I worried about her everywhere. She was always late. She was the kind of person who would arrive at a restaurant an hour after expected, run into the room, throw her things across three chairs, plunk down on a fourth, and then sigh and smile as if she’d lived in that spot her whole life. She never apologized. Her purse was always dribbling out MetroCards or tubes of eyeliner or important receipts. She left a trail of bobby pins wherever she went. She was always losing something but never frantic about it. What did it matter when you could just ask anyone for a swipe into the subway or a slick of lip balm or a tampon? Could it be that everyone had treated her that way her whole life? We all wanted to give her whatever we had.

I knew some details about her past—her mother had died young, her father was in finance. She was an only child. Her paternal grandparents were French, her maternal grandparents, Italian. She had gone to Marymount School, the religious bent of which had given her what she described as “a hard-on for Catholicism,” though apparently she didn’t mean this in a sacrilegious way. She still considered herself a member of the Church.

There were two photo albums jammed between thick art books on a shelf in her hallway, each containing no more than fifteen photos, mostly of people I never met alongside a few shots of flowers or rooms. Lonnie was featured in only three of them. In the first, she was probably twelve years old and away at summer camp, wearing thin white cotton shorts and a silly old-fashioned handkerchief tied under the collar of a white polo. She was standing in front of a cabin, leaning against the wooden handrail leading to the screen door, her little ass sticking out from the angle of her posture, her face turned slightly away from the camera, like she didn’t know the photo was being taken. She was slimmer, flat chested, a little gangly even, but with tanned, flawless skin and the same thick waves streaming down her shoulders.

The other album was obviously from high school. Lonnie was in two of these photos. In one, she was standing in front of a school bus, wearing a long coat with toggle buttons over the Alice-blue pleated skirt of her school uniform. She was standing next to two girls who were talking to each other, but she was evidently not a part of the conversation. She was holding an arm up, her hand touching the hair by her temple. Though the image captured her full face, she was not smiling or looking at the camera here either; she was looking down. It was impossible to tell whether she was again unaware of the photographer’s presence or attempting a model’s pose, trying to look natural.