Alice was depressing herself with all this thinking. She turned to look out the window, take in the scenery, blank out her mind. They were getting close to the clubhouse now. People were lining the road on either side. Expensive-looking people. People with pale clothes and tan skin. People who looked so different from people in Cambridge they might have been a different species. (Was it the city air that made everyone in her hometown appear gray and gritty and sickly, like they were coated in a layer of pollution?) For the millionth time that week, Alice wished that the activities she liked to do put her skin in contact with the sun, didn’t all involve staying indoors. She needed protective coloring so that she could blend into this new and hostile environment. It wasn’t a matter of vanity; it was a matter of survival. And then Alice noticed something strange: the people were staring at their car. Not every single one of them, but enough. Why? she wondered. Sure, a Mercedes G-Class SUV would get you gawked at on certain corners of Mass Ave., but here? Par for the course, she would have assumed.

A guy and girl caught Alice’s eye, maybe because they were about her age, and the girl was one of the people staring. Or maybe because they looked like characters in an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. The guy was wearing a seersucker suit, an actual seersucker suit, but it didn’t look goofy on him or try-hard or even weird. The cut was stylish and modern, and he wore it with such a dashing, natural air that he pulled it off somehow. The face behind the dark glasses was dissipated, but attractively so. And peeking out of his breast pocket was, if she wasn’t mistaken, a flask, the silver cap glinting in the sun. The boys she grew up with would definitely have him pegged as gay. And he could have been. But Alice suspected he wasn’t, that, on the contrary, he was a ladies’ man of the truly treacherous type. Girl crazy.