At 8:30, we got a text from Willie.
Hey—flight delayed for weather. Stuck on the ground for a bit. Sucks. Shouldn’t be too long. Will keep you posted.
No worries. How long?
They don’t know yet. Will keep you posted, he wrote.
No prob, I wrote. Excited to see you.
Whatchu guys doing?!?
I looked around. This was supposed to be a debaucherous weekend in Las Vegas, and it was 8:45 p.m. on a Friday night.
Getting soooo wasted, I texted back.
SOOOO JEALOUS!!!!
Then, twice:
WHO IS THE DRUNKEST??
We looked at one another, and Josh and Dave pointed at me.
Prob me, I wrote back. Super wasted.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! LOVE IT!!!!!!!!!
We went back to planning when a minor wave of conscience hit me: it probably didn’t make a difference, but the text I had just sent was technically glamorizing the drinking we were asking him to give up. It was a subtle thing, but maybe it was the English major in me that thought it would be off-theme to imply that we were having a great time drinking without at least implying some negative consequence.
Feeling sick, I wrote.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA U R such an amateur!!!!
This still didn’t feel like it had done the job, so I added one more line.
Making some real bad decisions .
What did you do?! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA tell me!
“What did I do?” I held up the phone.
Dave: “Does he have a macro for ‘BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA’?”
“Probably autocorrect, at this point.”
“It needs to be something big,” said Josh. “Something he can’t just tease you about.”
Cheated on Sarah.
Four texts came in from Willie in rapid succession:
W
H
A
fucking T?
Yeah. I know, I wrote back. Can’t believe it. So wasted.
What happened!?!?!?
Made out with some slut in the bar downstairs, I wrote. “Slut” didn’t sound like me, I realized as I read it back. It was a word I used when I was trying to sound like someone else.
Why?? Explain?! he wrote back.
As I held up the phone to show the others, it started ringing in my hand.
“Don’t pick up,” said Josh. “He’ll hear that we aren’t really partying.”
I sent it to voicemail and texted him:
Reception sucks.
He texted back:
Emailing you—too long to text—hold on …
Five minutes later I got an email with no subject:
Hey! I’m emailing you because this is really important and I hope you really read this and think about it. The first thing you need to do is be honest with yourself. Why did this happen, what does it mean, how do you feel about it, and what do you want to happen next. Don’t shortchange this or gloss over it. It’s not as easy as it sounds. This part will feel hard, and it should—it will actually be harder to be honest with yourself than it will be to be honest with her. Once you are 100% sure you know how YOU feel, we can talk about what you do from there. I can’t tell you what to do. But as long as you are honest with yourself, we can figure out what is really going on in your heart, and then I will be there to come up with words and actions that are true to that. Anyway. So sorry this is going on. I want you to do the right thing, but first & foremost I want you to know that I am always there for you and always on your side. Stay okay and SEE YOU SOON!!!
—W
I showed it to the room. Everyone read it.
“He could have texted that,” said Dave.
An hour later Willie texted the group:
Flight’s canceled. SUCKS!!! They put me on the first flight tomorrow & I leave first thing in the morning. Arriving tomorrow noon. Have fun without me. HANG IN THERE GUYS!!!
The next morning we woke up early, arranged the room again, and then got another text from Willie: more delays, in combination with some mileage game he was playing, meant that he was now going to arrive on the same flight as he had originally planned, which would get him in at 8:10 p.m. Still worth it!!! he wrote to the group. Trust me, one night is going to be PLENTY!!!! Then he sent a separate text to me: Hanging in there? I answered that I was.
Now we had to figure out how to spend a whole day in Las Vegas. I texted Sarah—the real Sarah, the best thing in my life, an honorary member of this friend group, close to all of us, a person on whom I had not cheated and never would. Sarah was finishing up her senior year and would then most likely be moving to New York to live with me. She was objectively, by all accounts, in every relevant way, cooler than I was, and would know things like this.