“I got Stella,” I said to his T-shirt, before letting go. Sometimes when I was buzzed, I called attention to alcohol on purpose. Offense as defense. I pushed all the magazines and old mail to one corner of the table and soon we were eating, one of Liam’s sloppy clean-out-the-fridge stir-fries, a beer open in front of each of us, and I was safe because he’d asked me if I wanted one and when I said sure there was no long, disapproving pause, no tightness to his voice, no Do you really need another? He told me about his day—he’s a CPA, and it’s always stories about the people in the office; Randy, who came in at noon and bullshitted his way through meetings; Selena, who was bubbly and too thin and, I suspected, his workplace crush. Whenever I went to one of Liam’s work events, Selena said the same thing, in the same jokey tone: It’s so cool that libraries still exist! Going strong, I always said back, which was true, and so lame and humorless that it effectively ended the conversation.
When it was my turn, I told Liam about Sal, but I made it sound like it wasn’t a big deal, really, like I was more stunned by the strange coincidence of it, the timing, than by the prospect of seeing Sal in the flesh so soon, after so much time. Liam knew about Marlena, but the broad strokes only—if anyone from my life outside of Michigan knew, and not many did, that was all they got. As a girl, I’d had a friend who died. We were close. I didn’t talk about it. When you grow up, who you were as a teenager either takes on a mythical importance or it’s completely laughable. I wanted to be the kind of person who wiped those years away; instead, I feared, they defined me.
“You should go through that old box,” Liam said, getting up, his plate like a child’s—clean except for the broccoli. “From the closet. Maybe there’s something you can take him.” He disappeared and came back with a shoebox full of Marlena stuff, stuff from my old room in Silver Lake. Mom had sent it to me after she lost the house to foreclosure and moved to Ann Arbor, the summer after my freshman year of college. I’d carted it with me from apartment to apartment ever since. A plain old Adidas box, the contents lifting the lid from underneath. I took it and a fresh beer with me into the office, while Liam cleaned up.
Papers, mostly, scraps covered with hearts and the gossip of the day. A slippery clipping of folded newspaper—an article with the headline, LOCAL BIG BOY DEFACED. A Polaroid of me and Marlena at the beach, the two of us far more physically alike to my adult eye than my teenaged self would have believed possible—more than anything, we both just looked like children. Marlena’s pin, bigger than I remembered, and painstakingly detailed—scalloped roof shingles, the windows etched so that each of them contained the suggestion of curtains, of a life going on inside. I pushed the face, clicking it open. Empty, except for a layer of white pill dust. I ran my finger around the cavity, and then popped it into my mouth, sucking the bitter dust off. Sunk to the bottom, a silky knot of T-shirt collars, the size of Liam’s fist, which confused me at first. Underneath everything, my old cell phone, mummied in its charger cord. I plugged it in and held the power button, feeling a distant wonder when the phone came alive slowly, the Nokia symbol emerging from the glow, the pixels reorganizing to the resting screen. A tiny time warp. There we were—text after text after text. The phone beeped. Even plugged in, the battery couldn’t seem to hold the charge. I opened my laptop and began hurriedly typing out our messages.
I think it’s pretty common for teenagers to fantasize about dying young. We knew that time would force us into sacrifices—we wanted to flame out before making the choices that would determine who we became. When you were an adult, all the promise of your life was foreclosed upon, every day just a series of compromises mitigated by little pleasures that distracted you from your former wildness, from your truth. Sylvia Plath, Marilyn Monroe, Edie Sedgwick, Janis Joplin. They got to be beautiful forever. And wasn’t that the ultimate feminine achievement—to be too gorgeous, too fucked up, too talented and sad and vulnerable to survive, like some kind of freak orchid with a two-minute lifespan? Who else could we look up to? Being young doesn’t seem like enough of an excuse—we egged each other on, committed, together, to these poisonous theories, until we reached a point where disagreement would have meant a betrayal of our friendship. How could we have been so wrong and so stupid? For years after Marlena died, it comforted me to remember her talking about how she never wanted to get old. Wouldn’t it have been death to her anyway, to grow to twenty-five in that barn, thirty, still taking pills or worse, her looks gone, her voice gone, her brain fuzzier and fuzzier every day? Silver Lake was quicksand. What possibilities were there, for a girl like Marlena, outside of the pills, the highs and lows—I hope she would have wound up somewhere entirely else, that her life would have taken an unimaginable twist or turn, but I can’t see it. After things fell apart, instead of trying to get out, she hunkered down.
I got another beer. I didn’t want to—that was not a lie. I didn’t want to. But I felt a desire for it that was separate from wanting, a yearning that came from the body, strong and clear and propulsive. It gnawed at me as I typed out all the dumb things Marlena and I’d said to each other, so many of them about getting fucked, hammered, shitfaced, wasted. I just want to have fun, she texted me, more than once. Were gonna have fun tonite. I would have tea instead. No, a beer. Why not, wasn’t it too late? I was already drunk. I wouldn’t. No. I did. And again. Liam went to bed without saying good night, so I’d been wrong, he was mad, and I would have to deal with that soon, but for now I was alone. I was free. When I popped off the top with the end of the can opener, the crimped metal circle spun into the air, dinging against the garbage can. I was already thirsty for water, my limbs estranged from my body. Such boring agony. The restaurants with their beautiful menus, the five o’clock feeling, just one, two, the tricks that never worked, no brown liquor, no clear liquor, no liquor at all, no wine, only beer, all the rules I’d tried, the days’ worth of hours up at three, four in the morning, thirsty and buzzing, the sleep that never came back, work the next day, whole weeks wreathed in padded gauze, the taste in the back of the throat, the hunger and never being full, the too-strong smell of all food, the way my hair got strawlike, after, face puffed to the seams, the wanting more and the wanting to stop in equal measure, not equal measure, not yet, one more. And repeat. When I was forty. If we had a kid. The phone beeped again, louder, and died. I held the power button but it wouldn’t come back on. There was a lot I hadn’t gotten to. Ctrl-S. I went whole months sure I’d misjudged. Months of normal, of having the same as everyone else, stopping like Liam, after one. I tried the power button again; nothing. But the desire was always there, the insidious little tug, how saying yes to it felt like giving into a laugh, letting myself go. How much of it was a choice. The sweet and easy click, then the fade to black.