Big Summer

by Jennifer Weiner

The trick of the Internet, I had learned, was not being unapologetically yourself or completely unfiltered; it was mastering the trick of appearing that way. It was spiking your posts with just the right amount of real… which meant, of course, that you were never being real at all.

I let myself remember the night that everything had changed; the night at this bar when I’d decided to stop being a girl on a diet and just start being a girl.

She was beautiful, and funny, and glamorous; a long, unfurled ribbon of cool, where I was a sweaty pretzeled knot of striving.

He tasted like whiskey and salt.

I knew that Drue was dead. Everything that had ever been inside her, everything, good and bad, that had made my beautiful, terrible friend who she was, all of it was gone.

When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you’re angry, everything looks like a target. There are a lot of angry people in the world. And these days, they’re all online.

Everyone deserves justice, I thought. Even people who lie. And everyone lies. Especially on social media, where there were lies of commission and lies of omission on everyone’s page, woven into everyone’s public presence.

Both of us were laughing, heads thrown back, the skirts of our dresses gathered in our hands. She’d been splashing me. Drops of water hung, sparkling, suspended in the air, and the sky stretched, vast and brilliant, behind us. She looked—we both looked—young and beautiful.