—I’m here now, I said the night I got home, when she filled me in on all this as her way of apologizing for how we’d left things the last trip. I told her I didn’t need to get a job right away; I’d earned good work-study money from all the extra spring break hours, had almost seven hundred dollars saved up even after buying that April flight home, plus I had my credit card. We’ll be okay, I told her. We’ll be good. I wished I had footage of that conversation—evidence for Professor Kaufmann. I could’ve shown her that tape, could’ve paused it and said, Now do you understand?
It became my summer job, then, to watch Dante, and to watch Mom. To pack up Dante’s diaper bag if Mom wanted to head out to a march, where I’d stand on the sidelines like a chaperone. To make her sit down and read the classifieds and look for another customer service job that didn’t ask for references. To take her and Dante with me to the library every day when I checked my e-mail while my mom read a book to Dante in the kids’ section. On that June morning, I got an e-mail from Jillian, who was two weeks into her internship in New York City. I could barely read the whole thing: she was subletting an apartment in the city itself, splitting the place with the girl she’d be rooming with off campus next year. The internship sounded boring despite the ways she tried to fancy it up (A file crossed my desk that had Marisa Tomei’s name on the label!), but I couldn’t help being jealous. The last weeks in our room were a lot like the first in the way we were careful around each other, but she almost always slept over at her All-Nighter’s apartment now that they were serious. There was one night when she was around, on the eve of some campus-wide debauchery, a year’s-end tradition called the Hill Spill that involved not much more than drinking outside all day on campus property. A friend of Jillian’s stopped by to pick her up for a midnight party that was a nocturnal pregame for the Hill Spill, and the friend—a girl I didn’t know and who didn’t live in our building and so wasn’t aware of my history there—said to me, You want to come? I surprised us all by saying, Yeah sure, changing out of my pajamas in just a couple minutes. Several hours and too many cups of sticky vodka-laced punch later, Jillian and I had our arms around each other’s necks, singing along to the same rap songs at the party. We were the only two who knew all the words to anything the laptop—set to random and plugged into high-quality speakers—could throw our way. Hours after that, Jillian was vomiting into our recycling bin, my hands holding her hair back from her face, and she marveled at my ability to keep it together, and we confessed how we each thought the other was so gorgeous, each of us taking compliments where we could’ve just as easily found insults: she said I was exotic before clamping her hands on the sides of the bin and retching more vomit over our aluminum cans, while I stroked her unbelievably slick ponytail and slurred, I’d kill you for this white-girl hair. I spent the next morning—the day of Hill Spill itself—recovering from the punch I’d kept down as she’d puked hers up, while she stumbled back out to keep the celebration going. She considered us friends again thanks to that night, had promised to e-mail me over the summer, and in the absence of anything from Ethan—my I’m okay, OK? response lingering unsent in my head—I’d been looking forward to hearing from her until the e-mail actually appeared and hinted at everything I was missing by being home.