The worst sound in the world is your own family laughing at you. Not at something you said. Not at a joke you made.
At you. At the shape of your life. At the choices you made in quiet rooms while they were busy performing elsewhere.
That laughter has a very specific texture. It does not echo and fade. It gets into the walls and stays there.
I heard it for the last time at my brother’s engagement dinner. My name is Lauren Bishop. I am twenty-seven years old, and for most of those years I was the invisible one, the safe one, the practical one who handled the family taxes and explained the 401k and helped Ethan understand, for the third time, why personal vacations cannot be classified as business expenses.
The boring one. My mother said it with affection, which is the most efficient way to deliver a verdict. She would tilt her head and smile and say, “Lauren is our steady one.
Thank goodness. Someone has to be.” Everyone would nod and the conversation would return to Ethan. I had been sitting in the back row of my family’s production for as long as I could remember.
My father, Richard, was the director, a partner at a mid-level law firm who organized his life around the proximity of powerful people. My mother, Caroline, was the producer, meticulous about appearances, with a social media presence curated to within an inch of its life. My brother, Ethan, was the star.
And I was the backdrop. The quiet painted tree at the back of the stage. Necessary, in the way furniture is necessary, but never actually seen.
Jenna Cross was Ethan’s fiancée, and she had the manner of someone who arrives at a party already aware she is the most interesting person in the room. She wore her confidence like a statement piece. She had a sharp, practiced laugh.
She was twenty-nine, a venture capitalist at a firm called Cross Kaplan, and she had looked at me exactly once before that dinner night and filed me immediately in a mental category that required no further review. We were at a private dining room at the kind of restaurant where the menus have no prices and the lighting is designed to make everyone look successful. The table was set for eight.
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