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  For Ashley, that place was California. It was a place I had never been, but I would end up learning a lot about it from her over the years. Her family had lived in an upscale Bay Area suburb with parks and pools and a walkable downtown where you could get your fruit from the local farm. Her life out there was beginning to feel fun, too: She liked school, she had a best friend, Kelly, and a new cat she named C.C., for California cat. But her dad had gotten a new job—a great job—heading up the classifieds department at The Village Voice in New York. Moving felt like a tearing away, a little sour taste of adulthood where things happened that were beyond your control and uprooted everything; things that divided your life into a before and after.

  In New Jersey, the Ellerins settled into a pretty, Colonial-style at the top of a hill in Peapack-Gladstone, a horsey town with woods and lawns and a little Main Street where commuters picked up their coffee on the way to the train into New York. They had a white picket fence and red shutters, plus a big American flag out front. At the bottom of the street, there’s a graveyard. It’s a scrappy, half-moon patch of brown grass with just a handful of graves from the 1800s dotting the centerline. Some are partially toppled against each other and stained with age, others are covered in lichens and mold, all look long since visited.

  The families buried there are the ones who first settled in the state in the 1700s, the ones whose names appear on the street signs and park placards: Jerolaman, Whiteneck, Vanderveer. The epitaphs are quaint and succinct: “Our Mother, Ann V., died June 17, 1844, in the 46th year of her age”; “Our Father, died January 1, 1852, at age 83.”

  I don’t remember noticing this place until much, much later, though when we were in the fourth grade, Ashley’s mother drove us up this hill nearly every day after school. Back then I didn’t know much of death and loss, and I likely looked right past the open field to the houses on the other side, the train tracks behind, and the trees above that. The corner was simply where we turned when we were almost home.

  • • •

  We sat across from each other that afternoon at Pizza Hut, taking small bites from our Personal Pan Pizzas, hers pepperoni, mine extra cheese. It was unusual for us to be at a restaurant by ourselves—our mothers had dropped us off—and in retrospect, the energy felt like a date. Looking back, it may actually have been the first date I had ever been on, even though for most of my life I attributed that milestone to the time I saw Far and Away with Matt from the local boys’ school a few years later in the eighth grade. I was so nervous on the way to the movie theater I had to have my mother pull over so I could throw up.

  But with Ashley, it was different. I wasn’t nervous at all—I was thrilled. It was finally happening! It was all finally making sense. Though that kind of instant connection was a first for me, it seemed to be exactly the thing that happened when you found a person you loved before you knew enough to think about how it looked or widening your circle or what might unfold if things didn’t work out. You grabbed on fast and sequestered yourself and forgot everything that came before. And really, what had gone before, for me, felt like not all that much. It was like an extended period of the TV getting fuzzy reception; you got used to watching your favorite shows that way because you had only a vague idea that they could look any better, when suddenly, someone came along and hit the side of the set just so and everything snapped into Technicolor sharpness.

  We were a little too young for those Best Friends Forever broken-heart necklaces, but if they had been around then I would have given her one that day, right there hidden in her Personal Pan Pizza; she’d have to wipe off the oil when she pulled it out of the stretchy mozzarella before she put it on.

  Ashley had invited me over after school early on sometime during her first few weeks in town, even before she’d had time to suss out where she—and I—stood, and ever since then there had been no one I was more excited to spend time with. She had a confidence about her that I had never seen before, though from my perspective at the time it looked simply like she knew how to have fun. She enjoyed life in ways I didn’t know how to yet—she could laugh at herself, loudly and often, and not be afraid of befriending someone like me. I wanted to learn from her.

  We went from being strangers to sharing clothes, food, and dreams in a matter of weeks. The first time we decided to wear matching outfits, it was black stirrup pants, a plain white sweatshirt, red socks, and black sneakers, midway into the fall of fourth grade. We discussed it on the phone the night before, weighing the merits of all the different articles of clothing we had in common and what could be combined with what. It was exciting to show up for school the next day and watch our teachers and other kids make the connection, both of us beaming as heads moved from one of us to the other. We were displaying our link to each other for everyone to see, like wedding bands. We were proud to be a pair—attached, mutually defined, without an ounce of the competitiveness, the “Who wore it best?” that would come to infect later years.

  For our first piano recital, we chose dresses that were the lightest shade of pink. Mine was cotton and hers was silk, but when we sat side by side on the bench to play our duet from a book called The Pleasure of Your Company, the colors matched perfectly.

  Later on, we graduated to just matching color palettes, not always actual clothes. For the first day of fifth grade—picture day—we agreed upon red and black. Ashley went with solid colors, a slouchy red sweater with a black collared shirt underneath and black pants, and I chose a matching Esprit knit skirt and top with skinny horizontal red and black stripes. I wore black tights with red scrunchy socks over them. It felt like one of the most confident days of my life. We had spent the summer together playing tennis, getting lost in the woods, baking cookies that turned out too salty. We brought that with us returning to school that year and wore it like armor. The smiles on our faces in those pictures, both of our heads tilted just so to the left that our jawlines looked almost parallel. Had we planned that, or was our body language that mirrored already?

  I spent nearly as much time at Ashley’s house during middle school as I did in my own. I can still picture the shed on the property that had a wall full of mysterious neon graffiti painted by the previous owner, but there was also the afternoon her dad yelled aggressively at their new puppy, who had peed on the floor, and the fear I felt watching the way his hand gripped the scruff of its neck. There were the brambly woods we explored beyond her yard and the crumbling abandoned house we found in the middle of it all, beer cans and cigarette butts strewn about the creaking floorboards, glimpses at a potential future of illicit hangouts we’d one day get to experience. High school, we knew, would be the time for sneaking around under the cover of night and adolescence and maybe bringing a boy, or many boys, to this place. But not now, not then. None of it appealed and or even made much sense. What were boys even for, anyway? Marriage and kids and things that were far beyond us. We had everything we needed with just us two.

  We spent time with other girls, occasionally, even trying it as a trio for part of our fifth grade year with a new girl named Jill. There were hangouts and a few adventures, but the triangle dynamic never quite took. Ashley and I couldn’t help that we had more secrets, more sleepovers, and more affection between us to leave any substantial room for anyone else.

  • • •

  Her house was so different from my own house, where everyone was busy and distracted, and I was often alone. At Ashley’s house, people knew each other’s business and you could always hear voices through the walls, or piano music coming from downstairs. Bandages were in the cabinet under the sink upstairs, but also one time we found Ashley’s mother’s sanitary belt in the bathroom, and were dumbfounded. We had been learning about periods in health class, so we knew what one was, but it still felt incredibly foreign and strange. You could use a tampon or a pad, or there was this third option where you hooked a pad between your legs to a belt you wore around your waist. And then perhaps you didn’t have to wear underwear? We were confused
. It felt antiquated and sexual at once—over our heads.

  Her parents, too, were a different sort. Younger than mine, with her dad even younger than her mom. They both were slender with dark hair and seemed almost like TV parents. They would bicker without concern for who was around, or yell at Ashley or her brother in front of me. I saw the both of them more as actual people—human, fallible, loving—much sooner than I did any other adults at the time.

  • • •

  There were after-school art classes—I made splatter-painted abstracts and Ashley, finely drawn portraits of her cat—and hikes and too many overnights to count; the memories bunch together in one long movie montage. Here are two little girls who start out on two adjacent swings, shy, pumping their legs forward and back, swinging in parallel. And then they accidentally bump into each other, and the music swells, and then they’re running up the hill, laughing and giggling under the covers with a flashlight and sharing an ice cream sundae at a diner. At the end of two minutes, they are not very much older—they may have different haircuts, or perhaps one has gotten a little taller—but they are clearly, indelibly bonded for life.

  There were many years of that. The feeling where we were always each other’s first. Where we were partners and pseudosisters, especially since neither of us had a real sister of our own. The year when we devised new ways to pass notes in class by hiding scraps of paper in a tiny compartment in our jumbo pens and then exchanging pens, because it was that important that we share absolutely all of our thoughts with each other, even if it was the middle of social studies. The one where we memorized every article of clothing the other had, and as soon as there was a new addition for one of us, the other one registered it immediately. The one where we began to be regarded as a unit to our classmates, that it was known that neither of us would go anywhere without the other. There was no need for autonomy, because we had found the one thing we valued more.

  3

  THE LAST WEEKEND

  THE SCENE ALWAYS opens on that wall. There were things that came before and things that came after, but when the playback begins in my mind, the camera pans down from a long tracking shot that starts over the water or sometimes at the Twin Towers and then heads uptown, moving over Union Square, over the Empire State Building, up the park past the café where I bartended, past the brownstone where I lost my virginity on a random Tuesday in July, down on top of St. John the Divine, and around the corner to that place on 109th and Amsterdam. There were no windows, and I never knew what went on inside the building, but I guessed it was an electrical substation of sorts, massive and looming from the outside, all marble and curious panels of circular, helixlike grating, the shapes folding back and over themselves like sixties wallpaper.

  I can still picture Ashley against that mysterious, windowless wall, framed like a photograph I’ll never have: her bleached blond hair spiked up with a million little rubber bands, her head turned to me in front of all those steel circles while we walked to my apartment. She was wearing a black, cap-sleeved T-shirt, a skirt with a Hawaiian print, and flip-flops; her round shoulders and tanned upper arms swished back and forth down the sidewalk across from the low-rise buildings and guys hanging at the corner on the block where I lived.

  • • •

  We hadn’t seen each other in what must have been three years, that gap between the end of high school and the middle of college when most of my other teenage friendships—the ones that had once seemed a fixture, essential even—had slowly become obsolete. They appeared to connect only with outdated versions of myself that I no longer wanted: the frizzy hair and attempts at conformity, the ill-fitting clothes and the awkward rejections by equally awkward boys. Now I had relationships with people who had known me only from age eighteen on—the adult world!—and I felt liberated: the me with liquid eyeliner and my own place where I could give people a beer from the six-pack in my own fridge. The me who rode subways and played Springsteen on an acoustic guitar. Those former selves, though only a few years behind me, now seemed as far away as New York was from Los Angeles, where Ashley now lived.

  • • •

  We had lost touch, as had happened with so many other people so many times before. How exactly had it happened? Gradually, then suddenly, but also in fits and starts, confusions and forgotten birthdays, faded memories and rituals. The scales tipping toward more important moments lived among other people in other places in other rooms far away from each other.

  • • •

  The Ellerins moved back to California in 1993, during our sophomore year of high school. Ashley’s leaving didn’t hit me as hard as it might have, since I myself had already left—for a girls’ school in the next town and then for boarding school in New Hampshire.

  Friendship had gotten easier in the years since meeting Ashley, because I finally had a good model for what it could look like. Our relationship had given me my first sense memory for belonging, and with it came a newfound impulse to seek connection whenever I went to a new place. Starting out somewhere would always come with an adjustment period—a lonely period—but after a while, I knew if I stayed open I could always find my people.

  So why did I leave my family and my best friend and a comfortable life that made me happy? Because I held the misguided assumption, at age thirteen, that things could only get better. That I could take my burgeoning self-confidence, newly straightened hair, a new boyfriend, good grades, and plenty of friends and move on to what I knew would only be greener pastures. Tragedy, self-doubt, and regret would never touch me, I was sure of it.

  I had surprised everyone (specifically, my parents) by being accepted into a school so competitive, so lofty, that my own wunderkind brother had been rejected from it years before. It was the highest form of validation my young brain knew at the time, and it clearly meant that I was bound for greatness. In reality, it would take me years—more than a decade, even—to get back to that same sense of optimism I’d had before I left.

  Everything was different at Exeter. I was no longer part of the smart crowd; I was merely getting by in the bottom half of my class, while kids around me had learned five languages or dug ditches to bring water to rural villages in Africa on their summer break. Making friends ended up being trickier than I had imagined at first. I spent my sophomore fall largely by myself or with another new girl from my dorm whose only goal in life seemed to be getting into Harvard. She was painfully shy and had never kissed a boy and showed no inclination toward changing that fact. I once rather wickedly asked her if she’d consider sleeping with a college admissions officer if he told her he thought it would help her chances. She said she’d consider it.

  Boys, too, were a problem. After the spike of new-girl notoriety subsided, I was left with nothing close to the sweet, consistent relationship I had left behind in New Jersey with my ninth-grade boyfriend. The next three years would be ones of confusion, otherness, and the lingering sense that I might have made a bad, irrevocable life decision. Leaving would mean accepting defeat or that I was someone who couldn’t cut it, and the emotional sunk costs only mounted with each passing trimester.

  Visiting my old friends from girls’ school at home wasn’t a solace, either. They were happy to see me, sure, but they had moved on in big and small ways that I couldn’t relate to. They were getting their driver’s licenses and spending weekends at all-night pool parties, while I was forced to check in to my dorm at 8 p.m. nightly and was prohibited to have a car or ride in anyone else’s. The kids back home were dating and coasting through AP classes while I was on probation for failing a surprise spot check of my room and had been moved back three levels in French. And they could wear what they wanted! At Exeter, the conservative dress code combined with the New Hampshire winters seemed expressly designed to make the girls look as frumpy as possible.

  • • •

  Meanwhile, Ashley had broken out ahead of the pack by sophomore year in every way that mattered. I had heard she used her grandparents’ out-of-state address to g
et a learner’s permit earlier than anyone else around and coasted through the streets of Peapack in their beat-up vintage Mercedes, blasting the Grateful Dead on the radio regardless of what music was cool at the time. She seemed to have breezed through what was typically the awkward period, too, emerging into her middle teen years with clear skin, a compact body, and perfect eyebrows, thanks to pilfered diet pills and the electrolysis she had convinced her mom to get her.

  Teenage boys didn’t seem to know what to make of her. She attracted plenty of attention from the older ones, the younger ones, and all the ones in between. She thrived off it and the feeling of being in control of an area that the others girls struggled in, while still maintaining her reputation as a relatively good girl. Most of that voodoo I only caught glimpses of during the holidays and the one time I saw Ashley in California during our junior or senior year of high school while I was accompanying my dad to a physics conference in San Francisco after she had moved.

  She had driven into the city from her parents’ house in Los Altos by herself in a stick-shift Volkswagen beetle. The way she could start on those hills . . . How fearless she seemed!—even my dad was impressed. She took us to lunch at some place near the hotel where my dad and I were staying, and though I can’t remember much of the meal or what we did after, I do remember how happy she was to see me. She was giddy almost, like “Look at the caper we’ve pulled off staying friends this long across this much distance.”

  At the time I didn’t realize how much I might have mattered to her—it seemed impossible that someone as confident as she was would need anyone in her life at all—but I know more now. Much more than I ever thought I would.

  • • •

  I was happy to see her, too, but it felt more complicated. I had heard stories from our mutual friends back in New Jersey about Ashley had been up to, and they made me wary. Wait, she tried what drug? And, like, she felt okay about hooking up with a guy that much older? How did that even work? The physical distance, however, and the fact that I wasn’t around to see any of it, compartmentalized things in my mind. That stuff might go on, I would think, but that wasn’t the real Ashley. I couldn’t quite picture or relate to what she was doing offstage, so it didn’t quite feel relevant to me or to us.