lunch table. She was my girl crush, and my adoration fed her.
But that’s not it. She could be such a good friend, when she wasn’t obsessed with her own problems or mad at you about something. I thought back to my twenty-third birthday, when we’d gone to see an Australian band at Glasslands, a wood-paneled venue with terrible bathrooms and reliably cute bartenders. I’d deemed the keyboardist hot, and as soon as the show ended, Edie had dragged me to the lip of the stage and introduced me as the birthday girl as he helped break down gear. He’d invited us into the greenroom and we’d spent the evening drinking with the Aussies; twice, she’d pulled me into the bathroom to make sure I liked this guy, that I was still having a good time.
I’d missed her so badly in the weeks and months after her death, even though I’d been planning to split from her anyway, even though the departure was almost mine. Over and over, I’d think of something funny or ridiculous or sarcastic to share with Edie, and sometimes I’d have my phone out by the time I realized I couldn’t text her. Nor could I contact any of the other Calhounies, off grieving in their building’s rambling halls. Instead I’d worked hard to find new friends, ones to whom Edie meant nothing, and I’d watched with slight surprise as time rolled past.
* * *
That night I dreamed I was in Calhoun again, stumbling through the halls with something behind me, my legs clumsy and useless, bruises blooming on my shins and knees. The apartment numbers on the doors that lined the corridor kept changing, so that no matter which way I went, SAKE slipped farther and farther away, 3G, 4H, wrong wrong wrong. I turned around and suddenly knew, with certainty, it was Alex behind me, Alex coming for me. I started awake gasping for air, terrified, like I’d been a hairsbreadth away from dying.
I stared at the ceiling for a while, picking back through my phone call with Alex two nights earlier. Why hadn’t Edie moved into her parents’ apartment after the breakup, if only for a week or two? She had her own room there, and things with Alex must not have ended well if, two months later, he was standing on a rooftop, screaming “I want to slit her throat!” into the night.
Edie and I had bonded a bit by complaining about our insufferable parents, but I’d never met Mrs. Iredale. Everyone else had, which made me feel a little excluded; she’d helped Edie move in and the other roommates complained about her occasionally showing up at Calhoun, smelling of whiskey and banging on the door of 4G. She was like the kooky old woman in the crumbling house that the neighborhood kids call a witch, one-upping one another with mad tales. Who was this woman?
On the subway ride to work, I hatched a plan, a madcap scheme that shoved Alex further, further, further out of the frame. I’d talk to Edie’s mother—figure out if she had any suspicions or details she’d kept hidden. From my desk, I used an app to hide my number and called her landline, a rare 212 area code on an island of untethered communications. She picked up and I asked if José was home (Why José? I thought, even as I said it), then apologized, hung up, and began gathering my things. I wasn’t sure what I’d tell her at her front door, but I had a twenty-five-minute bus ride to figure it out.
As I rode north toward Morningside Heights—an odd neighborhood near Manhattan’s knobby tip, one where old row houses unfold down both sides of the street—my brain kept sifting; mentally I stepped over the people I’d talked to like bodies scattered across the ground: Sarah, Tessa, Kevin, Damien, Alex. I peered out the window, where rain coated the street, and my mind wandered over to last year’s horrific accident in the Bronx, the one where a bus collided with a big rig, veered into a pole, and had its top sliced off by a sign. Fourteen people dead after rolling around like popcorn inside. I imagined it for a moment, this bus suddenly airborne, screaming and limbs and the stiff punches of seats, windows, other bodies.
The bus was frigid and I wrapped my arms around me, feeling the staticky fluff of goose bumps—one of those silly leftovers from evolution, like the tailbone and