Kristen came out of the shower, framed in steam. She pulled a dress from the wardrobe and then sat in front of a mirror, carefully applying her foundation, a few swipes of mascara. I wasn’t sure why we kept doing this: We weren’t sharing photos of ourselves, after all, and Kristen didn’t care much about impressing strangers. I imagine she was used to looking beautiful, with her caramel-colored waves and wide hazel eyes.
* * *
—
“I can’t believe this is our second-to-last night,” Kristen mused as we strolled into town.
“I know. Soon we’ll be back in our cubicles, ugh.” I glanced at her. “We need an action plan for dealing with Lucas.” She hated her boss, a heavyset Swiss expat who, as Kristen told it, had begun disliking her the minute the firm forked over $1,500 for her work visa. “What do we know about managing up?”
“That it’s impossible if you’re a scapegoat.” She shrugged. “The branch isn’t hitting its quarterly goals, and I’m the only manager who’s not part of their C-suite boys’ club. I think they’re afraid of me.”
“Afraid of you?”
“Just in the way all men are afraid of women. Deep down.” She ran her fingers through a jungly vine hanging over the street.
“You think men are afraid of us? I feel the opposite. Then again, I’m not all CrossFit tough like you.” Was this how she experienced life? I envied men’s indifference to personal safety—how they could amble through a dark alley without thinking twice.
“Of course they are. It’s why they’re so cruel. Men with batshit manifestos and access to assault rifles.”
“Why would we scare them?”
“Because we know things. We see things—sense things they miss.” She stepped over a pile of horse poop. “After all, we’re the ones who ate the fruit from the tree of knowledge.”
“Biblical references. Old-school.” Were all women masters of detection? Kristen could be observant, reading implications and people and rooms in a shrewd, cerebral way. But I was more sensitive than her, more thin-skinned and porous. It meant the sight of a bird dying on the side of the road could fill me with sorrow, but there were advantages too: Whenever a butterfly whiffled by, my eyes brimmed with joy, as if we shared a secret.
We turned from the narrow street onto a cobblestone one and gazed at the cute vegetarian restaurant anew: A treelike fern was plopped in the center of the patio, with colorful dream catchers and a worn Tibetan prayer flag strung between nearby trees. Kristen’s and my excitement over new cities borders on orgasmic. When we’d stumbled upon this spot earlier, we were both so overcome by its loveliness, we fell into a spontaneous, giggling hug.
Kristen loved telling people how we met, as if we were a long-term couple still astounded by our luck. Sophomore year, we were the only women in our Statistical Methods in Economics seminar. A couple guys, mostly seniors, had boxed us out of the discussion, rolling their eyes at our questions and regurgitating our own points with almost comical smugness. As we filed back into the hallway, I’d smiled shyly at Kristen.
“So that was…interesting.”
“We should study together,” she replied. “Ruin the curve for all those assholes. I’m Kristen.”
I shifted my books to shake her outstretched hand. And then I felt it, a decentering, a wobbling motion like when you’ve just stepped off a boat: Some part of me knew this was important, that things wouldn’t be the same.
I hadn’t had that feeling since I’d met Ben at a party junior year of high school, when he, a cute prepster from the all-boys school, ambled over and said hi, his ice-blue eyes holding mine. Within the month, we were officially “going out.” Sophomore year of college, by the time Kristen’s hand grasped mine, Ben and I were decidedly not in love anymore. But I still loved him, because we’d been together for years. I took a behavioral economics approach to it: All the time and space and knowledge and feelings we’d already invested, the future we’d envisioned back in Minneapolis, where we were both from—it felt like a done deal, inevitable. Sunk costs, sunken hopes.
I had so little context back then. No ability to take a step back and see things clearly. He takes care of you, I told myself, because he made it clear that he was smarter than me. He only wants the best for you, I told myself, because he disliked my more boisterous college friends, hated when I drank, and turned nearly apoplectic when I tried pot. He wants you to be your best self, I recited like a windup doll, because he wanted me to learn about esoteric Russian literature and art-house cinema and snob-approved music. Plus, there was a certain coziness to our dynamic, to knowing how he took his coffee and which restaurant we ate at before a movie and how everything would end. A peek at the future, like flipping to the last page of a mystery before the narrative gets too intense.
And then I met Kristen. She and I were almost instantly inseparable: We discovered our mutual love for nerdy wordplay and stupid brainteasers and whipped up our own secret language, our world for two. We’d meet all over campus to study together, and the location inevitably came through texted clues—a treasure hunt with our togetherness as the prize. Over in the dorms, we’d leave cryptographs on the whiteboards on each other’s doors, coded complaints of being Sexiled Again or invitations to Dinner at Hinman. The stealth, hiding secrets in plain sight, gave all our interactions an electric current. Who doesn’t love getting away with things?
An ironic thought, I supposed, after what happened in Cambodia. Blood on the floor in a widening pool.
In college, the high of prancing around with Kristen threw into stark relief just how small and tense I felt around Ben. Kristen had been the first to question it—to ask the just-right questions, until slowly, slowly, I came to recognize the manipulation, the criticism, the subtle gaslighting. I began to hold my ground with Ben and call him out on things. Question why our postgraduation plans were really his, with me as set dressing, a prop. Hers was the apartment I rushed to at two a.m. when, senior year, Ben and I got into the Argument of the Century, yelling and flailing.
He and I almost never fought, our resentment building instead, and so it was one of those moments when a part of you splits off and hovers over you like a drone: Will you get a load of this? Can you believe this is really happening? He whirled away and I reached for his shoulder, look at me when I’m talking to you, and he turned so suddenly that the back of my skull connected with the wall behind me before I could figure out why or how.
“I wasn’t trying to hit you,” he said, glowering, in lieu of an apology. I pushed past him and ran to the door. After a multiday standoff, Kristen went over to Ben’s and my apartment and filled a suitcase while he looked on, jaw set. We never had an official breakup.
I’d wanted to see him again, pathetically; I wanted to scream and cry as he held me, because his arms were almost as familiar as my own. But Kristen knew better. “Screw ‘closure,’？” she said at the time. “You’re not wasting another second on this loser. Now he can find someone new to try to cram into a tiny, suffocating box, and you can be the badass you are.”