lid I’d written BABY PICTURES, thinking, I guess, that this would seem less suspicious for me to store under my bed than an unlabeled shoebox. I lifted the corner of the box top with one finger, pretending for the benefit of no one that I was barely interested in what was inside. Somehow I felt that if I pulled each piece of paper out one by one, without ever removing the top, it didn’t really count.
I tried skimming them, focusing on the spaces between the lines, and for some of them—the boring ones from early on, when we were so enamored that every point-by-point description of the other’s day was Nobel-worthy poetry—it was almost easy. But toward the middle, and then the end, as the notes got less frequent, I got lost in them, looking for signs that she’d stopped loving me, or would soon. I’d done this before, right after it happened, and hadn’t seen them. But I’d been raw then, in total denial. By now, I thought, I should be able to tell myself the truth about what I saw.
But I read, and I reread, and I still didn’t see it. Not even in the ones I knew she’d written after we had a fight. And even though that didn’t make it any easier to understand, it allowed me to unclench my jaw, and un-hunch my shoulders, and imagine a future in which I never really understood, and was okay anyway.
In order to get there, I knew I had to get rid of the letters. Everything was layered chronologically like sediment, and the line where our friendship turned into something else was clear. I excavated everything above that line and put it in a plastic grocery bag I retrieved from under the sink, and tied the handles into a knot. I dumped the rest of the box on the floor and sifted through the early notes, the fake tattoos we saved for who knows what, a small stack of flyers for our failed Gay-Straight Alliance. I picked up a tight paper football, realizing what it was before I even opened it: the Straight Girls We Wish Weren’t list.
I could’ve sworn Jamie had the list, or that we’d long ago thrown it away. I unfolded it carefully, the paper worn thin from so many openings and refoldings and amendments. Straight Girls We Wish Weren’t (SG) was written at the top in Jamie’s neat purple handwriting, and below it, Ruby Ocampo was number one.
Just like I remembered, Natalie Reid was number three.
I scanned the rest of the names, some of which I still felt the same way about, some of which I didn’t. I imagined the revisions we’d make if Jamie were with me: we’d cross out Melissa Moore, who moved away, and replace her with some cute sophomore or junior. We’d have to cross out Indya Schoenberg, who’d taken a hard right, politically speaking, and no longer seemed as attractive as she once had. I’d add Erin Moss, who turned eighteen early and got four tattoos before senior year started, and if I knew Jamie, she’d add Ariel Park, who’d become a six-foot-tall volleyball superstar. For a minute I considered drawing a line through Natalie’s name, wondering if the list might work like a voodoo doll and make her disappear. Either way, she no longer belonged there.
But changing the list, especially alone, would ruin its sanctity. It felt a little eerie finding it now, with number one and number three so newly enmeshed in our lives. Neither of us had considered the list actionable, and yet here we were. And even though I still hated Natalie, and always would, I couldn’t help feeling proud of Jamie and me. Our younger selves would be so impressed.
I tidied the mess of friendship mementos with the list on top. I tucked this stack—our revised and sanitized relationship history—back into the shoebox, and pushed it under my bed. Then I picked up the bag of love letters, carried it into the garage, and dropped it gently into the recycling can. I looked at the bag at the bottom of the can and imagined the garbage man opening it and reading them, and showing them to his garbage-collector friends. I imagined them taped up in some city-government employee