a beautiful morning, breezy and cooler than normal, and a bird had chosen the nearest tree to sit and sing its little heart out. I’d gazed at it, wishing I could tear its lungs out and make the sound stop.
“How did she find her?”
“She came home to start getting ready for bed and found the body.”
She closed her eyes. “Jeez, poor Sarah. How’d she seem?”
“The next morning, you mean? She just seemed exhausted. Obviously they hadn’t slept all night. Sarah’s and…I think Alex’s parents were coming in that day. That’s right, Kevin had spent the night in jail ’cause of the unlicensed firearm and was waiting to talk to the DA, and then he was gonna go stay with Alex’s family. So everyone was just waiting to be brought back to hotels.” I’d felt jealous, to be honest: accosted by this news and then too many steps behind and away to get any support. None of my so-called “friends” had asked if I’d wanted to go with them; I’d just waited until they’d all left, then gone home, climbed back into bed, and bawled.
Tessa stood up and crossed into the kitchen, bending to root around in her backpack. “You said you and Edie were on bad terms?”
“Yeah. We were basically inseparable for a year. And then I started to feel like our friendship was sort of based on me being fucked up and her being more together than me.”
Tessa returned with a bar of dark chocolate; she broke off a chunk and handed the rest to me.
“That’s why I’d made up my mind to separate myself from her, which would mean also separating myself from the whole crew, which was scary. But necessary, you know? Deciding felt very adult. And then a week before she died, we had this stupid fight over nothing.” I held out the bar and she took it, foil crinkling.
“What happened?”
I let the chocolate melt on my tongue for a moment. “It was so inane. The weather was shitty and someone had invited me over, maybe Sarah, and I’d brought a bunch of DVDs in case everyone felt like being lazy and staying in. Edie still wanted to go into Williamsburg and I was jokingly being whiny, you know, ‘It’s raaaaining, let’s staaaaay,’ and she just snapped.” I could still see the look on her face, could still feel the blow of her shrieked words. “She just started screaming that I was the most selfish and controlling person she’d ever met and that I was always acting like I owned the place when it wasn’t even my apartment.” God, it’d hurt. The bruise resurfaced, still fresh. “Then she stormed out of the apartment and all of us were like, whoa.”
“Whoa is right,” Tessa said. “Did you ever talk about it?”
I shrugged. “She texted the next day and just said she was sorry for, quote-unquote, flipping a bitch, and that she’d been stressed about other stuff. I’d been thinking about cutting ties anyway, so I just told her it was fine. But after that, things were…tense. It was like she’d cut me off before I could do the same.”
Tessa set the chocolate on the coffee table. “ ‘Stressed about other stuff.’ You didn’t ask what?”
“Not really. I mean, everyone was stressed out. It was two thousand fucking nine. Edie’s parents were about to lose her childhood home, Kevin and Alex couldn’t find real jobs, Sarah had been laid off…”
“I remember,” Tessa said. “That era, I mean. All these weird aftershocks and this feeling like…” She hesitated.
“Like right after an earthquake, when you’re not actually sure if it’s about to get worse,” I offered.
Tessa nodded.
“You were still in Chicago then, right?” I asked.
She nodded again. We sucked on our chocolate. “I might have asked you this before, but I forget: Why was Kevin keeping a gun in the apartment?”
“Oh, it was awful. The good little Southern boy had this antique pistol from his grandfather that he kept in this chest in the living room—like a steamer trunk? He loved that gun. It didn’t occur to any of us that you can’t just randomly have an unlicensed firearm in New York. It was hardly ever loaded, and he never let us touch it. Apparently he’d gone target shooting in Bucks County the weekend before and just hadn’t dealt with it yet. God, he’ll never forgive himself.”
“Would Edie even be comfortable using it?”
“I dunno. I can’t think why she’d have touched it before.”