how they felt about their being best friends. They made no secret of it, and lectured Sam constantly about the danger of their being friends.
Sam had insisted that she be invited to his bar mitzvah when he was thirteen. She had sat through all four hours of the religious ceremony at the temple, and had then gone to the lavish party his parents had thrown for him at the Plaza hotel that night. Her parents had dropped her off. There had been two hundred guests and Coco had enjoyed it. It was the first bar mitzvah she’d ever been to, and she felt very grown up being there alone. She told her parents afterward that she wished she could have a bat mitzvah herself. She loved the celebration, and especially when they carried Sam’s mother around the room aloft in a chair to riotous applause and lively music.
Coco’s family was Catholic and had never been overly religious. Neither were Coco and Sam. Sam said he didn’t think he would hold Shabbat when he grew up, and he hated living in a kosher home. He ate bacon every chance he got when he went out, but of course never told his parents. He felt that his mother’s religious passion was stifling. Both his sisters had rebelled against it, but his brother, Jacob, always desperate to please them, said he wanted to be a rabbi when he grew up. He was a studious boy and Sam thought he’d do it.
Sam was expected to go to work at his father’s successful accounting firm after college, and they encouraged him to become a CPA now that he had graduated. He wanted to go to business school in a few years, but the ink was barely dry on his bachelor’s degree. Sam and Coco loved the fact that they had both gone to college in New York City, she at Columbia and he at NYU, and could continue to spend time together, when they weren’t studying or with friends at their respective schools. Sometimes they managed to study together. Sam always helped her with her math, economics, and statistics, and she had written more than one paper for him in psychology and literature. They pooled their strengths and had both gotten good grades and maintained a strong GPA all through college. Their parents could never complain that their friendship distracted them from their schoolwork, since their grades had never suffered from the time they spent together. And it was a mystery to Sam’s parents how they were so often with each other, remained friends, and didn’t fall in love.
One of the big differences between them was that Sam’s parents expected him to conform to their rules, their expectations for him, and their way of life, and hers didn’t. There was no room in his parents’ thinking for Sam to make his own choices, and they made it clear what their plans were for him, both for marriage and career.
Coco’s parents wanted her to find a career that was fulfilling, be creative about it, and march to her own tune, as they had done, Bethanie by marrying someone who came from a different world and Tom by achieving so much more than his parents had ever envisioned for him. They urged Coco not to accept other people’s limited views, and to fly with her own wings. It left a broad range of options and choices for her future, and her friendship with Sam had never worried them, neither due to his sex nor to his religion. They respected her ability to make good decisions and choose her own friends. Sam always said he envied her because her parents were so open-minded. He dreaded confrontation with his parents, and couldn’t imagine himself marrying the kind of girl they would eventually want to choose for him, a girl from an Orthodox Jewish home. Any other possibility was out of the question. His mother always urged him to marry early and have many children, as they had done. Both his parents came from big families.
Sam had no intention of doing any of that when he eventually left home. He had only graduated a month before, and in two more weeks they expected him to start work at his father’s accounting firm. He dreaded it, and for that Coco felt sorry for him. But he knew it was expected of him and he didn’t want to let them down.
Coco was excited about her summer internship, and her senior