“That’s medicine,” Hannah retorted, but half-heartedly.
“Well, whatever the equivalent is for English. Just because you wouldn’t do that, doesn’t mean everyone else is as high-minded as you.”
“April, you shouldn’t talk like that.”
“Why not? Because people will think I bought my way in too?” April said, laughing. “So what? They already think that, why not give them the satisfaction of thinking they’re right?”
“But they’re not!” Hannah exploded. “I know full well they’re not. Why do you talk like this? I’ve read your essays, April. You’ve got nothing to prove.”
“Exactly,” April said, and suddenly she was no longer laughing but deadly serious. “I have nothing to prove. So let them say what they want.”
There was a silence, then Hannah said, “I’m turning in. What about you?”
“I don’t know,” April said. She looked out the window at the top of the staircase, across the glittering roofs of the college and away towards the water meadows beyond the Isis, striped black and white in the frosty moonlight. “I’m not sure. Horatio’s asked me and a couple of girls to go for a drink in town. I’m not sure if I can be bothered, though.”
“Horatio?” Hannah knew the single word dripped disapproval, but it was too late to take it back.
“He’s not my tutor,” April snapped.
“He’s a tutor, though. Don’t you think this is a bit inappropriate?”
“We’re not in high school,” April said impatiently. Then she turned and opened the door to Dr. Myers’s rooms, letting out a gust of cigarette smoke and laughing conversation. “I don’t know. I haven’t made up my mind. Don’t wait up.”
“I—” Hannah said, and the door slammed behind April. “Won’t,” she finished to the empty corridor, and sighed, picked up the borrowed high heels, and crossed the hallway to go to bed.
AFTER
When they get home from the restaurant, Will falls into bed and straight into a deep slumber, but Hannah—though she felt tired in the taxi—finds she can’t sleep. She tries hot milk, white noise to drown out Will’s snores, but nothing works. Her joints hurt. Her breasts are sore. Everything aches and she can’t find a comfortable position in bed.
At last, she pulls out her headphones and does something she hasn’t done for months, years, even. She opens up Instagram and navigates to @THEAprilCC. April’s account.
April was the first person Hannah had ever met with Instagram, back in the days when filters were strictly for coffee, and plenty of people didn’t even have a camera on their phone. But April had been one of an early handful to download the app and she had known, somehow, that this would be big.
Now Hannah scrolls back through ancient selfies, with sun-soaked filters and frames to make them look like Polaroids. There are photos of April draped across punts, pictures from college bars, a snap of some tuxedo-attired boy being led by the tie down St. Aldates. All the drunken, laughing, unselfconscious mementos of student life, a decade ago.
She knows the photos well, and not just because the press mined them for publicity shots. In the early days, when they were all that was left of April and of her own life at Pelham, she had flicked through them obsessively—noting every like, reading every comment, each one testament to April’s impact on the world and the gaping hole she had left.
RIP April <3
OMG still cannot believe you’re gone. Luv u.
Wow she fit what a shame lol
It wasn’t healthy—she knew that, even at the time. And at last the pain the pictures caused outweighed her need to look, to prove that April had been real, and flesh and blood, and as beautiful and vivacious and happy as Hannah remembered. So finally, as the comments died away and the likes slowed down, she’d forced herself to stop going back.
But now, looking at them again, she is struck anew by April’s luminous, unpolished beauty, not just in the photos where she is dressed up to the nines, hip jutting, makeup on point, but even more so in the candid snaps—April lying in bed in a splash of morning sun, makeup-free, smiling sleepily at the camera. Oh hai there she had captioned that one, and then a series of hashtags: #nofilter, #nomakeupselfie, #sundaymorning, #godilookamess.
I miss you… Hannah types out in the comments, and for a moment her finger hovers above the send arrow. But she doesn’t post. Instead she deletes the three words and goes back to April’s feed, scrolling through the decade-old snaps.