hear her sit at the table, and I loll my head her way.
“Lindsay, there isn’t much of a point. In an hour I’ll once again be the only person who knows.”
“Then you have nothing to lose,” I announce, like I’m in a movie and it’s go time.
“Fine,” she says. I hear the crisp hiss of a La Croix opening, tsst. “It’s been bottled up for fucking forever, so it’s time you hear it. Since you have no idea despite being there.” She glugs, exhales. “August 21, 2009.
“I was in my apartment alone. On a Friday night, as usual. I’d just toked up and taken some Molly, so I was in a weird sort of swirly mood. And someone banged on the door. So I open it and Edie is standing there with tears on her cheeks. I would see her around every now and then, but we’d been avoiding each other, obviously. I’m so surprised to see her and I think maybe she’s going to hug me or apologize or something, but instead she looks at me and goes, ‘Jenna, you have drugs, right?’ ”
She swallows hard, then takes another sip of seltzer. “And I…I was like, ‘Sure, I have whatever you want,’ and she was like—I remember this word for word—she said: ‘I wanna forget. I wanna climb out of my life and feel good for a few hours.’ ” A heavy metallic sound; she’s rolling the bottom edge of the can on the table. “So I suggested Molly, since it makes people feel happy and not overthink-y like pot.” Her voice gets even smaller. “And also maybe because I know it makes you feel…connected to the people around you. I actually thought…I thought maybe we’d go back to being friends.
“So I gave her one and took another myself. And guess what, it worked like a fucking charm. Once it kicked in, she was super happy and peppy and excited to be hanging out with me. And she announced that she wanted to go out, she wanted to dress up and go find a party and dance and prove to everyone that she didn’t give a fuck, so she was stripping, flinging clothes off around my apartment.
“And she…she sort of suddenly looked around and yelled, ‘Fuck, I don’t have any clothes here!’ And we both just laughed and laughed and laughed. Just falling on the ground laughing. So she wanted to run into her apartment and change, and I was trying to get her to put some clothes on, but she was like, ‘It’s fine, it’s fine, no one will see us, come on!’ And she grabbed my hand and her clothes and took off running. It was so silly, like we were in a spy movie—she’d stop at every corner and look around it very carefully, she opened the door to the stairwell all, you know, mock covert—we were laughing so hard the entire way.”
“Then what?” I say. Making my vocal cords vibrate is beginning to feel like a chore, like when you’re too high and those muscles want to go to sleep.
She drums her fingers on the can. “So we went to her apartment. It was empty; apparently you guys were all getting wasted on the roof. She got out her laptop to show me something and then got distracted and went into the kitchen and announced that she was going to make us a snack. She was acting really weird, and I was especially confused because, like, I’d taken some stuff, too. But then before she could even pull any food out, she went back into the living room and was like, ‘You have to see this,’ and held out a gun she’d pulled out of god-knows-where.”
The last line croaks up into a sob. She pushes back her stool and stands to rummage in her purse. She sets something on the table, but I can’t turn my head to look. I don’t want to hear the rest. I want to pause the story, maybe switch to a nice Pixar movie instead.
“She picked up the gun and kinda stared at it, and then she said, ‘Kevin showed us how to use this, isn’t it gorgeous?’ And she clicked the safety off and then on again, kind of playing with it, and goes, ‘Don’t you love that sound?’ And I…I was like, ‘Hey, be careful, you should put that down.’ But I was still trying to be nice because…well, I guess ’cause I didn’t want to, like, yell