That Summer

by Jennifer Weiner

“You know what I thought, the first time I saw you, on the beach?” She shakes her head. “I thought you looked like summer. Like, if I was going to paint a picture and call it Summer, it would look like you.”

“White guys—especially white guys who are part of a family business—they fail upward, or they move sideways. And they always come out fine in the end.”

The world hurt; every man she saw was a man who could hurt her.

Talking to Beatrice about privilege was like trying to explain water to a fish.

He’s always been one of those born-on-third-base-and-thinks-he-hit-a-triple types. That saying fit most of the boys she’d met there to a T. They thought they’d gotten where they were: at Emlen, on their way to Williams or Princeton or Yale, with nice clothes and straight teeth, because of how hard they’d worked, and not primarily because, as Tricia used to say, they were lifetime members of the Lucky Sperm Club.

people treat you the way you let them.

in a world where being born female meant spending years of your life at risk, and the rest of it invisible, existing as prey or barely existing at all.

That was how it was with women. You could fool them; you could lead them. It was what they required. Without someone to impose order, some man to run the show, it would just be twittering hysteria all the time, flocks of chirping birds flapping their wings pointlessly, going nowhere, accomplishing nothing.