Rich and Pretty by Rumaan Alam

Sarah arrives, is perched on a bench in front of the restaurant. She wears a simple white button-down, but the buttons all hit in just the right place, the top one undone, so she looks like Katharine Hepburn instead of a woman trying to appear sexy. She stands, and Sarah is surprised again at how tall she is, how lovely.
    Fiona somehow looks English, which she is. “Sarah,” she says. Her accent is wonderful.
    â€œHi!” Sarah reaches up, deposits a kiss on each cheek.
    Lunch is a departure—normally, when she sees Fiona, it’s at a party. Fiona is a woman who’s reliably invited to a certain kind of party and remembers to extend that invitation to Sarah, at least a few times a year. A post–fashion show celebration for a mutual friend, also from college, now well known enough that her initials are embroidered on the tags inside asymmetrical dresses sold at Barneys; a genteel fund-raiser for an organization that plants trees in Costa Rica. Sarah relishes these invitations. Sometimes it’s fun to do something so frivolous, so glamorous, and Fiona movesthrough such parties with an ease that makes Sarah, too, feel at home. With Fiona, she feels like a different version of herself. She knows it’s silly, and knows it’s pretend, but she enjoys it.
    There’s small talk about the men in their lives, about the rigors of work, but the clock is ticking—that hour, Fiona was clear about that hour—so Sarah broaches the subject of the wedding bands with her usual forthrightness.
    No sooner are the words out of her mouth than Fiona claps, actually claps, once, twice, three times. “Of course, my God, what an honor, I can’t believe you’d ask,” she says.
    â€œReally?” Relief. “I was worried you’d be insulted.”
    â€œInsulted, don’t be silly.”
    â€œObviously, I’ll pay you, for your time, for the materials, for everything. I would just love to have something special, something unique.”
    Fiona waves this away. “I know just what to do. Rose gold for you, a simple silver for Dan. Or platinum? Maybe platinum.” Fiona produces a small tape measure from her bag, wraps it around Sarah’s finger.
    â€œI can’t tell you what this means to me,” Sarah says.
    â€œWe’re going to make you something beautiful,” Fiona says.
    Because Fiona’s office is not far from her parents’ place Sarah decides to stop there. Papa’s gone but her mother is sure to be there, and there’s a lot they need to talk about, not to mention that if she hears that Sarah had lunch nearby and didn’t come over there will be a whole discussion, one that’s easier to avoid. She walks Fiona back to the office, they kiss their good-byes and say their let’s do it again soons.
    Downstairs from her office is an outpost of the chain for which Fiona works. Sarah goes in, browses. The music is just the right volume, the salesgirls just the right amount of pushy. There’s a table of simple cashmere sweaters in several colors that feel like fall—burnt orange, saffron, chocolate, moss. She chooses two; they’re the perfect, simple weight, and they’re cheaper if you buy two, actually. She hates taking a big paper shopping bag. She always carries a little cotton tote, folded up into nothing, in her bag, so she takes this out and the salesgirl deposits her sweaters, wrapped in tissue paper, sealed with a sticker, into it. The bag weighs nothing because the sweaters weigh nothing.
    It’s warm now but she can tell it won’t be all day, that in a couple of hours, wherever she is, probably walking back to the apartment, she’ll be glad she has the blazer on. At the moment, though, she feels damp. She’s heard about people injecting something into the armpits, that this can control your perspiration. Her legs are a bit sore from the morning’s class. She doesn’t get to class as often