by Andrea Bartz
But Greg—there’s someone I hadn’t thought of in a while. Edie’s boyfriend at the time, the reason nothing could happen between her and Alex on that magical January night. Greg and Edie had begun dating shortly after I met her; I couldn’t remember how they met, but there was something cute about it, something serendipitous that she got a kick out of sharing with people. Greg was older and intimidating, with a real job and expensive clothes and a condo by the water in Greenpoint. He rarely made appearances in Calhoun; Edie often headed to his apartment after a late-night show or dance party with the rest of us. Now I wonder what emotionally stunted thirty-two-year-old man wants to date an impulsive twenty-three-year-old with a bit of a drinking problem, but at the time, he was a catch.
What had happened to Greg? I searched for his name in my inbox and confirmed they’d broken up in February 2009, shortly before Edie had begun dating Alex and moved into his apartment (the apartment, SAKE, the one with Sarah and Kevin—plus me as an honorary roommate). That had been such a fun spring and summer, right before everything went wrong. The first summer of Real Life, a hot season pulsed into the year instead of twelve demarcated weeks before the next semester. We were adults, we thought, but still soused on the sense memories of summers past.
And my friendship with Edie had been everything. I remembered a rainy afternoon when we’d holed up in my bedroom, drunk on boxed wine and high on our mutual friend-crushes. We were playing Truth or Truth, killing time with probing queries: detailed sex questions, humiliating childhood stories. It was thrilling and personal, like staring into each other’s eyes.
“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” she asked, setting her glass on my windowsill. I adjusted the pillow behind my back, squeezing it flat and pushing it around.
She realized I was stalling. “I’ll go first,” she said, turning to pour herself more wine. “My mom planned this big dinner for my eighteenth birthday. She was cooking all day—and she hates cooking—and she’d invited some family and close friends. It was all really unlike her; normally she’d just pick up a cupcake that day or whatever and I’d celebrate with my friends.” She took a long sip, then wiped her wine-stained lips. “So that morning she and I got into a huge fight—like, an all-out-screaming, plate-smashing fight. And I yelled ‘Fuck you!’ and stormed out of there. Then I proceeded to email everyone except my mom and tell them the dinner was canceled because I wasn’t feeling well. I stayed over at my friend’s that night, ignoring her calls, and when I came back, my mom didn’t say anything. Then my dad told me that she’d still cooked everything and set it all out and sat there while nobody showed up. She had no idea I’d canceled it.” She closed her eyes. “I mean, she is a bitch, but I still feel bad about that.”
I scooted over on the bed and rested my cheek on her shoulder. She tipped her head onto mine and we sat there for a minute, pop music playing in the background.
“I can beat that,” I offered finally. “It’s about my parents, too. Only I was younger.” And I told her the story they told me not to share, the one that scorches my cheeks and forehead still. When I finished talking, she raised her chin up to look at me, then nuzzled it back against my hair. She’s still the only other person who knows. Knew. Now there’s no one again.
It was hard to put a finger on exactly when my friendship with Edie began to come apart at the seams; by July, we were having icy half-fights via email, infuriating ones where I’d write something long and detailed and she’d respond, with neither punctuation nor capitalization, “sure” or “what time” or “k.” Edie said no to more and more group activities and closed herself into her little white room, especially sad because its square windows looked out not on the world but on the apartment’s gloomy interior. Alex and Edie broke up in July, too—just a few months after they’d finally gotten together—for reasons neither of them really bothered to explain, adding that they were going to stay friends and not move out or anything. Now I saw that it was probably FOMO that kept either from being the one to leave, fear of missing out, fear of being ostracized, seeming maturity masking massive insecurity. It had to have been uncomfortable.
That summer, Edie and Sarah spent more time than ever hanging out in my apartment, a tiny but comfortable share with cracked walls and scuffed linoleum floors and a normal layout, a quiet roommate from Washington State, bedrooms with windows onto the street below. I felt a humming anxiety that the Calhounies must be instantly bored in my apartment, unstimulated by its lack of weird wall hangings, life-size portraits, or swings suspended from the ceiling. And I was jealous, too, jealous and in awe of the offbeat creatures in Calhoun and other Escherlike buildings who could coolly live in those strange setups. They did it so casually: “Oh, this?”
I found Greg’s full name in an email and Googled him; strange how he’d felt so firmly in the past by the time Edie died, when in reality she’d been his ex of only six months. Time felt different then, stretchy and wide. I found him listed as a partner at some tech-y, startup-y architectural firm, beaming at me from a poorly framed headshot. The website was a confusing mass of buzzwords: “breakthroughs” and “collective reach” and “strategic partnerships.” Gross. No contact information for him, just a physical address somewhere in DUMBO. I saved the listing and returned to my archives.
A name hit a nostalgic note in the February emails, and I clicked through to something I’d sent a friend from college who was teaching English in Italy, someone I lost contact with in the ensuing years. It started out with boring catch-up talk, but the middle of it made my stomach squeeze:
Sometimes I just feel like such an idiot next to Edie. Like, so incompetent. The other day I was complaining to her about my boss and she was like, “Lindsay, you know everyone and their dog is unemployed right now, so you can see why she expects you to be working late and not complaining, right?” And she’s RIGHT, but it’s also like, Why can’t you ever just be on my side? Or sometimes when I’m asking for her advice on guys, she’ll ask what I said or look at what I’ve texted and she gives me this wide-eyed look like, Oh my GOD, how do you not know how to talk to boys? Which maybe I sort of don’t. She’s just so GOOD at everything. I know I just sound jealous, but it’s not that. It’s something, though…
Wow—I hadn’t realized that I’d noticed so early how uneven the power dynamics of our friendship were. Later, I’d worked out that we were the kind of friends you make fresh out of college, when the only thing you have in common is doing fun things together. And so, after months of passive-aggressive torment from Edie (and quiet complicity from the rest of our friends, who were just happy her scorn wasn’t directed at them), I’d made a grand decision: I’d extricate myself from this group and start over with kinder, happier, less self-obsessed people. I was planning to tell her that very weekend. I’d been prepped for that discussion, equipped and braced, and then she’d died. It was awful.
For her, of course. Well, for everyone. But especially for me. It was ridiculous, but in addition to the squall of confusion and grief and shock, there’d been a ribbon of annoyance—like Edie had skipped out on the confrontation by killing herself. I’d been so over her, how she was always making me feel like a charity case, like the one who had to be fixed. And then she’d disappeared.
She’d died dramatically, too, still a magnet for attention, with coverage of her death all over the blogosphere. Canonized, deified, the exact fucking week I’d planned to finally put an end to the toxic relationship. And so I’d left. I’d stopped talking to them all. And everyone thought it was because I was racked with grief—which I was—but it was also a convenient excuse to get the hell away.
I leaned back and felt my pulse thumping in my neck. I’d never put it together like this before—never allowed myself to see Edie’s death in this light.
These were sick, stupid, childish thoughts. I poured myself a glass of water and swallowed them all.
I checked the time: 10:12
; not late. So, before I could think too hard about it, I texted Michael and asked what he was up to.
My phone chimed a few minutes later. “Working late. What about you?”
Stupid noncommittal text. Obviously, Michael, I’m alone and bored and wanting you to want to see me.
“Just got home from dinner. Feel like watching a movie when you’re done?”
He waited six minutes to answer, just long enough for me to pee again and wander around and burn holes into the screen with my eyes.
“Sure. I’ll text you when I’m heading out.”
Forty minutes later, I hadn’t heard back from him. I checked in, hating myself for it. He said he could leave in fifteen and was that too late? I waited four entire minutes, the longest I could hold out, and then answered: “No, it’s fine, come over when you can.”
Chapter 3
Michael showed up a little before midnight, handsome and smooth. Four months we’d been sleeping together, occasionally with dinner or another sufficiently datelike activity beforehand; I knew I was too old to put up with this, but the thought of seeking out something more fulfilling made me so, so tired. We settled onto the couch and he was as witty and charming as ever, quick to steer the conversation to himself when it was clear I was feeling sullen. Sometimes this annoyed me; right now, it felt like warm relief, chatter I could wrap myself in like a blanket. Eventually I stood to make us tea and he suggested we turn in instead.
* * *
I was in the woods behind Uncle Bob’s farm, steadying a pistol in my hands, clicking through my pre-fire checklist: fighter’s stance, hand throttled high on the grip, thumb curled down for strength, trigger hooked inside the joint. I knew Edie was behind me, watching, and I was furious with her, anger streaming into my forehead and hands, a primal, frenzied, out-of-control urge to hurt. It occurred to me that Edie didn’t know not to step out in front, and then it happened: She was picking through the trees, treading over roots, headed straight into my crosshairs. I closed my left eye and took aim, and the recoil shook me awake.
I lay still, heart racing, something eager and carnal still pulsing through my veins. I slowed my breathing, beating down a flare of bewilderment and shame, then willed my brain to delete the dream from my memory. Michael, next to me, was snoring.
Hours later, he woke me up by kissing my neck, a gentle, urgent move that always roused me. I swam up to the surface, blinking the wool from my eyes. Then Michael was there, solid and warm and sour-breathed, and I pulled myself awake enough to kiss him, hard.
Almost as soon as he came, he slid back on the bed and gently pushed my hips flat, working his tongue against me. He was good about this in an unsexy, pragmatic way—tit for tat, keeping us in a tie. At first I didn’t think it would work, my mind suddenly cluttered with flashes of the dream, but I forced them aside, listening hard to my own deepening breath. Afterward he kissed my belly and wandered off, naked, to toss the condom and drink water and stretch his long arms; then he climbed back into bed.
“What are you thinking about?” He exhaled it as I nudged my head onto his chest, and I felt rather than heard the words. The lover’s laziest question.
“Do you ever get blackout drunk?” I asked.
He let out a surprised chuckle. “I mean, not lately. But in college and my twenties, of course. Why?”
I looked around the room, thinking. Postorgasmic oxytocin was probably needling through my brain like truth serum, inky and insidious.
“I’ve just been thinking back to those days. Remembering. Well, remembering what it’s like to wake up and not remember anything, which is sort of a Möbius strip of remembering.”
He stroked my arm absentmindedly. “I mean, it’s a normal part of being young. Figuring out your limits, and hopefully you have friends there to take you home and keep you safe and give you Gatorade.”
“That’s true.” I scratched my forehead. “It’s weird that it’s normal, though, isn’t it? It’s weird that we aren’t more terrified of it. Like, what did ancient civilizations make of it? Shouldn’t we be more freaked out by people walking and talking and, like, interacting with others when a critical part of their brain is offline?”
He considered. “What actually happens? Are the brain cells too fried to pull up memories the next day?”
“No, I looked into this once.” I laughed. “Not even for an article, I was just curious. It’s actually that your brain isn’t laying down memories. It stops recording. So not even extensive hypnosis or something could bring those hours back up.”
I heard the smile in his voice. “I knew you’d have researched it.”
“It’s what I do.” His hand stopped moving near mine and I wove my fingers into his. “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done while blacked out?” I tossed it out like a statement, a challenge.
“I got into a fistfight once,” he offered. “Stupidest thing. Apparently this guy bumped into me in a bar and I was wasted and in a bad mood about something—a lady, probably—and I was like, ‘Hey, fuck you, man.’ And he turned around and said something threatening like, ‘You wanna go?’ And even though he had about eighty pounds on me, apparently I was like, ‘Let’s go! Right here!’ And all my stupid friends were just watching like assholes as I took a swing at this guy. Who came back and punched me, busted up my nose, and threw me onto a table. So idiotic.” We both giggled. “What was yours?”
There were options. The Warsaw Incident, which of course I’d never tell him. The time I’d spent my entire savings on round-trip tickets to Balikpapan, Indonesia (I’d drunkenly agreed to go to Bali and was five hundred miles off the mark); the time I’d come home late and inexplicably screamed at my messy roommate, shoving her tub of dirty dishes off the counter and then cutting my foot on broken glass during my defiant, wobbly exit. Lloyd flickered into my mind, too, the terribleness of that one morning after, but I swallowed and rattled off my default blackout story.
“I was out one night and started talking to this guy,” I began, “and we had a bunch of drinks together, and then I think I invited him over, but he was like, ‘Ehh, I just want to stay here with my friends.’ Which, god knows what was actually going on, but I was pissed. So I went outside to hail a cab—this was when you had to actually look for them on the street—and some girls who, in retrospect, must have also been wasted saw me looking all furious and were like, ‘Fuck him, come hang out with us!’ and we went into the bar next door. I don’t remember anything after that, but the next morning, when I finally woke up and went to check my purse for my wallet and phone, I reached in and pulled out”—I mimed it, the slow vertical reveal—“someone else’s purse. Like a clutch? The entire thing was in there. And full of this poor girl’s stuff—wallet, phone, lipstick, keys. I remember shuffling out to the living room where my roommate was watching TV and going, ‘Hannah, I did something really, really bad…’ ”
“So you turned into a pickpocket?!” Michael was laughing now. I giggled, too, but I could still feel it, that balloon of shame, the feeling of fumbling into the past and finding nothing but air.
“That’s the thing, I don’t even know! Did I take it by accident? Did she ask me to hold it and I got lazy keeping it in my hands, so I dumped it into my purse? I have no idea! I didn’t recognize her at all.”
“God. What’d you do?”
“The phone was dead, but I had her name from her driver’s license. I tried to find her on Facebook but didn’t have any luck—for all I know, the ID might have been a fake. So I put on clothes and walked in a hungover stupor to the bar the random girl had brought me into and left it there—I said it looked like mine so I’d taken it by mistake. And then I just avoided that bar for the rest of time. I still have no idea how that bag ended up in my purse. I hope I didn’t mug anyone.”
He squirmed a bit, gently shook me off his shoulder, and rolled onto his side. “Are you a mean drunk? Is that wh
y you stopped drinking?”
He said it teasingly, but I felt myself blush. “I guess. Back then I was, at least. My friends used to joke about having to keep me ‘on-leash.’ ”
He snorted. “What’s funny is that normally when you’ve had too much to drink, you wake up feeling like you’ve done something bad even though you haven’t. But I woke up with a busted-up face. And you woke up with someone else’s bag. So the guilt response was correct.”
“I know, right?” I giggled again. “I looked into that, too. Your serotonin receptors are all messed up; basically gives you depression for the day.” I fitted my elbow over his waist and sighed. “I don’t miss that.”
“Why did you stop drinking?”
Impressive that he’d made it this many months without asking, really. “I had this disastrous thirtieth birthday when I had way too much to drink,” I said into his neck. “I finally put two and two together that…I mean, you’ve probably seen my pill bottles around, I’ve been on a few different things for depression and other stuff and yeah, I finally decided that alcohol wasn’t really a helpful chemical to combine with my fucked-up brain.” I normally avoided this entire topic—the stimulants as a kid, the benzos in college, the antidepressants now. That I don’t remember life without mood-stabilizing drugs, that I’m not entirely sure who I’d be without them monkeying around with my neurotransmitters. But I was feeling so open, vulnerable.
“What happened on your birthday?” he asked.
“Well, I’d invited people over, and there was a huge snowstorm that day, so nobody came. The only ones who made it were my friend Tessa and her husband. He left early because he had to be in court the next day, and when it was just Tessa and me…” My face burned. “I blacked out and got kinda mean. About how all my friends sucked and she’d turned into a Smug Married and stuff. I said some terrible things; she didn’t speak to me for days. They weren’t even true, I don’t know what I was talking about. After that I was like, ‘Maybe this isn’t such a good idea.’ It hasn’t actually been that hard. My life doesn’t revolve around drinking like it did when I was younger.”
