distant gunfire, the two of us mud-smeared in a trench. “Super charming when she wanted to be—good at working people.”
Another thought skates off like a water bug: my best friend Tessa, apparently jealous, apparently wanting her best friend, Edie, all to herself. My being single all the time I’ve known her, unable to get a romantic anything off the ground. I’m close to connecting this when all the pieces fall apart in my hands.
Wait, what were we talking about?
“The really funny thing is that I never thought to just introduce her to someone new. And then we met that idiot Alex at a stupid Calhoun party and she couldn’t stop gushing about him. She’d barely even talked to him; I went up to him, let him know I could get him Molly if he was interested, and I had no idea that that asshat would be the thing that finally broke up her and Greg, months after she’d stopped talking to me.”
Why am I on the ground again? Am I dreaming?
“She’d suspected I didn’t like Greg, so she put on a whole I’m-not-sure-if-he’s-right-for-me dog and pony show, all leading up to her getting me alone and asking me point-blank: What do you think of Greg? And I told her in the kindest way possible, I—I thought she wanted to hear this and was thinking it herself, like, if someone just put it into words for her, it’d be crystal clear what she had to do next.”
Her sentences are bouncing around like balls in a bingo cage.
“I told her, ‘Honestly, I think you’re too good for him. It seems like Greg puts a damper on all of your best qualities.’ And her eyes went red. I’d never seen her look that way; the scary, quiet kind of furious, you know?”
She’s speaking slowly, like this is the billionth time she’s gone over it in her mind.
“And of course I immediately backpedaled, I didn’t mean it, what do I know about their relationship, and I’m sure I’m reading everything so wrong, but she’s not hearing it. She got up—god, I can picture it so clearly—she stood up from the couch, picked up both of our mugs of tea, walked into the kitchen and dumped them both into the sink, then walked into her room and closed the door, not slamming it, just, done. And that was it. She was done with me.” She pauses to blow her nose as the tears drip on. “After that, it was like I didn’t exist. We’d literally be sitting around in a group and I’d count how many times she acknowledged me, and it was always zero. I’d say something and it was like I hadn’t opened my mouth; when she talked she’d bounce her eyes around between the other people there…and it caught on, she was so, like, alpha that everyone picked up the habit and would just cut me out of conversations. She unfriended me on Facebook and detagged every photo of us together. And all her little minions did the same. I felt like a ghost.”
Her voice grows wavery and my gut contracts like a fist; I know how this feels, the full-body burn of trying to pierce yourself into a conversation and failing, nearby but separate, as if you’re behind a sheet of glass.
“This went on for months. She even broke up with Greg and started sleeping with that loser Alex and it didn’t even matter, I was still dead to her. I remember that winter, I got sick—like really sick,” she says. “I was throwing up and couldn’t get any food down for an entire week. Edie was barely even around—she was staying at Alex’s apartment most nights, I overheard her saying something to Kylie or Sarah about me making the place a cesspool of germs. I was so weak that I fell once trying to climb back into my loft and just, like, lay on the floor, half in my room and half out, until Kylie found me and took me to the hospital.”
I wish suddenly that Edie were here to defend herself, to tell her side of the story, one where Tessa was less of a beatific victim and more of an instigator.
“Then what?” I say.
Tessa wipes her tears angrily. “So she moved out,” she continues, “she moved out and she had you as a best friend and she never looked back. It was awful.” I realize I’m pushing my back against the bottom of the couch to