Back then, the point of all the boy stuff seemed to be more about Emily and Penny than the actual boys themselves. Many hours were devoted to unpacking their crushes’ most minute actions, reading each of the paper notes passed in the hallway—never mind that searching the missives of a fourteen-year-old boy for subtext was, to paraphrase Cher Horowitz, like looking for meaning in a Pauly Shore movie.

Many years later, I’d search through an old box of Penny’s teenage journals and notes that she’d long ago abandoned in my parents’ house. I was looking for some kind of clue, but the only shocking thing was how ordinary they were. Like generals, she and Emily would plot and strategize their next moves, their next notes, their next phone calls, as though the fate of civilization hung in the balance. But it was the time with each other that seemed to matter, and that I envied. Luke and I talked, but it was to plan adventures, recount adventures; and mostly there was just doing.

That same year, a girl in the grade between us—Jennifer Baker—died suddenly of meningitis. Neither Penny nor I knew her well, but her death sent shock waves through the school. There was a vigil for her in the school gymnasium, and I remember the drained and haunted faces of her parents, the bewildered grief of her older brother, the way a halo of tragedy seemed to surround them. Our experiences with death before then had been minimal—almost abstract—involving minor pets and other people’s grandparents. Penny marshaled her class to do a fund-raiser for the family and to send them cards and flowers. Even young, she was good in a crisis.

Thinking back so many years later on Penny as a little girl would bring me both comfort and anguish. Some part of me believed if I could discover the exact moment her unraveling began, if I could just locate the thread, we could reverse what happened. As though we might even put back together what’s come undone.

Liz Sullivan Is Out of Here

December 2009

AS FOR my own unraveling, it begins on a chilly December day that starts out perfectly ordinary and then spirals into something else. My only intention that morning is to quickly cross the state line to go to the Nordstrom in Spokane. I need to buy new pants because none of mine fit any longer. These days I need to give myself discrete, manageable tasks to hang each day on or I’m likely to only make it as far as the couch or not emerge from bed at all. Today: pants.