She brought her cup back inside and placed it carefully in the dish bin, noticing as she saw her reflection in the glass that she was grinning. Yeah, okay, sure, she’d go see Caitlin up in Portsmouth. She could feel herself getting nicer by the minute. Must be the Cam Effect.

20.

The Squad

We were not obsessed with Alexa Thornhill, if that’s what you’re thinking. We were grown women, with husbands and children and jobs, some full-time, some part-time, and many, many appointments. It would have been unseemly to take an interest in a seventeen-year-old.

But when we found out that Alexa posted videos on YouTube of course we took a quick look. We’re not sure what we were expecting. Something salacious, maybe. Alexa Thornhill is a very pretty girl. We’ve always wondered about her biological father because Alexa and Rebecca do not look that much alike. The hair, maybe. Not that Rebecca isn’t pretty enough. But Alexa is drop-dead: another league.

We were hoping for information that would give us a little something to talk about on the beach, or on our early morning walks, which some of us took three days a week, rain or shine.

We were not expecting to watch a video on cryptocurrency.

Serious walking is one of the best ways to lose weight, you know. We try to walk five miles at a stretch. The New England summer humidity sweats everything right off you. Some of us were eating Keto that summer too. Keto is very effective.

It was on one of these early morning walks a couple of weeks after Esther’s birthday dinner at Plum Island Grille that Michelle posited that there was something “off” about Sherri Griffin.

“What do you mean, ‘off’?” we said. Most of us knew that Michelle was at work writing some sort of psychological domestic thriller set in our town. She called it “Girl on the Train-esque” but honestly we didn’t think it would amount to much. She wasn’t even a writer. But that was Michelle for you, always taking up something new, throwing pasta at the wall to see if it would stick. There was the scented candle business, a few years ago. The shares she bought in an ice hotel up in Montreal, then sold again after the warm winter. The alternative preschool that she thought up to compete with the Montessori school on Inn Street. Nothing came from any of those endeavors.

“She seems like someone who’s got some grit in her oyster,” said Michelle. She told us this was a phrase she’d picked up from one of the writing blogs she was always reading. She explained that it meant that somebody had something dark in their past. Something they were trying to escape, or something they were trying to figure out. Obviously we already knew what the phrase meant, but we let Michelle have her moment. “Definite grit,” she repeated.