The Note

The narrative shifts to a point in time six days earlier, when May is packing for a trip. Her dog, Gomez, is cuddling with Josh. May still struggles with COVID-related anxieties, and she realizes that this trip will be the longest stretch of time that she has spent away from her fiancé and her dog. Kelsey has rented a beach house for 10 days so that she, May, and Lauren can catch up with each other, but May has just accepted a new law professor job and needs to work, so she only plans to spend the weekend there.

Josh worries that May will become annoyed with her friends after spending three days with her them. May laughs off his concerns. She has not seen Lauren and Kelsey at the same time in over a decade, but all three friends text each other often. They originally met 15 years ago at Wildwood, an arts camp. This trip is very important to May because Lauren and Kelsey were there for her after she became infamous one year ago.

May picks up Lauren from JFK Airport. Lauren is extremely fashionable, and May feels a little insecure about her own appearance. Lauren is a music prodigy who served as a counselor at Wildwood when May and Kelsey were campers there. Lauren is now a director of the Houston Symphony. May and Lauren have bonded over their experiences as women of color in a competitive field. May, who is of Chinese descent, was raised by a single mother; she graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and Columbia Law.

May, Kelsey, and Lauren refer to themselves as The Canceled Crew and The Spelling Bee Hive. (The latter term comes from the fact that they all enjoy the New York Times “Spelling Bee” word game). The game helped them to bond during the COVID-related quarantine, and they still play it together every day. The three friends have also bonded through their similar experiences of being “cancelled” in the social sense. Lauren was the “other woman” in a high-profile affair, while Kelsey’s husband, Luke, was murdered, and May was filmed on a subway platform in an unflattering confrontation.

Lauren is still the glue of the friend group. Lauren prefers to stay in hotels because she has had several unfortunate experiences involving racist neighbors while staying in Airbnb rentals. Although Kelsey is the one who arranged for the beach house, the owner has left a long list of rules addressed to a guest named Callie. Lauren and May enjoy the house’s amenities while they wait for Kelsey to arrive from Boston.

The friends are excited to finally reunite. Kelsey is a bit stressed about her job; she works for her father’s high-profile real estate company. In terms of personality, Kelsey is known for saying inappropriate things and getting people to laugh. Years ago, Kelsey won over May’s mother and asked about May’s father, and her inquiry led to an unexpected conversation in which May learned that her father left her mother after getting her pregnant; he was prepared for the responsibility or the intricacies of a relationship between two people of different ethnic backgrounds.

Now, as the three women reunite in the beach house, May looks at Kelsey and reflects on the last time she saw her: eight years ago, when she and Kelsey stopped being friends.

The narrative shifts to eight years in the past. May is excited to travel to Boston and visit with Kelsey because they have spent the past seven years living in different cities. They meet at an expensive steakhouse. At this point in time, May is an underpaid associate at a big law firm, and Kelsey is working for her family’s real estate company. Kelsey is planning an elaborate wedding with her fiancé, who is opening his own restaurant. May realizes that Kelsey’s expensive lifestyle is vastly different from her own and feels a gulf in their friendship. May receives a wedding invitation from “Mr. and Mrs. William Ellis.”

The narrative reveals that Kelsey’s mother died of cancer when she was seven, and two years later, her father remarried Jeanie. Kelsey came to refer to Jeanie as her mother and to Jeanie’s son, Nate, as her brother. During Kelsey’s freshman year of college, her dad and Jeanie divorced, and he stopped speaking to both Nate and Jeanie.

Now, May peruses Kelsey’s pictures on social media, particularly those of Kelsey’s fiancé, Luke. May once dated Kelsey’s stepbrother, Nate, and she worries about the prospect of seeing him at the wedding. She RSVPs “no” to the wedding invitation. After that, May’s interactions with Kelsey dwindle until there is basically silence. Years later, Lauren texts her an article showing that Luke, Kelsey’s husband, has been shot and killed while making a bank deposit run. May debates whether to reach out to Kelsey. She extensively reads the articles about Luke’s case, learning that at the time of his murder, he and Kelsey were estranged and were preparing to divorce. Internet detectives speculate that Kelsey and her rich father planned Luke’s murder. At the time of his death, Kelsey was accompanying her father at an awards show, and speculation arose alleging that one of them hired a hit man to kill Luke.

May knows Kelsey as someone who is driven by the desire to create a family. She thinks that Kelsey is privileged and a little naïve, but not a killer. Kelsey deactivates her social media accounts, which May interprets as a sign of guilt. May decides not to contact Kelsey, just in case her old friend is guilty of murder.

The press and online trolls are vicious to Kelsey. After she tries dating apps, her profiles are posted publicly. Even then, May does not reach out to Kelsey; instead, she continues to watch as strangers examine her friend’s life online.

The narrative returns to the present. May is excited to see Kelsey, but she is not excited to learn that Kelsey’s stepbrother, Nate, might be joining them. Meanwhile, Kelsey’s father keeps calling Kelsey.

Kelsey wants to go to dinner, but she has to be the one to drive May’s car since May and Lauren have been drinking. May is surprised to see that Kelsey has downplayed her gorgeous features, rather than drawing attention to herself, and realizes that Kelsey has made this choice because she is used to people recognizing her in public. While Lauren and May both experienced negative press after their respective scandals, Kelsey was scrutinized much more closely than they were.

The three friends look for a parking spot, but just as they are about to claim it, a white car swoops in and steals it. A woman steps out of the car and smiles smugly at them, then wraps her arms around the man who steps out beside her. The friends watch the rude couple walk away. In the restaurant, May finds it odd that Kelsey asks to sit with her back to the street, but she assumes that Kelsey simply does not want to attract attention.

The friends drink more than they planned. May is still annoyed about the rude couple who stole their parking spot, so Kelsey suggests that May write an angry letter. May writes a letter on a napkin from the hotel bar, while Lauren writes her own prank note, which reads, “He’s cheating. He always does.” May contemplates Lauren’s relationship with Thomas Welliver, the Dallas oilman who co-owned Wildwood with his wife. When Lauren moved to California, May always asked for relationship updates, but Lauren said that she wasn’t dating anyone. However, when she moved to Houston, it was clear that she was still seeing Thomas.

Now, Kelsey takes both prank notes. She says that she has to go to the bathroom and tells her friends to order dessert without her. May worries that Kelsey has been drinking too much to drive safely.

May feels inadequate and plain next to Kelsey and Lauren, whom she sees as being much more attractive. Kelsey tells her friends that her stepbrother Nate will be joining them at the beach house on Monday. Kelsey and Lauren joke about the possibility that Nate will try to flirt with May. Kelsey gets teased about having a handsome stepbrother. The narrative notes that Kelsey is always reluctant to discuss her father’s divorce from Nate’s mother.

May reflects on her relationships with Nate and Josh. Unlike her fiancé, Josh, Nate is deeply charismatic. During the COVID-19 lockdown, May decided to settle for a relationship with Josh. She also accepted an invitation to teach at Fordham Law. Now, as more drinks arrive and Kelsey photographs the group, May worries about the possibility that the pictures will be posted online.

Kelsey dislikes Josh because she thinks that May is compromising too much of herself for him. May reflects that she has mostly been able to move on from her incident on the subway platform, and Kelsey is jealous of this.

As Kelsey drinks more than Lauren and May, they all reminisce about a cocktail party that Kelsey threw at camp when she was 15. (Another girl at camp, Marnie Mann, told Lauren about the party.) Now, as May says Marnie’s name, they all fall briefly silent. Then Kelsey changes the subject, telling her friends that she is thinking of having a baby on her own; she froze her eggs before her husband was murdered.

Because they have been drinking heavily, the friends take an Uber back to the beach house, and May notices that Lauren is texting Thomas. Once they arrive on the dock, they continue their party, and May finally falls asleep on a chair outside. At one point, she wakes up in the middle of the night to hear Kelsey crying. She also thinks that she hears a car engine.

May is hungover when she wakes up the next morning. Josh calls to ask if she wants to leave early, and she is annoyed that he thinks she can’t handle being away for a few days. May remembers dreaming about Marnie Mann drowning at camp.

The summer after May graduated from college, she returned to Wildwood as a counselor. On her off night, she met up with Nate, who brought the drug ecstasy, which they mixed with alcohol. She blacked out. That night, Marnie drowned. May had always despised Marnie, whom she saw as a rival—at least until Marnie confessed to May that she was very jealous of her. Lauren became the scapegoat for Marnie’s drowning and was fired.

The narrative returns to the present. May asks Kelsey about the crying and engine sounds from during the night. Kelsey hesitates before claiming that she doesn’t know what May is talking about.

May is exhausted after spending a weekend with her friends, and the stress of the COVID-19 pandemic has also burnt her out, but her friends beg her to stay longer. Kelsey expresses her fears that Luke’s parents will try to stop her from using her fertilized eggs.

Lauren returns with a missing person flier for a white man named David Smith. They realize that he is the man who took their parking spot. May wants to tell the police that they saw him, but Lauren discourages this. As May starts to call the police anyway, Kelsey stops her and admits that she left a prank note on David’s car—the one that read, “He’s cheating.”