the one that scorches my cheeks and forehead still. When I finished talking, she raised her chin up to look at me, then nuzzled it back against my hair. She’s still the only other person who knows. Knew. Now there’s no one again.
It was hard to put a finger on exactly when my friendship with Edie began to come apart at the seams; by July, we were having icy half-fights via email, infuriating ones where I’d write something long and detailed and she’d respond, with neither punctuation nor capitalization, “sure” or “what time” or “k.” Edie said no to more and more group activities and closed herself into her little white room, especially sad because its square windows looked out not on the world but on the apartment’s gloomy interior. Alex and Edie broke up in July, too—just a few months after they’d finally gotten together—for reasons neither of them really bothered to explain, adding that they were going to stay friends and not move out or anything. Now I saw that it was probably FOMO that kept either from being the one to leave, fear of missing out, fear of being ostracized, seeming maturity masking massive insecurity. It had to have been uncomfortable.
That summer, Edie and Sarah spent more time than ever hanging out in my apartment, a tiny but comfortable share with cracked walls and scuffed linoleum floors and a normal layout, a quiet roommate from Washington State, bedrooms with windows onto the street below. I felt a humming anxiety that the Calhounies must be instantly bored in my apartment, unstimulated by its lack of weird wall hangings, life-size portraits, or swings suspended from the ceiling. And I was jealous, too, jealous and in awe of the offbeat creatures in Calhoun and other Escherlike buildings who could coolly live in those strange setups. They did it so casually: “Oh, this?”
I found Greg’s full name in an email and Googled him; strange how he’d felt so firmly in the past by the time Edie died, when in reality she’d been his ex of only six months. Time felt different then, stretchy and wide. I found him listed as a partner at some tech-y, startup-y architectural firm, beaming at me from a poorly framed headshot. The website was a confusing mass of buzzwords: “breakthroughs” and “collective reach” and “strategic partnerships.” Gross. No contact information for him, just a physical address somewhere in DUMBO. I saved the listing and returned to my archives.
A name hit a nostalgic note in the February emails, and I clicked through to something I’d sent a friend from college who was teaching English in Italy, someone I lost contact with in the ensuing years. It started out with boring catch-up talk, but the middle of it made my stomach squeeze:
Sometimes I just feel like such an idiot next to Edie. Like, so incompetent. The other day I was complaining to her about my boss and she was like, “Lindsay, you know everyone and their dog is unemployed right now, so you can see why she expects you to be working late and not complaining, right?” And she’s RIGHT, but it’s also like, Why can’t you ever just be on my side? Or sometimes when I’m asking for her advice on guys, she’ll ask what I said or look at what I’ve texted and she gives me this wide-eyed look like, Oh my GOD, how do you not know how to talk to boys? Which maybe I sort of don’t. She’s just so GOOD at everything. I know I just sound jealous, but it’s not that. It’s something, though…
Wow—I hadn’t realized that I’d noticed so early how uneven the power dynamics of our friendship were. Later, I’d worked out that we were the kind of friends you make fresh out of college, when the only thing you have in common is doing fun things together. And so, after months of passive-aggressive torment from Edie (and quiet complicity from the rest of our friends, who were just happy her scorn wasn’t directed at them), I’d made a grand decision: I’d extricate myself from this group and start over with kinder, happier, less self-obsessed people. I was planning to tell her that very weekend. I’d been prepped for that discussion, equipped and braced, and then she’d died. It was awful.
For her, of course. Well, for everyone. But especially for me. It was ridiculous, but in addition to the squall of confusion and grief and shock, there’d been