a job, hiring freezes and mass layoffs all over the place like avalanches, like those videos of huge chunks of what looks like a mountain breaking off and speeding toward hell. That’s what it felt like, everything around us dropping with insane speed while I stood in the middle of my happy snow globe with shit whiskey and cool people and a few dollars and my drumsticks. Maybe not everyone appreciated it, but I knew we had it good.
So I guess I was pretty cheerful because I was on to that, and maybe in some subconscious way I was trying to convey that to everyone else, too: Dude, stop shitting on everything and come listen to this new album with me, it’s pretty good. Everyone was so negative all the time and I thought it was so funny, so affected. Rolling their eyes and hoisting up their noses at Murray Hill bros and Ugg-clad girls and popular songs and clueless parents and med-school-attending high school friends and themselves, hate hate hate hate. That was how it felt, like Duck, Duck, Goose only when they got to themselves they looked surprised and whispered “Duck!” too.
I remember once my roommate Sarah came home all upset because a guy on a packed subway had called her a “hipster bitch” after they got snappish about fitting through a door or something. She was all morose and finally our friend Lindsay asked what was up and when Sarah told us, Lindsay was so outraged and sympathetic, but I couldn’t stop laughing. Remember that word, “hipster”? It was the oddest thing, slippery as an eel, meant as a compliment when some out-members used it (like the New York Times speaking breathlessly about a new “hipster art installation”), but as an insult when certain out-members (see: the subway asshole) and even in-members (see: anyone dumb enough to utter the word inside Calhoun) used it. There were silly Tumblrs about it, stupid books picking the so-called “subculture” apart. We all wanted to naturally, effortlessly be hipsters without anyone calling us hipsters, we wanted to be the definition set forth by the supremely uncool editors of the Style section, but we would sooner die than let anyone know that, and also who the fuck cares what those losers at the Times think is cool? The fuck do they know about coolness? God, it was so funny then and it’s hilarious now.
So basically I just liked reminding everyone that yeah, ludicrous shit was going down and our parents’ net worth was plummeting, but we were doing just fine, the kids are all right, and so much is so funny if you know where to look. And I think Edie liked that, saw a bit of a kindred spirit, because she was amused, too, she was confident and gave zero fucks. I really didn’t know her that well when she first moved in with Alex and me that spring, had seen her around the building a bit, had the occasional beer with her in a Calhoun hallway or open-door living room. Alex seemed to like her a lot and when two rooms in our apartment opened up, the weird hippie chick from Portland and the mustachioed bro from Minnesota suddenly deciding to split, Alex seemed pretty thrilled about Edie moving in. Smiling to himself as he wandered toward the bathroom, that kinda thing. And it seemed like they were being smart about it, her still having her own separate room so they’d still have solo space. See? Shit’s not all bad.
* * *
It blows me away to think that Edie moved in in April and was dead by Labor Day. It felt like so much time. What was it about that era that slowed down the clocks and made every month feel brimming and eclectic like my steamer trunk in the living room? It reminds me of camp: Mom sent me one summer when I was nine or ten, and when I learned from her years later that the whole thing had been only three weeks long, I was blown away. Because so fucking much had happened, I was sure it had been the whole summer: best friends, alliances, enemies, crushes, breakups, entire operatic narratives compressed into twenty-one days. That’s how Calhoun felt, each week its own ginormous plotline.
* * *
And it became a story line with a big twist when I came home and Edie’s shorts were covered in blood. Years later, the first time Evelyn had a