The Unabridged Book Club

The Elm Street Book Club had one rule everyone agreed on: summer meant something light. This year, however, Mireille had proposed the unabridged Russian novel, all fourteen hundred pages of it, and nobody had objected loudly enough, in the moment, to stop her.

Renata realized her mistake only in July, three hundred pages behind schedule, when Mireille sent the group a spreadsheet tracking everyone's declared reading pace against their actual one. Bea was eleven days behind. Faisal, worse still, had apparently stalled on page two hundred and never moved again.

"It's not a competition," Mireille wrote, in the exact tone of someone for whom it plainly was.

What nobody said aloud, though everyone was clearly thinking it, was that an abridged edition existed, sold openly in the very bookstore where they held their meetings. Renata bought a copy in secret on a Tuesday and read it in four days, feeling a guilt so specific that she assumed, incorrectly, she was the only member doing it.

She was not. At the next meeting, Faisal was suspiciously fluent about a subplot involving a duel that the unabridged edition covered in exhaustive military detail across sixty pages. Bea, when pressed gently on a minor character's fate, answered with a confidence that suggested she, too, had taken the shortcut everyone was pretending not to know about.

It was Mireille, unexpectedly, who broke first. Had anyone actually asked her directly whether she'd finished the unabridged edition, she would have had to admit something embarrassing. She'd switched to the abridged one around page nine hundred and simply never mentioned it.

"I panicked," she admitted, when Renata finally asked. "I chose the book. I couldn't be the one who didn't finish it."

What followed was not quite an argument and not quite a confession, but something close to both. Four adults, each convinced they alone had cheated, discovered that the entire club had quietly abandoned the very book it insisted on discussing in full.

Rarely had a group felt so relieved to admit collective failure. Bea laughed first, then Faisal, and finally Mireille, who put her head down on the café table and stayed there for a full minute, shaking with something between horror and delight.

"So what," Renata asked, once the laughter settled, "do we actually talk about tonight?"

They ended up discussing, in surprising depth, a scene none of them had technically read in full: the duel, which each had pieced together from a different combination of chapters, summaries, and educated guessing. It was, everyone agreed afterward, probably the best conversation the club had ever had about a book none of them had properly finished.

Next month, by unanimous and immediate vote, they were reading something under three hundred pages, and nobody pretended otherwise.