Pre

Query

Pre is upmarket fiction complete at 78,000 words and set in present-day New York City, Montana, and Granada, Spain. It’ll appeal to fans of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag series, and readers of Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends.

It’s the story of River Lambert and Kevin Gorski, two twenty-something strangers coping with grief as their adult lives begin. Four years after the fact, River mourns her high school girlfriend’s suicide and grapples with her Montana town’s blame. Meanwhile, Kevin fumbles to get a foothold in reality after losing his mom (and muse) before his graduation from Juilliard.

The first years of their twenties are messy as they try to move on. Believing her affection curses people, River keeps lovers at an arm’s length, distracting herself with her skyrocketing startup career and her socialite best friend’s drama. Kevin numbs himself with weed, one-night stands, and low-key rebellions against his father, who’s reluctantly bankrolling his career as a cellist.

But as time passes, their orbits move closer and closer together. And they’ll have to take big risks if they stand a chance of being right for each other by the time their courses collide.

First 5 pages

23

River

My stomach folds over like dough, like water falling over itself in a fountain.

A pack of June mosquitos peck at the blood behind his brows.

From between his smooth tan fingertips, a mini-moon of a ring glares up at me. Too big, too good, too much. Saved up for with summer jobs since freshman year: lifeguarding, cold calling, an internship in Washington. Too nice, but still prudent, like him and his collared shirt, his many-siblinged family, his blonde curls, his leading of the debate club.

Will Bennington, why are you down on your knee for me at the age of twenty-three?

Terrible things happen to a body when it drowns.

I did a Google search when they wouldn’t let me see hers.

So I know about the bits of fish scale underneath her nails.

My necklace tightens like a dog collar. What were you thinking, River? I ask myself. You knew this would come. You knew this was coming soon.

You made this plan too. You lied.

With the autopsy we were finally a matter of public record. She was wearing my sweater.

She didn’t leave a letter for anyone else.

First, her mother on the phone, begging to see what Maizie had written. Then telling me that I made her sick. Then a click. Then her father’s rock hands on our cart in the supermarket. Him on the lawn with a shotgun.

I memorized that note, buried it under a tree in my woods.

Over my dead body, I thought.

My mind, monster of rationality, grasps toward a yes and can find no good reason for saying no to Will. But the rest of my body remembers. And the last four years’ worth of fear come crying up in a flood that drowns my throat in ink-black grief for her. For Maizie.

I heard her father and his brothers were standing watch outside the church hall where they held the funeral. I didn’t go.

Instead, I stepped on a plane as planned. I went to my freshman year at Princeton.

Maizie doesn’t know how it turns out for me so far. That another film has replaced Kill Bill at the top of my list, and I majored in economics. That I broke my arm sailing, and our promise never to love anyone else, too. As evidence: a boy, a much loved one, is asking me to marry him.

And all I can see is death, for him.

For the next week, I ignore Will’s calls, his texts, his voicemails:

“Do you hate me?”

“Why are you doing this, River?”

“Just checking that we’re broken up.”

“Is it because I asked you on your birthday?”

“What is wrong with you?”

“I love you. Please, Riv. Call me back.”

“I miss you.”

“I hate this.”

I understand why he’s upset.

But I want to tell him: stop it. Neither of us are dead yet.

His mother calls, his sisters. They just want to talk.

They love me in their voicemails. They tell me I’m family.

They think they know me, after all these years.

He comes to our house with flowers and red eyes, and Arianna dutifully tells him I’m not home while I hide in my bedroom up the stairs.

I hear him on the porch asking her why I did this. She says she doesn’t know.

Arianna doesn’t know, really. Arianna has guesses. Arianna is probably right about them, because unlike William, she knows about Maizie.

She knows better than to ask me why. Instead of talking, she brings me food. She sleeps on the chair next to my twin bed to intercept the bad dreams. They don’t dare come near all five feet two inches of her, fierce adversary that she is.

I go about that week like an automaton. Input, output. Not going outside, except for when Arianna tells me I should try to go get the mail from the box at the end of the drive. A postcard from a dentist in town, a statement about student loans, a card from my father congratulating me on my degree. I ignore all of my friends and their questions, calls, texts, their desire to say goodbye over beers before college disappears. I put aside everything that Will’s ever given me. Including the engagement ring, which I find in our mailbox too, and which I send back to him with a clean, crisp envelope and a stamp. I pack my things—running shoes, three pairs of jeans, a frame made of fir from my mother’s farm, a yearbook with Maizie’s signature in it—to go to the storage unit on Long Island. Getting ready to spend the summer in the Hamptons with Arianna and her mom before starting my job at a fledgling finance startup in the fall.

By the time graduation weekend comes, Will’s given up on the drop-ins and the texts and the calls. I know he might never forgive me for this. Not because of any masculine pride or anything like that, but because he worked so hard for the ring. Because we made a plan for a life together. Because, like me, he doesn’t like to fail. He is right to despise me, maybe. After all, he doesn’t know that my not saying yes is for his own good.

The day before we’re set to graduate, I get a call. My mother.

“Your grandma’s gone,” she says. “I’m so sorry, River. We aren’t going to make your graduation. I feel terrible.”

I get on the plane the next morning despite my mother’s protests, abandoning the ceremony. One rite of passage for another, my poor grandmother. The only thing that could make me choose home. That and the thought I won’t have to see Will. That I won’t run the chance of catching his mother’s eye, his sisters’. Staying in New Jersey is finally worse than going home.

“Will you be okay?” Arianna asks, as we stand in the doorframe of the house we’ve shared for the last three years. She’s all dressed in her curls, her cap and gown, her makeup done and dusted with powder. “It’s safe?”

“Maizie’s parents moved away,” I say, hugging her.

“Yeah?” she says, embracing me back.

“My mom wouldn’t let me come if wasn’t all right.”

This is what I tell Arianna, and in fact what my mother’s told me. But I don’t entirely trust it.

“Love you,” she says, and squeezes my arms, her chin on my shoulder. “Chin up, buttercup.”

I spend the plane ride back to Montana in a predictably nauseous, half-asleep state. I think of all the holidays spent with Arianna, her parents, and her brother Marcus upstate at the family house, or in their apartment on the Upper West Side. Or with the Benningtons in Concord or Cape Cod, taking spins on Will’s dad’s boat and learning the family pie catalogue. For four years, it’s worked: the excuses made to my family that I needed to study, or that it’d be rude to turn down these invitations. Making my mother take time off from her job as a part-time nurse to fly across the country to see me, when all I really wanted was to be home with her in the woods in the first place.Nice, River, I say to myself. Really selfless.

I try to focus on the happy memories of home as my body bounces up and down at the back of the plane, squished up against the window sitting next to two teenage boys covered in hoodies and Axe spray. I pick at my nails. I close my eyes. I tell myself, think. Remember. I drift off. My father placing me on top of a baby mule as a little girl, his hands holding either side of my tummy. My mother holding reigns and rakes, laughing, her short, straight hair turned up at the bottoms, wind-whipped. My father’s sister, Lona, with her night-dark waves making Kimmie and me pancakes on Sunday mornings. Lona and my mother painting Kimmie’s and my rooms bright blue and yellow after divorcing both our fathers and moving in together. My mom holding me back a year before the start of kindergarten because I loved being on the farm so much. Being raised in a girls’ club with two sisters in law as the heads of our household. Being a smart girl; known the town over as a good girl too, with good grades, good manners. Having it assumed by everyone that I was going places, when all I wanted to do was to run the family business.

I also remember being pinned back on my bed for a week, weighted down with misery. My window with the view of the treeline across the yard, light and then dark projecting onto the yellow wall as the days dragged on. Shadows changing on the old wooden furniture. Listening to the wolves wailing at night: wanting to take off my checkered pajamas, crusty with tears and sweat, and to run through the forest howling my horror with them. To go dig Maizie up in the cemetery and hold whatever I could scrounge of her.

 I remember going back to high school for our final year. The change from being universally approved of: highest GPA, the fastest mile time in track team history, a track record of perfect attendance. From that, to being hissed at in the bus. To the other kids calling my cousin Kimmie my girlfriend. Being called much worse. Friends I’d had since second grade telling me they were sorry, but their parents told them I was a bad influence, a Satanist, a witch. My sophomore year crush passing me a note in history class, asking if I had really liked him. Guys bullying him for having taken me to homecoming, beating him up in the locker room. Teachers trying to be fair, and teachers who never called on me anymore. Overheard discussions of whether or not I should be allowed in the girls’ locker room anymore. The people deciding were too small-minded to actually believe it would have made no difference. And then my mom, Dad, and Aunt Lona asking me if I’d feel better being homeschooled until I left for college, if I’d rather live with my dad in the no-name town in Colorado, in the genuine middle of nowhere.

I remember wanting to take off the suit of my skin and trade it in for anyone else’s. I remember feeling like a walking deficiency, a blight. I remember thinking I was a specter from a Hollywood movie, where you could see the blue outline, the see-through shadows, but none of the person, none of the guts.

My flight touches down in Billings before I’ve fallen properly asleep. I’m tired when I wake up, but it’s worth it for the sleeping pills I took mid-flight to stave off any too-sharp feelings.

At arrivals there is my cousin Kimmie, with her careful braids, in her dental hygienist’s blues. She smiles wide when she sees me, her mouth a target between a set of dangly earrings.

“Long flight?” she says, wrapping one arm around me and grabbing my suitcase with another. “Thanks for coming, Rivvie.”

“I wouldn’t miss it,” I say, feeling the body that has replaced my cousin’s younger one as we stand there under the arrivals sign. She is softer now, more like her own mother, Lona. I am thankful for her softness as I break down into tears regardless of the meds, my spinning head. Kimmie keeps her arm around me as we walk out the automatic doors, through the bunches of other families, and to the car where I dry my tears and buckle in, where Kimmie turns the radio to the lite hits station.

On the drive home, Kimmie helps by talking about her kid and the husband I’ve never met. I look over at her, thinking she is miraculous for never becoming bitter with me. The missed wedding, the missed birth, the infrequent phone calls. I listen to her lilting voice, watching the landscape change from flat valley to painted foothills to dense spruce forest. Home state, says my brain. I dissect the phrase over and over in my mind, nodding along as Kimmie continues on.

A few hours later, we pull into the gravelly drive where the shards of rock hail against the bumper of Kimmie’s Kia, up to the white farmhouse with the crackle-painted black shudders, the wreath of lilies and carnations on the door, most likely done by Lona. I pull all my breath in like I know I’ll need it all. Home.

I get out of the car, taking a second while Kimmie grabs my suitcase to lean over and breathe at my backpack on the floor of the passenger’s side. I pick it up, then sling it on my shoulder. I think about Maizie walking up the path with me, and she is very brave about it so I try to be too.

Through the slit windows on either side of the door, I can see my mom is there in the hall, sitting on the leather-topped bench, her feet rolling slowly back and forth from ball to toes on the worn-in wood, pretending she hasn’t been waiting there for an hour. The dogs are on each side of her, ancient Mary with her white fur and blue eyes and lumpy tumor, Willie the little black Scottie who I’ve only seen in pictures. I know my mother must be bursting with conflicting feelings: her long-ill mother is dead, but her long-gone daughter is home. She is in her matching lilac sweater set from JCPenney that she wears on special occasions, including tragedies. Her dove-gray hair is swept into a barrette on one side.

When I open the door, my mother holds me tight, the dogs sniffing in a circle around us. It’s been more than a year since she came to visit over Easter at Princeton. It was a polite weekend, just us walking the campus, Will hidden away at his grandmother’s house in Baltimore. I have missed the spicy smell of her sandalwood perfume, the soft of her chest, the frailing hardness of her shoulders’ tops.

“Your daddy’s on his way here,” says my mother, her voice cracking as she pulls away, and leads me through the narrow front hall with the blue-flower wallpaper. She sits me down at the kitchen table, automatically springing into habit, into making me a turkey sandwich. Kissing the top of my head. “You’re looking even taller than last year. I swear, you never stop growing.”

Aunt Lona has taken a more casual approach to the prodigal daughter, and is reading People in her chair in the living room off the kitchen. When she hears my footfall, she hides it under her newspaper. I know the latest issue has Arianna’s mother on the cover.

Lona comes to give me a kiss on both cheeks. A stream of her waist-long black hair falls over my back when she hugs me.

“Hi baby,” she says. “I missed you.”

Lona’s energy, her movement through space, lightens the room. She goes to stand next to my mother in the kitchen, reaching up into the cabinet for her favorite coffee cup. She pours herself a glass, her many-ringed fingers clanking against each other with the motion, sounding like a wind chime.

“I’ll see you later,” calls Kimmie, from the hall. “Gotta run to the store.”

“Bye, babe,” calls Lona, fixing her eyes on me as she comes to sit across the table.

“Bye, Kim,” I call to her, and the door closes. “Where’s Dad been?” I ask them, as my mother places a ham sandwich in front of me.

“Colorado Springs,” says Lona. “Cattle convention.”

“He’s dating a really interesting woman,” says my mother. “Really nice. Where did they meet, Lona? Remind me. Was it that Bob Dylan show in the spring?”

I’m thankful for small talk. I’m thankful no one makes mention of the second-in-a-row graduation I’m missing. That no one asks me where Will is, or why they’ve never met him.

The four of us sit at the kitchen table, exhausting the topics of my flight, my dad, Kimmie’s growing family, and grandma, whose time it was. Who had had dementia for so many years. Who had only come home for the last couple of months of her life. Who my mother says was so old that it seemed like she welcomed the change with relief.

I realize as we’re talking that they too would rather talk about anything other than my being back home after all this time. I look around the kitchen. Four years. How strange that I am here. The tableau of tchotchkes on the mantel has been picked up and cleaned probably 200 times since I’ve left, but always put back in the same place. In the late afternoon we get up from the table and it’s clear as we walk up to my room that I am a guest, that everything has been made especially comfortable for me: my preferred comforter on the bed, the cereal I like above the refrigerator. Small gestures that are really pleas that I know I am welcome and wanted here. These things mean what Lona and my mother won’t say out loud for fear of making me feel guilty for staying away so long.

The medicine wears off over the day and my brain gets stark and naked and clear. In spite of my sadness about grandma, whose favorite Bath & Body Works shower gels still line the shelf in a rainbow of goo in the bathroom across the hall, I can’t feel it. After changing my airplane clothes in the guest bedroom—my high school room mercifully turned into an office for my mom—I walk downstairs past the portraits of me and Kimmie on the stairs: with teeth, without. Through the family room and then out the back door. I cross the yard, toward our rows of prickly coniferous trees, the tangle of the forest. I want to kiss the dirt. To bury my face in it.

Rose Run Farm has been in my mom’s family for over one hundred years and it’s a hard place not to like. Unless you hate trees and mountains, or can’t bear the idea of stretches of yellow grass with deep, boulder-bottomed streams that trip along the earth like slithering scars, the tall, bald, legitimately purple mountains. It’s barely profitable, despite Lona and my mom’s best efforts, but it’s loved. There is a silent understanding in my family that the last thing we can do, no matter how tight the money gets, is sell the place.

I want to make so much money that we never have to think about that, ever. That’s the whole reason for the econ degree, the finance career. I know they’d still love me if I did something else, but Maizie’s death has cost them too. I want to pay it back. And selfishly, I want this place for me. Even if I never get to live on it again, even if the town never changes. I need to know it’s there.

But in spite of my love for it, I have never invited Arianna or Will to Rose Run. It seemed like the mixing of too many things. When I’m at Princeton or with them, it’s not like my personality changes. But my identity does. I dial down feelings, opinions, perceptions, just to make it easier. And so maybe it’d be hard for them to come here too. They know I’m not like them: Will’s upper-middle-class upbringing, Arianna’s famous family. Intellectually, they get it. But I don’t know how they’d feel about me if they actually came here and saw the splintering staircase in the house, the sputtering paint, the thirty-year-old furniture – all the things I’m determined to fix and make new.

But maybe it also has something to do with the protectiveness I feel over everything that’s already here, pebble to chimney to stars. It’s private in me and vast. The signature of my heart and soul—my history is written all over this landscape, and buried beneath it too.

The next day is Grandma’s funeral. Grandma, our loner. Quiet, content with a tea and a view and a collie. My mom always said I was like her.

Front row, center. Standing starched and humbled by reputation in my thick black cotton in front of every person I’ve known since pre-school, plus their parents. The men in tight polos without undershirts, the outlines of their big nipples showing; hair color on the women that Arianna would say is from a box. I know they are thinking I am uppity, up here in the sculptural dress I’ve borrowed from Arianna like it’s a suit of armor. Like a flag to carry into battle, to say: I know I am not one of you. And you’re the only reason I think that.

When the service is over, Kimmie takes my hand while we file out of the chapel after grandma’s coffin, attended by her husband and a few close relatives. As we walk down the aisle, I realize I don’t remember the names of the people I see. I just know their faces make me remember vague wrongs, probably things I’ve blacked out and forced myself to forget. That feels like another death.

There’s a reception up at the house. The family: my mom, Lona, Kimmie and her husband and her child, plus my father, who arrived late last night, are all lined out like a set of dishes to receive guests.

I don’t want this town to get the better of me, but I know if I stand there I will lose my mind, that my anger could become too big. I could combust, burst into tears in front of these people. Even if no one has the guts to say something to me. Even if none of them remember how they treated me, or how they let me be treated. So I busy myself in the kitchen, unwrapping platters of grocery-storesandwiches with their slippery slices of American cheese and roasted turkey meat, rinsing colanders of green grapes in the sink. An age-old female trick, I think. Looking busy to avoid confronting feelings.

Around the corner from my colander, a voice interrupts anyway:

“Hey,” it says, “remember me?”

I turn. It’s the sophomore year crush, and one of my oldest friends. I have memories of playing with the blocks with him in kindergarten. Though the “friend” part, I guess, is now a matter of debate: I haven’t spoken to him since Maizie’s death. He tried several years back to message me on social media. But I refused to friend anyone from Rose Run once I was in Princeton. So I never even saw what it said beyond “Hi River. Think about you a lot.”

I remember homecoming pictures that sophomore year. One of them is still on the mantel in the living room. My kelly green tulle dress, his royal purple boutonniere with the sprig of evergreen. He is gangly and wide-smiled, still. A baby girl in a frilly navy smock is propped up on his hip, sucking a finger and staring around the kitchen blankly. There is a wedding band on his finger.

 “I’m sorry about your grandmother,” he says, coming to give me an awkward pat on the shoulder.

“Thanks,” I say. “She was so sick for so long.”

“It’s been a while,” he says, and I nod. “I don’t want to make this about me, but I wanted to say I’m sorry for how I acted with Maizie."

“Sam,” I say, surprised at how harsh I sound, how firm when I feel so small and scared. “It’s in the past.”

He tries to gloss over it, not out of respect necessarily, but out of discomfort.

“You were at Princeton, right?” he says, redirecting. “My wife said you’re friends with that Arianna Dufont. She saw you onAccess Hollywood.”

“All that stuff is so silly,” I say.

“That’s not what all of us here think,” he says. “I really think you’d be surprised at how much this place has changed since you left.”

“I didn’t really have a choice to go,” I say.

“I just don’t want you to think people don’t regret all that.”

“I don’t know what you all thought I’d amount to,” I say.

The baby starts to fuss. My brow is fussing too.

“Sorry again about your grandmother,” says Sam.

I turn to the sink when he leaves the kitchen, grip it with both hands. Hang my head. Is this why you finally came home, River? To answer for your sins of evasion—every single one?