That Summer

by Jennifer Weiner

Picture each worry like a gift. Put them in order, from the mildest to the most intense. Imagine yourself picking up each one and wrapping it with care. Picture yourself placing the gift under a tree, and then walking away.

Maybe when you first experience a place as a six-year-old, you become six again, every time you return.

She dressed to please herself, and to feel comfortable, and if these boys believed that her body was an object that existed for their pleasure, she’d be happy to tell them otherwise.

“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.”

How long had it been since she’d had someone’s complete attention this way, for this long? How long since she’d felt like she was with someone who could see her, and could see how hard she was trying?

for old married ladies like them, making a new friend was the closest they could get to falling in love.

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.

When someone tells you who they are, believe them.

“Then I passed over from father’s hands into yours,” Nora said. “You settled everything according to your taste; or I did only what you liked; I don’t exactly know. I think it was both ways, first one and then the other. When I look back on it now it seems to me as if I had been living here like a poor man, only from hand to mouth. I lived by performing tricks for you, Torvald. But you would have it so. You and father have sinned greatly against me.”

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. “Stay