The Engagements by J. Courtney Sullivan

different Disney princess. Olivia had a pink tutu on over her pajamas, and Ava wore a pink feather boa draped across her shoulders and hard plastic pink high heels on her bare feet. The shoes in particular, and all that pink in general, made Kate uneasy. She had never seen any of this stuff before. May must have brought it along. No doubt, after they left, Ava would start asking for her own cotton-candy-colored, gender-normative crap.
    Kate” P.J. saidalgron wanted this day to be over. She wanted her family to go home and stay there, and just leave the three of them in peace.
    “Hi,” she said. “What’s up?”
    “I just saw on Facebook that my friend Rachel is pregnant again,” May said.
    “Oh.”
    “I swear to God, if she names that baby Amelia, I’ll slit her throat.”
    Kate glanced at Ava. Her sister’s choice of words seemed a tad violent for Saturday morning public television time. But Ava’s attention was on the screen.
    “What do you care?” Kate asked. “You’re not having any more. Are you?”
    “Maybe. Two girls and two boys would be nice.”
    She knew that it was now fashionable for couples on the Upper East Side to have four, five, six kids. A way of saying,
Look how freaking rich we are! We can afford to raise this many children at once in the most expensive city on earth
. Now apparently the trend had made its way to Jersey.
    “Any updates on the ring?” May said.
    Kate shook her head.
    “Girls, listen to me,” May’s voice grew stern. “If either of you has that ring, you’d better tell us right now, or else.”
    Ava looked terrified—they never talked to her like that. (
Or did she look guilty?
Kate considered this.)
    “Cross my heart and hope to die,” Olivia said dramatically.
    “Cross my heart and hope to die,” Ava repeated. She cast an adoring glance at her cousin, who at the age of five qualified as an older woman, wise in the ways of the world.
    On the television screen, Barney and his odd child friends were starting to sing a song about family. She hated the kids on
Barney;
they seemed like miniature cult members, their words overly cheerful and without affect.
    How many in your family?
Barney asked his audience, in the exaggerated, enthusiastic tone of a born-again Christian.
    “How many?” May asked Olivia, sounding bored.
    “Five!” Olivia said. “Ava. How many in your family?”
    “Five!” Ava shouted.
    Olivia crumpled her face in disappointment. “No. Three, dummy.”
    “Olivia!” May snapped. “Language. That’s strike one.”
    On the screen, a kid in overalls climbed onto a picnic table and declared with effervescence,
There’s a girl I know who lives with her mom, her dad lives far away. Although she sees her parents just one at a time, they both love her every day!
    “Why does she see her pareg up everythin

nts one at a time?” Olivia asked. Then,
answering her own question, “They’re divorced like Grandma and Grandpa.”
    “Probably,” May said.
    “My friend Lily’s parents are divorced,” Olivia said, sounding almost proud to know something about the topic at hand. “And also Joe and Sarah on our street, but I don’t really like them. e their parents are divorced, just because I don. Can you imagine?”r” Mona said
Kate and May were part of the first big wave of children with divorced parents. By the time she got to college, Kate knew more people whose parents had split up than stayed together. They all had awful stories—her freshman-year roommate, Taylor, had put on seven pounds the year her parents separated, because they exchanged her on Monday and Thursday nights, and on those nights they both fed her dinner. She didn’t have the heart to tell them. Another girl on their hall had come home sick from a slumber party in eighth grade to find her mother having sex with a neighbor while her father was out of town on business. She had told her father right away, and then proceeded to blame herself for the divorce for the next ten