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“That’s the mark of friendship in adulthood,” Pallavi said at their last meetup in April. “Do I make time to see you at least twice a year in person? We’re close friends. More than twice? We’re basically family.”
You’re too good-looking to be a writer, Helen immediately wants to say out loud. You didn’t have an awkward teen phase that forced you to develop a rich interior life to compensate.
They had been walking around campus in large packs, a bunch of teenagers trying on new adulthood for the first time.
It’s not true friendship—he knows he isn’t friends with everyone he’s ever worked with—but he likes knowing things about them. It makes him feel better, hearing the stories that stick in other people’s brains, the interactions that keep them up at night, the things they obsess over and care about against their will. The things that make them feel vulnerable and human too.
Helen isn’t sure how they do this—how everyone always seems to know exactly what to say next, striking some perfect alchemy of bitchy and interesting. It’s an exhausting, constant volley of conversation.
Helen tries to remind herself that her least favorite thing about herself is how much she cares about what other people think. And that they probably aren’t thinking about her anyway.
She wraps a throw blanket around herself tightly, and he doesn’t think he’s ever seen someone so badly in need of a hug in his life.
Maybe being bad at things in front of other people is the secret glue of friendship.
I’ve always seen myself as an East Coast person. I grew up in New Jersey, I went to school in New Hampshire, I moved to New York as soon as I could. Ninety percent of my wardrobe only works ten percent of the year out here.”
She thinks of how worried her mother was about earthquakes in this city and wonders if emotional earthquakes have the same kind of internal fallout—rattled bones, shaken foundations, everything hanging on the walls slightly askew.
This is what it would feel like to love Grant Shepard, she thinks, and it aches.
Helen has found it surprisingly easy to revert to an earlier draft of herself.
The kind of ending where someone else sees the best and worst of me and loves me back. We’d be happy together, we’d be sad together, we’d be everything together. And when it’s all over and we’ve reached another ending, my ashes would be scattered over the tree that grows from his body because till death do us part wouldn’t be enough, because I’d need more than one brief eternity with him.
