Just Last Night(13)

The story of myself and Ed Cooper is a door opening and closing.

SUSIE AND I were newly minted sixth formers, loafing in the common room. He and Justin wandered in during a free period, one sunny afternoon. I’d only been ever vaguely aware of them as presentable members of the male species, in our large school.

I was curled up with my Doc Martens carefully dangling off the upholstery, trying to concentrate on Tuesdays with Morrie. Susie was lying with her back against me, reading her horoscope out from Heat magazine. It was an auspicious day for Aries.

“Hi. We don’t know you, but you both seem significantly less noisy than everyone else here. Mind if we sit with you?” Justin said. “I’m gay so I’m no threat. He’s not gay,” he gestured at Ed, “but let’s face it, he’s no sexual threat either.”

Susie and I guffawed, and space was made. We didn’t know it yet, but in a single moment, our two double acts had merged forever.

Justin and Ed were good together, Ed as straight man, but both of them very droll in that way boys are when they’ve spent a lot of time practicing.

Ed said, pointing at my book: “Are you enjoying that?”

“Yes,” I said. “Well, it’s sad, but it’s interesting.”

Susie rolled her eyes and said: “Eve has a morbid nature. She likes songs without choruses, all hole-dwelling, vole-like creatures, Mafia-widow fashion, wet weather, and books about people dying of rare illnesses.”

“It’s not depressing, it’s full of uplifting wisdom about making the most of your time!” I said.

“I said I felt depressed once and you said I wasn’t a deep enough person to be depressed,” Susie said, and everyone howled. I said: “Oh God, sorry.” (This was a good explainer of why Susie and I work: pithy in our different ways, but we never took the other one’s mockery seriously.)

We had a conversation about middle names and Ed’s was Randall. I said: “Edward Randall Cooper. You sound like a 1930s newsreader.”

I mimicked a stiff, buttoned-up posh male voice: “Hello, we are in crisis. The king has abdicated, long live the king. I am Edward Randall Cooper. Good night, God bless you all.”

“Didn’t I say the one who looks like a cross between Little My from The Moomins and Winona in Heathers would be sassy?” Justin said to Ed, and Ed grinned at me.

I’d never heard myself described before. Assigned a character, as if we were in Clue. I liked it.

“What do I look like?” Susie demanded, with the nerve-free confidence of the terminally photogenic.

“Hmmm.” Justin narrowed his intense, pale gray eyes. Justin himself had a buzz cut and a rascally handsome face, like a charming Victorian pickpocket. “Jane Austen’s Emma meets the Laura Palmer they couldn’t kill.”

Susie screeched with mock outrage and joy and I swear I saw her fall in platonic love in a single second.

We spent much time laughing in the following hour, our first encounter with four personalities that tessellated perfectly as an ensemble.

“Hey, this works. Ally Sheedy,” Justin said, pointing at me, “Molly Ringwald” (pointing at Susie), “Anthony Michael Hall” (pointing at Ed), “and me. Queer Judd Nelson. The Dog’s Breakfast Club.”

I remember tripping off to my sociology class with a foolish grin on my face, thinking that making friends in adult life was clearly a piece of cake. The thing about being young is, you don’t have much else to compare anything to.

But as the months rolled by, I had an inkling we’d stumbled onto something rare, in our tight quartet. There were no rivalries, no real arguments, only magic chemistry where each personality balanced out and complemented the other. The most I’d ever hoped for at school was to be left alone, but I became vaguely aware the four of us were considered both cool and unassailably not to be messed with, now we were a team.

It helped none of us fancied each other.

Justin was not in play, and Ed—well, Ed was a mate.

I only went for wasted, cheekboney, brooding bastards. My infatuation was Jez the premier weed dealer, a bedraggled River Phoenix lookalike at a neighboring college with whom I’d had my deeply unfulfilling loss of virginity with, months prior. (“River Phoenix?! Canal Phoenix more like,” I can still hear Susie saying. “Canal Pigeon.”) I was honestly still in a mild state of shock that an act that was the obsession of ninety percent of popular culture was so underwhelming.

Susie and I once discussed the Edness of Ed, musing that he was, on paper, technically wholesomely good-looking—he’d get a role in Dawson’s Creek—and pleasingly tall, and we loved his company. So why no “grunt,” as we delicately termed it?

“He’s too straightforward, isn’t he?” Susie said, picking the chocolate cladding off a Magnum ice cream as we sat on chaise lounges in her giant garden. It had one of those lawns like a huge pool of green with an undulating perimeter, the border full of lipstick-pink hydrangeas.

Susie had no truck with any peer group boys whatsoever, and was involved with a twenty-seven-year-old doctor at the time, an age we thought sounded impossibly mature. He let her try some morphine, which we thought was an absolute hoot. Now I look back and realize he was a borderline sex offender who should’ve been struck off.

“It’s like there’s no twist, no secret. No edge to Ed.”