I have so little left of her. 

*

I had other female friends when I was young, but they never lasted. It’s hard for girls to trust each other. We grow up seeing each other as competitors, our relationship as secondary. Our husbands, we are told, will be our closest friends. 

*

She wore patchouli and a leather pouch on a cord. Her hair was long and tangled, softly waved, embellished with small braids and bells. She always flipped the first cigarette in the pack over so that the tip was facing out. She called that cigarette her “lucky”; she often gave it away by accident. 

*

She took me skinny dipping in this spot out in the country where someone had hung a tire from a rope over a deep creek. She loved floating high above the water and letting go. I watched from below, too scared to jump. She was careful to cover up after, knew it wasn’t a good idea to stand around naked with the boys. 

*

Jenn had the most beautiful voice. Her hands were graceful with long, oval nails, their movements accompanied by the clinking of mismatched bangles. She drew trees and teardrop patterns on her notebooks. Her room was a mess of moss specimens and discarded clothing. 

*

I called her Kitty sometimes. She called me Sparkle Bug. We bought each other dozens of small presents adorned with cats and butterflies.  

*

She wrote me letters in class, a way to communicate when we had to be silent. Later, she wrote to me from the hospital, from rehab, from her father’s house. The letters are mostly about the things she is looking forward to, but in every one of them she says she’s tired, so tired. 

*

We went to our first rave together at an abandoned elementary school. We wore corduroy and oversized vintage polos, grunge clothes, not party wear. We didn’t know how to dance the way the others did, but we did it all night anyway. There was no grinding or grabbing. We moved like children, forgetting everything else, even to be self-conscious. 

*

We traded mixtapes and collected rave fliers. We made bracelets with the colors from the flyer before each party and gave them away to everyone we met. 

*

We drove to Chicago every weekend. When we got stuck in traffic, we turned up the radio, wrote “Smile!” in a notebook, and held it up to the window while we danced and sang as loud as we could.

*

Jennie sewed us “phat pants ” that covered our feet—creating the illusion that our dancing was a smooth, gliding motion—from yards of sequins and lace we bought at Joanne Fabrics. The other ravers had store-bought versions made of denim; ours were admired at every party. 

*

At the end of the school year we went to an outdoor music festival in Wisconsin, a three day party where we danced in tents and fields, where I took acid for the first time, and where I slept with Nate, the guy Jennie liked. I don’t know why I did it. I remember it like fate, like weather, like this: he looked at me across our campsite, then suddenly he was beside me, pulling me by the hand, pushing me into the dirt. Then I disappeared. I could see him from behind, pumping away, swatting at the bugs biting his ass. There was no sound, not even breathing, not even mosquitoes. 

*

She worried because boys told her she was cute instead of beautiful. When one paid her attention, she was grateful. She found something good in every one. Even Josh.

*

I remember her and Josh showing up one day when I was home alone. Josh insisted that we have a threesome and neither of us dared to say no. We went upstairs. I perched awkwardly on the side of the bed while she kept her eyes locked on his. Even he couldn’t look away from her love. I snuck off, leaving them to it, but after, when they came downstairs, he looked at me and said it was my turn. My memory refuses to offer up any more of that afternoon. I hope the moment passed, that he let it go… But for years after I had night terrors: I laid frozen as Josh emerged from the mirror at the foot of my bed, pinning my body under his. 

*

She forgave me for Nate. We never talked about Josh. 

*

We had our senior portraits taken together. We wore velvet dresses. Hers was hand-made turquoise, mine was thrift-store crimson. We posed on the tire swing in her yard, both of us barefoot. I stood on top, clutching the rope. She stood below in the dirt, pulling my weight back so that I might fly.

*

There is a picture of us in our graduation robes, smiling. I look giddy, but Jenn’s smile is unsteady, ready to fall. I had made plans to go to Bradley University, which at four hours away was as far as my parents would allow. I would only stay for a single semester, but I didn’t know that then. I felt like I was finally escaping. Jennie had no such delusions. When everyone was making plans senior year, she didn’t. She hadn’t put much effort into grades. Instead she’d learned French and the names of flowers and how to draw beautiful landscapes. She honed her rich, alto singing voice. Even at fifteen she could belt Amazing Grace like a gospel star. At her funeral they played a recording of it, knowing no one else could match her style, her mournfulness. 

*

At the time I saw her lack of interest in college as immaturity. Everyone else was growing up, why wasn’t she? I didn’t yet admire her resistance to pursuing something just because she was supposed to. I didn’t see it as a warning that she wasn’t planning on a future.

*

At Bradley I skipped classes and spent most of my time with the odd assortment of men who showed an interest. Meanwhile, Josh got Jennie pregnant. I dropped out of college and moved to Chicago. Jennie and I talked about moving in together, but Josh wouldn’t allow it, and anyways I didn’t want to live anywhere he had access to. Instead we each moved in with our significant others. They kept us under tight control. The rare occasions we saw each other, they came along, chaperoning. I thought that’s what grown-ups did. Neither of my parents had any of their own friends. 

*

Jenn loved her baby—she would touch her pregnant belly so gently and sing to it—but she understood that even if she couldn’t leave Josh, she couldn’t subject a child to him. 

 

She used to cut herself. She went too deep once, and they called it attempted suicide. She had to go to the hospital and missed our senior vocal competition. I called her from a payphone to tell her about my performance. She was so supportive, though she must have been disappointed, must have needed support more than I did.

*

She picked out new parents for her daughter. The new mother sent her letters. I found out about all of this later. We had fallen out of touch around the time of the birth. I can’t remember what happened with Josh, but eventually she got away from him. 

*

Six months after I moved to Chicago, she was with someone new. She brought him over for dinner. I have a polaroid of the two of them, Jennie with glassy eyes, her new boyfriend looking smug and sly. After they left, my girlfriend told me she thought Jennie was high. Jenn smoked pot and we’d done some other stuff at parties, but she always avoided anything addictive. Everyone we knew did drugs of some kind, but we steered clear of the frightening ones, like cocaine and Ketamine. I didn’t really think about what people took; it seemed a personal matter, something that was none of my business. 

​

A few weeks later, I was washing dishes after dinner when the phone rang. I answered, pulling the cord into the hall where it was quieter. I heard Jenn’s breath before her voice, heavy and ragged, from running? Then I realize she’s crying. 

“Promise you won’t hate me,” she begs. I tell her I could never hate her. Her breathing gets more labored, then goes silent.

“I’m addicted to heroin.”

*

July third, the night of the fireworks in Chicago, I went to a party. It was in a fiftieth-floor corner apartment on the lake. The bright explosions were all around us, in the sky, the water, the glass buildings. I got home around 2:00 a.m. to a message on my answering machine from my mom. “I don’t know how to say this,” but then she does. “Jenn is dead.”

*

At the funeral, Jenn’s brother gave me the leather pouch that she used to wear around her neck. Her mother told me that she had been planning to call me, that she said we were going to spend the holiday together. I hoped that was true. 

*

She was unrecognizable in the casket—her lips mauve, face expressionless—except for her hands with their long, oval nails and bangles. I lifted her left wrist to add a bracelet, one that I made for her. Her hand was rigid and heavy like plastic, devoid of life or even death. 

*

What kept me from going down the same path? What made us different? Why was I still here while she was gone?  

*

I wore the pouch for three days before I decided to open it. It held beads, rocks, the broken edge of a purple fingernail, a baby tooth.

*

If she was destroying herself, it didn’t seem far from my own methods of destruction: staying in bad relationships, skipping meals to lose weight, choosing parties over sleep. 

*

There are lots of stories about addicts being selfish, stealing, destroying relationships, ruining people’s lives. It’s true that I didn’t see Jennie much after she confessed her addiction, but I have no memories of her hurting anyone. In fact, she forgave people she probably shouldn’t have.

*

She never asked me for anything, never took anything from me, never stole; she just withdrew. 

*

I’d like to tell her daughter about her, but I have no idea how to find her. The family that adopted her lived in Wisconsin, but that was seventeen years ago.

*

The last time I saw her she was standing in my coworker Stacy’s living room. There was a party going on behind us in the kitchen and on the balcony, but the living room was dark. She was facing the bay windows that were filled with the branches of a big, old oak, a tree that she once would have admired. Now, she ignored it, looking down at the street, tears dripping from her chin. As soon as her boyfriend pulled up in the cab he drove, she ran out the front door without so much as a goodbye. The next time I heard from her she was calling from jail. She said she was being sent to rehab where she would get clean. She sounded upbeat. She promised to write to me. She was in rehab for six months. I never heard from her. I assumed she was focusing on her recovery, that maybe she needed some space. 

*

Before the party, in the back of my girlfriend’s Honda Civic, Jenn had taken out a pretty vintage makeup box and an Altoid tin. They held a silver spoon with a bent handle, a needle, a cotton ball, a lighter. I didn’t see the stuff itself, but she poured a little water over the cotton ball, pulled up a syringe full of liquid, and squirted it onto the spoon. I was waiting for her to pull out rubber tubing and roll up her sleeve the way they do in movies. Instead she took off her shoe and stuck the needle into the skin between her toes. I worried that she’d fall into a wordless stupor; instead, she put everything away and we went inside. She was quiet but lucid. 

​

I hadn’t thought about how much she wouldn’t fit in. The girls I worked with wore flawless makeup and designer jeans. Jennie was in a ratty patchwork skirt with a drawstring waist. (Look, she had said, cinching it as we got out of the car, I’m so skinny now.) Stacy had just moved into a new condo and kept talking about her décor. Her kitchen, where everyone had clustered, was yellow, turquoise, and hot pink, adorned with pillar candles bearing the images of saints and dozens of crosses. Jenn stood off to one side quietly observing. She seemed okay, and then, after a while, I looked at her and she was crying. 

*

Did she mean to do it? She’d been clean for six months, out of rehab for only a day. She hadn’t even left the house. Her dad picked her up, brought her home, left her alone in her room. Did she sneak out that night and meet someone? Was it already there? Was it well hidden? Did her father bother to look?

​

I clung to what her mother had told me at the funeral, that she’d seemed happy, that she planned to see me. But if this was true, then why didn’t she call me? I pictured her at the party, standing in the corner, in her long ratty skirt. I remembered how I’d been embarrassed.

*

I allow myself to imagine the call that never happened. I picture her in her bedroom at her father’s house, pulling vintage dresses from a pile on her bed and holding them up to her body as she plans our holiday, how we’ll go to the beach early and bring giant cookies and Snapple, build sand castles and write poems, watch the fireworks and meet cute boys. She is still thin and pale, from the months in the facility, but she is smiling and she does a little dance and her words clang together with excitement.. She takes the phone outside to smoke a cigarette and she walks barefoot through the grass. She sings a line from a song she likes: One of these mornings you’re gonna rise up singing. She tells me that rehab was hard but that she met some real cool cats. One of them thinks he can get her a job at the restaurant where he works. One of them was telling her she should go work at Disney World, that with her voice, she could probably play someone really cool like Ursula the Sea Witch. She asks if I still go to parties, and I say not really, but I tell her about the clubs on Halsted where the play house music and all the boys are gay, so you can dance in peace. She reminds me of the day we went to the beach in Michigan, how we drove with all the windows rolled down and our feet on the dashboard, how we’d stayed until the sun set over the dunes. I promise her there will be more days like that. I tell her that I have my own place now and that she can come live with me. I imagine that it makes a difference.