Tell us your story: This is what our college wanted me to do that fall, in anticipation of our fifth reunion. I’d successfully avoided years of alumni fundraising calls, but the reunion form was more persistent. It tracked me down; I tore it up. I only had one story: I was the girl whose best friend was dead.

I only had one story and the only person I wanted to tell it to was gone.

I didn’t go to the fifth reunion, but I risked the tenth. I made small talk with people who were never supposed to become strangers, pretended to smile at the things they’d forgotten, our constituent stories faded to anecdote and then amnesia, understood why they could allow themselves the luxury, resented it nonetheless. I took it until I couldn’t take it, and then I ran away. First to cry myself out on an empty hilltop where no one would think to look — then to make a pilgrimage. To the past. To the stories I remembered and the places that could resurrect what I’d forgotten. To the balcony where we’d worn down the night before graduation, her eager to return to hyper-efficient packing, me terrified to let her go. To the basement of the science center where I’d ferried her Twix bars and Chick-fil-As on feverish thesis nights, and to its roof, where we’d pooled candy and counted the stars. To our freshman dorm, where I sat on the stoop feeling conspicuously ancient, watched Frisbee games and sunbathers and tried to conjure up a post-blizzard night, ice forts and dining tray sleds, our ghosts firing snowballs, mine laughing as the boy she was about to love pulled her out of my arms, tackled her into the snow. Then I went to the red brick fortress where we met, not technically for the first time, but for the time that stuck.

If you’re looking backward, a beginning is just another ending. Here is ours: A stuffy classroom in Sever Hall. A professor who would quickly prove himself to be as incomprehensible as he was famous. Two freshmen who lived in the same small dorm, one directly above the other, both quiet, both predisposed to distrust strangers on general principle and so still strangers to each other — but less so than we were to anyone else in the room. The wary look of recognition. The grudging nod of allowance, yes, sit here, why not. The relief, at least for me, in that year of strangers, of being seen, being known. The relief of knowing that as long as we sat there beside each other, I would not be alone.

***

Robin Wasserman is the author of the novel Girls on Fire. Her work has appeared in Tin House, LitHub, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and the New York Times.



To learn more about Girls on Fire, click here.