And now, Anthony realized, there was something else. Something they hadn’t known at the time. The boy was a short-stringer, before there was such a thing. And, that night in the frat house, his string had reached its end. If the alcohol hadn’t killed him, then something else would have, right?
As long as the boy’s string was short—had always been short—then Anthony wasn’t to blame. He couldn’t think of it any other way. He couldn’t entertain the possibility that there was a particular reason the boy’s string was short. Anthony believed in God, of course, but he couldn’t let himself believe that God had seen the future, seen that Anthony and his brothers would coax the boy into their midst, pretend he had a chance, physically and verbally taunt him until he imbibed so much he could barely stand.
And Anthony allowed himself to forget about the boy as the scotch seeped into his bloodstream, his attention span already shrinking, his brain slowing down just a tad. He poured himself one final glass for the night.
In the morning, his life would march forward.
Dear A,
Dear A,
I knew a guy in college who took a job as an investment banker, and he was so worried that he would end up hating the job but sticking around for the money, that he set an alert on his phone to send himself the same message every year on his birthday: “Sit down and ask yourself: Are you happy?”
We haven’t spoken in a few years now, but yesterday was his 30th birthday, and I wonder if he still asked himself the same question. Am I happy?
I think we’re raised to believe that happiness is something we’ve been promised. That we all deserve to be happy. Which is why this really fucked-up thing that’s happening to some of us is so hard to accept. Because we’re supposed to be happy. But then this box arrived at our doorstep, saying that we don’t get the same happy ending as the people we pass on the sidewalk, at the movies, at the grocery store. They get to keep on living, and we don’t, and there’s just no reason why.
And now the government and so many others are only making it worse, agreeing that we deserve less than everyone else. I haven’t even heard from most of my long-string friends in weeks. I think that maybe long-stringers feel a need to disassociate from us, to put us in a different category than themselves, because they were also raised to believe that they deserve happiness. And now they want to enjoy that happiness from a comfortable distance, where they don’t need to feel so guilty about it whenever they look at us. Where our bad luck can’t rub off on them.
Well, that, plus the fact that they’ve been told to be afraid of us. The wild, unhinged short-stringers.
I’m sorry to bombard you with such negative thoughts, but a friend of mine died last month, and sometimes it feels like everything is barreling downhill, and even though I’ve joined a group where I’m encouraged to speak these thoughts aloud, it feels easier, somehow, to write it all down.
—B
Amie
Amie still had the letter from last week. She’d read it over and over a dozen times by now, but she didn’t know what to write back.
She held the paper in her lap, sitting on the couch in the teachers’ lounge, thinking that “B” was right. A chasm had opened between the long and the short, one that only a few people, like Nina and Maura, had somehow managed to bridge.
Amie worried, for the first time, that she had made a mistake by responding to the first letter that spring. She had known, then, or at least suspected, that the writer had a short string. And now their exchanges grew deeper, more intimate. How could Amie be sure that she was saying the right thing? Or, god forbid, saying the wrong thing?
She was staring at the letter when it hit her.
She was doing it, too.
Everything the writer had said.
Making assumptions about them. Tiptoeing around them. Wondering if this friendship was too much to handle, too fraught. Fearing that—because of their string—they were breakable, delicate, different.
The letter was sitting inside her purse, still awaiting a response, when Amie met Nina for a walk in the West Village, before she and Maura set off on their trip.
The two sisters strolled through Washington Square Park, which was teeming on the warm evening with skateboarders and dog walkers, families and lovers, and at least two drug dealers in opposite corners of the park, thanks to the heightened demand among long-stringers looking to celebrate and short-stringers seeking escape.
Amie and Nina crossed under the massive marble arch at the entrance to the park, where someone had spray-painted along one of the two white columns: “What if YOU had a short string?”