A chronic friend-defector. I’d noticed it as well but had thought—hoped—she was like me, floundering through her early social life until the right people, the right friendships, appeared.
“Well, if someone did it, I want to figure out who,” I said.
He tittered again. “Hey, be my guest. You know absolutely everything I know at this point, but maybe you’ll have more luck.” Clunk clunk click. “Or maybe we’re both wackos.”
“Why didn’t you back up Sarah? When she was saying she didn’t think it was suicide?”
“Yeah, that worked out really well for her. Total pariah, shipped off to the loony bin. But unlike me, she wasn’t under suspicion by the poh-lice.” He drew it out for effect. “I’m glad you saw her, healed some old wounds. She still nursing her suspicions?”
“No, not at all. ‘I was young and stupid, I was grasping at straws,’ that kind of thing.” I chewed on my lip. “I never even knew she had this conspiracy theory. I kinda stopped talking to everyone right away.”
“Right, I think I knew that. The whole period is a blur for me, it’s kinda hard to remember who was around when.”
Did he know anything about my disputed whereabouts that night? It was as if he were addressing my unasked question.
“But I’ll tell ya, if you can somehow figure out what really went on that night—” He cut himself off suddenly. “Lindsay, I gotta run, my husband’s on the other line.”
“No worries, thanks for talking to me.”
“Y’all take care of yourself.”
You all? Me and whom?
“Thanks, Kevin. You, too.” I hung up and looked around the living room. Figure out what really went on that night. Clearly I didn’t remember as much as I thought I did. I’d been drunk, but it had just been a brown-out: I had strong snippets of each portion of the night, scene after scene after scene, like an intricately set-designed play. Up on the roof, sitting on the cement and chasing shots with beer. Then we’d all decided to head to the concert—no, Kevin had had a show in Greenpoint, it was just me and Alex and Sarah—and there was the flurry and racket and energy gust of a drunken location change. Then the show: Even Sarah’s photo hadn’t convinced me I was thinking of another night. I could see it, the guys in red zebra face paint rushing around the stage. Strobe lights and a ball spitting green dots over the crowd and what looked like hundreds of sweaty revelers dancing to the noise. The alcohol hitting me all at once and the sudden, billowing conviction that I needed to be in bed. Had I shouted goodbye to them or just left? Had Sarah somehow missed me?
Figure out what really went on. My damn brain was no use, a recorder with damaged tapes: 2009 was on the early end of the accidental police state we all live in today, where whipping out your camera to document everything is the norm. I remembered a story I’d fact-checked about Big Brother–type surveillance in which a filmmaker had mused that there’s so much more amazing material for documentaries today, because there are cameras absolutely everywhere.
Something clicked: my camcorder. My silly-looking Flip cam, a strange little thing with only a single function, a box with a big red record button that made videos we’d watched almost exclusively on its tiny screen—I’d carried it around in my massive vintage purse at almost all times. We used it rarely and randomly, and I’d been so bad about connecting the gadget to my computer that all the videos lived on the camcorder. There likely wouldn’t be many; I had a habit of deleting videos after a single viewing, especially when the clip showed me embarrassingly drunk. But maybe something had survived, some clue we’d overlooked that would bristle with meaning now.
I could picture my Flip cam, could almost feel its shiny plastic coating in my fingers, its shape readying my palm for the iPhone that would soon doom it. Had I tossed it during one of my moves? I began pulling things out of the hall closet, snapping open bags and boxes and piling them on the floor. Nothing. I moved on to the cabinets around the TV, yanking out board games and old magazines and outdated electronics and other things I knew an adult shouldn’t still own. Then I pulled every dusty storage bin out from under my bed, flinging through old scarves