She came to that first Thursday night party, and I almost didn’t see her. She was like some waif from a Victorian novel—thin and pale with long red hair. I watched her, and at first I thought she was nervous, blending into the wall she stood against with a drink in her hand, too frightened to talk with anyone. But I got closer to her, took another look, and decided that she actually didn’t care that she was at St. Dun’s. She seemed almost disinterested, like a girl in the back row of a boring lecture. Did she even understand what it meant to get a skull card as a freshman? I thought she’d never return, but she kept coming back, every Thursday, and it was clear that Eric had become interested. I found one of her father’s books in the library and read some of it in a basement carrel. It was supposed to be a comedy but it was mainly about boarding school boys in England being cruel to one another. It struck me as the kind of stupid book that Eric would idolize. I didn’t care so much at that point, since I’d started sleeping with Matthew Ford, who made Eric look practically middle class.
Senior year, Eric and Lily became a couple. I was fine with it. Matthew and I were a much better fit than Eric and I had ever been. Unlike Eric, Matthew was insecure enough to make up for it by buying me anything I wanted. I told him elaborate stories, how I came from a rich French-Canadian clan but that my father had been disinherited for moving his family to Maine and teaching his daughter only English. Before Christmas break of that year I told Matthew that I needed a thousand dollars to sneak into Montreal and visit my paternal grandmother who was dying. He gave me the money in cash. It was a good relationship, but I didn’t harbor any illusions that it would continue past our senior year of college. I assumed that the same would be true of Eric and Lily, especially since she was only a sophomore, but the more I saw them together, the more I realized that they were serious about each other. At least Lily was serious; I could tell that much. I wasn’t sure if Eric was capable of love. He was like me in that way, someone who could turn it on and turn it off. He told me once when we were together that he felt he could easily be in equal relationships with two women at the same time. I always remembered that he had said this, and reminded him of it during senior week, when our exams were done and underclassmen were still busy studying.
“You suggesting something?” he asked. We were sitting on the stairwell at St. Dun’s, sharing a cigarette and listening to the remnants of a party down below. Radiohead was playing, and someone was shouting to change the music.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Everyone thinks you and Lily are serious.”
“What about you and Matthew?”
“Over with as of graduation day.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Look,” I said, and touched his prickly jaw. “It’s senior week. What do you say?”
We hooked up that night, and continued to hook up the rest of that summer. Eric visited Lily at her parents’ place on weekends, and spent the weeks with me. Lily never came to the city, and he told his group of friends that he was visiting his sick father on the weekend. As a joke, I dyed my hair red and told Eric to just pretend that he had only one girlfriend. I loved my weekends alone that summer in New York. I was subletting my own one-bedroom in the Village, so Saturday and Sunday were entirely my own. I imagined Eric and Lily in the country, in love, and it didn’t bother me one bit. In fact, it made me laugh.
Eric died that fall in London. He was visiting Lily and forgot to bring his allergy medicine. Dropped dead from eating nuts. I used to wonder what it had been like for Lily. I’d heard he died in her apartment while she watched. I imagined her frantically searching for his EpiPen, trying to keep him alive. I always thought that Lily lucked out. She only knew Eric Washburn as a faithful boyfriend. She never learned the truth about him.
I ran into Lily a few years later. She wasn’t on Facebook, but I’d heard rumors about her—that she was some sort of librarian at Winslow College—and something else about her father being involved in a car accident that killed his second wife. I recognized her right away. She hadn’t changed at all, pale and waifish, Pippi-Longstocking-color hair in the exact same cut, blank face. I told her I was sorry about what had happened with Eric Washburn, and she stared at me for a moment with a flat, unwavering stare. That was the extent of our interaction. I tried to remember if I’d introduced her to Ted, and I think I probably did but couldn’t be sure. I did remember her cold stare, her green, almost translucent eyes. Did she know about Eric and me that summer? And if she knew, then was it a possibility that Eric hadn’t accidentally died? I didn’t think so, but it unnerved me somehow that she was back in my mind. There were many reasons why Ted might have gone to Winslow on Friday; the chance that it had something to do with Lily was incredibly slim.
I got back to Boston at four in the afternoon. I parked on the street about three blocks from my house, and went to the bar of a boutique hotel, where I drank a vodka on the rocks and ordered a plate of lobster orecchiette. I was starving. When I’d finished the pasta, I returned to my car and called Detective Kimball. He picked up immediately.
“I’m in Boston,” I told him.
“Great,” he said. “Where are you? I can pick you up if you like, take you to the station.”
I told him I was just down the street from our house, parked on the street, not knowing what to do, or where to go. I put a little hitch in my voice as I said it.