
Tripp was at the bar and when he saw Lauren he said, “Oh, you’re here?”
“See?” Lauren said to Shannon. “Chivalry is not dead.”
Tripp didn’t say anything, and Lauren had a feeling that he didn’t know what “chivalry” meant. It was becoming clear that he was stupid. She would have to end it. But before she could say anything else, he walked away.
“What a loser,” Lauren said. Shannon nodded.
The night ended when Tripp and Margaret Applebee left together. Lauren started crying, and Shannon and Isabella decided they should go to the diner and eat. Lauren ordered eggs and corned beef hash, poured ketchup all over her plate, and didn’t eat anything.
“He’s not worth it,” they said to her. She went home, left her dress in a pile on the floor, crawled into bed, and cried until she fell asleep.
By the time Lauren woke up the next morning, most of their guests were gone. Only Isabella remained, sitting on the couch with Shannon. They both looked like hell.
“Where’s Ellen?” Lauren asked.
Isabella shrugged. “She didn’t come home. We think she stayed at Louis’s.”
“I can’t believe she went home with him,” Shannon said.
“Who? Ellen or Margaret Applebee?” Isabella asked.
“Both, I guess. But I was talking about Ellen,” Shannon said.
“Can we please not talk about Margaret fucking Applebee?” Lauren said. She could feel Shannon and Isabella exchange a look behind her back.
Ellen came home later that afternoon, carrying all of their usual supplies for a Bloody Mary–and–summer sausage picnic. She hummed as she mixed together a pitcher of drinks, and bounced around the kitchen getting glasses and knives.
“You seem happy,” Shannon said.
“I am,” Ellen said. She smiled. “You guys, I had a really good night. Louis and I decided to get back together.”
“Oh,” Lauren said. She waited for someone else to be supportive.
“You can’t date him,” Shannon finally said. “He’s awful. He’s awful to you, and he’s awful to us, and he’s just awful.”
“He does seem to make you really unhappy most of the time,” Isabella said.
“Do you really think that?” Ellen asked. She looked straight at Lauren. “Lauren,” she said. “Do you think that?”
Lauren had no idea why she said what she said next. Sometimes she thinks back to that moment and imagines that she could take it back. She blamed it on being hungover, on the wedding, on Margaret Applebee, but really she had no excuse. Because what she said was “He’s just so ugly.”
Ellen was cutting the summer sausage when Lauren said this, and they all watched the knife slice right through her finger. Her hand was completely covered in blood before she even looked down.
“Holy shit,” Shannon screamed. Isabella ran inside to get a towel, and Shannon called 911. When they answered, she apologized and then spent five minutes on the phone explaining why they didn’t need an ambulance.
“Come on,” Lauren said. “We’ll take a cab to the hospital.”
Ellen’s face was white and she refused to take the towel off to look at her finger. “I think I cut it off,” she kept saying. “I think I cut off my whole finger.”
Lauren assured her that her finger was still attached. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You’ll just need a few stitches.”
They had to wait over two hours in the emergency room. A man sat across from them with his head leaning against the wall. When he was called to go in, he left a bloody headprint behind.
Lauren and Ellen didn’t talk much while they waited. Ellen looked like she was going to pass out any second, and Lauren didn’t think it seemed like the right time to continue their conversation. Maybe Ellen hadn’t even heard her when she’d called Louis ugly. It was possible, she thought. They sat in silence until the doctor called them in. Lauren walked back to the examination room even though Ellen hadn’t asked her to.
The doctor looked at Ellen’s finger quickly and started numbing it for stitches. “That’s a nasty cut,” she said. “How did this happen?”
“A knife,” Ellen said. “It was summer sausage.”
“Summer sausage bites back,” Lauren said. Ellen looked at her with her eyebrows wrinkled together while the doctor stitched up her finger.
Lauren apologized later, but they both knew it was too late. “I don’t know what’s best for you,” Lauren said. “You’re the only one who knows that.”
Ellen said she understood. “Lauren,” she said. “I get it. You were just being a good friend. Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”
When Ellen and Louis got engaged, Shannon screamed. “Well,” she said, after she stopped screaming, “I guess some people just want to be miserable.” They all went to the wedding and tried not to be somber. After all, she was their friend and they wanted her to be happy.
They lost touch with Ellen. Not all at once, but little by little, so that they didn’t even notice until it had already happened. Maybe it was hard for Ellen to be around them, since she knew they didn’t approve of her marriage. Maybe their lives just went different ways—Lauren and Shannon both moved to New York and Ellen moved to a house in the suburbs. Sometimes they thought that Louis was behind it, that he had forbidden Ellen to see them. In the end, Lauren thought it was probably a combination of everything, but she knew they would never really know.
Lauren talks about that summer a lot. It has a point, a moral of some kind, but she’s not quite sure what it is yet. When people tell her that their friend is marrying a guy they hate, she says, “Have I got a story for you.” When she gets a Christmas card from Sallie and Max with a picture of their two little boys on it, she shows it to people and says, “You’ve got to hear about this wedding.” And whenever she’s at a party and someone serves summer sausage, she says, “Did I ever tell you about my friend Ellen?” and if the person she’s talking to shakes their head no, she says, “Well, let me tell you. We had this friend. And our friend Ellen, well, Ellen dated ugly boys.”