It was hard to believe that this would be the last Friday lunch with the Club. Things that used to annoy Alex—like how they insisted on frequenting pricey local restaurants when her campus dining card worked perfectly well—now felt preemptively nostalgic. After four years that felt simultaneously eternal and much too short, they were finally graduating. Their parents would descend on the neighborhood in just a few short days, and their little group would be just one of thousands in powder blue caps and gowns. There would be photoshoots and speeches, teary-eyed hugs and promises to visit. Everyone would be off to their jobs, their grad programs, or, for those who had no financial reason to hurry into adulthood, their years abroad.

Alex would be starting her internship at NPR almost the second that school was out, with only time for a quick dash up to Rochester before returning to the city. Having secured not just the internship, but an impressive story to tell the visiting families next week, felt like being pulled onto a lifeboat after treading water for hours. She could finally relax: she wasn’t a failure.

In truth, though, the internship was just one in a long list of accomplishments she couldn’t even remember her reasons for pursuing in the first place. Her superb grades, the all-state gymnastics team, getting into Columbia and securing a full scholarship, working nights and weekends to excel, excel, excel: none of it had been a conscious choice. There was only the propulsive force of escaping her hometown, finding authority figures she wanted to impress and exceeding their expectations, running toward a destination of which she could only see fractions at a time. But here she was, somehow, at an Ivy League university, surrounded by an elite group so clearly destined for greatness.

She looked around the table and tears welled up at the corners of her eyes, which she quickly brushed away as to not seem overly sentimental. But the seven of them—always requesting a six-top with a chair at the end if possible, to be closer while they talked—felt like family. Well, no, that wasn’t quite true: they felt better than family.

They were like a magical portal to the life she’d always wanted to have, the person she’d always wanted to be. The credit cards she’d taken out without her parents’ knowledge to keep up with their expectations was a small price to pay for how she felt in their presence.

The waiter arrived at the table with their food, bleary-eyed from dealing with a restaurant full of demanding undergrads.

“Okay, I have the brioche French—”

“Here,” Bee called over, raising a waifish wrist decked out in her handmade jewelry. “And the quiche, too.”