Элисон Скотч: The Song Remains the Same

“I know.” I exhale. “Maybe I’m the one who’s being weird, not him.”

She wipes her hands on her jeans and stands to go.

“Oh, I forgot, one more thing.” She reaches into her bag and yanks out a stack of DVDs. “Here. Your favorite movies, TV shows, whatever, from when we were kids. I thought it might help.” She fingers something else and pulls it out. “And this—here’s an iPod, a music player. I put together all of the bands that I could remember that you loved, that meant something to you. I had Hugh search your closet for the box of mix tapes that you kept.”

“Hugh?”

“My boyfriend?” she says, and I detect a flash of annoyance, that the detail has slipped my mind, when so many details have slipped my mind.

“Yes, yes, I’m sorry. I lose track of things.”

“Well, I asked him to get the box from your apartment, and he did, and I made what I think is The Best of Nell Slattery . It’s all on there, hundreds of songs—everything from, I don’t know, your wedding song…”

“My wedding song? Which was?”

“Joe Cocker—‘Have a Little Faith in Me,’” she says, like that means anything to me. “To the Beatles to the Smiths to, well, just listen to it. You’ll get the idea.” She pops the earbuds in my ears and hits a button. My sensory system feels like I’m going through a car wash—poured over and cleaned. The music, it’s a balm, an anesthetic, and for a few seconds, it’s as if none of this happened, and I’m already healed. Or didn’t need to be healed in the first place.

“You’re a pretty great sister,” I say, popping out the headphones, a rush of gratitude warming me, though it could have been the sugar high.

“Sometimes.” She smiles, though it’s not necessarily a happy one. “Sometimes not.”

The first season ofFriends is as funny as I remember it, or more accurately, as funny as I probably remembered it, since I’m theoretically watching it for the first time. Rory has overloaded me with DVDs, and upon reading the description of each— Good Will Hunting, Party of Five, Reality Bites, Saving Private Ryan, Pretty in Pink —this seemed like the safest bet to ensure that I didn’t beg the nurses to euthanize me in my sleep.

The six of them—the crew from Friends at their hangout of Central Perk—make life in New York seem glamorous, effortless almost, even though their dating lives are woeful, and their jobs relatively unfulfilling, and Ross has discovered that his lesbian ex-wife is having a baby, and he wants Rachel so badly that his whole face has evolved into a basset hound. But still, their apartments are huge and sparkling, and their clothes tight-fitting around their lithe bodies, and damn if it didn’t make me crave my old life, even if I didn’t know what that old life was. Maybe it was like Friends . Maybe an episode straight out of Friends in which Samantha and I hung out on faux-velvet couches at our local coffee joint, and Peter and Rory and her boyfriend, Hugh, filled in the crevices with off-the-cuff jokes and witty banter that made everyone around us green with envy. I could see that, even if I couldn’t really see that. Yes, that would be a nice life to return to.

Remember, goddammit!

I hit pause on the DVD player and sweep some scattered photos off my nightstand. Rory has left the stack of photos along with the DVDs. In them, I’m on the cusp of adulthood, she’s on the cusp of puberty. The date stamp reads 1994, and though she is eleven, and I am sixteen, she’s already sprouted nearly taller than I. I’m dressed in some god-awful prom attire, while she wears a violet sundress with smocking across the chest that can’t conceal her little breast buds that are poking through. Even at eleven, she’s breathtaking—vacuuming up all of the beauty between us, your eyes inevitably drawn to her, not me. I’m in a red-and-white-polka-dotted concoction with a skirt comprising three taffeta tiers and a bustier that makes my own breasts look lopsided. My smile is reflected in the flash of the camera, thanks to upper and bottom braces, and my hair—evidently the victim of both a perm and an overdose of Sun-In—does my heart-shaped face no favors. I have a corsage around my wrist, and just in the edge of the corner, I can make out the shoulder of a man-boy in a tuxedo who must have been my date.

Upon closer inspection, my smile looks more like a wince, and I stare at my old self and wonder who I was at sixteen. Who that boy was. If we steamed up the windows to his mom’s station wagon that night, if we got drunk on wine coolers at the after-party. No, of course not. Everyone from Samantha to Rory has already well informed me that I was the straitlaced, buttoned-up one.

I stop and rewrite this in my mind: that I broke curfew, that I unsnapped my bra and let him feel me up before we went skinny-dipping after one too many wine coolers, that I slipped home through a bedroom window so I didn’t tip off my mom.

I feel my nose pinch, my cheeks spasm, my chest seize, and suddenly, really, for the first time, I am gutted at my loss. Sliced open. Fatally punctured with no hope of resuscitation. I’m overwhelmed with the loneliness of living the life of a skeleton—no meat, no flesh, nothing to fill in the holes, and the tears come quickly and furiously, my free hand wiping away what it can, but no match for the onslaught. I briefly consider the 152 people who didn’t even have this opportunity: Jesus! Get real! At least you’re alive, living, breathing, here, and with the chance to try to remember! But my brain can’t linger on the vastness of that loss, so it’s no use. There’s a time for appreciating the moment, and this isn’t it. Maybe eventually. Maybe I’ll call Anderson, and eventually we’ll find a way to answer the question: Why us? But now, it’s only my pain, eviscerating and hollow all at once. I reach for the iPod in an attempt to soothe myself, the way a baby does a pacifier, but the music only makes it worse—piercing my wounds, penetrating me from all angles.

Alicia must hear my sobbing because soon she’s wiping my cheeks dry, flushing my nose of snot.

“What can I get you, sweetheart?” she says.

“Nothing.” I hiccup. “No one can get me anything.”

She picks up the remote, flicks off the DVD, and the TV returns to the news channel I had on earlier.

She rubs my back until I’ve stopped crying, and then I reconsider.

“Could you get my sister on the phone?”

“Of course, dear.” She reaches for the telephone and punches in the digits, then places the cradle under my shoulder.

“Rory, it’s me,” I say when she picks up. “Listen, who was I before?”

“What do you mean?” She sounds like I’ve woken her. “You were my older sister. We worked together at the gallery. We’ve been over this.”

“No, no, I remember that. I mean, like, who was I? Who did I go to prom with?”

“Oh god, um…” She pauses. “Oh, yeah, his name was Mitchell Loomis. Um, he was on the wrestling team.”

“Was he my boyfriend? Like, did we make out at prom, go skinny-dipping, get drunk, go crazy?”

She laughs, even through her grogginess. “Of all the things you were, Nellie, crazy was never one of them.” She hesitates. “I don’t really know what you did at prom, to be honest. I was in middle school. But if I had to bet, I’d bet that no, you probably weren’t making out in a corner, much less going skinny-dipping.” I sigh. No, that can’t be right! I was out all night in an open-aired convertible, braying at the moon .

“So me, I mean, my life, it wasn’t like Friends ?” Flashy! Vibrant! Perfect hair! I can’t let the idea go.