“Thanks for kicking out of work early. You sure you won’t earn the Gorilla’s wrath?”

Lily was an editor for a travel magazine where her boss was so notorious for picking at her every move that he’d earned a special nickname. “Are you shitting me? There’s no such thing as a wrathless half day. When he saw me walking out with my coat, he made sure to tell me he needed that piece on Florence tomorrow morning when it wasn’t supposed to be due until Friday. Good thing for me it’s pretty much done already.”

Alice had met Lily in a spin class at her gym last summer. Their friendship had started with occasional groans about their shared discomfort as they grew accustomed to all that time spent bouncing on a bicycle seat. Then they’d moved on to casual conversations in the locker room after class. Once they realized they were both single and lived within a few blocks of the gym, they exchanged cell phone numbers with a promise of meeting in the neighborhood for a spontaneous drink.

Usually those “sometime we should” occasions were nothing but idle talk-imagined time people might spend if their lives weren’t already cluttered and prescheduled-but Lily had actually called. About three drinks in that first night, they figured out that they’d spent their lives only a few degrees of separation from each other. Lily was three years older than Alice and was raised in Westchester, but had traveled in the same rebellious circles as Alice’s older brother.

Now, six months into their friendship, Alice felt like she’d known Lily for years. And it was a comfortable kind of friendship. Unlike a lot of her other friends, Lily took Alice’s last name in stride. She never asked for screening videos, for an autograph, or that annoying question that made Alice want to throw something: “What was it like to grow up with your father?” And unlike Alice’s friends with similarly privileged upbringings, she had never once told Alice to run back to her parents for financial support.