I DON’T GET HOME UNTIL EARLY THE NEXT MORNING.
Documenting death, apparently, takes a very long time. The EMTs have to check every fucking detail before they can officially write on their clipboards: Athena Liu, twenty-seven, female, is dead because she choked, to death, on a fucking pancake.
I give a statement. I stare very hard into the eyes of the EMT in front of me—they’re a very pale blue, and big black globs of mascara are stuck to her outer lashes—to distract from the stretcher in the kitchen behind me, the uniformed people pulling a plastic sheet over Athena’s body. Oh my God. Oh my God, that’s a body bag. This is real. Athena is dead.
“Name?”
“June—sorry, Juniper Hayward.”
“Age?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“How do you know the deceased?”
“She’s—she was—my friend. We’ve been friends since college.”
“And what were you doing here tonight?”
“We were celebrating.” Tears prickle behind my nose. “We were celebrating, because she’d just signed a Netflix deal, and she was so fucking happy.”
I’m weirdly terrified that they’re about to arrest me for murder. But that’s stupid—Athena choked, and the globule (they kept calling it a globule—what kind of word is “globule”?) is right there in her throat. There are no signs of struggle. She let me in, people saw us being friendly at the bar—Call the guy at the Graham, I want to say, he’ll back me up.
But why am I even trying to come up with a defense? These details shouldn’t matter. I didn’t do it. I didn’t kill her. That’s ridiculous; it’s ridiculous I’m even worried about it. No jury would convict.
At last, they let me go. It’s four in the morning. An officer—at some point the police arrived, which I guess happens when there’s a dead body—offers me a ride home to Rosslyn. We spend most of it in silence, and as we pull up to my building, he offers some condolences that I hear but don’t process. I stagger into my apartment, rip off my shoes and bra, gargle some mouthwash, and collapse onto my bed. I cry for a while, great howling sobs to vent out this awful clawing energy in my body, and then one melatonin and two Lunestas later, I manage to fall asleep.
Meanwhile, in my bag, tossed at the floor of my bed, Athena’s manuscript sits like a hot sack of coals.
Two
MOURNING IS STRANGE. ATHENA WAS ONLY A FRIEND, NOT A close friend. I feel like a bitch saying it, but she just wasn’t that important to me, and she doesn’t leave a hole in my life that I now need to build detours around. I don’t feel the same black, suffocating loss I did when my father died. I don’t struggle to breathe. I don’t lie awake in the mornings debating whether it’s worth crawling out of bed. I don’t resent every stranger I encounter, wondering how they can keep moving around the world as if it hasn’t stopped turning.
Athena’s death didn’t break my world, it just made it . . . weirder. I go about my days as normal. For the most part, if I don’t think too hard about it, if I don’t dwell on the memories, I’m fine.
Still, I was there. I watched Athena die. My feelings those first few weeks are dominated less by grief and more by an awed shock. That really happened. I really watched her feet drumming against her hardwood floors, her fingers clawing at her neck. I really sat next to her dead body for ten whole minutes before the EMTs arrived. I really saw her eyes bulging open, stricken, unseeing. Those memories don’t make me cry—I couldn’t describe this as pain—but I do stare at the wall and mutter, “What the fuck?” several times a day.
Athena’s death must have made the news, because my phone blows up with friends trying to say the correct, concerned thing (Hey, I’m just reaching out, how have you been?) and acquaintances trying to seek out all the juicy details (OMG I saw on Twitter, were you actually THERE?). I don’t have the energy to respond. I watch the red numbers tick higher and higher in the corners of my messaging apps with thrilled, amazed disgust.
On my sister Rory’s advice, I visit a local support group and make an appointment with a therapist specializing in grief. Both only make me feel worse, because they assume a version of a friendship that didn’t exist, and it’s too hard to explain why I’m not more broken up about Athena, so I don’t follow up with either. I don’t want to talk about how much I miss her, or how my days feel so empty without her. The problem is that my days feel completely normal, except for the singular, bewildering fact that Athena is fucking dead, that she’s gone, just like that, and I don’t know how I’m even supposed to feel about it, so I start drinking and panic-eating whenever the blues creep up in the evenings, and I get pretty bloated for a few weeks from all the ice cream and lasagna, but that’s as bad as things get.
I am, in fact, rather astounded by my mental resilience.
I break down only once, a week after it happened. I’m not sure what triggers it, but I do spend that night watching Heimlich tutorials on YouTube for hours, comparing them to what I did, trying to remember if I positioned my hands the same way, if I yanked with enough force. I could have saved her. I keep saying this out loud, like Lady Macbeth yelling about her damned spot. I could have kept my head on, taught myself how to do it properly, put my fists correctly over her navel, cleared the obstruction, and let Athena breathe again.
I am the reason why she died.
“No,” says Rory when I call her at four in the morning, weeping so hard I can barely speak. “No, no, no, don’t you think that for a second, do you understand? You are not guilty for anything. You did not kill that girl. You are innocent. Do you understand?”
I feel like a toddler as I mumble back, “Yes. Okay. Yeah.”
But that’s what I need right now: a child’s blind faith that the world is so simple, and that if I didn’t mean to do a bad thing, then none of this is my fault.
“Are you going to be okay?” Rory presses. “Do you want me to call Dr. Gaily?”
“No—God, no, I’m fine. Don’t call Dr. Gaily.”
“Okay, it’s just, she told us that if you were ever backsliding—”
“I’m not backsliding.” I take a deep breath. “This isn’t like that. I’m all right, Rory. I didn’t know Athena that well anyways. It’s fine.”
A few days after the news breaks, I write a long Twitter thread about what happened. It feels like I’m writing from a template, drawing on the countless bereavement threads I have pruriently scrolled through in the past. I use phrases like “tragic accident” and “hasn’t sunk in” and “still feels unreal to me.” I don’t delve into details—that’s vile. I write about how shaken I am, what Athena meant to me, and how much I’ll miss her.
Strangers keep telling me how sorry they are, how I should be gentle with myself, how it’s totally valid to be reeling like I am from such a traumatic incident. They call me a good person. They send me hugs and well-wishes. They ask if they can set up a GoFundMe for my therapy, and I’m tempted by the money, but I feel too uncomfortable to say yes. Someone even offers to drive over and bring me home-cooked meals every day for the next month. I ignore that, though, because you can’t trust anyone on the internet and who knows if they’re really coming to poison me?