He looked at me, then at Jenny. “She’s … your cousin?” he said, a note of obvious disbelief in his voice.
“My mom’s white, dumb-ass,” Jenny said. “And this conversation is over.”
It took a few more minutes of Jenny shutting him down before the guy finally walked away. Eden still hadn’t returned.
“Sorry for speaking for you,” Jenny said once he was gone. “I’m sure you could handle yourself. I just … didn’t want to keep arguing with him.”
“No, I appreciate it,” I said. “Eden’s really strong to stand on a stage and relive what happened and argue for what she believes in. But I’m not quite there yet.”
“Yeah,” Jenny said, looking off toward the kitchen. “She’s … she’s strong.”
We made awkward small talk for a while longer. I tried to ask more questions about her parents, about Los Angeles, but I could tell she was distracted, constantly casting an eye around the room in search of Eden, who’d never emerged from the kitchen.
Eventually we both left the couch and began moving around the living room, navigating through the crowd. “If we’re going to make that midnight movie,” Jenny said, “we’d better get going.”
But we both knew the movie wasn’t going to happen. There was just this feeling that the night had shifted into something darker. I don’t know if it happened when the guy came over to us or in the moments before, when Eden’s face had tensed as she talked about Jenny’s mother’s critique of their comic. But the whole mood of the evening had changed.
Eden wasn’t in the kitchen. We found her twenty minutes later in one of the house’s bedrooms, sitting in a corner with a bottle of vodka in hand while she watched two girls play video games on the TV. In the hour since we’d seen her, she’d clearly been drinking quite a bit.
“Eden,” I said, moving toward her. “You okay? We were looking for you.”
She looked up at me with glazed eyes. “Lee,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m ruining your visit.” She tried to stand up, but her legs shook and she splashed some of her vodka onto the carpet. “We should go to the movie.”
“We don’t have to,” I said. “Are you okay?”
But I knew the answer. I realized it when I looked over at Jenny, when I saw the sadness and exhaustion in her eyes. I could hear it in the way she sighed as she stepped forward and gently pulled her drunk girlfriend to her feet. Jenny knew, and now I did, too.
Eden was not okay.
I didn’t know Eden before the shooting. Her cousin, Rosi, was in my grade and we were friendly, if not friends.
Rosi and Sarah had sat next to each other in several classes throughout the years, a side effect of alphabetically arranged seating charts, and they’d always gotten along. So once every couple of weeks, Rosi would sit at our little table during lunch. I’m not sure she ever sat at the same lunch table two days in a row, honestly. Rosi had friends from every clique, which meant there was always an empty seat for her, no matter what side of the cafeteria she was in the mood for.
Rosi was the first one who suggested I cut my hair short. We were sitting at the tiny round table near the vending machines, and she just looked at me, very seriously, and asked, “Have you ever thought about a pixie cut?”
“No way,” I said. “I’d just end up looking like a boy.”
“I don’t think so.” She leaned in, almost uncomfortably close to my face as she tilted her head from one side to the other, examining me. “Your face is very … angular. And you’ve got amazing cheekbones. I think you’d rock some super-short hair.”
I can’t say I didn’t think of her that spring, the day I took a rusty pair of scissors and began hacking away at my hair. When Mom saw what I’d done, she rushed me over to her friend Gretchen, who worked at the local salon in town. We ended up buzzing all of my hair off, and as it began to grow in, I thought of Rosi.
In some ways, keeping it short now feels like a tiny memorial to her.
But this was supposed to be about Eden.
Eden came to Sarah’s funeral, and I’d gone to Rosi’s. We’d gravitated toward each other at both, as everyone around us tried to say how sorry they were and how glad they were that we, at least, were okay, and how God had a plan and so on and so forth. Eden was the only person there who I knew understood. Ashley and Denny were both still in the hospital, and this was before Miles had started climbing onto my roof at night.
We didn’t even say anything as we exchanged numbers after the service for Rosi. She’d just handed me her phone and watched as I typed in my number. Mom had pulled me away almost as soon as I’d handed it back to her. But later that night, she texted me. It’s Eden.
We started spending time together after that, particularly as the spring began to warm into that lovely space before summer when the air is still dry and the breeze is still cool and it feels nice to just lie in the grass. She’d pick me up in her van and we’d drive down to Wargin Park, where we’d sit by the pond all afternoon. She’d draw and I’d read plays—that was the summer I decided I wanted to be an actress—and no one bothered us there.
Most of those days by the lake have blended together in my mind now. Like a collage of pictures with no real chronology. We were there to escape, after all. To try and not feel or think for a little while. To fade into the background and leave this version of ourselves behind.
I could tell Eden was struggling with that, though. And in my collage of memories there’s this one that stands out, in the center of the other pictures, larger and clearer, while the rest have tattered and faded with time.
We were sitting by the lake, under a large willow tree. I was on my stomach, eyes focused on the flimsy paperback copy ofThe CrucibleI’d purchased at a thrift store a few days earlier. I could hear Eden’s pencil scratching against her sketch pad a few feet away. I was trying to disappear. To lose myself in the text so that Lee didn’t exist in that moment. But the sound of her vigorously erasing pulled me back to reality.
I could tell something was wrong, though I didn’t want to ask. It was in the way she gripped the pencil, just a little too tight, and in the speed of her eraser scrubbing the page. When she was finished, she blew off the eraser dust and began sketching again. I went back to my book without a word.
