by Andrea Bartz
“That was some heavy shit,” I said.
She poked at her cocktail napkin. “It’s still hard for me to believe sometimes. Like, we were at the top of our game. We were having the time of our lives.”
“I know what you mean,” I said. “Everyone glorifies their twenties, I guess, but for me that period was…It meant a lot.” I swallowed hard. “And then it ended. It’s nuts. Literally, we were dancing around to some stupid band just a few floors up while Edie was…”
Sarah narrowed her eyes. “Well, you weren’t.”
“What?”
“You weren’t at the concert.”
I cocked my head. “Wait, what? Of course I was.”
“You weren’t. You went home. I remember because I was mad that none of my girlfriends came with me. Can you believe that? I was mad at Edie while she was, like, committing suicide. Seriously, that took me a few thousand dollars of therapy to work through.”
I scoffed. “Christ, Sarah, of course I was there. I pregamed with you guys on the roof, and we took a bunch of shots, and then we went to the show. I went home near the end of the set.”
She was shaking her head as I spoke and her expression matched mine: that charged look when you just know, know, the other person’s remembering it wrong.
“You didn’t come to the show.” She let out a bleat of laughter. “You didn’t! We pregamed together and then you left.”
“Sarah, come on,” I snapped. “I remember that night perfectly. I was there with you guys.” The band with the weird face paint. Music so loud we were part of it, gyrating through every crashing sound wave.
“I mean, I know what I know,” she said finally, leaning back and tossing her napkin onto the table. Like she was wrapping up a fight, doing the adult thing.
“That’s fine, but I do, too,” I told her, sighing and shaking my head. “I know exactly where I was standing. We were off to the left side. The band, something with ‘beach’ or ‘tan’ or ‘surf’ in their name—they were covered in red and black face paint.”
“They all lived in Calhoun. We saw them a bunch of times. You’re thinking of another time. Anyway.” She signaled to the waiter. “Could I get some more water, please?”
We sat there for a while, breathing. Everything was humming: my head, my chest, my hands. Finally she asked if I kept up with any good podcasts and I answered, awkwardly. After a few sentences we fell into a rhythm and Edie slid back into the past.
* * *
Outside, in the rain, Sarah and I frantically hugged goodbye and sped off between the raindrops toward different subways. Standing on a clammy C train, my umbrella dripping onto my boots, I let the outrage pour through me again. First there was Sarah’s prickly proclamation that she and Edie had been the closest, which was preposterous—everyone knew Edie and I had been inseparable. And here she’d just cut me out of the narrative on the most significant night of our friendship, snip. It wouldn’t be the first time Sarah had implied that I wasn’t in Edie’s inner circle but rather a hanger-on, like someone’s annoying little sister. All because I hadn’t lived with the four of them. Well, no. All because Edie and I had been the closest, and Sarah’s jealousy would sometimes waft by like a scent.
Of course I’d been there. I felt a propulsive need to confirm it, to pull up the old photos and messages that would prove her wrong. As soon as I got home, I figured, I’d put this to rest.
I slumped over my laptop at the kitchen table, squinting at the screen to keep it from blurring as my contacts turned gummy. I opened Facebook and blinked at the torrent of my peers’ baby photos (“Snuggles!!!”). For the first time in years, I searched for Alex: a profile picture of him and his shiny-haired wife on vacation. From 2016, which meant he didn’t use Facebook much. I opened up a message to him, then froze. What the hell could I even say? Quick question, on the night Edie died, I came with you to the concert, right? Hope all is well, thaaanks! I closed the message and clicked instead on my photos tab to begin the slow scrolling process of unearthing photos from 2009, sliding backward in time. Eventually I slinked into the right era: me with Sarah, Edie, Kevin, and Alex. I was struck by how good-looking we all were, smooth-skinned and twinkly eyed. Sarah was pretty and serene with that swingy hair and small curvy mouth.
I had the same dirty-blond curls and wide mouth and thick eyebrows I’d since learned to accentuate, but they were easy and unassuming back when I was that age. I’d always felt awkward next to Sarah and Edie, the less pretty friend making an unfortunate laughing face in photos. Now I saw that we were all just lovely, eager and open-faced. Fogging ourselves up with a practiced ennui, sure, but so much younger than we thought we were.
Alex was generically handsome, the stereotypical dark-haired, blue-eyed, five-o’-clock-shadowed Adonis with sleeve tattoos and a self-satisfied smirk. He had That Look; for years I’d stare down a stranger in a store or at a show, trying to decide if it was Alex or one of his ten thousand doppelgängers. Back then, he was a guitarist who made money taking on freelance coding projects and completing them at all hours of the night, and it was sort of sad to look back and realize that the Alex in these pictures had no idea he’d abandon music slowly at first, then with grim finality. Last I heard, he lived in Westchester, in one of those river towns, with a car and a dog and everything he didn’t know he wanted.
Aw, and Kevin, such a little goofball. I paused on a photo of him with his band: the guitarist with her pink hair, the fat, greasy lead singer whose confidence trumped his appearance, and little Kevin in the back, his arms and drumsticks a blur. I’d abruptly chopped them all out of my life, but I knew from Facebook that he’d been the second one to actually move away, after Sarah, relocating to Nashville late that year. The gun had been his, a vintage thing he kept in the living room (typically) unloaded, and the guilt surrounding it must have gotten the better of him.
Now he was a grown-up, too. I filed through his most recent photos, annoyed that there weren’t any of his husband. Kevin. Who’d have thought?
Edie was the quiet star of every photo she appeared in, bony and freckled and so sure of her beauty. I stared at a picture of the two of us until tears gathered in my eyes; I’d both hated and adored her, and for months after she died, I’d felt in my chest a black hole of grief, a sudden gaping absence. She smirked at me from the screen: She had a little gap between her front teeth and long red curls that spilled over her back and shoulders. Edie was the ringleader, the princess whose every wish came true, not because it was also our command, exactly, but because she stated her wants and the very universe seemed to bow to them. When she giggled, when you were in her smile with her, it was magic. And when you weren’t…
Well.
The problem, I realized, was that the date on the photos showed when they were posted, not when they were taken. I browsed around in the right era, the one after Edie’s death, but couldn’t find any of that night, anything that could prove my attendance. Which made sense—what a strange, gauche move it would have been, in the midst of our mourning, to toss up a photo of August 21’s debauchery. I couldn’t remember the band’s name or think of how to find other pictures from the show. Frustrated, I kept scrolling, hoping they’d pop up in another image, tagged.
Our little clique was outside in so many photos, drinking out of massive Styrofoam cups in McCarren Park or smoking on fire escapes, stoops, roofs. I remembered that summer, the last one with Edie, how all the bands we saw blurred into a cacophony of synth and Sarah wore that crazy Day-Glo hat everywhere and I was on a vodka gimlet kick. Not pictured: the violent bouts of crying alone, the change in cabin pressure if Edie was unhappy.
I clicked on a photo of the five of us, goofing around in a sculpture park on a weekend trip to Philly. Alex had his arm around Edie, smiling calmly. Edie was looking at something outside of the frame, squinting to see. Sarah and I were posing dramatically, arms up toward the heavens,
and Kevin had climbed onto the vaguely humanoid sculpture behind us and wrapped his arms around an appendage.
It won’t last, I told them as tears again coated my eyes. Then, because it was late and my anger had simmered into a tired ache, I snapped my laptop closed and went to sleep.
* * *
The next morning, I forgot my headphones for the subway ride to work and listened instead to the din of tired people commuting. I heard a sniffle and looked down at a young woman seated in front of me, tears pouring freely down her cheeks. Poor thing. I dug in my bag, then handed her a tissue. She shot me a grateful look and pushed it against both eyes at once.
Wedged against a well-dressed man holding a Kindle millimeters from a woman’s cheek, I debated. I should throw myself into work. Then an about-face: Fuck work, all I want to do is think about Edie. I was still undecided as I spun through the revolving doors into my building’s lobby, a minimalist entry with wavy metal and burbling fountains, all silver and glass and Impressive Business Is Done Here. “I’m really lucky to still have a job in magazines,” I’d told Sarah enthusiastically, fifteen hours before hurrying in to fact-check an inane six-page feature on CBD-infused cocktails.
I bumped into Damien, the magazine’s video editor and my closest (no, only) work friend, as I headed toward my office. He launched into an elaborate tale of how he’d spent his evening with the police because an idiot UPS worker had left his package outside his brownstone, where it had promptly been stolen, and now he needed a police report to have his insurance cover it, but the cops were acting like he expected them to find the package, and the worst part was that it was a beautiful coffee-table book about circa sixties erotica, but everyone was acting like he’d just ordered porn, and now he had to submit a Freedom of Information Law request just to get his own damn police report from the bureau of criminal records verification or something. He sighed grandly. Damien is the queen of histrionic sighs.
“What’d you do last night?” he finished finally.
“I had dinner with a friend from when I first moved to New York,” I said. “It was weird, she mentioned…Do you have work, am I distracting you?”
He waved his hand cheerfully and sauntered farther into my office.
“So, ten years ago this good friend of ours killed herself—and the friend from last night, Sarah, she found her.”
“Christ, Lindsay, I’m sorry. Did she take a bunch of pills or what?”
“No, she used a gun. And left a suicide note on her computer.”
He shook his head. “That’s awful. Was she young?”
“We were all twenty-three.”
“Damn.” We stared at each other. Finally he said: “Ten years ago. You’re old.”
“Fuck you.” I smiled. Why am I telling you this? Because he could bring me back to the present, take the gravity out of it. “Yeah, it was really sudden and…awful. Been on my mind.”
“Why’d she do it?”
“There turned out to be so much weird stuff going on that we didn’t really know about until we, like, compared notes in the week or two after,” I recited. “Like, her family was struggling and going through some stuff, and she and her boyfriend had just broken up but they were still living together.”
“Living with her ex,” he said, whistling. “I’d kill myself.”
“Right?” Why hadn’t we seen it as uncomfortable at the time? Well, because bucking conventions had been our status quo. “So anyway, I saw the friend last night, and it turns out right after the suicide, she went totally conspiracy theorist and claimed it wasn’t a suicide.”
“Jesus,” he breathed. “Wait, you’re just learning this now?”
“I kinda split from the group after the funeral. They all lived together, and it was…We were kinda drifting apart by then, anyway.” I sighed. “They were like this beautiful little hipster clique. When Edie died, it all fell apart.”
“I need to see these people. Facebook.” He gestured at my monitor and I pulled up some group photos.
“She’s cute,” he said when I pointed to Edie.
“And there’s the final proof that you are zero-percent heterosexual. She’s stunning.”
“Did everyone want to fuck her?” He shrugged. “So skinny. You could snap her in half.”
“Christ, Damien, she’s dead,” I said through inappropriate laughter.
He apologized, grinning, then headed for his desk.
I returned to Facebook, to the grid of photos. There were so many pictures of us hanging out in Sarah, Alex, Kevin, and Edie’s apartment, which we’d jokingly called SAKE, pronounced like the Japanese wine, unwilling to bear the inconvenience of mentioning all of the tenants’ names. Always with drinks around, always with drunk, sparkly eyes. So few of these images stirred up memories; they were like loose leaves or a deck of cards: Young People Having Fun. I seemed to be always there, though I lived two stops away on the subway. Sarah was sort of right: While Edie and I had been best friends for a moment, I’d never quite been a full member of the clique. Once Edie and I had had our falling-out, I’d been just outside, watching them through a sheet of glass.
I scrolled. There were just as many photos of us in other apartments within Calhoun Lofts—beer bottles scattered around, someone flipping off the camera or finding a way to look blasé. It was such an odd building, a full block long and set up like a college dormitory, only instead of small dorm rooms, there were apartments, each tall and rectangular, like a giant shoebox. They came gapingly vacant except for a kitchen and a bathroom crouched in one corner. And into those giant shoeboxes, tenants brought plywood and drywall and constructed their lives: lofted bedrooms resting on stilts with a forest of four-by-four pillars underneath, or cubbylike rooms lining either side of the long walls, so that standing in the central corridor felt like being on dry sand with the Red Sea rising on either side.
Sarah had been the Virgil who’d led me through Calhoun’s graffiti-splattered front doors and into its deepest circles. I’d first met Sarah in Manhattan a week or two earlier at a vodka-soaked rooftop party thrown by effervescent PR people for some product or campaign launch. It was August 2008 and I’d just started my first job as a fact-checker at a fitness magazine; Sarah was a junior designer at The Village Voice, and somehow both our names showed up in some media directory and garnered us invitations. It felt strange, gulping cocktails at this extravagant party while the stock market teetered and talking heads wrung their hands and both our companies implemented hiring freezes like an early winter frost. We chatted away and exchanged emails and then got lunch at a burrito place, and just like that, we were friends. I miss that about my twenties, that vastness, that sweeping sense that there’s room for everyone worthwhile, all the time and space in the world.
Sarah lived with Edie and some other girls at the time, in a different apartment within Calhoun Lofts. I’d heard the building referred to in reverential tones; it was hipster legend. Sarah had invited me to see a show there that Saturday. My outfit and hair carefully planned out and rethought, I’d taken two parting shots of whiskey, boarded the L train, and ridden deep into the bowels of Bushwick.
Sarah met me at the door with a hug and a compliment (I can still taste that tang of relief that I’d dressed acceptably) and brought me first to her apartment to pregame. Stepping into her place, I gasped at the soaring warehouse space with unfinished walls, twenty-foot ceilings, and, on the far end, a wall of dirty windows that looked straight out of a vintage elementary school.
Rap music poured from speakers and my eyes fell on Edie, standing on the couch and dancing with abandon, a red Solo cup held high in one hand. I saw her as if in slow motion: red waves skipping over a cropped gold blazer, a sliver of pale stomach above indigo shorts, all skinny limbs and outsize confidence. Sarah yelled up an introduction and Edie turned her emerald eyes to me and smiled, and suddenly nothing in life was as important a
s making this girl like me.
Sarah poured us drinks and we sat down with the other roommates. I remember less about them: a quiet girl named Jenna with long brown hair and a bumped nose (she worked in book publishing, maybe?) and an impressively skinny blonde named Kylie, who spoke with a California raaaaahsp. Strangers thrown together by Craigslist, but all nice girls, a group that danced and drank and lived well together. I focused my efforts on Edie, who was bright and hilarious and weirdly delighted by everything I said. I did so well. I hit that second-drink tingle of wit and found myself thinking that this Edie was everything I wanted my life in New York to be.
She didn’t ask me what I did for work; instead we gushed about our close-at-hand dreams, her imminent enrollment at Parsons, my plans to write narrative nonfiction so finely crafted it’d make readers’ chests ache. We talked about men and Bowie, how we’d both read an article revealing we’re about 40 percent stardust and 60 percent hydrogen, or Big Bang dust, and isn’t it wild our atoms are as old as life itself. We had such great energy. Even Sarah noticed it and politely faded into herself.
After a final round of shots, the girls led me to an apartment on another floor—another huge rectangular canvas, now decked out with a stage along the far windows, a bar/merch table off to its right, and an especially bizarre construction of living quarters: Over a thicket of four-by-fours, they’d built a cluster of elevated bedrooms, each claustrophobic and squat and opening into an elf-size catwalk, which lipped out into an overhang from which to watch the stage. (A resident I bumped into that night told me that during a brief run of Romeo and Juliet, they’d made literal use of it for the balcony scene.)
Our drunkenness swelled, not just from the shots but also from the frenzy: strobe lights, spilled drinks, gyrating masses, a pounding band sporting silver and gold jackets and sequins on their eyebrows. We allowed the surf to sweep us up, dancing along, a pleasant tornado. The night faded to black afterward, like so many after it, when the light of my consciousness would blink back on hours later in my own bed or on SAKE’s couch or sometimes atop the small, sweaty mattress of a male Calhoun resident. Periods snipped from my timeline, blacked out, right in the middle of the best days of my life.
