The Opposite of Loneliness Essays and Stories(9)

I walked out of the bathroom and down the narrow staircases through the books and emerged onto the street and the blaring sun. I opened my phone to call Charlotte but realized I wouldn’t know what to say. I walked a few blocks down Pear Street, passing people who didn’t know me, and felt anonymous and fat. I stopped when I got to the quad and turned around because I had no destination in mind; I thought about texting Kyle but realized, again, that the prospect of articulation was too exhausting. I think the one thing I really wanted in that moment was to text Brian and crawl into his bed; complain about Brian and the vigil and his death and fall asleep with his arms pulled around me and my hair tangling against his sheets. I took out my phone and called Lauren Cleaver.

“Hello?” she said.

And I hung up.

*

That night, I got really f*cked up. I had four drinks before we got to the party and did a couple of lines in the bathroom, which I hardly ever do. Spencer was the one with the coke, always was, and he dragged me and Kyle in behind him and locked the door.

“Claire bear,” he said. “Claire darling, you’re first, you poor thing.” He was gayer than Kyle and the two of us exchanged a look.

“We’re not talking about it,” Kyle said. “That’s the rule.”

“That’s not the rule,” I snapped. “You’re making me sound like such an *.”

This time Kyle and Spencer exchanged the looks and I remembered then that they’d hooked up a few times sophomore year. I’d expected everyone at the party to be sympathizing, offering condolences, but it turned out to be the opposite. I think they were all afraid to approach me or figured it wasn’t their place. That, or fewer people knew about Brian and me than I’d thought.

“Hey, I’m gonna go,” I said, attempting to be genuine. “I’m fine, really, I’ll see you guys in a minute.”

“Clairee,” Spencer cooed.

“Look, I’m fine,” I said again. “I’m actually feeling great.”

And I was. The coke had me instantly angry and empowered. Fuck Brian, I thought now. Fuck Brian and Lauren and his parents and his vigil. It was unfair of them to involve me in all of this and I wanted to scream at one of them, steal a car and drive home to Austin. I would never tell Lauren what Brian had written about her. Never tell her that all this time he was still thinking about her. Doubting their decision, hoping she might text him. I imagined she must have been doing the same thing—loving him alone at night, thinking of him while she was with other guys—and denying her that knowledge, denying her something, gave me pleasure.

The music pulsed and I wove through bodies and red cups looking for faces I knew. I felt confident now, defiant, and I wanted a circle of people to enter. To tell a story to and hear them laugh. But I couldn’t seem to find anyone I really recognized, and the faces crammed in the living room of 398 Brown Street seemed younger than ever.

“Who are these people?!” I shouted to a boy next to me. I’d never seen him before in my life.

“What!?” he shouted back.

“I said, who are these people? I feel like they’re all eighteen!”

“What!?” he said again. But this time he walked past me, shrugging, and I went back into the bathroom where Kyle and Spencer were making out.

“Oh, sorry,” I said, backing away, but Kyle opened the door again a second later.

“Come on,” he said, taking my shoulders. “Let’s go home.”

*

I woke up the next morning with a headache behind my left eye and thought seriously about calling Brian’s mother and telling her I just couldn’t do it. That it was going to be too hard. But I think part of me, deep down, wanted to do it, because I didn’t call all morning and by the time the sun set again, I knew it was too late to cancel. I had to prepare something and that was that.

I opened a Word document and stared at it for a few hours. Charlotte kept bringing me food because she wanted to help and didn’t know what else to do—but I let most of it sit cold by my computer, Brian’s musings on my body still fresh in my mind. We watched the end of The Royal Tenenbaums around four (Charlotte thought I could use a fresh start), but I was as lost afterward as I had been before. I played with the idea of framing the whole thing in Keats’s Grecian Urn—talking about how there was something romantic in preservation at a moment of static bliss. But the whole thing felt like an English paper and I realized a note of optimism might actually be inappropriate.

Around ten P.M. I started to panic. The pressure of the deadline, of the task I had to complete, clarified my already numb condition. I was upset and anxious and overwhelmed—no longer by the circumstances themselves, but by my mandate to assess them. How was I feeling? How were we all supposed to be feeling? What did Brian’s death say about our generation? The ephemeral nature of life? The need to cherish?

I gave up on profundity and tried writing honestly. Brian was an amazing guy. Even when he was busy with his own work and issues, he always took the time to listen. But every time I wrote these sentences, phrases from his notebook echoed back at me. “I almost feel like I’m settling.” “There’s no emotional desire for closeness.” “Lauren was hotter—Claire’s so clearly insecure when she’s naked.” They pierced me, deeply, and I entered a realm of insecurity I’d never been in before, wary of acknowledging it. I hated Lauren Cleaver more than I’d hated anyone in my entire life and I thought a lot that day about whether she’d sent me to pick up his journal on purpose. Knowing I’d read it, knowing I’d get hurt. But I remembered how swollen her face was, how raw her eyes had been, and had another thought entirely: that she’d asked me in an act of self-protection. Scared of what she might read. Scared of the rejection she might discover.