Her nails were a mess. She bit them down to nothing but would still paint them with glitter nail polish before a big race because she swore up and down that it brought her good luck in the water. On special occasions she tended to overdo it in the perfume department.
Pixar movies always made her cry. She was allergic to scallops. She had a birthmark shaped like Idaho on her lower back.
Those are the things that you don’t get to read in an obituary—the memories and bits of a person that make up a whole life.
My best friend, Jillian, was sixteen when she died. If she had lived for another nine days she would have made it to seventeen.
I try not to picture her on that last day—in the blue top with the light purple flowers embroidered around the collar and those shorts that she made from her favorite pair of jeans, but sometimes I can’t help it and the memory gets inside my head and my heart and it’s all I can do to keep breathing air. I wonder all kinds of things and I want to cry and I want to yell until my throat hurts and I want to pull all of my hair out. But, mostly, I want to go back to that night so that I can grab her hand and lace her fingers through mine, fusing us together.
“Hold on,” she’ll say to me. “I don’t want you to let go.”
***
“So then I was all, ‘you have got to move on because like I’ve told you a hundred times already—we are done and there’s no going back.’ And he started whining and sniffling and begging, the big baby.” Jodi rolls her eyes dramatically. “I just don’t know how to make things any clearer for the guy without completely killing him.”
I nod my head as I tear the top of the sweetener packet and dump the powdery contents into my Styrofoam coffee cup. It’s Wednesday and Jodi and I are getting coffee in the Student union before our last class of the day. So far I’ve seen her hopped up on Indian food and live music, and on a sugar high from one too many Twizzlers, but I’ve never seen her on a caffeine rush. Just the thought of it is intimidating and I wonder if I should have a tranquilizer on hand. Just in case.
“So, what happened after that?”
I follow Jodi as she navigates through the crowded tables to a set of oversized chairs and a sofa arranged in a sunny corner. She plunges herself into one of the chairs and pries open the lid of her coffee cup.
“Well,” she says, blowing on her coffee and looking at me sideways. “After two decent orgasms and a container of Moo Shu Pork, he went home. I haven’t heard from him since, but Jason’s like clockwork. Even though I keep telling him to leave me alone, the poor guy can’t make it ten days without showing up at my front door begging me to take him back.”
“Wait.” I blink slowly, adjusting myself on the sofa. “You had sex with him? After you told your ex-boyfriend all this stuff about moving on, you had sex with him?”
“And Chinese food.” Jodi nods. Today she’s got the blue streaks in her hair wound into tiny braids and pulled back from her face. Her eyes are heavily lined with dark kohl and she’s switched out the little silver stud in her nostril for a gold one.
“I don’t understand. I thought you said…”
“I said that Chinese isn’t my favorite, but in a pinch I can totally deal.”
“That is not what I meant and you know it.” I shoot her an exasperated look. In less than a week, Jodi and I have fallen into an easy pattern. She was annoyed with me when I stood her up last week at Dirty Ernie’s, but she told me that she’d get over it if I bought her an ice cream cone after the concert we went to on Saturday. Just to be on the safe side, I bought her a sundae with a mountain of whipped cream and three cherries on top.
I look at her hard. “I don’t understand why you had sex with him if you want him to leave you alone. Maybe I’m crazy, but that seems counterintuitive.”
“Oh.” Jodi leans in with an impish smile on her lips. “Well, Jason is too much of an idiot to make for good boyfriend material, but his, umm, eggroll is… well, let’s just say that it’s supersized. So from time to time I make an exception to the terms of our ‘strictly friends’ agreement.”
I flush red. “And that’s not confusing? Don’t the lines get blurred?”
Jodi rests her head against the wall above her chair and sighs. “Well, yes it’s confusing, Aimee, but a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do. And Jason can be very persuasive when he wants to be. He does this thing with his tongue and it’s so—”
I lift my hand to stop her. “I really don’t need to hear about what Jason can do with his tongue. Seriously.”