Friday morning, I cut off a big piece of roofing paper and tacked it to the bare wall inside the studio. It was uneven, not quite a rectangle, and as I stood there looking at it, the blackness seemed to become a doorway to somewhere else. I saw a diver descending into the deep, and I wondered what she hoped to find.

My phone dinged from the counter, making me jump.

But it was a message from Haley. I hadn’t heard from her in so long I almost didn’t believe it was really her. She’d sent a mirror selfie as if it were proof of life. She wore a black strapless minidress with a satin corset-like top, and she was in her parents’ house on Martha’s Vineyard. She wrote: Do you like this dress on me? I can’t decide if it’s too goth.

Another photo followed; this one showed her from the back. She had pinned her blond hair up, which revealed a string of star tattoos on her left shoulder blade that she’d gotten right before we graduated. They seemed to burst out of the dress in a mini-fireworks display, shading from dark red to gold to yellow.

Almost automatically, I responded: What’s it for?

She texted back instantly: NYC. I’m going for the weekend, planning to check out my new neighborhood by NYU!!

I wrote back: Looks good on you. Not too goth but definitely edgy.

Thanks!! she wrote, and that was all.

I put the phone down, feeling irritated, and returned to the black paper. But now I couldn’t concentrate. Haley and I hadn’t been in touch since graduation. Was everything back to normal now? I didn’t know if I wanted that.

My phone dinged again, and I flinched. I stared at the black paper for a minute longer, before my curiosity over what Haley was sending now drove me to pick it up. But this time it was Steph.

In n out?

—

When we were sitting in her truck looking out at the water, eating our burgers, I told her about Haley and Tasha, which somehow led me to show her the video from the Fourth of July. And then I told her how I was supposed to be spending the summer on Martha’s Vineyard, but I had been uninvited because of the Tumblr photos. She didn’t look shocked and she didn’t interrupt, and I realized I hadn’t told anyone about this before. I had been embarrassed and angry, but now the embarrassment had faded and my anger had dissipated. The photos were probably still on Tumblr since you could never entirely delete something from the internet, but with every passing day they got buried under more posts. It wasn’t a funny story—not yet, and maybe it never would be—but it didn’t hurt anymore.