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acheap toy camera: the focal length doesn’t adjust. “So, I’m thinking this return to Cook Island might be as bad a move as Andy’s and my marriage was.”
    Laney, running unbitten fingers through her spring of loose curls, says, “I expect a roll of film costs nearly as much as that camera, does it, Mi?”
    “She says the camera creates a mood,” Betts says quickly, with a warning glance in my direction: where else is there to go?
    “Foreign?” Laney says.
    “Remote,” Ginger says.
    I turn the camera first to one, then to the other, wondering how we are ever going to face this if we can’t even talk. “Nostalgic,” I say. “The camera creates a nostalgic mood.”
    “Nostalgic!” Betts snorts. “We’d best be careful or Ms. Terrorist-Bradwell here will have us wanting those awful navy blue suits back from the Goodwill. And those goofy silk scarves we used to bow at our throats, too—like we belonged under a Christmas tree!”
    “Remember all those conversations on the couch on the Division Street porch?” I ask.
    “That place surely was a dump,” Laney says.
    “It wasn’t,” I say.
    “That place made the Hamtramck apartment I grew up in look spiffy,” Betts says.
    “Definitely a dump,” Ginger says.
    “Ugly is in the eye of the beholder,” I say.
    Ginger puts me at the helm for a minute while she removes the blue casing over the sail. She’s completely at home on the water, even in her fancy suit, which, as perfect as it is for our planned New York theater evening, is exactly the wrong thing to wear sailing. One splash of bay water and that gorgeous jacket is trashed.
    “Pooley’s cocktail party first year,” Laney says. “Manhattans or Martinis, and not a drop of water.”
    “Plenty of water in that hot tub,” Betts says, and we all laugh at that memory.
    “That was the first time we got naked together,” Laney says.
    B ETTS AND I had been rooming together only a few weeks the night of the hot tub party. We were all taking a Thursday night wine tastingclass held, improbably, in one of the law school lecture rooms, and a classmate had invited eight Section Four women to a private tasting at her vacationing parents’ house. I can still see Laney and Ginger standing to strip off their suits in that hot tub, their nipples hard against the unseasonably cold September night before they sank back into the water. Laney’s nipples almost black to Ginger’s pink, her breasts dark to Ginger’s milk-water white. Salt and pepper, such different spices, but always passed together. They’d stretched their long legs out, side by side, allowing their feet to float up to the surface, Laney’s long and narrow without being fragile while Ginger’s were sturdy and calloused, inelegant. Their toenails were painted an identical red, where Betts’s and mine were bare. Just the four of us in the hot tub, our other friends already gone back inside the house.
    They seemed so comfortable in their nakedness, Laney lanky and easy, Ginger more aggressive, wielding her body as if it were one of her much-loved guns. I imagined a girl had to be tall and thin like they were to be comfortable naked, even just with friends, with no guys around. I imagined every girl who was tall and thin was comfortable with herself.
    “You know what I hate?” Ginger asked as she played footsie with Betts, kicking up the smell of chlorine. “I hate waking up in the morning and having no idea what the name of the guy in bed next to me is.”
    She fixed her gaze on Betts as if she somehow knew Betts was still a virgin, the only one of the Ms. Bradwells who was. As if she already knew Betts would beat her out for law review. I’d slept only with the college boyfriend I broke up with just before starting law school, and Laney only with her medical student, Carl. I don’t suppose Betts or Laney ever imagined climbing in bed with a boy they didn’t love, any more than I had, much less one whose name they didn’t know.
    Betts,