ravenous all the time now. Mom says it’s nerves, but I know it’s whatever they switched me to. They thought it was the Zoloft giving me headaches, though they haven’t gone away and now I’m convinced it’s this quiet hell of Onalaska, Wisconsin. M&D have eased up on the surveillance compared with last year, I guess because I’m almost 16 now and “making very promising progress,” as Dr. Mahoney wrote recently in an email Mom printed out and stupidly left on her desk: That’s how you discuss your dog in obedience school, not your daughter. I can’t wait for college. I don’t understand why people are so content to be here, imagining their whole lives spooling out without trying anything new or experiencing anywhere better.
What followed was a boring tale of being stuck at piano lessons, waiting for my parents to pick me up while a popular girl drove up for her own lesson and made polite, banal conversation. I could tell even from my written account that I’d been the bitch in the situation—so shy and self-conscious that I’d come across as hostile. How had I gone from hating popular girls to becoming one’s best friend?
I flipped forward a bit, the pages shuffling awkwardly under their glue. Josh was popular in high school, I decided. Maybe not prom king, but definitely prom court.
It was toward the end of that year that I started admiring my artsy classmates. I wrote something gushing about Michaela Leonard, a painter in eleventh grade who’d made a blog tribute to men in black-framed glasses. She let me burn copies of some of her CDs: The Get Up Kids, Weezer, The Dismemberment Plan. I could almost picture them, nacreous in my leather CD wallet.
I couldn’t play a CD now if I tried, I realized. I’d fact-checked a story once on futurists’ predictions, and one had commented that we’re in the digital dark ages: A few short centuries from now, historians won’t have any way to access the pixels and bytes into which we funnel our lives. The predigital stuff, this glue-y journal in my hands—that was what survived.
* * *
Sarah must have heard me, some weird tin-can-telephone telepathy stringing from my cerebrum to hers, because the next day she texted me a photo of a number written in curly, girlish handwriting. “Found my Moleskine from back then,” her message read. “This = Lloyd.”
I called him immediately, doubting he’d have the same number ten years on anyway. There was some clicking, then the sound of fumbling. “Whoa! Hello?”
“Hi, is this Lloyd Kohler?”
“Yep. Whoa, I was just trying to use my phone and you were there. Who is this?”
“My name’s Lindsay Bach. I know this is random, but we have a good friend in common from a long time ago. In New York.”
I felt my shoulders rise, ready for him to hang up.
“And who’s that?” he said finally.
“Please hear me out if you can. I’m calling about Edie Iredale.”
Another massive silence. I went on: “I’m sure you don’t remember this, but you and I actually hung out a few times around then, too. Edie and I bumped into you and Alex Kotsonis and some girls one night in Manhattan and ended up on a rooftop. Hanging out in an empty pool.” And, later, having terrible drunken sex. And, later still, being engaged in battery, when I blackened your eye. My fridge clunked on, humming through the silence.
“Familiar. Fourteenth Street, right?”
He remembered. I felt a small, pathetic spurt of pleasure.
“Yes, that’s the one. And I know you and Edie kept seeing each other later. I don’t mean to bring up anything painful, but I’m just trying to”—I hesitated—“get some answers.”
“Ha. Is this like High Fidelity, where you talk to all her exes, only the twist is that she’s dead?”
I tried mirroring. “Pretty much, except that in the movie version, Catherine Zeta-Jones had nothing helpful to say. I’m hoping you can do better.”
“Doubt it. Why the fact-finding mission?”
“I think someone killed her,” I said. “I don’t think it was suicide.”
Another long wait and I began to regret my frankness. Why couldn’t I stick with the old party line, that I was looking back and trying to understand why Edie did what she did? What about this kooky kid, on whom I’d had a breathless crush ten years ago, made me blurt out the truth?
“What makes you say that?” He had one of those preternaturally calm voices, like an actor who manages to make all his lines sound