year as a gang: such potent, intoxicating fun, a billowing glee I hadn’t experienced before and certainly haven’t since. A montage of drunken nights spent wandering from floor to floor searching for the source of a pounding bassline, or setting off fireworks from the roof, or drifting around phoneless, unable to find one another in separate sets of staircases. We weren’t yet glued to our devices: There was no Instagram to document in flattering light that you’d been included, no location tagging to show you were there. For me, it was like a college do-over, reparations for those four years of agonizing over my GPA and pottering around in a medication-induced fog. Calhoun felt self-contained, its own little microcosm, with secrets and a kind of kiddie society and the feel of a grand immersive theater production. We were so young but thought we were the wisest bastards on the planet. We didn’t run the world, and in fact outside the sky was falling, but we did run that building, eight floors high and a block long on an otherwise undeveloped street in Bushwick.
My pointer hovered over a photo of Edie dancing, and I smiled at the screen. She really did come alive on the dance floor—spinning and popping and shaking and convulsing in a way that somehow looked so fucking cool, so confident and brazenly joyful that others always turned to watch. There was a monthly dance-off, I remembered suddenly, in a sweat-smelling venue by the river, and three times Edie had taken home first prize.
And that smile on her face. I checked the date: June 3, a few months before she died. No one had seen her smile like this in the weeks leading up to her death. Not Alex, whom she would dump just a few weeks later, even as they vowed to be friends. Not Sarah, as the two picked little fights, half antagonizing, half avoiding each other—impossible, of course, in that strange Alice in Wonderland–style setting. Certainly not me, in the aftermath of the blowup of the century that left me looking around at the bomb site and wondering how I’d called her my best friend.
I finished fact-checking the cocktail feature and turned my attention to an absurd sex piece about what everyone can learn from polyamorous relationships. An idea unfurled as the day wore on: the state’s Freedom of Information Law. A FOIL request, a polite and unignorable demand that the police department pony up whatever I please; I completed them all the time for work, digging up files that writers were too lazy to uncover firsthand. I knew the intricacies of the application form and could certainly make a quiet request under the guise of my research job. If there had been an investigation around Edie’s death, as Sarah had mentioned, then there must be a case file. I filled out an online form and got a pop-up indicating the requested files would be sent to me in one to five business days—a bullshit timeframe when the retrieval was almost certainly happening on a scale of nanoseconds, if-then algorithms instantaneously humming in a digital brain.
Near the end of the day, I checked my work email, and midway through responding to an editor, something clicked: I had to get into my old email. I’d blathered tons of juicy stuff in messages to and from Edie back in the day; we’d written constantly about weekend plans, her relationship dramas, the previous night’s party recaps. Maybe inspecting them now, with my fact-checker’s eye, would reveal something I’d missed, a cry for help or a pall of depression I’d been too young to grasp. Or perhaps I’d written something about the concert that night—maybe there was proof, documentation of my whereabouts. I’d abandoned the account years ago, and the service no longer existed, so there was no simple reset password button. But there must be some way to crack it back open, wriggle inside.
And I knew who could help. I texted my friend Tessa late in the afternoon; she was always surprising me with the digital lockpicking skills she’d picked up in her library sciences program. She invited me over later that week—Damien, too, if he was free.
I couldn’t resist checking Facebook one last time before shutting down my computer. I scrolled a bit further and my heart jumped: Deep in one of Sarah’s photo albums was a little thumbnail that looked familiar. Full-size, it was four men scuzzing around onstage, keyboards and guitars and synth.