by Sara Barnard
“I thought you wanted to talk to me,” I said to her in the brief minute it took for Eric to go to the bathroom.
“I did,” she said. “Earlier. You didn’t, remember?”
Her irritation with me made no sense, at least not as much sense as my irritation with her made. We were snappy with each other for the rest of the evening. She kept rolling her eyes at me, hard-faced, but still drinking the wine I’d brought. Why are we friends? I thought. Seriously, why? I’d thought it before, multiple times, but that time it was without any kind of affection.
I made the mistake of complaining about her to Travis when he arrived, the two of us alone in the kitchen, which only made things worse, because he defended her. “Since when is it a bad thing for her to want to talk to you?” he asked, mouth full of tortilla chips. “Thought you loved that.”
“That’s not the point,” I said. “Obviously. And even if it was, you’re meant to be on my side.”
He frowned. “Why?”
“Because I’m your girlfriend,” I snapped. “Remember?”
“I’ve known Flick since we were kids,” he said. “And you’re just being a bitch.” He raised his eyebrows at me, tortilla chip crumbs round his mouth, and walked out of the kitchen.
I leaned back against the counter and looked at my blurred reflection in the fridge door, thinking about the first time I’d been in this kitchen, how excited I’d been to be in Flick’s house, how it had felt to kiss Travis for the first time. All of that excitement and potential, for what? For being here now, one year on, having to put up with both of them, and the group in general? I would never really be part of what they all had together, that was clear. They had too much history and they didn’t like me enough to displace it or override it. I would always be an extra. And hadn’t that been enough, for a while? Enough to ignore, anyway.
I got drunk, taking one of the wine bottles for myself and hiding it behind my chair. Travis and I had another mini argument in the garden, sloppier this time because of my wine and his weed. I said some horrible things and so did he. I told him I hated him, and he rolled his eyes. It was a half-hearted replica of the kind of fights Flick and Eric had, and I was so aware of it in the moment, embarrassed for both of us, but especially myself. I kissed him to distract us and we had sex right there in the garden, behind the shed, as if that would make anything better.
After, still breathing hard, he smiled at me. I said, “I still hate you,” which was so mean of me and, despite everything, I still feel bad about it.
He didn’t say anything, just shook his head, zipped up his jeans and walked away from me, back into the house. I watched him go, thinking about leaving. I could walk right home, finish the English essay that was still incomplete, be sensible. It was too late to try making new friends at college, but maybe I could just see out the year on my own. Friendless again.
No. I couldn’t.
I went back inside and sat with Travis, whispered that I was sorry. He kissed me but we didn’t talk. I drank more. Later, Eric went out to meet his brother in the driveway and returned smug and obnoxious, the way he got when he had coke.
“Pay up,” he said to us. “This shit isn’t cheap.”
I still could have left. For the record, I could have left.
“I don’t have any money,” Flick said.
“Not you, babe,” he said.
Same old, same old. “I do,” I said. Flick glared at me, then tossed her hair as she went back into the living room. I rolled my eyes at Eric and he smirked back at me. “If I pay extra, do I get extra?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Damn, Pey-Pey. Look at you.”
“Eric!” Flick’s voice, impatient.
“Sure,” Eric said to me. “Let’s settle up later, though. Got to deal with Flick.”
“Of course you do,” I said, and we shared a look at her expense that I hadn’t earned and shouldn’t have encouraged. I was annoyed with Flick, but she was still my friend, and Eric was such a dick. I’d become mean, somehow. Mean and small.
I had also not earned the cockiness I felt when it came to the cocaine, blithely asking for extra like I had any idea what I was doing. What was I trying to prove, anyway? Or maybe I wasn’t trying to prove anything. Maybe I was chasing something instead—something that would make all of this better, or at least make it make sense.
Maybe I would have been fine if I’d just stuck to the one line. Maybe none of it would ever have happened, and I’d have made up with Flick and we’d all have carried on as normal. I would still be at college and Travis would still be my boyfriend and I would still call them all my friends.
But I did do the second line. And a third. Surreptitious, with Eric, in the kitchen that was somehow the site of so many of my terrible decisions. I bounced through the house, joyful, throwing my arms around Travis, kissing him. Everything was good again, so good, including me. I was exactly where I wanted and needed to be. These were my very best friends, my squad, and I was a champion.
It didn’t last long enough, of course. The happiness was so temporary. The weird thing was, though, that this time the rest of my body didn’t calm down when the euphoria passed. The energy didn’t dissipate—it doubled. My whole body felt weird, actually. Wired. Weird. Wired.
My heart was going really fast. Really fast.
“Why’s it so hot?” I asked the room, but no one responded. I wasn’t sure if I’d actually spoken out loud. I got to my feet and made my way across the room, stumbling out into the hall, through the front door, into the garden. It was raining and I closed my eyes, trying to control my breathing, which seemed to be happening a lot faster than usual, or was that my heart, too? I put my hand to my chest, trying to blink away my confusion. Thump, thump, thump.
“Close the door, Pey-Pey.” Someone’s voice, someone nearby. “It’s fucking raining.”
My heart was going even faster. Was I breathing or not breathing? I’d closed the door, I was inside the house, but now I was looking at the floor, which was weird, because why would the floor be this high?
“Pey-Pey?” Motion near my head. “Where’s Travis? Someone get Travis. Pey-Pey’s being weird.” Fingers on my skin. “Fuck, she’s really hot. Pey-Pey?” Worry. “Pey-Pey?” Panic. “Fuck! Eric!”
“…probably just passed out.”
“No, something’s wrong—”
“Shit, oh fuck. Peyton?” A shake. “Peyton? Eric! Did… see… she had? Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“…been drinking… not supposed to… taking coke.”
“…all been drinking…”
“How much… we all… though? Fuck, why… stop her?”
Loud. More voices. Shouting. Hysterical. Hands on my face, my arms. Something cold and wet splashed over me.
“Nico!”
“It might wake her up!”
More hysteria. Someone crying.
“Oh my God, oh my God!”
“Shut up, Flick!”
“You shut up!”
My eyelid lifted open, then dropped.
“We have to get her to hospital.”
“How? You going to drive like this?”
“I’m calling Mum.”
“No, Flick!”
A clatter, a shriek. “Ow!”
“Don’t be an idiot. You know what will happen to us if we get caught with all this shit?”
“Fuck! Why’s she shaking like that? Oh my fuck, is that a fit? Oh fuck, oh fuck.”
“Someone call a fucking ambulance.”
“Everyone shut up, I can’t think.”
“Peyton? Peyton? Peyton!”
Everything black for a while. Then being lifted, held in someone’s arms, my head lolling back. Cold air, rain. Outside. Why? Trying to open my eyes but my head.
Being put down. Down on the… on the what? Cold and wet. Hard. Concrete. Pressing my forehead against the pillow. No, curb. Mumbling, “What?”
“Fucking go.”
“We can’t just leave her here!”
> A soft voice, near my ear. “The ambulance is coming, Pey.”
“Flick! Where are you go—you can’t—”
“You’ll be okay—it’s okay.”
“Go!”
“Shit, shit, shit.”
Running footsteps, running away, away from me. The rain on my face, stirring me out of the dark, but still something quiet deep inside me, saying, Stay down. You don’t want to be awake for this.
* * *
I still don’t remember much of anything after that until I woke up to the harsh light of the hospital the next day. I had the sense more than the memory of a flurry of people all around me, talking to each other or me, I wasn’t sure. Being poked by needles and one question on repeat. What did you take? What did you take? Either I told them or they figured it out, because when I woke up I was, at least physically, fine. Numb, hollow, confused. Dry-mouthed. But fine.
And then there were my parents, alternating between fury, worry, and—this surprised and confused me—shame. “This isn’t how we raised you,” they said. I knew this meant the drugs, though they didn’t say so specifically. They wanted me to confirm who it was they should blame, but I didn’t tell them. I still thought I should be loyal, that’s the thing. I thought they were still my friends. Even when Mum said, as if the words hurt her, “They left you in the gutter.” Those are the words she used. The gutter.
Maybe I should have cried when I understood what she meant, that my only friends had abandoned me on the side of the road when I was clearly having some kind of extreme, potentially life-threatening episode, but I didn’t. I felt numb. Just entirely numb, physically and emotionally. The memories surfaced slowly, swimming back to me through the sludge of my addled mind. The sound of running footsteps away from me. The flashing lights reflected in the puddles on the road. The low voices of the paramedics.
But, mostly, a feeling. One that started there on the roadside in the dark and the rain and never went away. Abandonment. Like loneliness, but worse. Like rejection, but deeper. I felt it then and I’ve carried it with me ever since, even as I’ve tried to outrun it by crossing oceans and continents. Some feelings have staying power, though. Some feelings last.
NOW
WHISTLER—JASPER
I tell Maja in a jumble of confused, embarrassed shame, the two of us sitting on the grass together on the roadside in Alberta. She listens quietly, and at some point I realize she’s holding my hand and maybe it should be weird but it isn’t—it’s nice. She doesn’t interject with gasps or protestations or commentary—that wouldn’t be very Maja—she just listens.
“I guess…” I say, my voice a little hoarse. “I guess they had to leave me, right?” Hearing the story out loud for the first time, I find myself needing to defend them, searching for reasons I’ve been overreacting all this time. “They would have got in so much trouble, and…”
“No,” Maja says. “They didn’t have to leave you at all, and they shouldn’t have done. That was very wrong.” She says this like she knows I need to hear it. “What did they say, when you spoke to them later?”
“They didn’t,” I say. “Speak to me, I mean. No one even checked I was okay.” I think of Casey’s email, weeks after the fact, too little too late. “The only one I spoke to was Travis, and that was only to…” My voice gives out. The memory of that awful phone call, after I’d gotten home from hospital, charged my phone, waited for the screen to fill with messages and stared in shock when they didn’t come. Travis’s guilty, defiant voice when I finally called him. How he’d shrugged off the silence of him and his friends in the face of what they’d done, the fact that I could have died, as if it didn’t matter. “We called you an ambulance,” he’d said, as if that was enough. When I told him we were over, and he just said, flat and unbothered, “Okay.” I called him a twat, he said, his voice harsher, “And you’re an up-yourself bitch. No wonder you never had any friends,” before he hung up on me.
And I never heard from him again. Not him, not Flick, not anyone. Radio silence, even in the WhatsApp group we shared. When I left it, no one asked me to come back.
“Oh, Peyton,” Maja says, her voice soft. “I’m sorry.”
She’s more sorry in this moment, hearing the story, than they were for being the cause of it. The truth of that is still painful, even though it all feels so long ago, half a world away from that house and that pavement. They should have cared more, that’s the simple truth. Maybe that won’t ever not hurt. Maybe it’s okay that it does.
We stay there for a while longer, just the two of us, until I feel normal again. I’m glad I told her, even though I still feel mortified about losing it in front of everyone. When we get back into the RV the boys are all waiting, watching me with wide, nervous eyes. They offer me embarrassed, sheepish apologies I try to wave away with a laugh that doesn’t convince anyone. Seva is sitting in the driver’s seat and I go to sit with him, thinking he’s annoyed with us all for acting like children, because he hasn’t gotten involved with any of it and his mouth is a thin line. But I realize when he tries to smile at me that he’s more worried than anything else—worried for me. As we ease away from the roadside onto the highway, he asks me repeatedly if I’m okay, telling me he wouldn’t have driven off if he’d realized I wasn’t on-board. “I know,” I keep saying. “I’m fine, and it’s not your fault.”
Beasey waits until we can be alone before he tries to talk to me. When we’re all settled in at an RV park in Jasper, the two of us go for a walk, wrapped up warm in our coats and hats. He apologizes again, soft and sincere, and I tell him everything. It’s easier after telling Maja. He’s not as quiet a listener as she was; he asks questions and shakes his head a lot and curses under his breath. He touches my arm, puts an arm around my shoulder, hugs me, over and over, almost on rotation, like he doesn’t know what else to do.
I’m almost embarrassed by how genuine his distress for me is, how much he cares. “It wasn’t that bad,” I find myself saying. “Loads of worse things happen to people. It wasn’t, like, a trauma or anything.”
“Sounds traumatic to me,” he says. “I want to jump into the past and—”
“Save me?” I ask, trying to joke.
He shakes his head again. Simply, he says, “Be there. For you.”
I feel myself smile, swallowing down more tears. “Everything would have been different if I’d had a friend like you then. All of you. But I didn’t, so… Yeah.”
He asks me more questions about my friends who were not my friends, what we did together, why I liked them. I explain that I never really liked them; I’d just convinced myself that didn’t matter. But as I say it, I think of Casey’s email, how she’d tried to tell me, so early on, to say no to Flick sometimes. And Flick, smiling as I designed a tattoo straight onto her arm. I trust you.
I find myself telling Beasey about Flick, starting with the Instagram post of her tattoo, how she’d called me her friend, and going back to our first meeting. I tell him how she’d carried all my lifelong hopes of friendship—“Which I get isn’t fair on her; I do know that.” How when we were friends I’d lost all sense of myself, trying to be exactly what they wanted even though I—and they, probably—didn’t know what that was.
When I’m finished, he says, very carefully, “What is it you want from her? From them?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I really don’t. Nothing, I think. I mean, a real apology would be nice, but it’s way too late to mean anything. Or otherwise some kind of explanation, like a debrief of our friendship. Why they even bothered with me. What they thought of me, really. But you don’t get that stuff in real life, do you?”
“Why does it matter what they thought of you?”
“Of course it matters.”
“Why? Do you think they’re thinking this much about what you think of them?”
The question throws me. I’d never even thought about it. “Well… no. But they don’t have the issues I have. They’ve always had friends.”
“The issues you have are even more of a reason why you shouldn’t be thinking about what they thought of you.”
“Beasey, they were the first friends I had since primary school, which doesn’t count.”
“Of course that counts—”
“And before them, everyone hated me. I had no friends, okay? I told you that. So what was wrong with me before, was it still there? Did they just not care about it? Or maybe they didn’t see it, and then they did, and—”
“Won’t you listen to me?” Beasey breaks in, frustrated. “There’s nothing wrong with you. You haven’t had any issue making friends here, have you? Whatever went wrong before, it wasn’t because of you. It just was. I know this is easy for me to say, but you have to find some way of letting that go, or it’s going to really screw with the rest of your life.”
“It’s different with traveling friends, though,” I say.
“Yeah, people are even more likely to just pass you over if there’s no connection,” he says. “People aren’t nice for the sake of it just because you’re traveling. If they like you, they’re nicer and they try harder. But they still have to like you first. And we do like you, all of us. You’re not going to have trouble making friends when you get back to your ‘real’ life. Can you just trust me on that?”
“But why didn’t I have them at school?” I know as I’m saying this that he can’t answer, but I say it anyway. “Why? Everyone has friends at school.”
“I don’t know,” he says. “School is such a weird, artificial environment. You put, what, thirty kids in one class, all the same age, all from the same place? That will never happen again in your life. It’s not how life is. If you think about it, it’s weirder that you would make lasting friendships there. I don’t think you should beat yourself up about that time of your life. It doesn’t say anything about you.”
“It does, though,” I say. “It’s nice of you to say that, but it does.”
He shakes his head. “Don’t read too much into the school bit,” he says.
“You and Khalil met at school,” I point out.