secretly hates me, and no one will tell me? Would you tell me if you hated me?” “No, no,” the men assured her, petting her hands. “No one could ever hate you.” I used to think this act was a ploy for attention, but she’s also like this when it’s only the two of us. She gets so vulnerable. She starts sounding like she’s going to burst into tears, or like she’s bravely revealing secrets she’s told no one else before. It’s hard to watch. There’s something desperate about it, and I don’t know what frightens me more—that she’s manipulative enough to pull off such an act, or that everything she’s saying might be true. For all the blaring music and bass vibrations, the Graham feels dead— unsurprising; it’s a Wednesday night. Two men come up to try to give Athena their numbers, and she waves them off. We’re the only women in the place. The rooftop feels quiet and claustrophobic in a way that’s frightening, so we finish our drinks and leave. I think, with some relief, that this will be the end of it—but then Athena invites me over to her apartment, a short Lyft ride away, near Dupont Circle. “Come on,” she insists. “I have some amazing whisky saved, precisely for this moment—you have to come try it.” I’m tired, and I’m not having that much fun—jealousy feels worse when you’re drunk—but I’m curious to see her apartment, soI say yes. It’s really fucking nice. I knew Athena was rich—bestseller royalties do count for something—but I hadn’t processed how rich until we step into the ninth-floor, two-bedroom unit where she lives alone—one room for sleeping, one room for writing—with tall ceilings, gleaming hardwood floors, floor-to-ceiling windows, and a balcony that wraps around the corner. She’s decorated it in that ubiquitous, Instagram-famous style that screams minimalist but bougie: sleek wooden furniture, sparely designed bookshelves, and clean, monochrome carpets. Even the plants look expensive. A humidifier hisses beneath her calatheas. “So then, whisky? Or something lighter?” Athena points to the wine fridge. She has a fucking wine fridge. “Riesling? Or I have this lovely sauvignon blanc, unless you want to stick to red—” “Whisky,” I say, because the only way to get through the rest of this night is to get as drunk as possible. “Neat, on the rocks, or old-fashioned?”
I have no clue how to drink whisky. “Um, whatever you’re having.” “Old-fashioned, then.” She darts into her kitchen. Moments later, I hear cupboards opening, dishes clanging. Who knew old-fashioneds were such a hassle? “I have this beautiful eighteen-year WhistlePig,” she calls out. “It’s so smooth, like toffee and black pepper mixed together—just wait, you’ll see.” “Sure,” I call back. “Sounds great.” She’s taking a while, and I really have to pee, soI wander around the living room searching for the bathroom. I wonder what I’ll find in there. Maybe a fancy aromatherapy diffuser. Maybe a basket of jade vagina rocks. I notice then that the door to her writing office is wide open. It’s a gorgeous space; I can’t help but take a peek. I recognize it from her Instagram posts—her “creativity palace,” she calls it. She has a huge mahogany desk with curved legs beneath a window framed by Victorianstyle lacy curtains, atop which sits her prized black typewriter. Right. Athena uses a typewriter. No Word backups, no Google Docs, no Scrivener: just scribbles in Moleskine notebooks that become outlines on sticky notes that become fully formed drafts on her Remington. It forces her to focus on the sentence level, or so she claims. (She’s given this interview response so many times I’ve nearly memorized it.) Otherwise, she digests entire paragraphs at a time, and she loses the trees for the forest. Honestly. Who talks like that? Who thinks like that? They make these ugly and overpriced electronic typewriters, for authors who can’t string together more than a paragraph without losing focus and hopping over to Twitter. But Athena hates those; she uses a vintage typewriter, a clunky thing that requires her to buy special ink ribbons and thick, sturdy pages for her manuscripts. “I just can’t write on a screen,” she’s told me. “I have to see it printed. Something about the reassuring solidity of the word. It feels permanent, like everything I compose has weight. It ties me down; it clarifies my thoughts and forces me to be specific.” I wander farther into the office, because I’m exactly drunk enough to forget that this is bad manners. There’s a sheet of paper still in the carriage, upon which are written just two words: THE END. Sitting next to the typewriter is a stack of pages nearly a foot tall. Athena materializes by my side, a glass in either hand. “Oh, that’s the World War One project. It’s finally done.”
Athena is famously cagey about her projects until they’re finished. No beta readers. No interviews, no sharing snippets on social media. Even her agents and editors don’t get to see so much as an outline until she’s finished the whole thing. “It has to gestate inside me until it’s viable,” she told me once. “If I expose it to the world before it’s fully formed, it dies.” (I’m shocked no one has called her out for this grotesque metaphor, but I guess anything’s okay if Athena says it.) The only things she’s revealed over the past two years are that this novel has something to do with twentiethcentury military history, and that it’s a “big artistic challenge” for her. “Shit,” I say. “Congrats.” “Typed up the last page this morning,” she chirps. “No one’s read it yet.” “Not even your agent?” She snorts. “Jared pushes paper and signs checks.” “It’s so long.” I wander closer to the desk, reach for the first page, then immediately withdraw my hand. Stupid, drunk—I can’t just go around touching things. But instead of snapping at me, Athena nods her permission. “What do you think?” “You want me to read it?” “Well, I guess, not all of it, right now.” She laughs. “It’s very long. I’m just—I’m just so glad it’s finished. Doesn’t this stack look pretty? It’s hefty. It . . . carries significance.” She’s rambling; she’s as drunk as I am, but I know exactly what she means. This book is huge, in more ways than one. It’s the sort of book that leaves a mark. My fingers hover over the stack. “Can I . . . ?” “Sure, sure . . .” She nods enthusiastically. “I have to get used to it being out there. I have to give birth.” What a bizarre, persistent metaphor. I know reading the pages will only fuel my jealousy, but I can’t help myself. I pick a stack of ten or fifteen pages off the top and skim through them. Holy God, they’re good. I’m not great at reading when I’m tipsy, and my eyes keep sliding to the end of every paragraph, but even from a sloppy once-over, I can tell this book is going to dazzle. The writing is tight, assured. There are none of the
juvenile slipups of her debut work. Her voice has matured and sharpened. Every description, every turn of phrase—it all sings. It’s better than anything I could write, perhaps in this lifetime. “You like it?” she asks. She’s nervous. Her eyes are wide, almost scared; she’s fiddling with her necklace as she watches me. How often does she put on this act? How forcefully do people shower her with praise when she does? It’s petty, but I don’t want to give that validation to her. Her game works with adoring reviewers and fans; it won’t with me. “I don’t know,” I say flatly. “I can’t really read drunk.” She looks crestfallen, but only for a moment. I watch her hastily plaster on a smile. “Right, duh, that was stupid, of course you don’t want to . . .” She blinks at her glass, then at me, and then at her living room. “Well, then do you want to just . . . hang?” So here’s me, just hanging with Athena Liu. When she’s hammered, it turns out, she’s shockingly banal. She doesn’t quiz me about Heidegger, or Arendt, or the half-dozen philosophers she loves to name-drop in interviews. She doesn’t go off about what a good time she had guest modeling for Prada this one time in Paris (which was completely by accident; the director just saw her sitting outside a café and asked her to step in). We cackle about celebrities. We both profess that the latest twink with puppy-dog eyes in fact does nothing for us, but that Cate Blanchett can step on us, always. She compliments my style. She asks whereI got my shoes, my brooch, my earrings. She marvels at my skill at thrifting—“I still get half my stuff from Talbots, I’m such an old lady.” I make her laugh with stories about my students, a procession of pimply, dull-eyed kids who could waltz into a lower tier Ivy on their parents’ legacy connections if they could only score two hundred points higher on the SAT, and how their ghostwritten college essays are all an exercise in inventing some personal hardship when it’s clear they’ve never experienced any. We trade stories about bad dates, about people we knew from undergrad, about how we’ve somehow hooked up with the same two guys from Princeton. We end up sprawled on her couch, laughing so hard our ribs ache. I didn’t realize it was possible to have so much fun with Athena. I’ve never been so myself with her. We’ve known each other for over nine years now, but I’ve always been so guarded in her presence—in part because I’m
nervous she’ll realize I’m not half as brilliant or interesting as she thinks, and in part because of what happened freshman year. But tonight, for the first time in a long time, I don’t feel likeI have to filter every word I say. I’m not struggling to impress Athena Fucking Liu. I’m just hanging with Athena. “We should do this more,” she keeps saying. “Junie, honestly, how have we never done this before?” “I don’t know,” I say, and then, in an attempt to be deep, “Maybe we were afraid of how much we’d like each other.” It’s a stupid thing to say, and not remotely true, but this apparently delights her. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe. Oh, Junie. Life is so short. Why do we build up these walls?” Her eyes are shining. Her mouth is wet. We’re sitting side by side on her futon, knees so close they’re almost touching. For a moment I think she’s going to lean over and kiss me—and what a story that would be, I think; what a plot twist—but then she jumps back and yelps, and I realize my whisky glass has tilted so much I’ve spilled on the floor; thank God it’s all hardwood, because if I’d ruined one of Athena’s expensive rugs I would have just flung myself off the balcony. She laughs and runs to the kitchen for a napkin, and I take another sip to calm myself, wondering at my racing heart. Then suddenly it’s midnight and we’re making pancakes—from scratch, no box mix, and embellished with several dollops of pandan extract in the now-neon-green batter because Athena Liu doesn’t do normal pancakes. “Like vanilla, but better,” she explains. “It’s fragrant and herbal, like you’re taking a big breath of the forest. I can’t believe white people haven’t learned about pandan yet.” She flips them off the pan and onto my plate. The pancakes are burnt and uneven, but they smell incredible, and I realize then that I’m starving. I wolf one down with my hands, then look up to see Athena staring at me. I wipe my fingers, terrified I’ve disgusted her, but then she laughs and challenges me to an eating contest. And then there’s a timer going and we’re shoveling down the gloppy, half-cooked pancakes as quickly as we can, swigging milk in between to help the bulging lumps down our throats. “Seven,” I gasp, coming up for air. “Seven, what did—”
But Athena’s not looking at me. She’s blinking very hard, brows furrowed. One hand goes to her throat. The other frantically taps my arm. Her lips part, and out comes this muted, sickening rasp. She’s choking. Heimlich, I know the Heimlich—at least, I think I do? I haven’t thought about it since grade school. But I get behind her and wrap my arms around her waist and jerk my hands against her stomach, which should dislodge the pancake—holy shit, she’s skinny—but she’s still shaking her head, tapping my arm. It’s not coming out. I jerk in again. And again. This isn’t working. It crosses my mind to pull out my phone to Google “Heimlich,” maybe watch a YouTube tutorial. But there’s no time, that’ll take forever. Athena’s banging against the counters. Her face has turned purple. I remember reading a news article a few years ago about a sorority girl who choked to death at a pancake-eating contest. I remember sitting on my toilet, scrolling through the details in prurient fascination, because it seemed like such a sudden, ridiculous, and devastating way to die. The pancakes were like a lump of cement in her throat, said the EMT. A lump of cement. Athena yanks at my arm; points at my phone. Help, she mouths. Help, help— My fingers keep shaking; it takes me three tries to unlock my phone to call 911. They ask me what my emergency is. “I’m with a friend,” I gasp. “She’s choking. I’ve tried the Heimlich; it’s not coming out—” Beside me, Athena is folded over a chair, jamming her sternum against the back, trying to perform the Heimlich on herself. Her movements get more and more frantic—She looks like she’s humping the chair, I think stupidly—but it doesn’t seem to work; nothing comes flying out of her mouth. “Ma’am, what is your location?” Oh, fucking hell, I don’t know Athena’s address. “I don’t know, it’s my friend’s place.” I try to think. “Um, across the taco place, and the bookstore, I don’t know exactly . . .” “Can you be more specific?” “Dupont! Dupont Circle. Um—it’s a block from the metro station, there’s this nice revolving door—” “Is it an apartment building?”
“Yes—” “The Independent? The Madison?” “Yes! The Madison. That one.” “Which unit?” I don’t know. I turn to Athena, but she’s curled on the ground, jerking back and forth in a way that’s awful to watch. I hesitate, torn between helping her and checking the door number—but then I remember, the ninth floor, so far up you can see all of Dupont Circle from the balcony. “Nineoh-seven,” I gasp. “Please, come quick, oh my God—” “An ambulance is on its way to you now, ma’am. Is the patient conscious?” I glance over my shoulder. Athena has stopped kicking. The only thing moving now is her shoulders, heaving in wild jerks like she’s been possessed. Then those stop, too. “Ma’am?” I lower the phone. My vision swims. I reach out and shake her shoulder: nothing. Athena’s eyes are wide, bulging open; I can’t bear to look at them. I touch my fingers to her neck for her pulse. Nothing. The dispatcher says something else, but I can’t understand her; I can’t understand my own thoughts, and everything that happens next, between the banging at the door and the rush of EMTs into the apartment, is a dark, bewildering blur. I DON’T GET HOME UNTIL EARLY THE NEXT MORNING. Documenting death, apparently, takes a very long time. The EMTs have to check every fucking detail before they can officially write on their clipboards: Athena Liu, twenty-seven, female, is dead because she choked, to death, on a fucking pancake. I give a statement. I stare very hard into the eyes of the EMT in front of me—they’re a very pale blue, and big black globs of mascara are stuck to her outer lashes—to distract from the stretcher in the kitchen behind me, the uniformed people pulling a plastic sheet over Athena’s body. Oh my God. Oh my God, that’s a body bag. This is real. Athena is dead. “Name?” “June—sorry, Juniper Hayward.” “Age?” “Twenty-seven.”
“How do you know the deceased?” “She’s—she was—my friend. We’ve been friends since college.” “And what were you doing here tonight?” “We were celebrating.” Tears prickle behind my nose. “We were celebrating, because she’d just signed a Netflix deal, and she was so fucking happy.” I’m weirdly terrified that they’re about to arrest me for murder. But that’s stupid—Athena choked, and the globule (they kept calling it a globule—what kind of word is “globule”?) is right there in her throat. There are no signs of struggle. She let me in, people saw us being friendly at the bar—Call the guy at the Graham, I want to say, he’ll back me up. But why am I even trying to come up with a defense? These details shouldn’t matter. I didn’t do it. I didn’t kill her. That’s ridiculous; it’s ridiculous I’m even worried about it. No jury would convict. At last, they let me go. It’s four in the morning. An officer—at some point the police arrived, which I guess happens when there’s a dead body— offers me a ride home to Rosslyn. We spend most of it in silence, and as we pull up to my building, he offers some condolences that I hear but don’t process. I stagger into my apartment, rip off my shoes and bra, gargle some mouthwash, and collapse onto my bed. I cry for a while, great howling sobs to vent out this awful clawing energy in my body, and then one melatonin and two Lunestas later, I manage to fall asleep. Meanwhile, in my bag, tossed at the floor of my bed, Athena’s manuscript sits like a hot sack of coals.
Two MOURNING IS STRANGE. ATHENA WAS ONLY A FRIEND, NOT A close friend. I feel like a bitch saying it, but she just wasn’t that important to me, and she doesn’t leave a hole in my life that I now need to build detours around. I don’t feel the same black, suffocating loss I did when my father died. I don’t struggle to breathe. I don’t lie awake in the mornings debating whether it’s worth crawling out of bed. I don’t resent every stranger I encounter, wondering how they can keep moving around the world as if it hasn’t stopped turning. Athena’s death didn’t break my world, it just made it . . . weirder. I go about my days as normal. For the most part, if I don’t think too hard about it, if I don’t dwell on the memories, I’m fine. Still, I was there. I watched Athena die. My feelings those first few weeks are dominated less by grief and more by an awed shock. That really happened. I really watched her feet drumming against her hardwood floors, her fingers clawing at her neck. I really sat next to her dead body for ten whole minutes before the EMTs arrived. I really saw her eyes bulging open, stricken, unseeing. Those memories don’t make me cry—I couldn’t describe this as pain—but I do stare at the wall and mutter, “What the fuck?” several times a day. Athena’s death must have made the news, because my phone blows up with friends trying to say the correct, concerned thing (Hey, I’m just reaching out, how have you been?) and acquaintances trying to seek out all the juicy details (OMG I saw on Twitter, were you actually THERE?). I don’t have the energy to respond. I watch the red numbers tick higher and higher in the corners of my messaging apps with thrilled, amazed disgust.
On my sister Rory’s advice, I visit a local support group and make an appointment with a therapist specializing in grief. Both only make me feel worse, because they assume a version of a friendship that didn’t exist, and it’s too hard to explain why I’m not more broken up about Athena, soI don’t follow up with either. I don’t want to talk about how much I miss her, or how my days feel so empty without her. The problem is that my days feel completely normal, except for the singular, bewildering fact that Athena is fucking dead, that she’s gone, just like that, and I don’t know how I’m even supposed to feel about it, soI start drinking and panic-eating whenever the blues creep up in the evenings, and I get pretty bloated for a few weeks from all the ice cream and lasagna, but that’s as bad as things get. I am, in fact, rather astounded by my mental resilience. I break down only once, a week after it happened. I’m not sure what triggers it, but I do spend that night watching Heimlich tutorials on YouTube for hours, comparing them to what I did, trying to remember if I positioned my hands the same way, if I yanked with enough force. I could have saved her. I keep saying this out loud, like Lady Macbeth yelling about her damned spot. I could have kept my head on, taught myself how to do it properly, put my fists correctly over her navel, cleared the obstruction, and let Athena breathe again. I am the reason why she died. “No,” says Rory when I call her at four in the morning, weeping so hard I can barely speak. “No, no, no, don’t you think that for a second, do you understand? You are not guilty for anything. You did not kill that girl. You are innocent. Do you understand?” I feel like a toddler as I mumble back, “Yes. Okay. Yeah.” But that’s what I need right now: a child’s blind faith that the world is so simple, and that if I didn’t mean to do a bad thing, then none of this is my fault. “Are you going to be okay?” Rory presses. “Do you want me to call Dr. Gaily?” “No—God, no, I’m fine. Don’t call Dr. Gaily.” “Okay, it’s just, she told us that if you were ever backsliding—” “I’m not backsliding.” I take a deep breath. “This isn’t like that. I’m all right, Rory. I didn’t know Athena that well anyways. It’s fine.” A few days after the news breaks, I write a long Twitter thread about what happened. It feels like I’m writing from a template, drawing on the