The last time Kay saw Nina was almost fifteen years ago. For a long time, Kay had relished the theatrics of a good old-fashioned toxic female friendship: the wounds, the scars, the gnawing pain that she had been left with. But, like most meticulously reviewed memories, it grew uninteresting after a while. After all, the story wasn’t exactly moving forward; the central characters were stagnant, nonthreatening, with their individual lives operating safely apart from one another. Nina was not powerful, unable to sustain an entire section of her thoughts. About two years after their last meeting Nina had been relegated to a subsection of Kay’s mind, and three years later, a subsection of a subsection, until it was only Nina’s name that was left, filed away on a well-hidden list in a corner of Kay’s brain under the heading “People I Have Forgotten About.”
Nina’s face had changed. She was older and larger and more desperate than she had been a decade and a half ago, but she was also wealthier, better dressed, and had a new nose. Kay had to admit that she liked the new nose. Maybe Nina had gone to their old friend Mimi’s uncle, who treated burn victims on the side, for free, to feel better about how much money he made saving women like Nina. But sitting calmly in seat 11A of the plane, clutching an iced tea, her manicured nails curled tightly around the bottom of the cup, Nina was still Nina.
“Hi—you look great!”
A compliment, a reality, a conversation starter—or ender, depending on how Nina would respond. All Nina said was “Thanks, as do you!” with a disconcerting politeness. It was a lie. Kay did not look great. Kay did not even look good. The last eighteen days had been a haze of old sweatshirts and intermittent showering. Kay’s hair was pushed up into a messy bun that many years ago she had thought made her look sexy in a way that said I don’t care if you think I look good because we both know deep down that I do.
Kay said, “So, how have you been?”
Nina pretended not to hear.
*
They had a wonderful fight in senior year. It ended in tears and boxed wine and pretend-but-real death threats. Everything about the fight was perfectly calibrated to make for an excruciating memory—painful, disgusting, bold and open and with sores that would irritate for years until even the side characters (Mimi, Teresa, et cetera) got tired of their friends’ drama and returned to their own lives, in a definitive sign that what had once been noteworthy was not anymore. Even Dan, who would never take his share of the blame, who would evade responsibility in every way possible, just as he had done for the past eighteen days, became old news.
Nina, Kay and Dan went to a small liberal arts college in Maine that made it hard to avoid people. Nina both dreaded and longed for the sick thrill of being ignored by someone on her walk to the dining hall—a cute guy from lecture, a TA, or a friend she had made during the first week of freshman year and never spoken to again. It barely mattered who it was as long as they locked eyes in the cold and together, looked away, because sometimes kindness and warmth were too much to ask for. Kay was always warm and never kind.
Dan was always kind, until he wasn’t. Until Nina was not the focus of his kindness.
Nina and Kay’s fight was something about how Nina said Kay always looked tired and would be so hot if she just put in a little effort, the bare minimum even. And to prove how wrong that was, Kay walked away with Dan. It was a long fight, spanning January to May of senior year. By June, after Kay and Dan moved to Boston, Nina’s eating disorder from high school, that for years she’d jokingly referred to as “my old friend,” returned. That was fifteen years ago.
*
Seeing Nina had shut off Kay’s ability to speak about herself, to respond to the claim that she also looked great, even to sit down. Kay hovered above seat 11B, looking at Nina and her new nose. Between the two of them, they had three failed marriages. Did Nina know? She must, she must. Nina knew everything.
Now, Nina looked out the window, at the wing of the plane. They were in the “you will die first” row, where the flight attendants came by to make sure the unlucky passengers were comfortable with their row opening up to produce a slide to safety in the event of an emergency, and if you said you were uncomfortable with it you must have a health problem or otherwise you should, because any selfless human being surely would be intrigued and even a little bit honored. Kay lifted her carry-on into the overhead compartment. It was a bland duffel bag, black, and inside the papers she was meant to sign were probably being crumpled. She sat down in the middle seat and buckled her seatbelt, careful not to let her thigh press against Nina’s, or her scarf swing over into Nina’s airspace. A man was waiting behind her, to sit in 11C, the aisle seat. He looked friendly and confused. Maybe, Kay hoped, he actually had the middle seat and would insist they switch to sit where they were supposed to. But Kay had no choice but to settle into 11B, as she sipped the Americano that she had bought at the airport Starbucks, while she had argued on the phone with Dan, the man she was divorcing, and the first person Nina ever loved.
*
She looked terrible, Nina decided. Tired, but Kay always looked a little tired, even in college, with puffy eyelids and purple circles that she never tried to hide because what was the point, really, when the cosmetics industry, worth billions, promoted obscene and unrealistic standards of beauty for women, and no matter how much of Kay’s hard-earned cash from her on-campus job she forked over to them, she would never be what they had in mind, anyway?
Kay was exhausting, operating with a ferocity that extended beyond cosmetics into every facet of their college existence. Being around her all the time drained Nina of energy, and she eventually resented Kay because she scared away friendly but weak women who might otherwise have been nice friends to have if they were able to handle Kay. Most of them were not able. Nina often asked herself why she didn’t just leave; Kay would not put up a fight. Or, she might put up a fight, but it would be too late because if Nina timed her exit just right, she would be long gone before Kay even noticed. She could be in Mexico or Paris or down the hall, it didn’t matter, because she would be on her own.
But resenting Kay had made Nina cry on the phone to her mom—because she knew she was not supposed to hate her best friend. She was supposed to love her.
*
In the months leading up to their separation Kay and Dan had tried everything, from yoga to cooking classes to thinking about maybe one day thinking about beginning to think about children, to stay together. It wasn’t a matter of saying I love you in a new location, like Spain, or in a new room of the house, like the weird basement, where they searched for a green bike that a houseguest years ago had apparently left there and now wanted back, or in a new tone of voice, one that was utterly, hopelessly elusive.
“When you’re a kid, or even in college or something,” Kay had told her sister over the phone, “And a friendship ends, it’s traumatic, right?” Sure, yeah, her sister had said. “I just didn’t expect I’d ever feel that again,” said Kay. “I thought that feeling that kind of loss was all in the past.”
But losing Dan, now, in such a similar way, was in the present—and suddenly so was Nina.
*
They met Dan in the spring of junior year. Wasn’t it so funny, they both said, how they had been in the same class with someone so great for three years and never interacted with him? Dan really was great. One night when Kay was drunk and Nina was worried about her, Dan called Nina. Did she want to watch a bad rom-com and complain about their families? Nina went over to his room. Kay was placed in the charge of a different friend, who hadn’t known her for as long as Nina had and therefore was not as tired. And by the time Nina was in love with Dan, Kay had an internship in New York for the summer and Nina decided that she could breathe.
Nina and Dan took the bus from Maine into Manhattan to visit Kay. Neither wanted to, necessarily, but Maine was so beautiful in the summer that they both started to feel terrible. Their research jobs with professors allowed for a lot of free time, so they booked two tickets for a boiling July weekend. Dan had never been to Manhattan except for a tour of Columbia in high school, during which he had been unexpectedly rushed to Lenox Hill for an emergency appendectomy. He and Nina roamed the streets until Kay was done with work and then the three of them got drunk in midtown. And later Nina called her mom to say that the night had been amazing and perfect and she had meant it, until that fall, when Dan’s father got sick and he wanted space and said that it wasn’t fair to Nina for him to rely on her because she had a thesis to write, too, and soon enough he made her believe that she was the one who had wanted space all along. And a few days after his father’s funeral, Kay went to his room with boxed wine and told him about her mother, who killed herself when Kay was eleven. Kay said she couldn’t possibly understand what he was going through, but by the way she looked at him he felt that maybe she did. It was November. And in January, after a tense winter break, Nina told Kay that she looked tired, and in March Dan found an apartment in a safe-ish neighborhood of Boston, and in April Kay said something funny about South Boston’s homicide rate. And she kept saying funny things, often at night, as she and Dan would watch bad rom-coms and complain about their families, until early May, when Dan asked Kay to split the rent with him. Nina found out from Dan, who ran into her in their robes on the morning of graduation. Kay’s last name was earlier in the alphabet; by the time she finished walking across the stage Nina was on her own.
*
Nina forced herself suddenly to become very interested in the window, in the wing of the plane outside the window, in the clear sky beyond the wing of the plane. She studied the glass of the window (or was it plastic? Or some other substance specifically designed for plane windows?), admiring the smudges on the surface, wondering if perhaps seat 11A’s previous inhabitant was a child who’d pressed his or her nose against the window, exhaling heavily to create an already-disappearing paint canvas of breath on the windowpane.
She was aware that Kay was looking, judging, maybe even talking to her. But Nina was drifting deeper and deeper into her imaginings of this child who must have been terribly disappointed when the flight attendant said no children in this row of the plane, it’s a special row, for grown-ups only. And the child must have pressed their nose against the window one last time, looking at the wing of the plane, strong and still before takeoff, the same wing that Nina looked at now, before reluctantly trudging off to a different row.
*
Kay admired Nina’s coldness. No, she did not have to respond to her pathetic “So, how have you been?” Nina did not have to look at her once for the entire six-hour flight from Boston to Los Angeles, where Kay was going to stay with her sister for “as long as you need” (that polite euphemism for until you get your shit together). Nina did not have to ask her anything, she did not even have to breathe the same air; if she really wanted to, she could fake a medical emergency and get switched to a different plane. Nina used to do that sometimes, to get out of a conflict or sadness. I struggle with food, my eating habits are not optimal, I was hospitalized not that long ago and it’s still a huge part of my day to day, you know? But that’s what Kay had liked about Nina in the first place: she was open, exposed, vulnerable. So she settled further into her seat, between Nina and the friendly but confused man, read Vogue, and connected to the plane’s Wi-Fi to answer an email from her lawyer and finally, she forced herself to take a nap. Nina stared out the window as the plane left Boston behind.
*
In the time since Dan, Nina had married one man she met in person and one she met online. Both ended in divorce in fewer than five years. Julia, her daughter, was eight years old now and did not have a relationship with her father. She was starting to ask about him, at an age where a general curiosity for the world was beginning to extend to herself and to her mother and to a father who was not either of her mother’s ex-husbands, but a different man, who lived in Los Angeles and had recently received an email from a woman he used to know, a man who was unaware that he had a daughter named Julia at all.
*
No one understood what it meant when the plane started to shake. They were above Tennessee now. The shaking must mean something, because why else would the pilot, a deep-voiced man, speak in the past tense—and had it really been a pleasure flying them this afternoon? The pilot’s voice seemed to get deeper as he spoke, descending so far that the plane’s vibrations molded with his until the passengers were enveloped in the icy embrace of knowing for certain that something glorious and awful was about to happen.
When the slide opened up, in their all-important row, and Nina’s body shook, she did not think to look back at Kay. It did not matter who Kay was or who she had been or why she was here, today, because Nina had a daughter she loved and a job she did not dislike and a home, a home she had worked hard to build. And so she lost sight of Kay, relinquishing her to the sea of terrified and angry and litigious passengers. And amidst the shouting and crying and bitching Nina couldn’t help but wonder if maybe Kay would fling herself from the plane, missing the slide on purpose, and if she didn’t, why not.