We find Belly at the (not very prestigious, it is heavily implied) Finch College, where she has only made one close friend beyond her boyfriend Jeremiah and childhood BFF, Taylor. She’s not quite sure what she wants to do with her life (maybe go into sports psychology?). She wonders about studying abroad in Paris, but when Jeremiah needs to stay back for an extra semester to graduate, those plans are quickly abandoned. Even though he cheated on her.
The cusp between young adulthood and real adulthood is famously hard to navigate. But the frustrating thing about Belly is that she’s so sure about being firmly on the grown-up side. She accepts a rash proposal from Jeremiah against the advice of her family and friends. While her brother, Steven, graduates early from Princeton and starts his own company, and her best friend Taylor accepts a prestigious internship in New York, Belly mostly spends her time wandering between the two homes of her fiancé’s wealthy family, to his father’s annoyance. (“You said she could stay as long as she wanted,” Jeremiah says to Adam Fisher after Belly’s clogged the shower drain in the Fishers’ Boston apartment. “Yeah, but it’s been two weeks, Jer,” comes Adam’s reply.)
It becomes clear to the viewer that Belly doesn’t only measure her life in the summers she spends at Cousins Beach, but actually defines herself by them. It’s a bit uneasy to observe the intense familiarity that she has with the Fishers while also understanding that, well, she’s not a Fisher. (Sorry to be blunt, but family doesn’t fuck family.) Without that beach house, who is this girl? And without a Fisher boyfriend? Belly barely tries to find out herself. “Susannah told me that when I was born, she knew I was destined for one of her boys,” she says in Season 2, referring to Conrad and Jeremiah’s late mother.
There’s a reading of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice that suggests Elizabeth Bennet only really falls in love with Mr. Darcy after seeing Pemberley for the first time—“She had never seen a place for which nature had done more, or where natural beauty had been so little counteracted by an awkward taste,” Austen writes. “They were all of them warm in their admiration; and at that moment she felt that to be mistress of Pemberley might be something!”—and there are echoes of that idea in the way Belly describes Cousins. I have no doubt that she’s in love with the Fisher boys as people. But it also feels like she deeply believes that their home, and the way they live, is entitled to her. As she puts it in the very first episode, “I don’t really begin living until June, until I’m at that beach, in that house.”
