“Are you kidding?” I slur. “You’re a perfect-looking creature. And so smart. And I feel … I feel like I understand you.”
She holds my face, panting like we’re out in a snowstorm. Her eyes grow huge, and without words I understand. She knows I understand what is missing. Someone is gone. She beats her chest with a tight fist. “But it hurts so much. You can’t believe how much it hurts.”
“I know,” I tell her, and for that moment I do. “I know, I know. You’re so brave.”
She lies down next to me. We’re face-to-face now. Jenna is dancing over us, laughing, having stripped down to only a sports bra.
“It’s hard to talk about,” she says. “I love knowing you.”
I squeeze her. I feel as though I’ve never felt another person’s pain more deeply. I imagine my breath is terrible, but I also imagine she doesn’t mind things like that. And I don’t mind when she blows smoke in my face. I rustle her hair, my own, hers again. I didn’t think she’d kiss me, but I didn’t think she wouldn’t either. I said I was leaving an hour before I actually left, and in the cab home I clutched a piece of paper with her number on it and thought about how I hadn’t gotten to see her pond.
The next morning, I sleep until almost 3:00 P.M., lulled by the sound of cabs pulling up to my hotel in the rain. I have meetings in the afternoon and am determined not to tell anyone I vomited. But sharing is my first instinct, and I offer it up ten minutes into my first professional engagement of the day. I nurse a single cup of tea until, around 6:00 P.M., I’m ready to eat the crust of a potpie. I pull out my phone and start scrolling through images of the night before, none of which I have a memory of taking. In one, Aidan menaces the camera, blurry. In another Jenna kisses my sweaty face. In a few Nellie’s cigarette waves wildly, threatening to set fire to her house. In others we are face-to-face, eyes closed. Our hands are clasped.
If you look carefully you can see, in the upper-left-hand corner, the purple specter of my vomit.
I kissed three girls in college. All at once. Three straight girls were experimenting with universal love in a corner at a party to benefit Palestinian rights and, when they offered me membership, I took it. We went around in a circle, taking turns, kissing for just long enough to get a sense of one another’s mouths. They felt soft and tickly to me, minus the hard edges and rough bits I was still getting used to on boys. Afterward we laughed. None of my eighth-grade fears had come true. I was not, suddenly, the militant lesbian leader of a motorcycle gang, nor was I ashamed. I didn’t even flinch when a photo of me, mid-lip-lock, with a girl named Helen surfaced in the art building, part of a boy named Cody’s “Nan Goldin–inspired thesis.”
Later, alone in bed and almost over the nausea of my hangover, I zoom in on the picture of Nellie and me. The uncropped version, that is. Conspiratorial, sickly, lost girls on a good sofa. If I were a slightly different person, I’d have had many nights like this, a hard drive full of these images. I may hate the term “girl crush,” but a picture does not lie. It has the quality of an image taken by a ghost hunter, revealing floaters and spirits that the participants had been unable to see.
“I DON’T THINK this is working out,” he says. “I think we would be better off as friends.”
It’s seventh grade, and we’ve just come back from winter break. On our last date we walked up and down the street holding hands for a few hours before going into H?agen-Dazs to wait for my mom to pick me up. I know I like him because when his teeth filled with seeds from a Very Berry Smoothie it didn’t gross me out at all. Next Wednesday would have been our six-month anniversary.
“Okay,” I squeak before throwing myself into the bosom of Maggie Fields’s blue fur coat. She smells like cotton candy, and she feels so sorry for me, leading me into the girls’ bathroom on the twelfth floor and petting my head. He was my first boyfriend, and I feel sure I’ll never have another. Maggie has had three, and all of them disappointed her.
“What a dick!” she says. “What are we gonna do to him?” Her Brooklyn accent only comes out when she’s angry. This is the best part.
“I can’t do this anymore,” I say, and crumple against the window.