loudly without her. Her aloneness was so random, so total and unprovoked, that she almost thought someone from the school would come along to smooth it out, the way they might a housing mix-up, or a schedule snafu. Just before winter break, she tried to join a sorority, walking into an information session to find two hundred girls in the nearly same black pointed boots, ink-blue jeans, and tartan scarves. Only one other girl in the room was not wearing some version of this look: a girl from India whom Orla recognized from her discrete math class. An eager blonde who had been talking to the Indian girl, enunciating loudly, turned to Orla when she sat down. She assessed Orla’s Lehigh hoodie and sky blue denim, the plastic claw in her hair. “And what country are you from?” the blonde said loudly.
By spring, Orla was leaning into isolation. She sold her meal plan on the student exchange website and took to eating buffalo wings in her room. She worked her way through Sex and the City on DVD. She wrote: short stories, song lyrics, never-ending screenplays. And, as more and more ways to do it were invented, she kept up with Danny. She would write for four minutes, then refresh Danny’s Myspace. She would falter on a passage, then toggle over to stare at his screen name on her Instant Messenger buddy list, watching the letters go from black to gray when he found something better to do.
The semesters turned into the next ones, and nothing changed. Once, Orla saw the Indian girl from the sorority meeting in the student union. She walked toward the girl, an opener gathering itself in her mind—Remember that night, how crazy was that, like was there a Burberry memo we missed? But as she got closer, a harried redhead ran up and punched the arm of the Indian girl. They found a table and unzipped their jackets. Orla saw that the Indian girl had on the right scarf, the right jeans and boots. And a crew-necked sweatshirt with Greek letters, denoting Alpha Phi.
When she went home on breaks, Orla would sometimes glance up at the ring of her parents’ landline. But, after a school year’s worth of silence, Catherine had started to text her. She would send Orla canned messages on holidays—happy this or that, and hi to your parents—and each girl would ask how the other had been. What could really be said that way? Twice, Orla snuffed out an exchange by saying, with a smiley, “Nothing new to report!” Facebook had not yet reached Catherine’s lower-tier state school, but Orla didn’t need it; she could picture how well her friend had moved on. She imagined Catherine’s soccer teammates with tight stomachs and clean faces, fussing over Danny the first time he came to visit. She imagined them teasing Catherine about being a lightweight, and putting her gently to bed when she proved them right. There was only one thing she really wondered about her old friend: how long she and Danny would be together.
She got the answer she wanted a few weeks after college graduation. Orla moved straight back to Mifflin, to make good on a deal she had struck with her parents: she would live at home and work locally for one year, to save money before moving to New York. She had secured a job covering town council meetings for the newspaper that fell on Mifflin’s doorsteps.
One night, a week before she was due to start at the paper, Orla ran into Catherine while picking up takeout at TGI Fridays. (Jerry was fond of saying that the chain’s Jack Daniel’s chicken was the best dinner on earth, that “you”—who “you” was had never quite been defined—“can keep your Michelin-star joints.”) When their eyes met, Orla was holding her father’s credit card, and Catherine was holding a drink with a flashing scrotum plunged into the ice.
“It’s my bachelorette party!” she crowed, grabbing Orla’s elbow to anchor herself. “Danny and I are getting married next month.” Her eyes widened and she dug her fingers into Orla’s arm. “Stay!” she pleaded. “Hang out.” Orla phoned home, hoping for an out, but Gayle joyfully insisted that Orla forget about bringing home the food and enjoy herself.
Catherine’s soccer friends—there were three of them—looked exactly as Orla had envisioned. They were bright and healthy, sculpted muscle covered in skin that was somehow tanned and freckled at once. They all had hair that looked like it was