a glare. “Then a cop car pulls up with its lights flashing and they take all our licenses and tell us that drinking in the street would be a—what was it?”
“An eighty-dollar fine for drinking in the street, but it’s three hundred twenty if you’re in a public park,” Edie supplied, to general agreement.
“Then what?” I said. My voice sounded nasal.
Alex blew a plume of smoke. “Then Edie gets up and walks over to the cop car—”
“—even though they told us not to move.” Sarah’s voice, off-camera. Something sat up in me like a cat. So spooky, hearing the same voice I’d just heard over dinner, but younger, frothier.
“Right, even though they told us not to move,” Alex continued, “and she’s over there talking to them for like five minutes, and then they come back and say we’re really lucky we’re over twenty-one and they’ve already hit their ticket quota for the night, and they watched us dump our beer and then off they went.”
“Edie, what’d you say to them?” I panned back to her.
She shrugged, still smiling. “I just said we were all dumb, unemployed kids who should’ve known better, but that we’d never do it again,” she said. “And then I told them my roommate had called 911 last week after a man followed her into the building and forced himself on her in the foyer, and he matched the description of the serial rapist who’s been running around Williamsburg, and the cops who came to take her statement were so nice, and the work the policemen do is so important.”
“It isn’t true, for the record,” Sarah called, still off-screen. “About the rapist being in our building.”
“But there is a serial rapist in Williamsburg, that’s true,” I said.
“Yeah, maybe the cops should worry about that,” Alex muttered.
“…and then I cried,” Edie finished sweetly, with a shrug. Someone said something, then repeated, “Do it.” So the camera zoomed in to Edie’s head, her face, then just her eyes, shakily, and Edie looked hard into it until fat, pretty tears broke free.
The video ended and I Xed out of it, alarmed by Edie’s intense stare. I hit next: There was a Fourth of July barbecue with a shitty band performing on a rooftop; a mass of skinny humans in lamé bathing suits and bright eighties patterns and so much exposed, tender skin. Edie had climbed onto the brick ledge along the edge of the roof, standing up so she could see the stage. Fearless. Watching it now made my ribs contract. In the video, I screamed, “Get down from there, you moron!” and Edie just turned and waved.
Then there was a little video from mid-August, just a few days before Edie died, thirty seconds of the four of us—no Edie—playing Jenga in a bar’s leafy backyard. The game’s pieces had dares Sharpied onto them by previous players, and Sarah pulled one that instructed her to post a photo of herself wearing the Jenga box as a hat. She was reluctant and Kevin spazzed around, hyping her up, squishing his big grin into her photo.
That was it. Nothing new about August 21.
Perhaps there was a recently deleted folder. I held down the center button to try to call up a new menu and…
Black. I pressed the forward and back buttons and still just black. I hit play and the screen said “No new videos.” I’d deleted them all. Fuck.
Fighting down panic, I texted Tessa and Damien for help, then Googled “how to recover deleted Flip cam videos.” Incredibly, there were how-tos, dozens of them. I had to convince my computer to play nice with the camera, and then I had to download a sketchy-seeming program called Recuva (“pronounced re-cuh-va!” according to the cheerful Southern dad in the YouTube tutorial), but a half-hour later I had an ugly-looking folder just bursting with old videos.
The new file names were meaningless, but I counted forty-three of them. An uncensored batch of video files, up from a dozen—now we were getting somewhere. I checked the file creation dates and saw, with a pulse down my arms, that one was from August 21, 2009.
I dragged it into my iMovie player and turned up the volume. The video jerked around in the dark for a while; there was music, tinny guitars. Tones of black and gray, the indistinct din of people hanging out. The time stamp read 10:48. When had Sarah found Edie? Shortly after that, wasn’t it, around 11:15, 11:30? The video was long,