And Then Who Knows? by Marissa Castrigno by Gorilla Publishing Collective

AND THEN WHO KNOWS? by Marissa Castrigno. Text & Illustration Copyright © 2015 by Marissa Castrigno. All Rights Reser ved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author. The following text has been printed as a part of the Gorilla Publishing Collective 2014-2015 Series. The Gorilla Publishing Collective is a small group of writers that produces individual books through a collaborative editing process over the course of an academic year. Our series is written, illustrated, edited, and designed by students at Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT). Electronic access to our series via Issuu.com: https://issuu.com/gorillapublishingcollective Books in the 2014-2015 series:

And Then Who Knows? by Marissa Castrigno Sea Salt and Sandalwood by Karmenife Paulino Words From The Kitchen Table compiled by Yael Horowitz Women I Have Disappointed by Raphael Linden Today I Am Allergic to Tangerines and It’s True, I Feel Relieved by Kai Wilson Managing Editor: Marissa Castrigno Head Designer: Giorgia Sage Special thanks to Kate Weiner. This year’s series was funded by the Wesleyan Writing Program and by private donors through a grassroots fundraising campaign. A very sincere thank you to all those who contributed. Special Donor’s Circle: Tony Castrigno Stacia Cronin Julie Glantz Lisa Korn Mina Seeman David Wilson Heather Woodward

AND THEN WHO KNOWS? marissa castrigno

HOW TO LISTEN TO MUSIC

INCK

TWICE A FRESHMAN

YEAR OF THE SNAKE

POINTS OF ORIGIN

THE WEB

CROSS-CONTINENTAL

CODA: A FAREWELL SERMON

POSTSCRIPT: CATALOGUE OF COINCIDENCES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

how to listen to music JUNE 2013

Ninety-eight percent humidity feels like being inside a mouth. This I

learned in Tennessee. I estimate there was a 1 in 30,000 chance that I would run into Hana at Bonnaroo Music Festival, let alone that our tents would be a stone’s throw away on the 600-acre campground, but that’s what happened. Although we both went to Wesleyan, we hadn’t been introduced before that day. It was eighty-six degrees and ninety-eight percent humidity and I was feeling distraught. I had spent a week traveling to the festival with my girlfriend at the time – and a third girl who she was in love with – and had put myself in a bad spot. From the moment I looked up and saw Hana walking down the wide, hard dirt path towards me, the sight of her put me at ease. She was kicking up little dust clouds as she padded along, her Birkenstock sandals lightened three shades by thin layers of earth accumulating on their straps. She smiled.

Hana had come to the festival with two other girls from Wesleyan, and

I took refuge in them. We spent the next four days together listening to live music, smoking in the grass, dancing, sweating, applying sunscreen, and eating picnic dinners as the heat finally broke each evening. “What did you think?” Hana would ask after we saw a concert. Her reviews of artists and their performances came from a deep personal interest – she was a musician and an avid consumer of all purposeful sounds. One night as the sky grew dark and we waited for Jack Johnson to take the main stage, the four of us sat in the vast field that ser ved as the festival’s crowd space. Hana and Sivan were mar veling at how the thousands of people turned into one body as the music began. “Don’t you think of collective effer vescence,” Sivan asked, “when you see something like this?”

“Yeaaaaah! Absolutely,” Hana said, nodding with the rhythm of the song.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

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“Collective effer vescence is like – a group coming together with one

experience – and it unifies them as a community – and then individuals feel a part of something – and they’re sharing this one thing with everyone else,” Hana said. Durkheim for dummies. They’d learned about the philosophical concept in a religion class that they both took that spring.

“So, you see how everyone is moving together with the music?” Hana asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“They have an energy… and that’s collective effer vescence.” If I hadn’t

been so desperate for positive human connection at the time, any optimistic view of our social existence, I might have scoffed at them for intellectualizing something as simple as a field full of dancing people.

Standing in the crowd at every show we went to, especially those at

night, was like being a blood cell inside a heartbeat. There was ebb and flow in the audience – anywhere from 200 to 80,000 people – that simultaneously gave everyone and no one control over the way they moved together. I enjoyed the sensation of being taken in, but not nearly as much as Hana did. She seemed to be swallowed into every dancing crowd we found ourselves in, sometimes humming along to the music, sometimes just swaying along, arms lifted, hips turning in circles, knees loose. Her skin was browned by the sun and by the days of dry, powdery earth and no running water. Her hair was long then, dirty blonde and wild with curls, and as she moved her hair played followthe-leader with her torso, bending with her, rising and falling. I admired her for the way she gave herself totally to music. It inspired an ease about her that was enchanting. In those few days a fast intimacy burgeoned out of my dire emotional state and her willingness stilt me up. We became good friends, and when we got back to school I heard her sing for the first time.

When Hana walks into a room there is nothing unusual about her

reception, but when she sings in a room, she becomes it. The first time I 12

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heard her perform we were in an emptied living room that was accruing an audience as she started mic checking. A string of Christmas lights behind the stage lit the room, and long tapestries draped over the windows ser ved as a backdrop for the band. She had a guitarist and drummer accompanying her, and they were going to open the show with a cover of The Beatles’ “Oh, Darling” slowed down to about half its normal tempo. A few encouraging whistles shot out from the audience, light with anticipation.

“This is the most sexual thing I’ve ever done I can’t believe I’m about

to sing this in public,” she said quietly as she prepared herself to meet the audience. “It felt like pornography during rehearsal. I need a drink.” I handed her a bottle of wine and she took a heavy gulp. She took her place between the guitarist and the soundboard, her hands holding themselves ner vously, and then the microphone. The band started, she closed her eyes and her knees loosened, the room hushed – collective effer vescence.

INCK JUNE - AUGUST 2014

The money for my college tuition came from the profits of a wallpaper

factory. Last June I found myself standing in a field with Hana at Bonnraoo Music Festival in Manchester, Tennessee for a second time, in a small crowd of Wesleyan kids, wondering how we’d all got there together from Middletown, Connecticut. Yes, I could name the road we’d driven on through Virginia and into eastern Tennessee, but how had our particular group of people come to pass? It was Wesleyan that had brought us to that field, but even that wasn’t enough of an explanation to make me content. How had I got to Middletown, to then travel to Manchester? It wasn’t my grades – plenty of students with deser ving report cards don’t get to go to schools like mine – it was wallpaper.

James Seeman Studios Inc. operated for about 30 years in Garden City

Park, Long Island before being sold to the Masonite Corporation in 1973. I imagine it was a cavernous warehouse with tall windows, the clunking rotors of old printing presses turning over endlessly, and an overwhelming smell of wet ink. There was also a gallery on Robertson Boulevard in Los Angeles, where the studio’s wallpapers were on display. One renowned design showcased the Ponte Vecchio stretching endlessly across light, warm paper. James Seeman Studios Inc. rose to such acclaim in its prime that Lady Bird Johnson had one of their wallpapers installed in the White House’s private residence. All of the wallpaper and scenic wall coverings featured original artwork painted by James himself, and at his death – in 1994, at age 79 – he left hundreds of elegantly framed original watercolor paintings in various studios and basements along the east coast of the United States. He had three homes himself where he stored work, and the overflow accumulated in his family’s homes as well.

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James, affectionately called Jim by his family, emigrated from Vienna,

Austria as a young man in his twenties in 1938 and landed in Queens, New York. In Austria he had gone to engineering school but couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t get work on account of his being Jewish, so instead he capitalized on his natural talent for art and painted posters for movie theatres. (The Nazis made him paint propaganda flyers in the time before he escaped Europe.) When he arrived in New York he worked as a house painter and went to night school to learn English. His artistic hobby eventually birthed into a small business that grew over the course of thirty-five years, giving rise to the factory space in Garden City Park that employed up to 150 people at once.

After a prolonged illness Jim died of complications related to heart

disease at his winter home in Miami. (He probably would have lived longer, but the hospital gave him a blood transfusion contaminated with Hepatitis C). His obituary was published by The New York Times in May of 1994 and the 15

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short paragraph dedicated to his sur viving family ends with his one stepgranddaughter: me.

My grandmother married Jim in 1979, second marriages for both of

them. Now she is the proprietor of his remaining estate: huge paintings, small paintings, paintings of lilies, grapes, beach dunes, arbors, Jerusalem, Florence, Rockefeller Center. Her home is filled with his paintings, as was my childhood home and most of the homes of our close friends. Sometimes it seemed like every room I went into had a James Seeman painting hanging in it. Because I was so young when he died, I grew up thinking of Jim as a series of watercolor landscapes and oil canvases rather than a living and breathing man. Once he was gone, giving away his paintings became a symbol of my grandmother’s affection; she sent them, warmly and generously, to her dear friends and her daughter’s dear friends. Little by little, we emptied Jim from our basement.

There is one photograph of Jim and me together. I am sitting in his lap,

massively burdened by thick rolls of soft pudge, wearing a white onesie with a pale blue pattern; he has unkempt gray hair on the sides of his head, and large gold-rimmed glasses with maroon lenses. My parents took me down to Florida to meet him while he was very ill.

As soon as I was old enough to babble I nicknamed my maternal

grandmother Gammy, a name that stuck so hard that many people still don’t know her actual name. And they don’t need to. Almost everyone in my life knows my grandmother; she has probably taken the #66 DeCamp bus from New York City to our house in New Jersey upwards of a thousand times. She came to attend all of my school plays, kinder-kickers soccer games, birthday parties, piano recitals, and watch my regattas in high school – and on and on. It wasn’t until high school that I learned Gammy missed my birth. Jim was in the hospital, and his sons refused to come oversee his care unless my grandma paid them for their efforts, which she refused based on the human 16

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principles of familial love and mutual caring. By the time she made it to New Jersey I was almost six weeks old.

Gammy has always been a devoted mother and grandmother, a trait that

Jim knew well, and he would’ve known how sad she was to miss the very first days of my life. As a way to show his thanks to Gammy, Jim wrote me into his will. The sum that I inherited at eighteen months old was immediately deposited in the bank, and my father drew up a 15-year investment plan. On both counts I consider myself very lucky: I was graced with immense generosity from a stranger, and it’s rare that you find a theatrical set designer who plays the stock market.

While I was living in Los Angeles last summer I first found out about

the factory in New York and the gallery in Beverly Hills. Two of Gammy’s old friends – they were Jim’s friends first – insisted they take me to dinner. I had never met anyone but my immediate family who knew him. I had never missed Jim, never wondered what it would have been like with him in my life. I had a grandfather. His name was Papa, Gammy’s first husband, and he too came to all my birthday parties and school plays and piano recitals until he died of lung cancer when I was seventeen. Jim wasn’t an absence or a presence, he was a myth, he was a basement full of art, and it wasn’t until I sat in Du-Par’s Restaurant four months ago that I came to understand he actually lived. They called him Jimmy. They talked about the things he liked and disliked; they talked about the gallery. “Gallery?” I said.

“Oh yes! On Robertson. And the factory!”

“Factory?” I said in surprise.

“Oh yes! Has no one told you?”

I do wonder how no one ever told me. Did they not find it important to

explain why and how I was privileged? I spent the first two decades of my life believing that I was “the 99 percent,” and later rationalized my support of Occupy Wall Street by postulating that I was probably in “the 98 percent,” and 17

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that was close enough. Although my mother grew up well off, her parents did not, and sometimes I think their quietness about money came from a fear that they might jinx their good fortune. I suppose my father was too busy at the office to come home and teach me that poor people were not invented for sad movies.

I was raised in a community of families that were also taking nice vacations

and renovating large houses. I did not know that kitchens with stainless steel appliances were luxurious. I did not know that some little girls who took piano lessons did not play on Baby Grands. I did not know that most families changed their own sheets and washed their own towels every week. I did not know that my dad’s Saab was a sports car, or that my mom’s refusal to lease anything but a new Volvo was a symptom of her bourgeoisie concern. I often heard that I was lucky, but couldn’t figure out why. I am embarrassed that it took me twenty years to come to consciousness and that none of the people who cared for me could help me shed my ignorance any sooner. It took me so long to feel grateful, too long.

That summer in Los Angeles was my expedition to become an adult – far

away from my family and entirely on my own. Ready to seize the prescribed adventure of twenty-somethings throughout the country, I picked up and moved to a new city alone. My parents had just separated after twenty-two years, and I wanted nothing more than to be completely removed from their imminent divorce. In the process of escaping I managed to spend fourteen percent of my college vacation days in my hometown the year they split – twenty-four of one hundred and sixty-eight days. I also totaled a car on the Massachusetts Turnpike that year during a short-term escape to Boston. Los Angeles was another step in the progression of my fleeing my family. Surprisingly it was Jim, a cloudy figure in my mind unremembered for many years, who surfaced to illustrate how intricately I was connected to the history of myself. Whether I liked it or not.

Lani –- the seventy-year-old woman whose mother redecorated forty

years ago and met Jim at the gallery on Robertson –- took me to dinner on a Tuesday. Her husband, mother and some of her oldest friends came, too. I told 18

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Lani I was working on the eighth floor of the Pacific Design Center. “How funny is that,” she said. “Jimmy loved the Pacific Design Center, thought it was so beautiful.” As if I, or the building, were somehow a part of him. Lani’s mother spoke of Jim only with admiration and a deep respect, and a love for both him and Gammy. “They were a perfect couple!” I wondered how I ended up at dinner with these people in this restaurant in this city.

Later that night on my way home I called my dad from the car. “A wallpaper

factory! Did you know about this?” He did. I was inexplicably upset that no one had mentioned it to me. He knew and it wasn’t even his family!

“Well. Now you know,” he said matter-of-factly.

But I was not pacified. I felt like I knew nothing. Less than nothing,

because I didn’t even know how much I didn’t know. I put thousands of miles between my family and myself and instead of finding distance I found myself tied up in fifty years of my own making. Whether I liked it or not.

After my summer internship ended I packed my boxes in the shabby room

I sublet on West 8th Street and flew east. I spent less than a week at home between Los Angeles and Middletown. My mother moved out of my childhood home while I was away, a situation that I orchestrated carefully so that I would not have to bear witness to the emptying of my home, which was an extension of self for fifteen years. My father left the big, green Victorian months before us. When I walked into my mom’s new, smaller house, I put down my bags and crawled into bed. Before going back to school I visited my dad’s new place, too – an apartment on 22nd Street in New York City. Neither was really home, a place where I could find the bathroom or the trashcan without asking, knew which light switches to flick, or which drawer had the forks. Wesleyan was the home I had then, and I came back to take solace in it like an old blanket.

While I am still bitter about the loss of my home and my family, I have

given up on trying to disconnect myself. James Seeman Studios Inc. is the first step of many. I feel a looming responsibility to hold myself accountable for my privilege, a daunting endeavor that I do not fully understand, nor do I have any idea how to accomplish. I barely know where to begin. 19

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Although I still hold my family at armâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s length, I have come to understand

that in order to delve into my experience at Wesleyan, celebrate the friends I got to meet and the professors I got to learn from, and vice versa, I have to acknowledge the reason I got here: wallpaper. So I am starting to unearth, work backwards from the dusty fields of Bonnaroo to begin at the beginning, and then â&#x20AC;&#x201C; who knows?

TWICE A FRESHMAN FALL 2011 & 2012

On my third day of college I suited up in an eye-burning yellow

SuperFan tee shirt and went to my first ever Division 1 sporting event – a football game. I was a freshman at Boston College, wearing a BC Eagles sticker on each cheek and red beads around my neck; our school colors were maroon and gold. “Eagles on the war path! Hoo! Ha!” echoed from the student section, where thousands of drunken idiots were falling over themselves in the name of school pride. Enrollment period had been disheartening because I had to fulfill core curriculum requirements that I wasn’t interested in, but I was hopeful that social novelty might make up for my lack of academic excitement. What I found was a pack of pastelclad, blonde-haired, charity-working clones who spoke often about how many hours they volunteered at such-and-such soup kitchen, and how they really grew to value those sweet poor people as human beings, but couldn’t discuss any of the complex systemic inequalities that perpetuated poverty or homelessness.

On my fourth day I decided I didn’t like it and spent the rest of my

freshman year preparing to leave and figuring out where to go. In the midst of my miser y I started writing a satirical lifestyle blog about Boston College. I may be looking for evidence of some higher power where there is none, but the first post I ever made on the blog was a quote by Joss Whedon, famed moviemaker and Wesleyan ‘87. “Remember to always be yourself. Unless you suck,” he said. By the time I actually left for good, I had friends that I loved and was sad to be separating from them. “Don’t stay for us,” they said. “We’ll be here.” I peeled myself away from what was comfortable and drove on towards what was the better decision. I almost cried the first time someone asked me how I identified at Wesleyan – it was such a relief to escape presumption.

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Sometimes I imagine myself in a black cap and gown at my graduation

from Boston College, walking down to Alumni Stadium for the commencement ceremony. I take a picture of myself. I look different. The smile on that girlâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s face is the pride at having sur vived college, not the joy at having reveled in it, and I feel immensely relieved that I never had to live her life.

A year minus one day after I moved into Duchesne Hall as a BC freshman,

I was unloading my car behind Foss Hill at Wesleyan.

YEAR OF THE SNAKE

It was November of senior year and I was sitting on the floor of

Russell House, between rows of chairs, during one of their Speakers’ Series events. The main room, which holds about seventy people comfortably, was filled to the walls with students eager to hear journalist Ariel Levy read her award-winning essay “Thanksgiving in Mongolia,” answer questions, and hopefully drop shiny life gems into our open, eager palms. While giving some commentary on mourning she said two things that struck me: “It takes a year to grieve until you’re kind of normal again,” and then, “If a bad thing happens, you’re still you.” In her case the bad thing, the grief, was a miscarriage, but in the world grief can come from anywhere – dead babies, dead parents, husbands, wives, friends. Maybe a fading romance, or a friendship worn too thin. Someone not dead, but definitively gone.

When I heard Ariel Levy speak I was freshly recovered from my second

year of grief. The two were not consecutive. First, for my high school friend whose heart stopped suddenly and without explanation when we were in our senior year, then again when I had my heart broken my sophomore year of college. Most of my friends were either seventeen or eighteen when Mitch died, and our introduction to mortality left us careening for almost a year, grasping onto each other in the hopes that somehow the sum of us could equal his absence.

As for the hear tbreak, her name was Sydney and we dated briefly,

but I had cast in my chips with an uncharacteristic fer vor and our relationship ejected me with equal passion. I lost twenty pounds the summer it ended – anxiety mostly, and a gruesome over-sentimentality that projected her ever ywhere.

It becomes easy to resent those that earn the power to hurt us and then

use it. At the end of the prescribed year after our break-up though, when I was “kind of normal again,” I had learned to cherish both the hurt and the woman it 23

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came from. Maybe to value internal darkness is to be masochistic, though when a fresh bud breaches the ground and falls open, didn’t it struggle through the dirt to reach the sun?

For a time I thought she had ruined me, but Sydney had in fact given me

the thing I valued most – some of my dearest friends. So when I think to myself that I am glad we met, glad we dated, glad it ended, it’s not because I felt glad to live through it, but because she is the first link in a very long chain of other, better love.

It was Sydney who brought me to my first Bonnaroo Music Festival,

where I found Hana wandering through rows of camping tents that stretched farther than the eye could see. A year minus one day after that murderously humid afternoon, Hana and I returned to Bonnaroo and set up camp with a big group of friends.

In the year between those two summers at Bonnaroo, Hana had become

one of my closest friends, a confidant and a pal and steady source of laughter. In the spring of our junior year, 2014, we both took a literature class called Faulkner and Morrison. Every Monday and Wednesday we would eat lunch together and then walk to the African-American Studies building. If for some reason we didn’t arrive together, one of us would save the other a seat. The seminar was small, a 300-level class with an adored professor who took a vested interest in her students, both academically and personally. I had had her twice before, and she knew me well enough to know that my relationships with women were often more intimate than they appeared.

One afternoon Hana and I were “being bad” as Professor M. called it,

chattering quietly and writing notes after we had shuffled seats around to sit next to each other. Frankly, Professor M. grew suspicious of Hana and me, and Hana loved it. 24

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“Hold my hand so she thinks we’re together!” She whispered to

me. I flushed, refused. As much as Hana and I joked about going on dinner dates and being a couple, I valued Professor M. and wanted to maintain a respectable image in front of her, one that did not include holding hands with my fake girlfriend in her class. But Hana was ruthless with her commitment to the rouse, and when we saw Professor M. around campus Hana would take my hand loosely and smile.

During our next class meeting Hana whispered to me again to hold her

hand, and again I flushed. “No!” I hissed, with certain desperation in my voice.

“What are y’all two doing over there making a fuss?” Professor M. said.

“Marissa is afraid you’re going to think we’re dating!” Hana said.

“Well are you?” Professor M. asked, in her characteristically strong,

no-bullshit tone.

“No!” I said, right as Hana said, “Yes!” Our class laughed. There were

only fifteen students, and most of them knew what Hana was up to. Her scheme continued for weeks afterwards, always trying to sway Professor M. in favor of our “romance.” And my insistence that we were not together just made it seem more likely that we were, despite the fact that Hana had a boyfriend and I was dating basically everyone except her. The whole thing was terribly embarrassing but I appreciated the chance to laugh at myself, and I laughed even harder at Hana.

Other, better love.

POINTS OF ORIGIN

I imagine the friends that I have in terms of the chains of people that

led up to our introduction. Far-fetched, loose connections that make me appreciate the degree of chance built into our world. For example: if I hadn’t met Sydney over two years ago, I might not have had dinner with Hana last night, two people who were never friends and probably never will be, yet I am a connection between them. I’m fascinated by the slim probabilities that afford us our most important friendships, and tracing the human chains that bring us to them. If I work backwards in my head, starting with my closest friends from Wesleyan, I almost always end up at one of two people: Sydney and Jacob. The first links in the chain, so to speak.

Aside from the fact that we went to the same school, I met Sydney

partly because I was a transfer student. Caroline, the friend who unwittingly introduced us, was a former transfer herself, and it was our shared status as latecomers that brought Caroline and me together. I learned her face at Transfer Orientation events, where she came to support the optimistic yet terrified sophomores and juniors who were starting college for a second time. We swapped phone numbers at a writing workshop several weeks later, and she introduced me to Sydney in her dorm room several weeks after that.

Sydney established her significance in my life with a blinding immediacy.

As a transfer I was placed on a hall with returning students – we called

them “real students” – in the basement of Hewitt 9. Down the hall past the bathroom on the right lived a tall, slim and effusively friendly guy named Jacob. He became my first “real student” friend, and we spent a lot of time together that year hanging out and talking and meeting people. Without his knowing it, over my first two years at Wesleyan Jacob became another, more 26

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tangential â&#x20AC;&#x153;first link.â&#x20AC;? He hooked in somewhere after Sydney and together they funneled me towards a bi-coastal, multi-city spider web of friendships that I first caught sight of during my junior spring. The Web took two decades to build, and is threaded by six girls from all over the country who found each other by chance and by accident.

THE WEB SPRING 2014

First I met Clara. Jacob introduced us in the fall of our junior year,

Clara’s senior year, and it took four or five months for us to really become friendly. By then I had met her housemate Natalia and I got to know them that spring like two parts of a unit. I spent a few weekend nights in their living room, watching them spiral into some strange emotional oblivion that can only exist in the weeks before one’s imminent college graduation. I met their closest friends, a group of four girls that had been steadfast in their love of one another since they were freshmen. They’d acquired the ability to simultaneously function as a collection of individuals and as a four-part whole, which reflected the way I came to know Natalia and Clara together, as both two people and one.

One afternoon in April I found Natalia and Clara on the grass at the

annual Zonker Harris Day music festival, sitting near my friends. I laid down in the grass with them, and we all spent a few hours there listening to music, applying glitter paint to our faces, and having a good time laughing hard at things that were only mildly funny.

That was where I met Lindsey. I think it was her laugh that piqued my

interest, that warm barreling sound with its own strange allure. It was AN undeniably happy sound, and that’s what made it so magnetic. She was lying there with Clara and Natalia, and their fourth piece, Maddie.

Lindsey and Maddie were another strange little pod of two people that

meshed into one being. They were all best friends in such a way that nearly eliminated the space between where one girl ended and the next began. It was hard to think there was a time where they didn’t know each other, before they were this beautiful, symbiotic thing. I wanted to know them, but it was the end of their senior year and it felt wrong to intrude on their last weeks together. I was happy in my place as this sudden outside obser ver, appreciating the

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little time I was able to spend in their company while mostly watching them appreciate each other. It was surprising how little I saw Maddie after that day in the grass, relative to how much importance she seemed to hold when Natalia, Clara and Lindsey talked about her – especially Lindsey. She relied on Maddie for so much and yet whenever I was with them, Maddie was either coming or going, completely transient.

When I said goodbye to Lindsey, Clara and Natalia in late May it felt

probable that I would never see them again. Clara and Natalia were flying to South America for six months and Lindsey was moving home to Dallas. Something between Lindsey and me felt open-ended, like our time together had been inconclusive, though I couldn’t quite figure out why. Months later Lindsey would tell me, laughing, “I don’t know how we became friends, it doesn’t make sense. It’s like I bought from you once and then we just kept in touch.” Her version is a hilarious reduction that highlights how quickly and seamlessly we transitioned from strangers to friends. In truth, we became friends drinking together at Clara’s house, and I texted her with totally outrageous, hyperbolic and partially genuine advances that somehow made us into amicable friends. Then we left.

I turned up in Los Angeles in mid-June with three small moving boxes,

a dirty orange trek backpack, and a rented sedan to take up my sublet bedroom in the center of the city.

My internship was at a top public relations firm in a shiny building

where dozens of people in cubicles pecked at their keyboards from morning to evening, often foregoing their lunch breaks to take calls and squint at computer screens. Going to the office was a nice distraction from the lonesomeness of being a stranger in a new city, but work was taxing in its own way – mindless, and I often went whole days without any assignments from my super visor. I spent my first few weeks feeling constantly on edge and unner ved, perpetually strange and estranged. 30

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On my sixth day there I got this text message from Lindsey: Ay! I don’t know when you’re in LA, BUT one of my best friends from home who also happens to be super close to Clara and Maddie just moved to LA and I feel like you guys would totally get along so in the event that you’re looking for friends/people to meet you should Facebook Grace W–– she’s the shit and went to Pomona and I think has like some friends in the area so that could be somethin? Anyways I told her you’d be there for the summer and she wanted to meet you so in the event that you get bored or desperate or just wanna meet people you should totally contact her! Also planning my trip to LA this week so you best still be there in early August cuz that’s when I’m tryna come with Clara. We can frolic in the sand together

I was thrilled and endlessly appreciative to have a potential friend that

came with such a high recommendation as Lindsey’s. I waited a few hours so I wouldn’t seem too eager and then messaged Grace.

When I first saw Grace I was standing in the middle of Melrose Avenue

during rush hour trying to jaywalk like a stubborn New Yorker. She was on the opposite sidewalk laughing at me. We’d agreed to meet after work that day and a few minutes prior she’d texted me, “Sorry I’m late. I have a present for you,” and I thought, “What a funny message to get from someone you’ve never met…” It was certainly intriguing. The present was a piece of cake that her bosses had ordered for a belated birthday celebration; it was wrapped in tin foil and had one layer of ice cream in it, which was melting quickly and getting very sticky. We sat at a café with tables on the street and I ate the 31

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cake without any utensils, which for some reason this café did not have. The forks, plates, and napkins were probably reser ved for those who were actually patronizing the cafe. We had brought our own food and were squatting on their outdoor furniture. I showed Grace the text that Lindsey sent me about our introduction. “In the event that you get bored or desperate!” Grace shrieked with laughter. “Thanks, L! You really sold me!” I sent Lindsey a picture of Grace sitting at the café table, putting up a peace sign with one hand.

I found out that while Grace and Lindsey were best friends from high

school, Maddie’s best friend from high school was also Grace’s best friend from college. Her name was Hannah. Maddie and Lindsey had, effectually, gone to college and swapped best friends.

The Friday after our café debacle, Grace and I hung out again and I met

Hannah, too. We went to see a play that Grace’s friend was acting in. It was an unspeakable relief to be around girls my own age that weren’t discussing sorority recruitment or designer shoes, as was the chat at work. They were cool and they were queer! It was exactly the thing I needed to make Los Angeles feel manageable, and I was unspeakably grateful to Lindsey for having introduced me. In July, Grace went on a trip to Europe for three weeks and by the time she got back I was dating Hannah, had befriended Maddie, and was just starting to understand how deeply connected they all were to each other. Bit by bit with each conversation we had I learned a little more about how they had all found each other, but what I wanted to know was why they’d stuck.

CROSS-CONTINENTAL

The whole thing started with two friendships forming simultaneously a

thousand miles apart, in Los Angeles County and Greater Dallas, in 1997. I first heard the whole story during a few phone inter views in January of 2015.

Four and a half years ago Maddie and Lindsey got their freshman

housing assignment and met in their double in Fauver, but the threads between Lindsey and Maddie and Clara and Grace and Hannah have developed on their own. Grace refuses to call it luck. “It started with chance,” she says, “but it’s sustainable for other reasons.” She suspects an underlying compatibility that thrives on the differences between the girls as individuals and intricately connects them in so many ways. There are unseen forces that hold these friendships together and help them spread outwards over time, which is, of course, how I got here. CHADWICK SCHOOL (PALOS VERDES, CALIFORNIA) 1997-2010

When a graduating class of high school seniors leaves the Chadwick

School, there is a special ceremony for those who boast a full, thirteen-year career there, enrolled since kindergarten. They are invited to exchange small gifts with the current kindergarten class, a ceremony that they themselves were in at five years old, handing a navy blue baseball cap to a college-bound giant and receiving a stuffed dolphin – Chadwick’s mascot – in return. Then 34

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all the students (of which there are less than 900) can feel touched, and cement in their hearts a deep fondness for their alma mater.

Stories of a student’s Chadwick years make it sound like a decade-long

fairytale; a small community where teachers are engaged, warm, challenging, and students are interested, driven, involved. The whole thing is an intimate collaboration between the school and its’ families. At Chadwick it is not uncommon to have teachers invited to dinner with students and their parents, or to see them on the sidelines at sporting events, cheering; many of the teachers live in homes on the 42-acre campus. Each year starting in 7 th grade, students substitute classes for a 1-week backpacking trip along the Pacific Coast Trail, which culminates in a 23-day senior hike – a Chadwick rite of passage. Families take annual group vacations to the posh skiing destination Mammoth, CA to relax and spend time with the Chadwick community. Intimate by design, sheltered by choice.

Maddie and Hannah both spent thirteen years in Chadwick’s insular

community. By the end of high school they were inseparable best friends, but it was a decade of growing companionship rather than a magnetic codependence that brought them there. Of the 450 Facebook photos they’re tagged in together, at least one quarter show the brace-toothed smiles of awkward pubescence, decked out in superhero costumes, cocktail dresses, sports uniforms.

Hannah is five-foot-two and has an almost perfectly circular face framed

by long, dark chocolate hair that runs more than halfway down her back. She is Korean-American and although her family has lived in California for many 35

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years she was the first to be born in the U.S. Maddie is slightly taller than Hannah and also has long, dark hair that stands in contrast against her pale white skin, and a more oval-shaped face. Somehow her round features always catch the light when she smiles and her cheeks glint.

When Maddie’s mom is too critical of her own daughter, Hannah’s dad

comes to her defense. The lines between the two families have blurred slowly over time, and to some extent the lines between the girls themselves have blurred, too.

“At the end of our Senior Trip there was a 6-mile run on the last day with

our entire grade,” Hannah tells me. They were trekking through the Sierras. “It’s the final push and at the end there’s a campsite with bagels and donuts and all the foods you haven’t had for 23 days.

“Some people run together, some people tr y to push themselves,

some people walk, it depends on what you need to do. Maddie and I started running and there were probably 70 people, and we ended up running the whole thing together.”

“We didn’t even plan that did we?” Maddie says. “I remember while we

were running you were like ‘this is a metaphor for our friendship! We’ve been together since kindergarten at the beginning!’” Maddie laughs. They saw each other on most days between the ages of five and eighteen, until Maddie went east for college while Hannah stayed home – to Wesleyan University and Claremont McKenna College, respectively.

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GREENHILL SCHOOL (ADDISON, GREATER DALLAS, TX) 1995-2010

Like Chadwick, Greenhill boasts low enrollment – Chadwick’s class of

2015 will be only 82 students, Greenhill’s approximately 116 – and works to create wholesome relationships between the school, teachers, students and families. It is an exclusive little haven with its’ students best interest truly at heart. From Level 1 – two years before kindergarten – until the end of twelfth grade, Greenhill provides its’ students a tightly knit community, which makes it a deeply supportive (if sometimes self-concerned) web for growing children.

It is hard to tell who loves their school more between Chadwick and

Greenhill students; the two learning communities have fostered affection in similar, endearing ways with long-standing traditions designed to bring students closer to their schools and to each other. A unique account of the Greenhill School, however, is that it asks its students to use a critical lens that they sometimes turn back against it. Greenhill lets its students beat it down and trusts they will love it anyway. And they do.

“I had my first kiss at Greenhill, I got high there for the first time,

I got my period there for the first time, I had a teacher there that I am actually convinced changed my life and made me want to be an artist, made me confident enough to admit that’s what I wanted and believe I could do it. I read some of the best books, I fell in love with some boys… and actually fell in love with some girls, but didn’t realize it.” Grace 37

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started at Greenhill in Level 1, at three years old, and stayed through her high school graduation in 2010.

Lindsey started one year after Grace and the two of them spent fourteen

years becoming family. There are old class pictures of them with their full baby cheeks, Grace with the same long, flowing blonde hair she has now, and wearing backwards baseball cap, and Lindsey wearing her dark hair pulled back with her tongue sticking out. Grace spent both nights at Lindsey’s mom’s house every weekend of seventh grade, watching the MTV Music Video channel hour after hour waiting for Britney Spear’s “Toxic” to come on. To one, the other was sure footing where all else was mostly loose ground. While there was a tacit openness between them, outside of their alliance they put on strong faces and shirked vulnerability.

For most of the girls’ high school years Lindsey’s mom was terminally

ill and passed away the summer before their senior year. At Greenhill, Lindsey was the girl to be – universally adored, enchanting and alluring – and she’d continued to publicly play that role as her mother’s health deteriorated. “I was homecoming queen but truly everyone loved Lindsey,” Grace says. “I don’t think I’ve ever met a single person who didn’t like her, let alone that most people are obsessed with her. I’m not even being hyperbolic, I can’t think of anyone.” And those who have met Lindsey know that Grace is right.

Her laugh is mountainous. It comes out of her like a shot and feels real

enough to hug, as if her happiness has taken a physical form and she has shared it with you. Her joy becomes a mass with gravitational pull.

“You just wanted to be near her and you wanted her to be happy and

even better if you could be the one to do it.” As Grace speaks there is an underlying anger and sadness; anger because it was unbearably unfair that Lindsey should suffer, and sadness because when it was happening, her teenage friends could only “somewhat grasp [death] stuff,” and were “kind of self absorbed assholes.”

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The closeness of Greenhill could be a comfort, but the culture at the

school and in Dallas prompted a social circumstance of veneered teenagers who often performed as themselves rather than just being themselves. The community was tinged with a droning homogeny. Lindsey was “used to being the only black person in the room.” People liked to gossip. It made for the type of place where a sexually confused girl was too stifled by her public history of high school boyfriends to address her feelings. For Grace, Lindsey was one of two friends with whom she felt a genuine human connection beyond appearances, social niceties, and partying. It was the type of connection she craved. They formed a little trio with their friend Ryley and quietly enjoyed their last months at idyllic Greenhill.

The Greenhill farewell dinner that left Lindsey sobbing – a confession

that would later bring her closer to her new freshman year roommate, Maddie – was also a long anticipated and much-needed fresh start. Grace felt it too. While Lindsey was coping with her mother’s death, Grace, who felt a piece of that same loss, also had a brother who often worried her deeply, and was reeling whenever she thought about women. The girls processed (or chose not to process) their emotional struggles in different ways: Lindsey launched softly into college life and Grace was enveloped by it – at Wesleyan University and Pomona College, respectively. WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY (MIDDLETOWN, CT) 2010-2014

“I was in fucking Latvia,” Maddie says, “but I knew our roommates

were coming out and I kept taking my mom’s phone to check if it had been posted yet.” When the assignments were finally posted Maddie sent her new roommate’s Facebook link to Hannah. “She had biddie pics on Facebook and we were like, hmmm, we’ll see,” Hannah says.

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“Yeah but she looked normal,” Maddie says, and it was an early relief.

“Lindsey from Dallas… she sounded harmless enough.” Now Maddie wonders if the Office of Residential Life matched them by their backgrounds because the similarities between them are so uncanny. The two K-12 schools are so unlike anywhere else and yet somehow they are like each other.

“They don’t have time for that shit,” Hannah says, and she’s right.

Nor do they care, really. Rumor has it they once put six freshmen on a hall who had the names of the Friends characters – Rachel, Phoebe, Monica, Ross, Joey, Chandler – just for fun. Another story goes that an incoming freshman asked for a Christian roommate, and they gave him a roommate named Christian. They certainly wouldn’t have valued the likeness between the Chadwick School and the Greenhill School, a thousand miles apart. Maddie and Lindsey, both coming from high schools one-twelfth Wesleyan’s size, were matched by chance. They started messaging about the logistics of sharing their room. Soon they were talking about leaving home, and Lindsey confessed she had been crying all day. Maddie understood. After attending the same school for all their lives, both girls were leaving the only community they’d ever had.

“I remember doing all the orientation shit with her,” Maddie says. “We

did everything. We always had the same reactions to people and the same judgments about what was going on around us, we related to people in the same way. It was comforting. Coming into a brand new environment.” 40

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Even though they connected, the process of becoming true friends was a

long one. The novelty of college wore off quickly and October loneliness took hold. Still, Maddie and Lindsey spent all their time together and slowly their early comfort with one another became an understanding of one another, too. They talked about high school and their new lives at Wesleyan, but in the first three months of their friendship Lindsey never mentioned her mother. On her second day at Wesleyan she’d told Clara about her mother’s death and “regretted it immediately. For no reason.” After that she was guarded, and waited months to tell her friends about her mom. She kept things light, even with Maddie, and they spent most of their waking hours together talking and hanging out and eating meals and doing homework. It was easy for them to connect the dots and realize they both had best friends at the Claremont Colleges.

Throughout the fall Lindsey talked to her friends from high school a lot,

and Maddie felt jealous because they were supportive in a way that she couldn’t be yet. That’s not to say that Maddie wasn’t also talking to her friends from home, namely Hannah. They would video chat often. One February afternoon Maddie was in her room with Lindsey, talking to Hannah on Skype.

Eventually at a pause Lindsey said, “Hannah, you should meet my

friend Grace!” Pomona was one of the five colleges in the same consortium as Claremont McKenna, and their campuses were adjacent, separated only by a quiet, local two-lane road.

“I think I was like ha-ha uh, okay,” Hannah says. “But Lindsey had

already texted Grace and then Grace sent me a Facebook message like an hour later saying ‘Let’s get coffee!’ and I was like, ‘Okay, meet at the Motley!” Their impromptu date at the campus café lasted over two hours.

Around Thanksgiving of their freshman year, Maddie and Lindsey found

themselves in their room late one drunken, weekend night with a few other girls – namely Clara and Natalia. They had been forming a little group over the 41

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course of the semester and had found comfortable, familiar friendships, even if they had been surface up to that point. “Maybe it was because we’d been drinking, but I don’t think so. We’d reached a point where we felt safe enough to share things we hadn’t yet since getting to college,” Lindsey says. “And we recognized what was happening, like, ‘Okay, we’re becoming friends now, real friends.’” Trusted confidants. Since the incident in the first week of school where Lindsey felt like she’d fumbled, she hadn’t addressed her mother’s death with any of her friends. That’s not to say they hadn’t guessed. “I told Maddie first, before the night we were drunk in our room with everyone,” Lindsey says. “She was great about it, obviously.” “She thanked me for having supported her before she told me, like I already knew,” Maddie says, “…and I did, I figured it out, but we never talked about it until then.” Now, in retrospect, Maddie understands why Lindsey guarded her mother’s story for so long. “Lindsey doesn’t want to take anyone’s sympathy or pity, and she didn’t want this one thing to be her defining factor.” So, it took a while. And when it became clear to all of the girls that they had reached a turning point, that their comfort and familiarity could be the building blocks of more friendships, they took a vulnerable leap forward. It paid off. “We both had a shitty senior fall,” Lindsey says of her and Maddie. “It was a miserable semester.” Everyone was leaving campus for fall break, going home or to see friends or to take short trips off campus. We were maybe going to go somewhere at some point, but it got complicated and we were just like fuck it, we’re staying. We’ll do homework; we’ll cook; we’ll be here together… I think it was the best time I had in college. I don’t even know what we did for those four days… We did nothing. We watched Netflix and cuddled and talked about all of life. “I’m the type of person, I’m not an introvert exactly, but I need to be alone to recharge, take some time to myself. After those four days I felt relaxed and… revitalized… it was just what I needed, she was just what I needed.”

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INTERLUDE FOR BAGUETTES & WINE (PARIS, FRANCE) 2012

Clara is also from Dallas. She did not go to Greenhill with Lindsey and

Grace, but she did go to college with Lindsey, and Paris with Grace. That is, she and Grace studied abroad together in the fall of 2012. Lindsey had introduced them once or twice at Dallas parties, so when Lindsey told Clara that Grace would also be in Paris that fall, Clara reached out to her.

The first time they planned to hang out they were going to cook dinner at

Grace’s apartment. “I remember arriving and there were two big perfect plates of food laid out for us, and probably a bottle of wine. Grace was like, ‘Yeah honestly I’m starving and the thought of cooking at this point was impossible.’ She had bought this fancy prepared food for us,” Clara says. “And then we talked for hours so easily like old friends.”

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Clara is fluent in French and was on a very independent work-study course, and Grace, who was studying art, was “on a very independent schedule at a random French art school.” They spent a lot of their copious free time together. “We would be out and it would come time for the last metro, which is so early in Paris, and I’d stress out about whether to leave or not because I didn’t want to pay for a cab home later,” Clara says. Without fail, Grace would convince Clara to stay out every time, and they’d split a cab back to Grace’s apartment to crash. She had her own place in a central part of the city.

Grace would speak vaguely about the women she’d slept with, and after

a while Clara’s interest overcame her inclination not to pry. “I was finally like ‘what do you mean EXACTLY when you say sex? Like for you, what is having sex?’ And she was really awkward, and she isn’t very open about that kind of thing… I felt worried about making her feel like she was my token lesbian friend who I could ask all the questions about gay stuff, but I feel like that was good in the end. And as I’ve had more experiences with girls I’ve been really excited to tell her specifically about that,” Clara says.

“Abroad was just this weird time where I had two friends on different

programs than mine, and then Clara on a fourth program, and we ended up making like, a little crew,” Grace says. “We all were very much on the same wavelength and liked each other a lot better than the other people there… Mine and Clara’s relationship then became its own thing, which I don’t feel as much with Maddie.” Grace knew all of Lindsey’s college friends, but she and Clara had shared experiences independent of their connections to Lindsey, and Clara became Grace’s friend in her own right. Clara helped bring Grace closer to Lindsey, and gave Grace “new insight into their group dynamics and personalities and friendships,” which she was thankful for.

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CLAREMONT MCKENNA COLLEGE & POMONA COLLEGE (CLAREMONT, CA) 2010-2014

It was February 2011 when Hannah and Grace first met on campus for

coffee. Although they had been at college for more than a whole semester, the search for friendships that were substantiated versus opportune was still in full swing. Grace’s search for social genuineness had carried over from Greenhill to Pomona, and she found something rare in Hannah – a deep and inquisitive interest in others. It was no surprise they hit it off. Hannah was in a long distance relationship with her high school girlfriend and Grace had recently come out. “Talking to her made it feel normal,” Grace says, and from their very first meeting, their conversations – about girls, friends, philosophy, art, food – melted from minutes to hours without either of them noticing.

“Lindsey and I both distinctly remember getting texts from them raving

about each other,” Maddie says, laughing.

“We were obsessed with each other!” Hannah says.

“Wasn’t it hard to hang out from different colleges?” Maddie asks.

“No. Grace would always find a way. She would call me like ‘I’m walking

past your dorm I’m going to take a nap, let’s hang out for 5 seconds.’ And we would.” Maddie and Hannah are laughing and giddy and excitable as they tag-team the story of their early college years, their enthusiasm spurred on by red wine. 45

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As much as Grace pined for authentic people in her life after living

in socially veneered Dallas, that’s how fulfilled she felt when she was with Hannah. And relieved. Hannah was undeniably and whole-heartedly interested – in people, in design, in practical applications of sociological theory, in whatever it was that caught her attention. She didn’t perform her interests as her social persona; her interest became the lens through which she related to the social world, and so she did not change as her interests grew, she just related differently. “She just has genuine, unpretentious interests,” Grace says, “something that you can’t really fake. You just notice it in her over time.” Grace was so comfortable with Hannah that she began to take for granted the ease with which they communicated, and, as she describes it, essentially forgot that social perceptions existed.

“I’m interested in… and freaked out by… the difference between how

you feel as a person and your physical self, and how people read you and how they perceive you,” Grace says, and this key social difference was negligible when she and Hannah were alone. “Bringing Hannah to a new place, for some reason that’s hard to explain, I forget myself and her… Forget how she comes off to other people… forget that she’s this really, really smart glamorous beautiful girl. She’s so cool!” Grace says.

Before meeting Grace, Hannah hadn’t really gotten her feet under her at

school either. Her long distance girlfriend absorbed a large portion of her time and energy, so it was easiest to stick to the friends from her orientation group and her dorm, rather than searching out people she felt more comfortable with. “Grace was my first friend,” Hannah says, “friend friend.”

“There was one night where I just fucked up so bad, and after that I

knew she was really with me,” Grace says. “She had a girl from high school visiting her at Claremont McKenna, like to see if she would like to go there. I was drinking a lot at that time and I was just doing completely wild and stupid shit, and I got really drunk, and we went to a party, and as we were walking 46

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across campus I started screaming, for no reason at all, something really terrible. I think it was like, ‘Hannah L–- murders people!’ …Or like, does meth! I think it was ‘Hannah L–- does meth!’ Just over and over at full volume.

“The next morning I woke up and I was so embarrassed. Poor Hannah

had this girl visiting, and there I was, a drunk mess and screaming at strangers, ‘Hannah L–- does meth!’ I was so afraid that she would be mad at me, or that people were going to think less of her or something because of me. When I apologized she was so chill, she was laughing and kind of making fun of me, and I knew that if she could put up with me like that she really cared and she wasn’t going to just ditch me.”

“The best part is that she convinced the two girls I had visiting to yell

it too!” Hannah says. “They were all running around North Quad shouting ‘Hannah L–- does meth!’ That’s when Grace was drinking a ton. She would get blackout all the time… I’m so glad that’s over!” she says, a smile audible in her voice.

It wasn’t long before they were taking trips home to Hannah’s family in

Palos Verdes, less than an hour from Claremont. Grace became a part of the furniture, so to speak. Rather than going back to Greenhill, she preferred to make herself at home in the Chadwick community, and felt at ease in Hannah’s house and with her parents. It was like she’d always been there. None of the stresses of being a guest in someone else’s space applied for Grace when she was with Hannah, and it was partially the ease with which she became a part of the household that signaled the depth of their friendship.

“Grace knows everyone from Chadwick,” Hannah says. “I wouldn’t be

surprised if Grace knew more people from Chadwick than I do.” She had been to all the Chadwick parties during school breaks and had met all the friends and friends-of-friends who had once been Hannah’s classmates. “Why don’t you date Grace?” Hannah’s mom once asked, “I love Grace!” The girls spent so much time together even some of their friends thought they were a couple. It was this obsessive compulsion that glued them together for the 47

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first “phase” of their friendship, as they both describe it. After they spent their junior year apart – Grace went to Paris in the fall and Hannah to Chile in the spring – things changed.

They returned to Claremont for their senior year having achieved a quiet

and complete understanding of each other, where few words could carry a lot of meaning and even chatting felt connected. “We both changed a lot every year, and college is that, a pressure cooker that’s fast-paced with intense changes, and lots of friends grow apart as they grow older, but we kind of evolved in the same ways,” Grace says. “Our intense phases matched up.”

“You probably know this about Hannah but she gets totally obsessed,”

Grace continues. The thing she’s steering towards, at least on this occasion, is the Enneagram personality test1. Enneagram, similar to Myers-Briggs personality types, is a nuanced and complicated analysis of human behavior and interaction. The Enneagram Institute outlines 9 basic possibilities, every human fits only one number and their number cannot change as they age or grow. Hannah was turned onto Enneagram by a friend, and became immediately obsessed with how it characterized her, her family, her friends, basically anyone she knew. Several years after finding it, she still muses aloud, “I wonder what number they are,” when she meets someone new or considers an old friend. She gets daily Enneagram emails from an online subscription.

Hannah is a 5 herself, and you can be sure Grace has heard all about it.

“I almost don’t want to give her the satisfaction to know that it was such a big part of our relationship but it was just so fascinating to me, and she became even more interesting to me. She just seems like a paradox.” Above all, Grace was shocked that Hannah related so closely to her type description, because to Grace, it sounded completely and totally odd. “It was just the weirdest thing I could’ve read and she was freaking out because it felt so real. At that point I 1 FOR MORE DETAILED INFORMATION, OR TO TAKE THE QUIZ, SEE: ENNEAGRAMINSTITUTE.COM 48

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5 “THE INVESTIGATOR” ENNEAGRAM TYPE 5 IN BRIEF Fives are alert, insightful, and curious. They are able to concentrate and focus on developing complex ideas and skills. Independent, innovative, and inventive, they can also become preoccupied with their thoughts and imaginary constructs. They become detached, yet high-strung and intense. They typically have problems with eccentricity, nihilism, and isolation. At their Best: visionary pioneers, often ahead of their time, and able to see the world in an entirely new way. BASIC FEAR: Being useless, helpless, or incapable BASIC DESIRE: To be capable and competent KEY MOTIVATIONS: Want to possess knowledge, to understand the environment, to have everything figured out as a way of defending the self from threats from the environment.

realized how strange she was,” Grace laughs. “I thought to myself, ‘Hannah is so weird! What if we haven’t been connecting like I thought because we don’t think in the same way?’”

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3 “THE ACHIEVER” ENNEAGRAM TYPE 3 IN BRIEF Threes are self-assured, attractive, and charming. Ambitious, competent, and energetic, they can also be status-conscious and highly driven for advancement. They are diplomatic and poised, but can also be overly concerned with their image and what others think of them. They typically have problems with workaholism and competitiveness. At their Best: selfaccepting, authentic, everything they seem to be—role models who inspire others. BASIC FEAR: Of being worthless BASIC DESIRE: To feel valuable and worthwhile KEY MOTIVATIONS: Want to be affirmed, to distinguish themselves from others, to have attention, to be admired, and to impress others.

After some time, Grace learned to appreciate their completely antithetical modes of thought. It made things more interesting, anyway. Hannah insisted that Grace take the quiz as soon as she became obsessed with it, and they discovered that Grace was a 3.

Grace has always been particularly fascinated by Hannah’s fer vent

insistence that she is awkward, abnormal in social situations, and she thought that Enneagram shed some light on that self-conception. “She has this idea in her head, this social anxiety… She thinks she’s being so weird when in reality she’s completely functional! She’s so normal…” Using Enneagram as a lens it becomes easier to understand that Hannah’s own internal monologue might be convincing her of something that seems untrue to others, but feels true to herself. “Cerebral” is a good descriptor. 50

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CONTEXT

After a few semesters of college’s “fast-paced, intense phases,” Lindsey

and Grace were more like friends who orbited each other than those who ran alongside one another. Their twenty-year relationship grew dormant as their lives apart became increasingly consumptive. Greenhill was the fundamental base of their shared life, and although it was a “weird and wonderful place” where they felt at home, it was also ground zero. After the fact, their friendship stood in for the turmoil that it sur vived. Maddie and Hannah became an important connection between Lindsey and Grace that kept them all in the present (and suggested a future). In college, Maddie and Hannah kept the same stride they had had since childhood, talking regularly to divulge every detail of their personal lives. Things had been a little disconnected for them during their freshman year when Hannah was still dating her high school girlfriend; she could never update Maddie fully because things moved so fast and changed so often, but they still talked a few times a week. At least.

“We didn’t talk for like two or three weeks at the end of school, at senior

week,” Maddie says. She sounds disgusted.

“Oh, yeaaaah,” Hannah says, remembering.

“I hated it,” Maddie says.

“Yeah, it was the worst!”

“I was so anxious!”

“When we texted it would be like, ‘HAVENT TALKED’ ‘CANT WAIT 51

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TO SEE YOU SOON’ ‘TALK SOON’,” Hannah says, each recounted message shouted a little more desperately than the last. She laughs.

Maddie describes Hannah as one of the easiest people to connect with and

talk to, even when they aren’t together. “I would feel like I was having a conversation with her but I would just type little thoughts and send them to her,” Maddie says. She’s laughing a little because she knows how weird it sounds, but she means it anyway. One morning Hannah woke up to 97 text messages from Maddie. “They weren’t short little messages, either!” Hannah says. “They were chunks!”

“I had a lot to say!” More laughter. It makes sense why Maddie, an

Enneagram type 9, would feel anxious about a break in communication with her best friend. 9 “THE PEACEMAKER” ENNEAGRAM TYPE 9 IN BRIEF Nines are accepting, trusting, and stable. They are usually creative, optimistic, and supportive, but can also be too willing to go along with others to keep the peace. They want everything to go smoothly and be without conflict, but they can also tend to be complacent, simplifying problems and minimizing anything upsetting. They typically have problems with inertia and stubbornness. At their Best: indomitable and all-embracing, they are able to bring people together and heal conflicts. BASIC FEAR: Of loss and separation BASIC DESIRE: To have inner stability “peace of mind” KEY MOTIVATIONS: Want to create harmony in their environment, to avoid conflicts and tension, to preser ve things as they are, to resist whatever would upset or disturb them.

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Because Maddie and Hannah were so close and their lives remained

so fluid, it was inevitable that Lindsey and Grace would feel a part of each other’s experiences as well. It’s hard to say what their friendship might look like now had they not been inextricably linked throughout their college years. They were chased apart by a harr ying past that neither of them was keen to address.

“Sometimes I am unsure of how much being around me or reminiscing

is painful for her,” Grace says, “we can be painful for one another.” They have been physically absent from each other’s lives for some time now, and that space has been reflected in their friendship. “It makes me sad, but I also understand… and I can’t really force that on her,” As a human being it is scary to imagine that you may be a trigger for someone you love, let alone your best friend. But they would never abandon each other, regardless of how difficult the alternatives were. It isn’t in their natures to walk away, especially not Lindsey’s. To know Lindsey is to know that she is fiercely devoted to her loved ones, but it doesn’t hurt to have a kind of confirmation.

Lindsey hates that she’s a 6. She claims it’s the worst possible number,

which, one may argue, is a very “six” thing to say. “Come on!” she says. “Every other number has some redeeming quality about it, except for six!” But if nothing else, the way she embodies her number makes her the ideal friend. “As we have gotten a little off course with our relationship over college, our bonds as friends have remained relevant and important through their connections. We have changed as individuals but in similar ways,” Grace says. Now they have to reconstruct their relationship and make it work for who they are in the present. “Lindsey feel free to cut in,” Grace says over the line. I had asked them how their relationship had changed since they had become grown up friends rather than childhood friends. “No, no,” Lindsey says, “I am totally on board with everything that you are saying. I agree with you 100 percent.”

AND THEN WHO KNOWS?

“THE LOYALIST” ENNEAGRAM TYPE 6 IN BRIEF The committed, security-oriented type. Sixes are reliable, hard working, responsible, and trustworthy. Excellent “troubleshooters,” they foresee problems and foster cooperation, but can also become defensive, evasive, and anxious—running on stress while complaining about it. They can be cautious and indecisive, but also reactive, defiant and rebellious. They typically have problems with self-doubt and suspicion. At their Best: internally stable and self-reliant, courageously championing themselves and others.

BASIC FEAR: Of being without support or guidance BASIC DESIRE: To have security and support KEY MOTIVATION Want to have security, to feel supported by others, to have certitude and reassurance, to test the attitudes of others toward them, to fight against anxiety and insecurity.

“You will forever have gotten me my best birthday present ever,” Lindsey says. There’s a pause on the line where Grace is thinking but can’t figure out what Lindsey is referring to. “You got me a fake ID when I was fifteen!” Lindsey says. Grace lets out a shriek-cry-laugh-scream, “Oh my god! I was such a fuckboy I can’t believe I got you a fake ID!” “Why did we even need fake IDs at fifteen?” Lindsey says. There is something good and right in their voices, like it has been both a long time and no time at all.

AND THEN WHO KNOWS?

ACT III 2015 Maddie and Hannah share a loft apartment in downtown L.A., and Grace lives in Echo Park about ten minutes north of them. Lindsey moved from Dallas to Crown Heights, Brooklyn shortly after summer ended, and I missed her and Clara’s visit to L.A. by less than a week. I had to move back to Wesleyan for my senior year. During that trip in late August of 2014, Hannah, Lindsey, Maddie, Grace, and Clara were finally all together in the same place at the same time after four years of melding from afar, piece by piece, all over the country and on three continents.

Sometimes I can’t believe I got myself into the middle of this social tangle,

lovely and beautiful as it is… I met Clara, Natalia and Lindsey about five weeks before graduation, lived in Los Angeles for only 58 days; somehow in that short time I became relevant amidst friendships that have been forming since I was two years old. I’m hesitant to say that any individual connection I have within the Web is the reason the whole group has unexpectedly remained a part of my life. Like Grace said, “it started with chance, but it’s sustainable for other reasons.”

Hannah and I both insisted that we were a summer fling. We were trying to

convince ourselves we didn’t love each other, because not loving someone is easier than loving them. As I am writing this, eight months have passed. When people ask us how we met, it is hard to know where to start.

CODA: A FAREWELL SERMON

Last year one of my greatest role models gave the Baccalaureate address

during commencement weekend (Professor M., whose class Hana and I had together). So many people address a graduating class and stress the idea of a new independence, she said, but she on the other hand, wanted to cast her vote for dependence. We are inherently social creatures, and by our nature we cannot thrive while we are completely alone. When she spoke with students they seemed most afraid of losing the community they had built during their time at Wesleyan, the comfort that comes with familiar faces. Which is why, consequently, Professor M. was speaking on the less popular topic of

dependence before an audience of several hundred people.

When she was in kindergarten her class put on a production of The Three

Little Pigs, she told us. On the night of the show, there stood the three little pigs hiding from the big bad wolf, who was huffing and puffing and blowing houses down. When the house made of brick accidentally tipped over mid-scene, neither the little pigs nor the big bad wolf knew what to do. The kindergarten cast stood frozen for three, five, ten seconds, until finally Professor M.â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s father calmly stood up from his seat in the audience and propped the house upright. The rest of the show went off without a hitch.

Four of my oldest Wesleyan friends graduated the same sunny

May weekend that Professor M. gave her address. They were the first people I met on campus when I turned up in late August of 2012 for transfer student orientation. What star ted as a group of sixty transfer students had chipped down to nine friends, and we shared our lives to var ying degrees during our time at Wesleyan. Regardless of whether our individual relationships were intimate or tangential, we each became an inherent par t of the othersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; experience at school because there was effectively no par t of our time here where one of us did not know the eight others. 56

AND THEN WHO KNOWS?

Wesleyan is an atomic physical space where passersby and friends

are interchangeable terms, and every friend is always passing by en route to somewhere. In this metaphor, our self-described “transfer family” is the nucleus that balances me against all of the people who are more like electrons, bounding at incomprehensible speeds in and out of my life. Some of them have been momentary blips, and some have been relationships that burgeoned outwards, tied to one another like a chain of daisies. We have come of age in a place where people love each other fiercely, for better or for worse – and if someone has been “for worse” in our lives, chances are, they are leading us into the arms of other, better love.

Sometimes I close my eyes and imagine a room with tall ceilings and

lots of light, walls papered in colorful, intricate prints. I put all of my friends in the room. I like to think of them there because having everyone together assuages my tendency to worry, and because when you put a lot of people who love each other in the same room it feels like a holiday. This makes sense to me because friends are the families we make for ourselves, and loving families gather on holidays.

For a while I was afraid that I would leave that room and find myself very

alone, outside the reaches of its security and comfort. My experiences suggest that is ostensibly true. Amid loneliness, if we search very carefully, we can find the thin strands of a nexus that binds us to everyone with whom we have shared love. Our lives are not static and neither are our relationships. We find human connection rising from the dry dust of the earth, from unhappiness and from change and from chance. We commit to each other. We now face our imminent release from the college-centric universe. We spend our final moments reveling in the company of our friends, the mentorship of our professors, the challenges of both, the joy of it all. We are not starting over, but starting anew. We leave but are never gone, are by ourselves but never alone.

Postscript catalogue of coincidences

1) My best friend from high school, whose name is Becca, goes to Cornell University. Becca’s best friend at Cornell, whose name is Sarah, is from Long Island. Sarah’s best friend from high school on Long Island, whose name is Ariel, goes to Wesleyan. Ariel and I didn’t really know each other before Becca told me to keep an eye out for her, but I drunkenly introduced myself to her in a bathroom our sophomore year. Ariel and I hung out while we were living in LA during the summer between our junior and senior years. 1.1) When we were young Becca and I both spent the summer at sleep-away camp, but not together. She went to a camp called Interlocken, where she met a girl named Hannah who was from the greater Boston area. Hannah and I go to Wesleyan together, and we’ve become good friends over the past two years (Sydney introduced us). “Omg I thought she was so weird she made everyone call her Chopstix! With an X!” Becca said when I asked if she knew Hannah. When I relayed Becca’s Chopstix comment, Hannah laughed profusely. “Oh my god, I was so weird,” she said. “Whatever, I’m still that weird. Now I just own it.” 1.2) Chanelle and I met in second grade when we played on the purple pandas recreational soccer team together, and we’ve remained friends since. Our mothers have developed a friendship over the years, too, and after Chanelle and her mother moved away, my mother and I drove down to visit them in Virginia for a mother-daughter weekend. Chanelle goes to Brown, and for a while she dated a guy named Sam. He is from the greater Boston area, the same greater Boston area as Hannah. They went to high school together and both did theatre. Hannah smiled in a nostalgic way when I asked if she knew Sam, the way that people smile when they remember the Good Old Days.

AND THEN WHO KNOWS?

1.3) This past summer Chanelle was an intern at the Center for Sexual Health and Pleasure in Providence. She worked with another intern, Talia, a friend of mine from Wesleyan. I’d get periodic snapchats from both of them posing with a giant wall of dildos, or a picture of a butt plug with a face drawn on it. To add an extra layer of coincidence to the story: Talia lives with Hannah in a house on Fountain. 2) At summer camp I was in a bunk with the same girls for six summers, and about five of us are still friends. One of those girls, who went by Hirsh (a truncated version of her last name), was from New York City. She went to the Fieldston School, where she was friends with a girl named Molly. After high school Molly went to Macalaster, and after one year of college we both transferred to Wesleyan. We were roommates our sophomore year. The three of us got sushi on the Upper East Side the next summer. 3) Sam is another one of my camp friends (she went by Skirsch, a composite of her first and last names) and we’ve known each other since we were eleven. She went to the Northfield Mount Hermon School with Caroline, the friend at Wesleyan who introduced me to Sydney. Skirsch and Caroline spent a semester in New Zealand together in high school. It was only after I’d met Caroline at Wesleyan that Skirsch realized we went to college together. “I didn’t think to introduce you because she’s… nice!” Skirsch later said. I guess I had fairly earned a reputation for my biting sarcasm over our eight years together. 4) I went to high school in New Jersey with a girl named Sarah who I knew only peripherally at the time. She ended up going to B.U. and becoming best friends with Jess, who I have known since I was twelve years old, and have been very close to since my teenage years. Jess also went to my summer camp. Our friendship was characterized by her lack of common sense and my affectionate faux-judgment whenever she asked a silly question. Once when she was in seventh grade, she turned to me after she had just met a young British girl and asked, “Does America have a queen, too?” 59

AND THEN WHO KNOWS?

5) During my year at BC I got close with a girl named Laura, who lived on my hall my second semester after I changed dorm rooms. She is from New York City. When I transferred to Wesleyan, I met Laura’s best friend from high school, Edrianny. Edrianny and I once drove up to Boston together to visit Laura, and when Laura comes down to visit she sees us both, although Edrianny and I operate in completely different social spheres at Wesleyan. 6) During my senior year I’ve had two classes with a quiet but thoughtful guy named Dylan, who I’d never met before except for the one time we were introduced by my friend Jon. Jon went to high school with me, and studies at Tufts, but he and Dylan met in India, where they did a semester abroad together studying Buddhism. When Jon visited me at Wesleyan he called Dylan to hang out, too. Their program was an intensive look at Buddhist tradition and culture, and they spent time in monasteries among other places. Jon, a talkative, loud, high-strung guy, is hard to imagine in a monastery, especially next to such a peaceful guy as Dylan, and it was funny to me that they’d become friends. I suppose they balance each other out.

acknowledgements There are many people to whom I owe thanks. This book would not have been possible without the friends who graciously allowed me to pry into their lives and put words to their histories: Lindsey Boyd, Maddie Kidd, Hannah Lee, Clara Peretz, Grace Wielebinski. To Hana Elion for being herself. To Jackie Soro for always shining in the eleventh hour. To my parents and my Gammy, since long before I was writing. Most importantly, to the teachers that have been shaping and reshaping my love for English since I was eleven years old: Gail Ciecierski, Erika Davis (Pierce), Sally Howell-Rembert, Gregory Woodruff, Anne Greene, Lisa Cohen and Sarah Mahurin.