“It’s co-ed. And it’s small and the programs are so cool and individualized. Plus, it’s only half an hour from Manhattan! I’ll have the best of both worlds.”
She sounded like a college brochure. I could see her in a cable-knit wool sweater, sitting beneath a grand old tree in a bed of crunchy red and golden autumn leaves, a textbook spread open in front of her, and her lips parted in laughter as she studied joyfully with another handsome, sweater-clad, Sarah Lawrence caliber student.
“I’m sorry,” I said, harshly. “Am I supposed to be excited for you?”
Her face crumpled. “I thought you would be.”
“I thought you were going to school with me next year, but I guess you’ve been hiding things from me this whole time.”
“I didn’t hide anything from you. I was waiting to make a decision until I knew what all my options were.”
“Right. You were waiting for a better option than me.” I knew she wanted the argument to end – we never argued, not about anything that mattered anyway – but I was just warming up. Old feelings, feelings I’d ignored for years, were churning in my chest, and my self-pity was indulgent.
“That’s not it at all.” She drew a deep breath. “This is probably the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make. You’re my best friend, and you know I wish we could go to school together, but I have to make a serious decision on this. We can’t follow each other forever.”
“And it’s so convenient that I’ve been following you for years and now when I need you, when I trusted that you’d be there for me, because I have to move to another place where I don’t know a single person, where not a single person will notice me, you bail on me. I’m so sick of living in your shadow, but I did it because you’re my best friend, and I thought – for some reason, I thought, that I was your best friend, too.”
“You are my best friend. You’re the track star, Jill. They picked you as the homecoming queen. You’ve never been in my shadow.”
“Don’t you get it, though? None of that matters. In the fall, no one will give a shit that I was good at track in high school. And homecoming was a fluke. What you’ve got counts – your perfect grades and perfect looks and perfect family,” I could hear hysterics in my own voice. “Why can’t you stop being so selfish for once?”
“Don’t you know my life’s not perfect? Out of everyone in the world, I thought you were the one person who could see that - who could understand me.” Rudy’s mouth sagged at the corners, and I could tell by the way the tip of her nose twitched that she was about to cry. “You can come visit me in New York, and I’ll come visit you in Columbia,” she said weakly. “Please. I know you don’t mean all that crap.” She gave me a sad half-smile.
I squared my jaw and looked at her injured face. I could feel the spot inside me that was beginning to give, the spot that was already starting to rearrange my life to defer to Rudy’s. Maybe I’d make friends easier if I had a random college roommate. She might turn out to be great; I would go to parties with her on the weekends and I’d meet her other friends and over Thanksgiving break I would ask to go visit Rudy in New York. We’d ride in yellow taxis and wear cashmere scarves against the East coast chill, and she’d be impressed with how much I’d changed without her. But I didn’t want to give in to her logic; I felt I had yielded too much already. At eighteen years old, don’t we all feel we never get our way, that the world is unfair and vindictive toward us in particular? I locked the soft part of me away in a dungeon, and I dug into my own wound, pressing on in anger.
“I’m sure your life in New York will be perfect. I just don’t want to be part of it.”
When I said it, I felt the tears rush to my eyes and I turned and fled down the driveway before she could see them. She didn’t chase after me, and I didn’t turn around to see what she did instead. I don’t know if she stood at the end of the driveway and watched me go or if she went straight back inside her house. I don’t know exactly what she was thinking – how badly my words injured her.
But they were just words, I thought at the time. And I was angry and hurt, too. I knew she was smart, that she had better grades and better test scores than I did, but wasn’t college college? Couldn’t she get an education and be my roommate simultaneously? It’s not like I would have held her back, I thought. Though the possibility had been lingering in our lives for the past year, I realized in that moment I’d never thought she would actually leave me. And I was embarrassed I had been so naïve.
If I could say something to myself in this moment, I would shout and scream at eighteen-year-old Jillian to go back. To apologize. You didn’t mean it, I would yell.
You didn’t mean it.
Even then, I knew I didn’t mean it. But sometimes, no matter how hard you beat yourself up, there are things you just can’t take back.
She tried to talk to me before class the next day, but I skillfully avoided her. It wasn’t difficult. We had finals that week, and the normalcy of our days had been interrupted, replaced with rigid test schedules. I arrived at Ogden just before the bell rang, I focused on the black text on sheet after sheet of exams, I ate lunch with a group of girls from the track team and if Rudy approached me, I would simply get up and leave the table.
That Friday, at the culmination of finals week, was supposed to be our party. I wondered if Rudy would go through with it without me. On Friday morning, when I heard whispers about it before the bell rang in my math class, I knew that she would. With or without me, apparently, the celebration would go on. I sulked.
On Friday night my new dress stared at me from where it hung on the back of my bedroom door, the tag still poking out from under the armpit. Out the window I could see a few cars already parked in front of Rudy’s house. I closed my curtains and turned up the music and lay in my bed with a fat magazine spread open over my face. I held it up until my eyelids grew heavy, then I set it down beside me on top of the sheets and closed my eyes and tried to think of nothing at all.
At eleven thirty, I turned out my lamp and went to sleep, and I didn’t stir until nearly noon the next day.
They said no one found her until 3 a.m., when it was far too late to do anything to help her. She lay in the middle of the foyer, her almond arms woven between shattered gold and crystal pieces, her thighs smashed against the grey and white marble. A twisted pile of shimmery opulence, ready to be swept from the floor.
Everyone was there that night; every boy we’d kissed, every girl we knew and every single person who had ever received a wink or a smile or a nod from Rudy as we crossed paths in a crowded hallway. Everyone was there, everyone except me.
They said Rudy was out of control. She was clearly several shots in when the first guests arrived, and when she struggled to open the heavy front door, her hair fell in big, chocolate-gold curls in front of her face. They said she was the life of the party that night, throwing off her shoes to dance on her family’s formal dining room table. Cartwheeling down the length of it, her bare feet slapping against the shiny wood.
They said that by midnight she couldn’t walk; she just sat at the foot of the marble entryway stairs, rooms away from where the party was raging. The grand staircase, with its grand chandelier and its grand fucking elevator music piping in through the walls. Several people said they sat on the stairs and talked to her. Someone told someone else she was upset; she was crying and she was in complete hysterics. Someone told someone who told someone else she was puking her guts up, which I know is a lie because I’d never seen her throw up a single time in my life. No one was there when she made her way to the top of the staircase, or when she reached over the railing toward that stupid chandelier.
An ambulance came at 3:30 in the morning. My bedroom window faced the street, but I didn’t hear the wailing siren or see the red and blue lights through my curtains. Almost everyone had fled the scene and the ones who stayed paced the living room or sat with their heads in their hands. Someone threw up. No one held her hand.
The paramedics burst in and
carted her off – I can see it all unfolding in slow motion in my mind, even though I never saw it at all – but it was too late. Maybe it had been too late for a while now.
She didn’t see just who she was. Maybe I never did either.
I woke late that morning with a good feeling in my gut. It was one of those mornings where the sun was warm outside my window and birds were chirping quietly while they built nests in the trees outside. I lay for twenty minutes with my head against the pillow, enjoying the feeling of my soft sheets and the warm cocoon my body had made, wrapped up in the comforter. Through the floor, I could hear my parents’ hushed voices downstairs and the click of them opening and closing drawers in the kitchen as my mom made herself lunch. I think about that morning often now, those last conscious minutes before I knew. Before my world turned upside down. I wish I could remember what I was thinking while I lay there, but maybe it’s not important that I know after all.
At noon, I crawled from the sheets and went straight to my bathroom. In the shower I sang along to the radio, and I brushed my teeth while I conditioned my hair. After, I dressed in jeans and a tank top and bounded down the stairs into the kitchen.
“Mom.” Her back was turned – she was standing over the kitchen sink – and I started to tell her I was going to Rudy’s for lunch. I was ready to apologize. When my mother turned, the look in her eyes stopped me dead in my tracks. They were red-rimmed and bare, and they sagged at their wrinkle-less corners. She looked old and serious in that instant, and it struck me with paralyzing fear.
“Jill.”
She exchanged a look with my father, who was seated at the kitchen table. He didn’t have the newspaper like he usually did. His hands were folded on the tabletop beside his empty coffee mug.
“What’s wrong?” I said, and my mother broke into tears, stepping toward me with her arms outstretched. “What happened?”
My father cleared his throat and he met my eyes for only a brief second before looking back down.
“Jillian,” he began, softly. “There was an accident last night. Ruth Ann passed away in an accident at her house.”
His voice tunneled in my ears; it distorted and became a strange echo against my brain. My mother had closed the distance between us and had wrapped me in her arms, crying with her face against my shoulder.
“What accident?” A shrill voice cut through my mother’s sobs. It was my voice, I realized with a jolt.
“Jilly, we’re so sorry.” My mother rubbed her palm in a circle against my back. I shuddered.
“What accident,” I repeated. “I don’t understand.”
My father stood.
“We don’t know exactly what happened, but she passed away early this morning. If you need to talk about –“
“Why didn’t you wake me up? I should have been over there. I need to be with her!” I was shouting.
“She’s gone, Jill. It’s terrible, but Ruth Ann is gone.”
My mother hugged me tighter and I was smothering, my chest collapsing into my lungs. I could feel my damp ponytail where it hung against my back, leaving a wet spot spreading across my shirt. I could smell the mint toothpaste on my own breath, and I could feel the little hairs on my mother’s arms pressed up against my triceps. My father started to speak again, but his words jumbled and his face blurred in my vision and for a second I didn’t know why.
Tears.
There were hot tears in my eyes; that’s why I couldn’t see.
It wasn’t at Rudy’s funeral where I felt things the hardest but at our graduation ceremony, one week after her death. We were all crowded inside the gymnasium, this huge herd of navy blue and white robes, with teachers-as-shepherds dispersed among us, yelling above our low rumblings, trying to direct us into straight lines. No one paid any attention to me, aside from the occasional sideways glance or tight smile. At the time, I felt I was invisible to them without Rudy by my side – no one wants to finish watching a movie once the hero’s been killed off – but I’ve gained perspective since that time. How could I expect my eighteen year-old classmates to know what words to say in the wake of my best friend’s death? Fifteen years later, I still don’t know how to approach it.
The year before, when Rudy and I were juniors, a senior had been killed in a car accident one snowy evening in February. He was on the tennis team and was secretary of the student council, and we had smoked weed with him once, on someone’s back patio while we rubbed at the goosebumps on our biceps and froze our asses off. We didn’t even really know him, but when word of his death had trickled through the school, Rudy and I had joined the rest of the upperclassmen in the auditorium. We bawled our eyes out, hugging each other and pressing our wet cheeks to other friends’ shoulders. The whole school was a mess of tears, and I caught myself thinking, how are these broken down girls, red eyed with muddled blush caked on their cheeks the same girls who never stepped outside without mascara? I felt acutely aware of my weight resting against the shoulder of the girl beside me as we all pressed together, and I can remember thinking maybe this was the most you could love someone you didn’t really know – huddling shoulder to shoulder with them, connected by the loss of one of your own. I felt calmed, and at the same time I felt disturbed by the queer unreality of the whole situation. When Rudy died, I thought back to this afternoon and I tried not to cry at all. I avoided the theatrics and pity of tears; tears were a cheap form of currency I did not want. They made things about me instead of her, and I didn’t want to steal anything more from her, especially not this moment. I deferred to Rudy, even in death.
I stayed publicly dry-eyed through the visitation, the funeral and my final school days at Ogden, but I cried endlessly at home in front of my mother, and in my own bed at night, shaking underneath the covers.
The evening of graduation, I walked with my classmates out onto the grounds of the football field, the girls’ heels sinking gently into the soft ground as we strode out in neat lines under the fading light of dusk. We made our way to our seats – folding chairs covered in crisp white linens and arranged in rows across the grass. Around me, my classmates grinned and whispered excitedly to one another and bobbled their heads so that their tassels would shake from side to side. They waved up at their parents in the football stands. I did not know where my mother and father were sitting, and I did not attempt to find them.
As the ceremony began, I felt my face flush, blood rushing to my cheeks and my forehead. My eyes felt swollen. The principal spoke first, then the guest speaker – a Missouri state senator – and mid-way through his speech the lights above the bleachers flipped on, adding illumination as the sun disappeared behind the horizon and the sky darkened. Everyone’s eyes darted from the stage up toward the lights, and I could see the principal frown at this untimely distraction, this blemish that revealed Ogden to be just shy of the perfect presentation it strove for, and its students to be exactly what we were – still kids, distracted by flashing lights and sounds. So much of life, it occurred to me then, though I think the realization had been lingering in my mind for many years, depended heavily on appearances. The senator continued, unfazed. During the part where Rudy would have spoken as our class valedictorian, the class president stood at the podium instead and looked both sad and uncomfortable as Mr. and Mrs. Golden came forward, Mr. Golden’s arms around Mrs. Golden’s shoulders, holding her up as she shook and cried, and they received Rudy’s diploma. My heart ached.
We filed across the stage – all 147 of us – received our diplomas, shook hands with Dr. Foakley and endured hugs from each of the teachers in line to congratulate us as we made our way back to our seats.
At the end, we were led out of our chairs and encircled the football field, as we’d practiced the morning before, our arms outstretched to hold the hands of the people beside us. The band played the school song. Everyone around me sang, but I didn’t even attempt to mouth the words. At the very end, fireworks erupted up into the sky behind the podium, raining gold and blue and purple s
parks down from above. We threw our caps high into the air, and everyone was cheering, shrieking with joy. The boys clapped one another on the shoulders and the girls squeezed each other in tight hugs. The air sizzled with excitement and as I stood there, not moving, not speaking, I could feel the pit of my stomach drop and all of the energy in my body drain to my fingertips. I would never again feel her absence as acutely as I did in that very moment. I burst into tears.
Each time I tell someone my high school story – my Rudy story – I can feel the questions rolling around in their heads. I know I shouldn’t tell this story, or at the very least I should tell the abridged version, with less longing breaking through in my voice. Because it’s been fifteen freaking years, and so many things have happened in my life that haven’t included Rudy at all.
I have two children now, five and two years old. I worry constantly about the mistakes I’m sure I’m making with them – am I allowing them too much freedom, am I too soft when I punish them for throwing tantrums or bickering with each other, do I give them enough kisses and tell them often enough how fervently I love them – and I wonder what missteps the Goldens made, what missteps my own parents made with my upbringing. I wonder how different my life would be if she’d never been in it. I wonder how I changed her life. I wonder what would have happened if I’d been there to catch her that night.
Rudy’s photo, our first photo together, the photo of the two of us on the staircase before we became inseparable, sits on the entertainment center in our living room, where I pass by it daily while I get ready for work and pick up after the kids. I still feel eclipsed by her presence, by the unfulfilled potential of the bright light inside her. She was the person who always knew me best, and yet I wonder if I ever truly knew her at all.
During the first year of our marriage my husband, a high school counselor, suggested I go see a therapist to talk things over, things that still haunt me daily. After three meetings with the woman, she told me – to put it quite simply – that I had to move on. I had to stop idealizing Rudy and the friendship we had, because years had gone by and even if Rudy had lived, things would have changed so drastically since then. Rudy would be thirty-two years old today; she would have children and a job and she would forget to take out the garbage and she would have love handles and she would fight with her husband. Or maybe she wouldn’t. And the reality of it is we probably would have grown apart somewhere during those fifteen years since high school. But that’s just the problem. She isn’t here. She never had the chance to change another person’s life. We never got the chance to grow apart.
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