I remember when she’d blacked her own eye. Now I somehow wondered even about that, who? And had the others in our group always known what was happening? How could I save my friends if, so far, I still seemed to understand so little about them. About people.

She’d once told me people are far worse than I ever guessed, plus some better, but new ways stretched in each direction. People were usually mean about something, but good because they found sometimes they truly could be; and soon the virtue felt narcotic. Its buzz lasted longer than mere wear-off bad. She told me I expected people to do right, but me? I waited in the wrong places. (How to argue with that?)

Lately, given the publicity, those admirers first meeting her called her only “Alabama.” She hid her real first name now, or rather it hung back, in natural eclipse. I myself had always held off changing it; or else I alternated between “Angie” and that entire state for which she’d titled herself.

Henceforth I vowed I would only call her that third-person geographic name, invented. Never again “Angie.” I couldn’t be that personal, not after It.

A few months later Gideon took me aside and asked, in his divine accent the following phrase chic then, “Why get your bowels in any of ze uproar?” He sweetly tried to explain that I mustn’t blame them, that, champagne, cocaine, good fortune was a flammable mix and I was a prig to mind, though walking in on them like that could not have been so pleasant. Was it true I’d dented Robert’s precious boat? Hadn’t its luck been bad enough pre-me?

How could I explain the extra sadness? About the spot. Everybody betrayed feels killed. You feel that the turncoat loved ones are now dead to you. But, loving them as I still did, how could I tell our friend here how literal all that Love-Death duet stuff might really be? So I shrugged, acting as “adult” as our pal the philosophical French-Egyptian. How could I tell him when I myself was still unable to say aloud how wronged and small and sad and underrated and left-behind it made me feel—their doing it or anything without me? Even dying, if that was ever required. And since we were mortals, certainly probably, it would be.

At least, they could have called me in to watch.

All I’d ever really tried was seeing them both.

So, after It, to me, her name was only “Alabama.”

Nothing more than what everybody else called her. Nothing older than the brand name.