Took a two-week trip to Bangkok. Beautiful city, beautiful country, beautiful people. Strange, but the pollution makes the color of the sky here remind me of home—or maybe I just stole that from a Harrington song 
Have been thinking of you. Hope all is well. Permission to turn my room into a hot tub/party spa.
She felt a sting behind her eyes and quickly handed the postcard back. “I don’t know what this has to do with me.”
“Yes. I…” Bethany took a moment to sit up, her eyelids in a hummingbird flutter to keep back her own tears. “I know she left for many reasons, and even though she writes me—not very often, but she does—she keeps talking about how apologizing isn’t what she wants. But she never says what she does want.”
“Maybe she’s not interested in forgiveness,” Stacey said. “Maybe she doesn’t want to come back and never will.”
“I’ve considered that. I have. But… you see, she has been back. The last e-mail she sent, Alex told me he checked something called an IP address. Do you know that?”
In her stomach, she felt ripples of nausea, of insects scuttling over one another.
“Yeah, of course.”
“Right. So he said this e-mail—I think it was the summer of 2011—it was sent from a computer in Ohio. At the New Canaan Public Library. She came home and left without telling me. I wrote over and over to ask her why, but she never e-mailed back. Then finally, I get this postcard from her—finally she writes to me…”
The sting behind Stacey’s eyes grew sharper. She wouldn’t have been in the country then, but Lisa never so much as reached out to ask.
“I keep thinking… I keep telling myself that she’ll come around. That’s what Bob keeps saying. But it’s been nine years since she left. Ten years next summer. And I don’t know what else to do. I’ve tried everything. I lie awake praying until I’m exhausted all day every day. I just want her to come home to me.”
Her voice cracked on the last few words, and Stacey could see how this particular mode of crying had impacted her face, gouging specific wrinkles into her mouth and brow, around her eyes. Stacey tried to hold on to what she’d carried for so long. She wanted to spit on her. Ask her what she’d do if Lisa brought home a real butch dyke. Nine years spent loathing Bethany for her cruelty, for driving away someone she’d loved, and she sprang a couple of goddamn tears, and it all went melting away.
Because I know exactly how she feels. And suddenly her bitterness was directed elsewhere.
“I guess I don’t understand what you’re asking me for, Bethany.”
“Just…” She pinched the knuckle of her index finger hard, like she might rip it off. “I don’t know. Just write to her. She might listen to you. If you tell her how sorry I am, and how badly…” Her voice cracked again in that discomfiting pre-sob way. The waitress passed from the kitchen and darted a curious glance in their direction before minding her own business. “Just tell her how badly I miss her.”
They sat in the booth for a while longer, Bethany dabbing her eyes with a napkin, Stacey staring at the table. Finally, Stacey said, “I’m not in touch with her. I haven’t spoken to her since… I don’t even know.” This was a lie. She knew the time stamp on the last e-mail Lisa ever wrote to her because she’d just looked at it: 4:54 a.m. EST, September 2, 2004.
“I’m not asking you to move mountains, Stacey. But I know she still cares about you. If you talk to her, she might listen.”
She put her hand on Stacey’s. How quickly contempt can dissipate when faced with the pathetic humanness of another person. You see inside them for even the briefest moment and suddenly empathy blows through. A dark sky cleared by a hard rain.
“I can’t promise anything. But if I do talk her, I’ll tell her what you said.”
She was not great at staying friends with people. Her family was her only constant, and she was one of those lucky/unfortunate women who was best friends with her mom since the moment she learned to speak. Other than that, whoever Stacey was dating tended to be her most intense friend until that relationship ran its course, at which point she was back to square one. It was surely a lousy way to organize her friendships, but she seemed incapable of adaptation. Natalya, an artist of indeterminate income and reputation with whom she spent a month living in Lithuania, asked Stacey when she knew she was gay. Young Lithuanians are a gorgeous people with a preponderance of neck moles, and Natalya had a line of them down the left side of her neck and one near her nipple on her otherwise milky and objectively incredible body. Most of Natalya’s art was zombie-related: massive canvases filled with hordes of the living dead shredding the flesh of terrified men and sultry women. Natalya’s zombies were overtly sexual. They ate the genitals first. The clothes of their victims always seemed to come sluicing off mid-portrait. They had disagreements about what the popularity of zombies signified (Natalya thought it was the suffocation of sexuality, the fear-mongering of the dominant culture that sought to eradicate non-normative sexual practices; Stacey, of course, maintained that it was a metaphor for pandemic, resource scarcity, and ecological collapse). Natalya claimed she knew her destiny as a sexual being when she was just a small girl, that she drew pictures of her female friends and watched them while they slept. Stacey found this impossible to understand because she truly had no clue.
There was a Goth girl two grades ahead of her, marginalized even within the school’s marginalized population. She wore baggy jeans and Slipknot T-shirts, dyed her hair black and red, had a face full of piercings by age fifteen, and coated herself in white makeup until she had the complexion of a mannequin. Bloodred lipstick and the eyeliner quantities of a comic book villain. A bit overweight but still pretty beneath all her attempts not to be. Stacey could no longer recall her name. It was in the second-floor bathroom, just the two of them, when she was coming out of the stall as Stacey was walking toward one. She knew in the back of her head that this girl had noticed Stacey noticing her. That sometimes Stacey stared at her for reasons that were inexplicable to her at the time. She looked Stacey up and down and sneered, “Want me to eat your pussy on the toilet, Stretch?”
Stretch, Stacey supposed, because she was tall.
Of course, she reacted with horror, turned a deep shade of pink that must have still been on her face when she got to class because her music teacher, Mr. Clifton, asked if she was all right. That night she masturbated for the first time in her life, and wouldn’t you know she was in such phenomenal denial about herself that she didn’t put two and two together until years later.
Then there was Kaylyn. Before things began in earnest with Lisa, when they were dating the three boys, and they were all just friends, Kaylyn was the pure, unchecked, blood-tingling crush she chose to never acknowledge. If eugenics experiments became commonplace and were led by a bunch of horny, scrotum-petting midwestern boys, Kaylyn would be their product. Long and slim, trash-sexy, she was always coiled around something, serpentine in her movements. At lunch, she’d pull apart her sandwich, eat the turkey, and then scrape the mayo off with long, lascivious strokes of her tongue before throwing out the bread. On the floor in Lisa’s basement, writhing in her own stillness, her dirty blond waterfalling on the carpet as she lay with her head propped on her hand. At a dance, arms draped around Rick’s industrial shoulders, hips swishing while he stood stock-still and enjoyed it like he was at a strip club. Even at her desk at school, she sat in such a way that her body seemed to melt over it. Stacey would study her face and try to understand how she plucked her eyebrows into these slim, skeptical arches; wish for the sprinkling of freckles and crystal eyes. She never felt entirely comfortable being alone with Kaylyn. At first she thought it was because she was older, desired by the entire school, but really Stacey was a part of that mess of desire. She wanted to feel different pieces of Kaylyn to see if her fingers might evanesce into those parts if she gripped hard enough.