Other People We Married by Emma Straub

asked, she said she could always tell which trails were difficult, and which one old ladies could do in their wheelchairs. We would do the latter.
    The loop was two miles and took us immediately up a flight of stairs made of rocks and boulders. Was there a difference? It seemed easy enough, and I kept up with Abigail. In the places that were wide enough to walk two people across, we walked next to each other, and when the path narrowed, I fell back and followed her through. That was the way it worked.
    “Dumbo, come look!” Abigail pointed at a gecko zipping across the ground, its body twitching quickly back and forth as it scurried to safety. I watched the lizard vanish into a crack between two rocks, jealous that it had found shade. There were voices above us, and we both turned to look. Three men were dangling by thick ropes, climbing up or down, I wasn’t sure. They had helmets and carabiners and would have loved to have a long conversation with Abigail about the Master Cleanse, I just knew it. “Meow,” she said, as if she’d heard me.
    I wanted to wait and see how long it would take, how much silence we would need, before Abigail asked me a question. Not if I was hungry, or if I was as sweaty as she was, but an honest-to-God question about my life. That she hadn’teven followed up about Justin the drug dealer seemed like a sorry indicator. We were somewhere about halfway through the two-mile loop when I realized what I wanted to do. I wanted to leave Abigail in the desert. It wasn’t like she would have to sleep there—we encountered small groups of people every few minutes, and there were the hunky rock climbers. If I left her, she would still be able to find someone, to get a ride back into town, get to the airport. I wondered what the desert would look like on drugs, if the bright blue sky overhead would start to darken and change, if clouds would appear and speak to her in languages she didn’t understand. I wondered if all the creatures in the park would hear her cry out for me, and whether they would come running to her rescue. Maybe they would stay put, hearing it all in her voice, every mean thing she’d ever done in her entire life. There were foxes and rattlesnakes, animals that could hurt her if they wanted to. Maybe I would just let her get a few steps ahead at a time, until those few steps became a few more, and a few more. I might just go and sit in the car. Or I might drive away, find a gas station that actually sold gas, and keep going until I was home.

Pearls
    J ackie was from Newport, Rhode Island, which as far as Franny knew was Nowhere, Rhode Island. Even though Franny was from Brooklyn, they both felt like total rubes at Barnard, where all the city girls wore going-out clothes to English class just because they felt like it. Their dormitory room was exactly the same as all the others on the hall, narrow and spartan, perfect for two eighteen-year-old nuns. Jackie tried to spruce it up with some pictures she’d cut out of magazines, mostly models dressed up to look like Ali MacGraw. The two girls tried to do the same—sweeping bell-bottoms and collegiate sweaters. The effect was not great on Jackie, with shoulders as wide as an Iowan football player, or on Fran, who stood just over five feet and had to hem every pair of pants by several inches, sometimes cutting off the bells entirely.
    Jackie’s family spent most of the winter in Florida, and sometimes she was permitted to bring a friend. When she asked Franny to go to Palm Beach with them during the Christmas break, Franny was so excited that she punched Jackie in the arm. It took Mrs. Johnson three phone calls to convince Mrs. Gold that airplanes were safe, and then the tickets were booked, and Jackie packed all three of her swimsuits, knowing full well that Franny would want to borrow them.
    There was the Breakers in Newport and the Breakers in Palm Beach. Franny didn’t know the difference. They pulled up in the rented car and