Dear Reader

by Mary O'Connell

  The Apple employee was smiling expectantly, but I had no idea what else to say to her. I squinted at her, stumped, my mouth half-open: D is for Dumbass!

  “Feel free to use a computer.” She chuckled and swept her bony white hand in the air, a seagull taking flight. “Take your pick.”

  On a shiny silver laptop that looked smooth and sweet and compact, a foil-wrapped chocolate bar of a computer, I logged into my Gmail account and found six new e-mails: three from Sacred Heart, one from the police department, and one from Zappos. And then I started scrolling back, looking for my last e-mail from Brandon, the one I’d never deleted. It was now more than six years old, and I didn’t know if a statute of limitations for gazing at old e-mail existed, but I kept scrolling. I had 18,000 unread e-mails—the Gap was very keen to get in touch with me—so I had to go back and back.

  The last time I’d actually seen Brandon had been at Carman Hall. After overhearing my disgusting, world-changing words to Nancy, aka the backstabbing I want to go out with Miles monologue, Brandon had disappeared. I had lain awake the first night, wondering if he would call or text—he couldn’t get back into Carman without Nancy or me, since he didn’t have a dorm ID. But morning came, and The Day After The Drama passed, and my Brandon-less life commenced: Yes, I felt flayed by the harsh twists and turns of life, and was prone to protracted crying jags, but I figured Brandon had gotten himself back home. Oh, and I was also hanging out with Miles.

  Nancy was not as worried about Brandon as I thought she would be, and so I assumed her obvious little crush was just the old passing fancy. We started exploring the city together—two girls on the go! One Saturday morning walking with our coffee in Central Park, we saw two children—a little boy in a white oxford shirt and navy blue shorts and a little girl in a white dress with a navy sash—vogueing gamely for their mother, who was taking their photo. Their father yelled encouragement: “Smile, Chandler! Smile, Lily!” The nanny fake-smiled as she waited by a stroller some twenty feet away. The mom—all honey-blonde blown-out hair and gym arms and dark-rinse skinny jeans—kept yelling, “Smile, silly Lily! Smile, Chandler! I’m looking for your very best smile! I want the best of the best, buddy!”

  Chandler and silly Lily were posing in front of a large gray rock, and from our vantage point on the sidewalk, Nancy and I could see a big old rat behind the rock. Dear Reader, of course we Oh my God-ed and convulsed with laughter, and I regret to report we took out our phones and walked closer so we could take the Rich Kids and the Rat photo. The parents kept up with their “Smile!” routine, not knowing that hantavirus loomed right around the jagged granite corner, not knowing they were giving two college girls the laugh of their lives. The rat swished his fat posterior back and forth; he had found a discarded spool of pink cotton candy and lowered his head to eat. O, how our hearts sang! How grateful Nancy and I were to the sweet-toothed litterbug who had furthered our joy with a sloppily discarded cotton candy. But from where I stood I couldn’t fit the rich kids and the rat in the frame, so I aimed my phone directly at the rat. He (or she) frantically gorged, and when he lifted his head, a puff of pink cotton candy lodged on his little rodent head, the briefest bouffant. I got the photo. Buddy, I got the best of the best.

  Nancy and I couldn’t speak for a good ten minutes, and later our abdominal muscles ached from laughing so deliriously: Did we just see George Washington Rat about to forge Central Park West in his powdered pink wig? No! The rat was just on his way to Rodent Wigstock. Dear Reader, we agreed that the wigged transformation of the rat was just the sort of physical miracle—our personal loaves and fishes—that we would not witness again in our lifetimes.

  The next Friday, Nancy left me a note saying that she had gone to her parents’ house for the weekend. Miles and I went for sushi and to hear Junot Díaz read on campus, and I felt awfully pleased with myself, pleased that this was how I now I spent my Saturday nights, my sweet, broadening horizons! Still, it felt a little weird to head home at 9:30 on a weekend night, even with company.

  Miles and I went back to my dorm room, since Nancy was in New Jersey. We were walking down the hallway at Carman, laughing about how Miles’s roommate, Phillip, was a perpetual presence, due to his agoraphobia, and wasn’t that just the best luck ever?

  I unlocked the door; I flipped on the light.

  “Oh my God, Caitlin?” Nancy pulled her comforter over her face and moaned: “Caitlin, I’m so sorry.”

  Dear Reader, there are some moments so otherworldly that it is best to run, to run away and to make no excuses for your exit: Flee the scene. Do not stand and blink; do not make your mouth a perfect oval and emit a banshee wail of sorrowful surprise.

  Brandon propped up on his elbows, squinting from the sudden light. He smiled at me—his dimples showed—and said brightly: “Hey there, Caitlin!” I had the horrible memory of once placing a Skittle in Brandon’s dimple to see if it would stay (it had): a personal science fair of new love.

  Nancy started to cry.

  Copper-colored stars showered into my vision: Yes, I was seeing stars, as if I were a cartoon Southern belle—Why, oh my stars—instead of a shocked college student. Brandon! How I had missed him! If not for the incongruency, I would have told him I loved him right then and there, and if not for our three hearts, which would remain fiercely broken, Nancy and Brandon and I could have been the hapless, slutty stars of an MTV reality show about hooking up with roommates. All we needed to complete the unfortunate tableau was an empty Captain Morgan bottle next to Nancy’s twin bed and a hot-pink string bikini top dangling from a phallic bedpost. Instead, there was Nancy’s bra on the floor—pale lilac trimmed with white lace—horrifying as a severed head.

  I put my casted hand over my eyes.

  From beneath the covers came a noise from Nancy, halfway between a groan and a whimper, and I regretted that we would never be able to laugh about this together, to indulge our word-girl fun: From beneath the covers, Nancy grimpered. She grimly grimpered!

  Miles commented, “Awkward!” and politely looked away. Perhaps because Miles had gone to boarding school, these dormitory dramas were entirely familiar to him. In any case, he navigated the awkwardness with mastery. He stepped back into the hallway and offered up a casual: “Sorry, guys! Carry on.”

  Miles: the only person on the scene without a crucial bit of information.

  “Carry on? Well, aye, aye, Captain. At your service, sir!” Brandon stood, and gave him a salute. “Also, what a great jacket that is, would you call that color puce?”

  Brandon himself was wearing no clothes at all, so Miles couldn’t slam his fashion sense. In truth, I had noticed earlier that his jacket, possibly a blazer, looked a bit odd—wide-wale corduroy in a faded shade of gray with a lavender undertone. Brandon was correct: puce. Well, Miles had the confidence to wear any jacket he’d picked up at a thrift store for five dollars. (And he always bought his jeans at Barneys.) But right at that moment, Miles looked extremely unsure of himself.

  Brandon was not a fighter by nature, but it seemed like that might be about to change.

  I gripped the baggy sleeve of Miles’s puce jacket and whisper-hissed, “Let’s go.”

  “Leaving so soon, Caitlin?” Hearing Brandon say my name was pure punishment. “You got some big, big plans with Tiny Tim?” I could see a stripe of muscle pulsing in Miles’s jawline as we started down the hall. He was on the short side. By now Nancy was fully sobbing underneath the covers. No more grimpering for her. You deserve it, I thought.

  But really, she didn’t.

  Miles whispered. “Wait. Is that him?” He walked faster when I nodded. I banged my good hand on the elevator button but we were stuck, waiting. Oh God! We should have taken the stairs at the other end of the hall, but we obviously couldn’t walk past my room again. And just as I was regretting yet another life decision, I heard a loud thunk, and then Miles’s voice, stripped of all irony: “Owwww!”

  And then came another thunk, and another, and Miles doubled over
just as the elevator dinged, but he managed to scramble inside after me. There were two girls getting out, alarmed at the way Miles was whining and holding his back.

  I looked down the hall. It was the last time I would see Brandon alive.

  He had stepped back into my dorm room, but his head was poking around the corner, watching me. Dear Reader, what had I done, and could it possibly be undone? He held out one hand, palms up, and I would spend years discerning if that gesture meant: What do I care, Caitlin? Enjoy your life with the puce blazer dude, or O, come back to me. My vision of the hallway narrowed as the elevator doors moaned and started to pull together, a gray frame shrinking the picture into a vertical slice before that world disappeared altogether.

  From inside the elevator I heard one of the girls say: “What is up with all the … Oh my God, is it applesauce?”

  I slept in Miles’s twin bed that night, fully clothed. Phillip the agoraphobic was just eight feet away, so Miles and I had to whisper. He had taken eight ibuprofen and sounded a little loopy. “I feel like I’ve been branded.”

  Brandoned, I thought.

  “The pain is incredible. It feels like I have circles of fire on my back. You wouldn’t believe it.”

  I didn’t say: Shattering my hand can hardly be expected to compare to the agony caused by being struck in the back by three individually sized containers of organic applesauce. Instead, I made a soothing sound: Hhmm.

  “At first I thought I’d been shot. I thought he had a gun.”

  It occurred to me that Miles had never shot skeet—he’d never heard the satisfying shatter of the clay pigeon after the shotgun kicked and bruised his shoulder; certainly he had never gone hunting. Though I was mostly a vegetarian and delighted to be away from the Midwestern camo and beer culture, apparently my ingrained ideas of proper masculinity still enslaved me. I found myself disgusted that Miles would mistake pureed apples for gunfire.

  I envisioned Nancy’s dad stacking the organic applesauce next to my bed, and wondered if my old life had just vaporized.

  It had.

  Nancy moved into a single room on the eighth floor of Carman. We successfully avoided one another for the rest of freshman year, except once when I stepped into the elevator and it was just the two of us. Nancy immediately put her phone to her ear and faked a call: “I’ll be there in five minutes.” She proceeded to tell the empty air how sorry she was for running late until we reached the lobby and went our separate ways.

  “He’s got quite an arm,” Miles whispered. “I will give him that. And incredible aim.”

  I closed my eyes and saw a football torpedo out of Brandon’s hand and arc across the Kansas sky: higher, higher still, sailing above the cottonwood trees before it descended between the goal posts. “I know.”

  Victory at the Apple Store: I had finally found my last e-mail from Brandon. It had arrived the week after the applesauce incident. I had not heard from him in the interim, and, sad to say, I had not been particularly worried about Brandon.

  I was out to dinner with Miles at a restaurant called Massawa. He was shocked, forlorn, even, that I’d never eaten Ethiopian food, and eager to show me what I’d been missing. When I took the first bite of my entree—the spiced pumpkin and beef such a sublime blend, such a perfect bite—that it seemed I had been waiting my whole life for time to pass so that I could live in this moment, to be eating Duba B’siga in Manhattan, with someone named Miles.

  But then Miles offered up a condescending “I told you it was good,” as if I were a stodgy culinary xenophobe pining for a Big Mac and had to be cajoled into trying something new. I felt so vexed that when my phone dinged, alerting me to a new e-mail, I took my phone out of my jacket pocket. I tapped the mail icon, and there it was, an e-mail from Brandon. The subject line was empty.

  I clicked.

  I would very much like to write that I raced to the bathroom of Massawa all those years ago and vomited up my Duba B’siga, such was my distress. And in fairness to myself—for who else would I rather see treated justly?—my hands did tremble as I looked at my phone. But I cleaned my plate that night.

  Seven years later, in the vast brightness of the Apple Store, and fully knowing what I would find, it took more courage than it had when I was sitting across the table from Miles in Massawa, but I did it.

  I clicked, and each word was a gut-wrenching punch, so that right there, in the supremely bright Apple Store, I knew the howling grief of Heathcliff: “The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you.”

  “Doin’ okay?”

  I looked up. The Apple employee smiled at me; she had the glowingly over-bleached teeth of my Sacred Heart students, an emerald nose ring, and short, wheat-colored hair.

  “This new Airbook is tight. And it’s a good deal, too. Do you so love it?”

  I nodded, my brain all abuzz with “The murdered do haunt their murderers.”

  “Wish my employee discount was a little more rad. I want one myself.”

  I started to sob, but my belated sensitivity only made my fellow pilgrims in the Apple Store uncomfortable: A mother started talking in a loud singsong voice to her little girl, “Look Nora! This iPad has that Caillou app you like.” Two teenage girls shared a glance of empathy tinged with disgust: Wow, check her out, kinda sad but way to be a freak at the Apple Store.

  While the poor Apple employee fumbled for something to say (“Um, are you … Oh, hey … Uh, I think we have a box of Kleenex at the Genius Bar … located directly at the back of the store…”) I pulled my coat tighter around me and walked out of that magnificent glass ship.

  Now the sky was dark, and when I saw a cab coming down the street, I raised my hand, and it stopped, all lucky, fluid motions. I was still sobbing when I opened the door and slid into the backseat.

  The cabdriver turned around to look at me.

  “Hello? Are you okay?”

  I nodded. “Can you take me uptown?”

  “What’s the address?

  “Can we just drive for a little bit,and then I’ll decide?”

  “Will you be able to pay for it?”

  “What?”

  The second time he asked with pique: “Will you be able to pay for it?”

  Yes, I told him. Dear Reader, I was ready.

  Twelve

  “We have to leave now, and we have to go fast.” Her thumb on the spine, she held out the pages so Heath could read.

  “Oh?” His shepherd’s pie was nearly gone, just a few spring green peas and cubed potatoes glistening in the greasy gravy. He prepared to fork another bite as Flannery pointed at a page. “This part, Heath! Just read this part!” She put her index finger on Brandon’s e-mail as she handed Heath the book. “Start with ‘the murdered do haunt their murderers.’”

  “Alright then, Missus.” Heath raised his eyebrows at her bossiness and read. Flannery watched his face turn from neutral to distressed, his mouth hooking to one side.

  “Jesus,” he whispered. “She’s ready?”

  “Right?” Flannery took the book from him. “We have to go.”

  The scrappy guitars of the Ramones filled O’Kelleys with the battle cry of the disenchanted: I wanna be sedated. The plaid-shirted couple danced—a sort of pogo-hopping, along with some ironic air guitar; they kissed and laughed as Flannery took one last, longing look back. Heath was holding the door for her.

  “Dining and dashing are we?” Eileen had a bar cloth slung over her shoulder and she held two pints of dark beer. “A very classy move, Heathcliff, and a surefire way to impress your date.”

  “I’ll settle up later, Eileen.” Heath gave her a quick, apologetic shrug. “We’ve got to fly.”

  “You’re fine, love.”

  “Thanks,” Flannery called back to her, and walked out of the warmth of the bar.

  “Oh God, Heath, it got dark while we were inside. We sta
yed too long.”

  “We’re fine.”

  But he was already walk-running to Broadway, where he flagged a cab. They scrambled into the backseat and sat close together, their thighs touching.

  “We’ll give you the proper address in a minute, Mate,” Heath told the cabdriver. “For now, just get us uptown, please.” He turned to Flannery and lowered his voice: “That deodorizer he’s got hanging from the rearview mirror? It’s like a cherry orchard in here. Pretty sure it’s where Chekhov got his inspiration.”

  Here, Heath’s blanket-reading knowledge surpassed her Sacred Heart curriculum; Flannery hadn’t read The Cherry Orchard. “I don’t know the book.”

  “It’s a play, actually. Or am I mansplaining again?”

  She guessed that Heath was only acting carefree to keep her calm, but they had already indulged too much time on personal delight. Flannery pushed the book at him. “Read the next part out loud.” She added a plaintive “Please.”

  Heath cleared his throat, mumbled “I shall be telling this with a sigh,” and began:

  The cab headed uptown, and I decided on my destination: The Cathedral of Saint John the Divine.

  Heath stopped reading and told the cabdriver: “The Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, please.”

  “Okay, that’s good,” Flannery said, reassuring herself. “We know where she’s going, or where she is. Go on. Go!”

  And so Heath read:

  “The Cathedral is close by Columbia,” I instructed the driver. “It’s on—”