The restaurant at the Alumnae House had been redone at great expense according to the college’s newsletter, but to little effect, according to me. Still dark wood, white table cloths, chandeliers with flickering electric bulbs pretending to be candles, and fading black-and-white and sepia pictures of female students playing field hockey in ankle-length pleated skirts and taking tea in white gloves and pearls.

Arriving first, as I always did, I was seated alone at a round table and handed a menu. “Water for now,” I said when the waitress asked me if I’d care for a cocktail, even though I was dying for a Scotch. But not knowing how late Carrie and her husband were going to be, I thought it best not to start drinking until they arrived.

As far as I could remember, Carrie and I had been to this restaurant together twice before. Once was when she very sweetly made a surprise party for my eighteenth birthday, involving our mutual friends and my parents. 

I wasn’t surprised. Carrie’s obsessive and anxious nature made her supremely unqualified to affect the breezy nonchalance necessary to avoid triggering my suspicions. But it was a nice party nonetheless. My parents got me an epee for my nascent fencing career and my friends got me cards with slyly suggestive handwritten notes about how I was “legal” now.

The second time was post break-up, during the brief interval when we were trying to do the mature thing and be friends. This generally involved her telling me about a cadet from nearby Franklin Military Academy that her parents had set her up with. In previous episodes, I had learned that he had “great arms” and that in the athletic hierarchy of FMA, fencers were “the wimps." 

In this episode of Carrie & The Cadet there would be a steamy sexual encounter. But it wasn’t only steamy, Carrie informed me, it was also very funny. Which was the only reason she was telling me the story. Because I would appreciate the comedy. 

The truth is that, given my teenage insecurities, this attempt to make me jealous, though practically canine in its guilelessness, still would have worked. But she started the narrative too early, and told it in such laborious detail, that long before they fucked, or she blew him, or they performed an anal 69, if such a thing even exists, or whatever it was they did, I genuinely lost interest. 

At some point, she burst out laughing and said, “Isn’t that hilarious?” and I smiled and agreed that, yes, it was quite hilarious. 

Not too long after that, I started dating, too, at which point the mature phase of our break-up was apparently over.