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  What I did pick up on, however, was the feeling I had about myself the few times we were together during those years. It had changed. As nine-year-olds Ashley and I had been an offbeat pair. We’d talked alike, dressed alike, and crafted our own hair accessories out of Koosh balls and Trivial Pursuit pieces. We’d both been picked last for kickball but had usually managed to stay on the same team and laugh about it. I might have gotten better grades, but the real dividing factors, the social signifiers—drugs, sex, male attention—were still years ahead of us. So were the other intangibles that amplify self-consciousness in girls, the little things that twist the way you look at a friend’s choices—and really, they could hardly be called choices at that age—into a tacit judgment on your own.

  At sixteen, they were front and center, and with them came a sense of not measuring up. Ashley’s body was lithe and angular, and the clothes she wore showed the beginnings of a unique personal style that I hadn’t myself yet developed. I was utterly average and had gained ten pounds my first year away from home, which upped the self-consciousness I felt about putting on a bathing suit when Ashley wanted to swim in her grandmother’s pool during one of my visits home our sophomore year. Ashley talked about bands I had never heard of and of taking acid at their concerts. I had smoked pot once but was still unclear about whether or not I had conclusively inhaled. And the boys! She reiterated the gossip I had heard, but in a self-deprecating, nonchalant way. She dropped names of kids I didn’t know and would never meet. Boys who had dumped their girlfriends for Ashley or tried to talk her into having threesomes. She generally seemed to consider them all rather inconsequential. I was by no means a prude, but my stories of pajama parties in an all-girls dorm and my one botched attempt at oral sex were of no comparison.

  Perhaps at the time it might have seemed that we were just out of touch. That, given a few more days spent together, the disconnect I felt could likely have thawed. Instead, I recognize now that something far more crucial was happening: we were beginning to communicate in two different languages, with distinctly different perceptions of how the world worked. Ashley’s was the language of youth, risk, and sexual possibility. And mine was—what, exactly? I didn’t quite know, except that my sense of self felt defined by limits and lacks, by the things I wanted to be but couldn’t, and by the ways I wished the world saw me but didn’t.

  I knew that there was a difference between the way things really were and the way one saw them, though, enough at least to have an adolescent understanding that I couldn’t claim to know for sure how Ashley felt inside, despite thinking that I had it all figured out just by looking at her. Somewhere along our twinned paths, however, I began to define myself in relation to her. Involuntary, illogical—it is something I may never stop doing.

  Later in life, a friend in recovery turned me on to the valuable maxim often batted around in AA meetings: “Don’t compare your insides to someone else’s outsides.” That’s an exceedingly tricky stance to maintain as an adult; as a teenager, it was nearly impossible, considering that I didn’t even have the vocabulary to describe what was happening in the first place. And especially as a young woman, when it was starting to feel like your outsides were what most of the world judged you on anyway. Why bother fighting it?

  • • •

  Somewhere between our fifth-grade picture day and riding in cars without our parents, it seemed to me that Ashley and I had become two sides of the same coin. The feeling didn’t start when my mom got those photos back from the developer, but that’s the first time I became aware of one of the big forces that would go on to come between us as we grew up. It would be years into my career in media before I’d be able to give it a name, but all along, I felt it like a colorless, odorless, corrupting gas: the male gaze.

  It meant attention was on you, at all times, for what you wore and how you looked and whether the proportions of your body measured up to whatever standard was the norm that year. It meant that if you were deemed worthy, a new ocean of power and opportunity opened up to you, and if you were lucky and smart, you’d surf that wave for as long as you could stay on.

  It was as if Ashley had taken that essential truth I woke up to at ten—that the male gaze was a given—and stared squarely, defiantly right back at it, while I was still attempting to avoid eye contact for as long as possible.

  • • •

  It’s hard to recall if it had started to hurt yet. Most likely I still felt that it was just a phase, that there would be more time, more opportunities, a stage where we’d live closer to each other again. In the years after that, of course, she had called, written, whatever she did or we did every now and again but used to do more of. I usually responded, but I might not have one time or another; the whens and hows didn’t seem to matter as much as the vague notion that the chance was always there.

  • • •

  By twenty, I had turned even more inward. I was living in a dingy one-bedroom near Columbia University. Poor grades from boarding school had left me with no college acceptances a couple years prior, so I had begun taking classes in the city part-time and trying for a do-over. Since I wasn’t a degree candidate, the dorms weren’t open to me. I lived alone a few blocks from campus, scratching at the edges of university life and wondering if and when I’d get the real thing.

  I had moved to New York City the day Princess Diana’s death hit the news, and at times it felt as though the aftershocks of that crash were still with me. For the week it took for my new furniture to arrive and the cable to get hooked up at the apartment I had found off a sign at a bus stop, I sat on the floor in the empty front room watching fuzzy images on television about that tunnel, that car, that bodyguard, that poor, poor, mistreated woman.

  It was the wedding footage I remember the most, the pictures that seemed to cycle on repeat every four minutes on every channel, on and on through the nights. The billowy fabric of Diana’s dress and veil, the train that stretched on for yards, the carriages and attendants and those dozens of steps. The whole thing seemed to carry the weight of being choreographed for the postcards and the history books and the commemorative coffee-table albums, even as it was all unfolding in real time. It was as if to make us believe, even just for a day, that nothing bad could ever spring from a scene that looked that perfect. That somehow, if every detail was right, it would keep them—and us—safe.

  • • •

  My apartment was a first-floor railroad flat with bars on the windows and an old radiator that clanged as though someone were hitting it with a baseball bat. The molding looked to have been painted white long ago; now gray chips of plaster and grime pooled in the corners. The floors were linoleum tile made to look like wood, and the bathroom sink was no bigger than a paper plate. Dust collected everywhere, fast and thick, but I soon realized that the lack of natural light made the filmy surfaces easy to ignore.

  Despite the dingier aspects of apartment 1W, having people over—something that happened only once in a while—gradually became a point of pride. I knew it was unusual what I was doing—living alone and being alone without being shown how first. No roommate from Craigslist (it didn’t really exist yet); no older sister who lived a few blocks away to check on me; no resident adviser to field questions or front-desk security guard to field visitors. No one at all, really. I was playacting being an adult without bearing the full brunt of the responsibilities—my parents paid the bulk of my expenses—and when I took a moment to remember that, I realized I was unspeakably lucky. I had my first big party for my nineteenth birthday and served six types of alcohol and played the music loud: Nina Simone and Elvis Costello and the sound track from The Last Days of Disco. People danced and kissed, and I felt happy and free. After midnight the upstairs neighbors called the cops, who arrived shuffling down the hallway with smirks on their faces.

  My block was mostly four- or five-story tenements, located smack in the center of operations of a drug gang called the Young Talented Children, aka the Yellow Top Crew. Their name
referenced the color of the hard plastic lids on the crack vials they sold, which I’d occasionally see crushed into the spaces between the sidewalk squares. Things had calmed down a bit since the mid-nineties, when they had been responsible for eight murders and five million dollars a year in sales, but I always held my breath when walking past the groups of guys on the corner and asked cab drivers to wait until they saw me go inside. Once a homicide detective knocked on my door to ask what I had heard during a shooting that had apparently just taken place on my front steps. I had been watching a movie, unaware of the crime and the buzz of disquieted neighbors.

  Mail would sit unopened for weeks, and sometimes a utility or two would be discontinued because I’d forgotten to pay the bill. I tended to avoid doing laundry because I didn’t like going down the grimy alley to enter my building’s basement laundry room, with LOCK THIS DOOR NOW written in drippy black paint on the inside wall. Filling an empty, full-sized refrigerator seemed daunting, so I often settled on chicken and yellow rice from the take-out place on the corner with the bulletproof glass. One Styrofoam container could usually last me three meals.

  I became friends with an obese young Dominican woman who lived upstairs with her two sons and slick, handsome husband. She’d come over from time to time with a harsh joint, and we’d sit in my front room, passing it back and forth, tapping the burnt bits into an ashtray I got from Urban Outfitters.

  Johanna never said much about her husband, and I wondered about the two of them as a couple. She always looked harried, disheveled, and preoccupied, the fabric of her pants straining around her hips, her arms weighted down with groceries. She worked a few jobs at a time, often heading to the first one while it was still dark out. Other times she’d yell at her son on the sidewalk, yanking him forward by the hand. Her husband I saw only late at night, usually alone but sometimes with various women with crunchy, styled hair and long fake nails. Dressed in shiny shirts and slim trousers, he’d climb into different cars with reggaeton blaring out the windows. I wanted to believe there could be more to their marriage beneath the surface, but I knew implicitly that things were probably just as they seemed.

  One night over a few cigarettes and some cheap red wine, Johanna confessed that her husband had another family in Spanish Harlem. A woman had called her out of the blue one day, saying that their sons were the exact same age: same eyes, same hair, same father. Every time he stayed out late, he was with her, and when Johanna had gone back to Santo Domingo to see relatives last summer, he had spent the whole week over there across town, taking his other son to the park and his other wife out dancing. It was part of the way things went, Johanna said, her voice not even cracking. The same thing had happened to a few of her friends. She had learned to cope, but some times were harder than others. She would gain weight, and then it would get worse, and then she would gain some more. She told me she felt proud to know someone like me, a college girl who was smart and took care of herself. I smiled anxiously and looked at the floor.

  • • •

  Ashley coming to visit was like a strange punctuation mark in a summer filled with more than my usual share of confusion and social possibility. In between a few classes, I had been spending most of my time with two graphic designers who lived together down the block in a medium-sized building with an exquisitely tall doorman. As the year progressed, the doorman would watch me come and go, go and come, mornings and evenings and all the small hours in between—until it abruptly stopped and a new girl took my place. Much later, after everyone in that story was gone from my life, I would run into that man around the neighborhood and we would exchange one of those tight, apprehensive smiles, the kind you might give to your doctor if you happened to see her in the supermarket one morning buying milk. A look that says: you’ve seen me naked and vulnerable, now move along, please.

  The graphic designers were five years older than me and wore suits every day and polished shoes and identical portfolio bags strapped across their chests. I met Nick first, in a philosophy class he was auditing at night that I was taking for credit. Never before and never since have I felt such an overwhelming physical attraction to someone. His blue eyes looked like a mirror image of my own, and I was certain that he could see right through me whenever he glanced over to my side of the room. My face grew hot any time he sat across from me; I took to always having water on hand so that I could sip it whenever my cheeks started to flush and I was unable to look up. Any newfound confidence and self-sufficiency I had picked up living alone the past few years went out the window in front of him. I was utterly, completely infatuated before we had even spoken to each other.

  He took me home with him one night after class, and there was his roommate, Oliver, equally attractive and standing at the stove with his collared shirt unbuttoned all the way, half undressed from the workday while making chicken with canned mushroom soup in a small, flimsy skillet. My mind reeled—there were two of them! Men who looked like actual men, who cooked for themselves and had chest hair—I felt as though I were entering an alternate universe.

  Their shirts were all the colors of the sun—mustard, brick red, orange—while their ties were dark and their pressed Prada pants crisp and slim-fitting. I could listen to them talk about design until my eyes grew heavy—and I did. How much it all mattered! How animated they could become in their intellectual debates, dense with name-dropping—Foucault, Derrida, Mies van der Rohe—the words rushed out with such intent. How right I felt sitting on their couch, buzzed off all the testosterone and the sense of being that much closer to an adulthood that was most certainly going to be filled with countless scenes just like this one. I was obsessed with both of them: their arrogance, their newness, the way they behaved as if everything and everyone were theirs for the taking—including me.

  One I was sleeping with, while with the other I was carrying on a rather ambiguous, boundary-less friendship. Overnights with one; breakfast with the other. Playing guitar for Nick while Oliver sat across the room, rapt and glaring. The guys were competitive with each other, but for most of the summer neither could agree on needing me enough to make me his girlfriend. I alternated between feeling empowered and out of my depth all at once but couldn’t stay away either, despite my repeated attempts at trying to distance myself. A few days on my own, and Nick would be at my door, leaving a breathless note or flowers if I didn’t answer. But if Oliver went to a party with me that Nick hadn’t known about, he’d seethe and pout, his hurt feelings pulling me in like a magnet. Rapid cycles of jealousy, shame, redemption—our three-way relationship had the makings of a Hitchcock noir.

  • • •

  In bed, I was still just getting my bearings. I wasn’t completely inexperienced but was nowhere near sexually confident either. Sex felt fun and exciting but also like something I was still too young to understand: its risks, its implications, its potential to be wielded like a weapon. I wanted intimacy, pleasure, power, to be wanted—all of it—but I didn’t quite grasp if I had any say in the matter. How did the moving parts fit together? How could I figure out what, exactly, I had to offer and what, exactly, that stuff was worth? What kind of negotiation was necessary, and what sort of language should be used? Was it a barter or more of an even trade?

  The things I was used to being validated for—intelligence, talent, eyes—I took for granted and barely even registered compliments about them. The kind of validation I wanted and fantasized about was the kind I hadn’t yet heard: that I was magnetic, hot, that someone couldn’t stop thinking about wanting to be with me, touch me, fuck me. That I had whatever it was that inspired madness, infatuation, power ballads. I was convinced that this ineffable essence I clearly lacked was the thing standing between me and the romantic relationships I wanted. What it was exactly, I didn’t know, but I was sure that it didn’t come from being the smart, introspective type, the type guys wanted advice from or talked to for hours about ideas. That kind of thing only got you so far.

  • • •

  Havi
ng Ashley inside my apartment that first afternoon was strange. Since the moment I had met her at the train station, she had assumed a quick familiarity with me, and I was still struggling to catch up. Taking stock of her after our long hug hello, I’d had to squint my eyes to register some point of recognition. Ashley was tan, toned, and feral. She wore leggings as pants and had glitter dusted across her temples and collarbones. She talked fast and unself-consciously, moving through the crowd with a physical ease not unlike that of a dancer or a celebrity. Her apparent confidence, the on-ness she had about her, immediately made me feel almost tired in comparison. I thought about the days we had ahead of us, and I felt a vague tension that I couldn’t quite place, almost as if I wished I could rewind and tell her no, now wasn’t such a great time to visit after all.

  We met my mother for lunch at a department store café in Midtown before heading to my place, and I sensed that she found Ashley’s tone a bit unnerving. Ashley called my mother by her first name, had an espresso with lemon peel after her meal, and kicked things off with a chatty, rather un–parent-friendly story about being flown down to Cancún by a man who had hired her and a group of girls to promote his new T-shirt line on the beach. She’d mostly worn just the shirts and a bikini the whole time she was there.

  Why did I feel as if I had brought home a new boyfriend who was rapidly drinking himself under the table? I took Ashley’s unwillingness to play along almost as a personal rebuke. It was hard to find discussion topics we could sustain for longer than a short exchange: school we covered quickly—Ashley was in the process of transferring from UCLA to the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising but wasn’t sure when that would get sorted out. Family we breezed through, too, as my mother still kept in touch with Ashley’s ever since the Ellerins had left New Jersey a few years back, so she was up to date on most of the news. Workwise, Ashley told us about a part-time job she had just taken at Sephora; her boss there was a bit Eurotrash, but the freebies were good. She knew everything there was to know about anticellulite creams. We picked at the remnants of our shared dessert while waiting for the bill, my mother checking her watch often, as was, and still is, her nervous tic.